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SSDs vs. Hard Drives In Value Comparison

Posted by kdawson on from the mostly-clear-with-scattered-data dept.

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."

9 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Typo in summary? by Piete · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It says: "A few of the SSDs offer much better value than their solid-state competitors, too."
    Is that meant to be "SSDs"?

  2. Reliability? by TheRedDuke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Reliability? by Miseph · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Do you say the disk is 9% worse, or 10x worse?"

      Probably depends on which product we're advertising. No, scratch that, it depends ENTIRELY on which product we're advertising.

      --
      Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
    2. Re:Reliability? by beelsebob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What's even better, is that the life span of an SSD is linearly related to it's capacity (because there's more cells to write to, and the write speed remains constant), so as SSDs get to the capacity needed for A/V editing, they'll also get many many many year reliability at that write speed.

      At the moment, good SSDs last ~10 years writing to them at a normal rate (which is tbh, better than most HDDs anyway); many TB ones will last upwards of 40 years, great news :).

  3. As usual, ignores the value of data integrity... by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Would you employ SSDs in DB intensive tasks? by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well good thing we have your exceptionally small sampling size of two total drives (one of each) to make generalizations off of.

    --
    while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
  5. Prices on the article are bunk by StormyWeather · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Maybe missing the point by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...
  7. Re:Would you employ SSDs in DB intensive tasks? by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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