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The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives
An anonymous reader writes "Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC, but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB, the drive offers offers massive storage capacities of the level normally not seen in SSDs. While 1TB of SSD space hits right at the heart of the traditional hard disk market, it comes at a high price — at around $4,000 for the 1TB model, these drives are in the realm of aspirational rather than practical."
So at roughly $4/GB that'd place us where, back at the late 90s? I'm not sure what part of 'catching up' people seem to think of when they're talking about SSDs replacing HDDs. Yes, they're faster in a number of applications, but HDDs are crazy cheap at $0.10/GB or better, fast enough for most purposes and have a longer life than Flash-based media. I guess I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.
Considering Flash is reaching the point with its feature sizes (32 nm) where its data retention rate (1 year) and number of write cycles (8,000) is dropping rapidly (enterprise SSDs use 65+ nm SLC Flash instead), it's hard to see how Flash-based SSDs are winning, exactly.
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You don't need a solid state drive for storing media. It's completely useless. There's only a few really good uses of these things. Mostly in places where you have a lot of reads all over the disk in a very short amount of time. Mostly for things like Databases and stuff. For personal use, it really only makes sense to store your programs and OS on it. There's no reason to store things like movies and MP3s on there. Get a second drive spinning platter drive for that.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, a normal 15k RPM SAS drive costs about $1400 per TB ($700 for a 500gb drive) and draws around 16 watts of power (for a Seagate Cheetah at least). Let's assume these SSD's will be like the others and draw around 1 watt. So that's a difference of $2600 and 31 watts (Because you need 2 SAS drives per SSD). So every hour, each SSD will consume 31 watts less. So with a price of $0.12 / kWh, every hour the SSD will save about $0.0036. Over the course of a year, that will add up to about $31.44 in power savings. So you'd need to run the drives for around 82 years to recoup the added cost from power savings (A higher electricty cost will lower this, but even at $0.50 per kWh, you're looking at nearly 20 years). Needless to say, that's well beyond the life span of the drive. So no, a prudent company won't buy these for power savings...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Its all relative, folks.
Come back in a year or so.
Heh, everyday I find a new reason why we need open BIOSes as well.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
[citation needed]
The wear of defragmentation is never worth the POSSIBLE increase in performance. All manufacturers say it, all tech journalists worth anything say it. Until I'm told by a reputable source (with numbers backing it all up) that defragmentation has a potential benefit for SSDs, I'll listen to the advice given by those who know what they're talking about.
As for filesystem issues, using a modern OS like Windows 7 or recent Linux or OSX releases will mostly take care of that as there have been updates to take advantage of SSDs. Sure, if you're still using Windows 95 with FAT, you may have issues, but anything built in the last few years will take care of that nicely (and continuously improving firmware and drivers further improve performance while diminishing issues).