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SSDs vs. Hard Drives In Value Comparison
EconolineCrush writes "SSDs hardly offer compelling value on the cost-per-gigabyte basis. But what if one considers performance per dollar? This article takes a closer look at the value proposition offered by today's most common SSDs, mixing raw performance data with each drive's cost, both per gigabyte and as a component of a complete system. A dozen SSD configurations are compared, and results from a collection of mechanical hard drives provide additional context. The data are laid out in detailed scatter plots clearly illustrating the most favorable intersections of price and performance, and you might be surprised to see just how well the SSDs fare versus traditional hard drives. A few of the SSDs offer much better value than their solid-state competitors, too."
It says: "A few of the SSDs offer much better value than their solid-state competitors, too."
Is that meant to be "SSDs"?
While a pretty comprehensive article, nowhere do they actually talk about reliablity and longevity of these drives in their value calculations. That's a pretty important factor for me, and has been one of the reasons (besides price) that I haven't seriously considered one yet.
Sorry, but until I can get an SSD and not have to spend almost the same amount of money again for a drive to store media and games on, no deal. They are just way too expensive per GB, and I'd rather pay for one HDD to get a lot of space than pay for a HDD PLUS an SSD just to get a speed increase with only slightly more space.
I'm afraid that people jumping big-time on the expensive SSD bandwagon, though, will not encourage makers to decrease prices as fast as if people would have actually smartly waited until they were a decent price to size ratio.
While most every hard disk supports and respects proper cache flush semantics, SSDs typically trade performance for data integrity. Although it should be a standard feature, very few SSDs include a capacitor to prevent filesystem/data corruption in the event of power loss.
Unfortunately, the vendors are very secretive about SSD internals, and the algorithms they choose to employ can also have a significant effect on data integrity. At this point in time, there is far too much blind faith required, and many vendors definitely do not deserve it.
I think the consumer trend is pretty clear with respect to SSDs (enterprise-level I think is still uncertain). Consumers like the speed and the battery savings (laptops being incredibly popular now) that SSDs provide, but of course there is no way you are going to get the sheer quantity of storage space that you can get with hard disks.
Consequently, a lot of companies are marketing "home storage servers." I've seen Lenovo, Acer, Asus, etc... all come out with small 4 or 5 bay boxes, usually running Windows Home Server, all aimed at the mid-range consumer market. It makes complete sense to put the platters in a box, where you can keep network-accessible massive storage, and to put the fast, low-power SSD into your client machine.
The problem arises when you need to access what's on that home NAS while you're out on the road. While I think many people have the upload bandwidth for streaming music, I don't think that exists for video (at least, not in the United States, or at least not where I live). So sites like hulu, etc.. will remain popular in that regard for the time being.
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Well good thing we have your exceptionally small sampling size of two total drives (one of each) to make generalizations off of.
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If your really a budget consumer, and are using the hard drive to get crap done then at the cheapest rate a laptop replacement SSD from newegg is going to cost you like 80 dollars more for a 64 gb SSD than a 500gb hard drive. If your time is worth 50 bucks an hour on the market, and your boot time is reduced by 2.5 minutes your ROI is at break even in around 3 work weeks according to my head math.
Don't chase dimes with dollars.
they didnt test all brands but all the controllers the brands use. so look up your samsong controller and that site probly has the test.
The test is very unfair on small SSDs like the Intel X25-V because it doesn't look at overall price, only $/Gb. Hardly anybody is going to install a small SSD as the only drive in a machine. Most people would combine them with a big hard disk so the final score would be a blend of the scores for the SSD and the second hard disk.
eg. I just rebuilt my machine with an X25-V for the OS and applications. The X25-V gives the machine amazing boot up times and near-instant application load times - way faster then my old Velociraptor. As an overall performance enhancement it's a complete no-brainer for $110.
For the price of a big SSD you can probably get an X25-V (boot drive) plus a 300Gb Velociraptor (video editing and/or your hardcore games) plus a 1.5Tb HDD (for your torrentz and AVIs). Beat that for price/performance!
No sig today...
No, it's a fine conclusion. Don't trust SSDs. Don't trust spinning rust. Don't trust your drives, make sure you have redundancy (RAID) and backups. And don't blindly trust your backups, test them first. Then keep a set off-site.
Now, the implied "don't-trust SSDs, trust rust instead" conclusion is bad.
Not a sentence!
The article sounds like an "industry sponsored report" designed to sell more SSDs because, presumably, the manufacturers are not selling as many as they would like to.
Personally, I don't see what value SSDs bring based on how expensive they are currently:
1. Reliability? - A responsible computer user will still need to maintain backups of SSDs in the same way that they currently do for hard disks. Sure, the failure rate of SSDs may be lower but, ultimately, every SSD will eventually fail - and because it's a new technology, people do need to be extra vigilant for previously unforeseen problems that may only appear after millions of them have been sold. The price of three hard disks (a mirrored pair and a backup disk) is still far cheaper than one SSD.
2. Battery life? - I cannot argue with this one except to say it's still cheaper to buy a couple of spare laptop/netbook batteries than it is to buy an SSD.
3 - Bootup/operational speed - I'd certainly be impatient waiting 5 or 6 minutes for a computer to boot up but I'm not sure my life is that busy that waiting 30 seconds for a hard disk as opposed to 3 seconds for an SSD matters that much to me. In my 30 years computing experience, machine speed comes from avoiding bottlenecks and good OS optimisations - yes, a faster SSD helps with the hard disk speed bottleneck but that still leaves things like the amount of memory, CPU power, OS bloat and fragmentation to consider.
I'm certainly not dissing SSD, it's a logical progression to the hard disk, but for the current prices of them, there's not enough benefit to me that justifies replacing my hard disks with them.
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Sometimes value isn't practically measured just by numbers/benchmarks. I think this is one of those cases.
I think personal enjoyment and your user experience trumps data of Performance per dollar from a chart. If updating your PC to use SSD storage signifigantly improves your user experince on a day to day basis, it's probably worth it.
As an example, what's the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $20 one? You could compare alchol levels, etc., but in the end the taste, and palate (ie. user experience) is what matters. Sometimes it's not really possible to put a value on these things using charts and graphs. Your own opinion and what the value is for that convenience/experince is the true measure.