Slashdot Mirror
Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD
Lucas123 writes "While solid state disks may be all the rage, what's often being overlooked in the current consumer market hype is that fact that hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low — offering users good performance and massive amounts of capacity for 10 to 30 cents a gigabyte. And in a side by side comparison of overall performance of consumer SSDs and HDDs, it's hard to justify spending 10 times as much for a little more speed."
you would know why you would never ever go back for your boot drive, these things are just so night and day faster. Yes it squeezed my budget till it squeaked to get my Intel x25-m (early adopter) but I'd never have anything else now for boot, my Velociraptor went on Ebay after a week of using it. I'm considering a second for raid0 even though as it is it's fast enough (more for the extra space than speed tbh now they have come down in price). Bulk storage is fine for movies etc, but for the OS space mechanical magnetic disks are a dead dead end to me.
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
FYI, this is a pretty nifty tool that pulls drive information from Newegg and calculates the best price/size so you can quickly find out the best deal.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I don't think anyone out there is saying that from a $/GB perspective that SSD's are a bargain.
But here are two key points:
1) Not everyone needs 1TB of storage (about $100, and practically entry level now for hard drives). Especially on laptops, a $350 32GB SSD (also entry level) can get you quite far, especially if it is reserved for the OS and applications. You can pick up a 32GB SSD for a reasonable price, and get the really good performance, and use a big, cheap HD for media files.
2) Many people view the extra performance + lower power consumption + greater reliability as worth the premium price, and that makes them a value. Just because they can't compete on a $/GB basis doesn't make them a bargain to some people.
Higher performing parts have always carried a higher price. However, there is a need for higher performance, and clearly the market shows that the demand is there for the price, I'm looking at you servers and computer enthusiasts.
I have a 300GB velociraptor in my computer, and I have been eye'ing the SSD's for some time, but they just haven't hit the price point for me yet to justify purchasing them yet.
In fact, I feel like an oddity, I work for a small IT firm, and when I asked my boss why a customer's computer had a raid0 of 250'sGB (where we had to replace them both with a new 500GB) why did he just get a velociraptor in the first place, he simply stated that it was cheaper to get 2 250GB hard drives at $60 than it was to get 1 300GB velociraptor.
Now, the only thing that may change the landscape from all this is that SSDs are built on silicon, which is subject to Moore's Law, and we've witnessed how cheap thumb drives and other flash media drives are, there's definitely a real possibility that in time SSD's will be faster AND cheaper than HDDs.
What makes sense to analyze is not just the hard disk prices per se, but how the price sweet spot evolves in specs, as well as the sweet spot price trends. There's an interesting article about this here
Read distance measured in microns, magnets, heads, cylinders, normal forces, weight and my favorite, impact functions - all of these seem like great reasons to move to SSD.
1000 (or more) rewrites is a scary limit for the SSD route, but I like the idea of walking around with my laptop on and not worrying about drive failures (as much).
Take this for what it's worth, but I was at a conference a couple years ago and the VP of Intel's desktop support division said that 30% of his problems with laptops were solved by requiring folks to wait for the drive to spin down after hibernating/shutdown operations and before shouldering the laptop. Even if the number seems somewhat inflated, it seems like good advice for anyone with a "conventional" hard drive.
Your logic doesn't track. It is specifically BECAUSE CPUs are so fast that the slow performance of HDD is exacerbated even farther. Hard drives were always the slowest component in PCs, but as RAM and CPUs get faster and faster, without any appreciable difference in HDD speed, the gap grows farther and farther.
I have a friend who just replaced a single 72GB Raptor (not Velociraptor, but still a 10K RPM SATA HDD with 32MB of cache) with TWO (2) OCZ Vertex 30GB SSDs in RAID0 and let me tell you, the difference in performance is nothing short of staggering (and was with a single drive before he added the second). Solid state drives are the single largest upgrade you can do to any modern PC assembled from parts manufactured in the last 3 years.
If you haven't seen the difference with the new generation of SSDs (Intel X25-E/M and anything with the Indilinx or Samsung controllers - not JMICRON drives) I seriously encourage you to do yourself a favor and just try one out. You can get a 30GB Vertex for as low as ~$130. Sure, it benchmarks with TWICE the throughput of the fastest consumer HDD on the planet (WD VelociRaptor) but that doesn't really tell you the whole story. It's not just throughput, its the random read speeds and the total silence from the drive that is just absolutely awesome.