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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."
"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ? Putting the OS on a quality SSD gave lots of people immense performance gains.
Aren't hard disk prices always at an all time low? Have they ever gone up in price?
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
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
From the article: "(Random access was a jaw-dropping 7ms.)" 7ms random access time is not "jaw dropping"...in computer terms it's an aeon. This fascination with sequential read and write speeds has got to stop. A ssd with 40 mb/sec read and write but 0.1ms random access time will fell faster than a 200mb/sec hard drive for a large number of applications. In the enterprise world, random access time is even more important. Performance critical databases run on giant storgage systems with dozens of disks not for storage reasons, but because of limitations of the spinning platter. SSDs stand poised to revolutionize computing by drastically raising the slowest (and most important) component in the computer a couple of orders in magnitude of performance.
If I have an SSD in a laptop and I drop the laptop, what are the chances that even if my screen goes splat, my keyboard gets crumbled and the case splits open that my data is still safe? Pretty good. On the other hand, if the same laptop had a hard disk, you are looking at some pretty expensive data recovery plans to get data off of it. Sure, SSDs may have other issues (such as you can only write to a certain sector so many times till it becomes read-only) but with SSDs now and in the future you shouldn't have unpredictable failures like what happens to so many HDs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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 $/GB basis doesn't make them a bargain to some people.
It's also about dropability. And moving parts. And use of Coulomb. And heat.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Looks like the submitter is mixing up 2.5" HDD and 3.5" HDD.
SSD is all the rage in the 2.5" segment, not the 3.5" (yet, as they are much much faster than what's described in the article and much more expensive as well).
I can't fit these very fast 3.5" HDD in my Macbook Pro no matter hard I try.
The article in the link is from July 31, 2008 and has nothing to do with SSDs, but rather a comparison of WD HDDs. I think they meant to link to this one: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468 from today (June 18, 2009)
Let me be the first of many to point out this article was posted July 31, 2008, though its central point still stands. Also worth nothing, this article was written before Intel's X-25 SSDs were released which moved the performance bar so high that their insane price (~3-4$/GB) started to make sense for the some people.
Did anyone bother to take a look at the date of this article? Seems a little outdated given the continuing advancements in disk storage over the past year.
"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ?
No matter what I do with my Bunsen Burner and Alchemy cookbook I can still only turn my SSD's into a molten pile of useless debris. Which smells.
Tips for speed production using only harddrive technology would be most welcome.
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.
Should have been this article. .2 milliseconds; Seagate's 16.9 milliseconds.
That said, I don't think anyone claims SSD is better than HDD if your bottleneck is capacity or sequential read speed. However if you do lots of random reads/writes, this line from the comparison says it all:
OCZ's drive had a random access time of
That's an 84X difference.
You drop them, and they don't break. That seems - for many, including myself - the killer feature. For internal laptop drives, they take less energy, so my laptop lasts longer. And on my laptop, since it's not my primary machine, I don't need an enormous drive. That said, you were right; it's hard justifying extra cost for a small speed bump, but that's a less-than-honest way to phrase this particular choice.
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.
Someone who shoots photos or videos on the road might use a laptop for storing and editing them.
Firstly, let's be a little more specific. Shooting photos on the road is not exactly a space intensive task for most people. At 2 megabytes a jpeg for your average ultra-portable, you'd have to try pretty hard to fill up 16 gigabytes. On the other hand, if you're the guy shooting in raw making 60 megapixel landscapes, a laptop probably isn't the best tool for the job anyway. Photos aside, I'll grant your point with video which does tend to be very space intensive.
Secondly, somebody who needs that kind of space on the road would be well advised to keep an SSD in the laptop and buy an external USB hard drive. This model offers several advantages:
I do think we agree here - if you don't have at least 100 megabit to the fileserver, it isn't practical to pull large files from that server.
a tethering clause on their cell phone plan
Is that actually stopping you?
Next I transferred a 1GB folder filled with photos and video files to the drives from a USB drive. Both the SSD and the HDD accomplished the file transfer in about 50 seconds (the Seagate was 2 seconds slower).
Hmm, interesting that they both performed exactly the same. I would have expected the HDD to be faster transfering sequential data, except they were probably both limited by the transfer rate of the older, generic USB drive you were using. Way to go, you've successfully benchmarked the transfer rate for a USB drive that you weren't even reviewing.
Or this:
A lot depends on how you expect to use your computer. If you're a college student writing papers and surfing the Internet for information, the advantages of an SSD are negligible, but if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost, Wong said.
This is exactly backwards. The college student downloading video will need the extra hard drive space, where the college student writing papers and surfing the internet is going to have a much better experience with storage that performs better under random io workloads. But then again, what college student these days doesn't have an external usb hard drive for all their media?
They also mention that consumers will likely look for larger storage regardless of the type of underlying technology. But the consumers likely to care are the same as those likely to know the difference between HDD and SDD in the first place. The consumer that doesn't is more likely to make a purchase based on "wow 20 second bootup" and "MS Office starts in a snap, and everything goes faster" than anything else.
For interactive workloads nothing beats SSD.
The Slashdot submission is using the wrong article link. A mistake by the submitter: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468
This is absolutely correct. I'd go one step further to say that as SSD and traditional hard drives continue to shrink in size, we're more likely to see two-disk set-ups as a standard, even in laptops, so the most heavily accessed (read-only) stuff goes on SSD, and other stuff--either archival or often-changed--will go on a traditional hard drive.
In fact, now that I think of it, there's no reason to think that the two couldn't be combined with some sort of smart interface to let the drive itself decide what to put where. I can't believe that nobody else has thought of this, so there must be some sort of hybrid (SSD+platter) drive out there...
The CB App. What's your 20?
I don't shoot landscapes much but do shoot 40MP raw a lot. I tend to leave the images on the CF cards, since I have to carry them for the back anyway and their capacity has increased to the point where that is preferable to lugging any other storage. They hold up better to being banged around as well.
I am always suprised that on a site where there should be a higher than normal concentration of 'above average' computer users, there is always a lot of butthurt over some new (and usually expensive) piece of hardware or software. Someone shooting his kid's soccer game can't really justify an SSD at this point. Someone sitting in a coffee shop wearing pantaloons browsing the web doesn't either.
Some of us do though. I switched from fast HDDs to SSDs for my scratch disks and noticed a considerable speed improvement for batch processing, which made the cost well worth it to me. If I were doing a few dozen vacation pictures from a P&S it wouldn't be worth it though.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Easy: an SSD will be more reliable, consume less power and have a much better acces time.
Unless they bought a SSD, and the content isn't spinning in circles, it's getting dusty in a little box.
Back maybe 5 years ago there were articles like this talking about how CRTs still had so much to offer and how they were so cheap and how LCD displays were still new and expensive...
Somehow I expect this article to have a similarly short shelf life and will look at best amusingly quaint in about 2-3 years when SSDs start getting really price competitive with spinning platters. Probably not cheaper, but close enough that people will be willing to pay the extra for the rather substantial performance improvement.
I read the internet for the articles.
the controller card to run this (assuming you're not going to try to get your software raid to run this) would be more than the drives..........
if you are trying to get your software raid to run this, you'd better get a really nice processor.......
Here's the truth about RAIDs: RAID has faster transfer rate, but the access time is just as slow as the slowest hard drive you have in the RAID. When you try to read a file from a specific part of the disk, the disks still have to move the heads to that location and wait for the given part of the plate to spin past the reading head. Whether you have 1 hard drive, or a RAID of 20 hard drives, the time it takes to start reading the given block is identical. However, once you start reading the block, sequential access is much faster in RAID0 or 5 and that's the advantage of RAID.
If you're copying a very large file from one place to another, RAID0 or 5 will go much faster. But: when people are talking about speed in general, they are referring to things like Windows booting up, programs starting up, your database reading a bit of data from a file, a game loading some textures from a file, browser accessing hundreds of cached files etc, those all keep accessing random blocks of data from the hard drive and the overall speed for these are almost entirely limited by the access time, at that point RAID makes very little difference.
This is where SSD comes in: transfer speed of SSD is about the same as a standard hard drive, but the access time is phenomenally faster because there's no waiting for a head to move and there's no waiting for a plate to spin past the head.
In addition, SSD makes no sound, and uses much less electricity to read/write and almost no electricity when idle, produces less heat, and: immune to mechanical shocks and vibrations. These are very desirable attributes on a laptop.
Also, SSD and RAID aren't mutually exclusive. You can have a RAID of SSDs for some mind blowing performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs