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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."
Longevity and reliability are tough to quantify, because for the vast majority of users the median SSD or disk drive will never fail as long as they use it.
Failures of disks occur at the tail end. Perhaps 10% of disk drives and 1% of SSDs fail over two years, but how do you compare them? Do you say the disk is 9% worse, or 10x worse?
About 5 months ago I bought a $700 250G SSD for my laptop and ditched the spinning disk. The system is overall faster, and for someone who's used HDs since the 286 days and floppies before then, the performance is oddly different (almost always better). The big bonus though is that my laptop takes about 10 seconds to boot (once past the BIOS) while it used to take about a minute. This has changed the way I use my computer, and is enough to justify the swap. I do have a few other systems I occasionally use, and apart from the OLPC XO-1 (which has its own performance characteristics that are different again from anything else I've seen), it's now kind of irritating to use spinning disks and feel those delays again. As the costs go down, I imagine anyone who's tasted SSDs will spread the technology very broadly among their friends.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
And as for value, a good 128GB SSD is $300. For about $200 more, you can get 3 x 150GB Raptors and a $100 Adaptec SATA RAID controller, config it in RAID 5 and get comparable performance, not to mention a little redundancy. The extra initial investement will pay for itself in uptime over the long-term.
I'm sorry, but you're completely and hopelessly wrong. Spinning rust gets around 100 IOPS, maybe 200 at 15k RPM. The Intel X25-E gets around 10,000 IOPS. Assuming linear speedup (which you won't get anything close to), you'd need 100 rotational drives to come close to the performance of a single X25-E.
The only performance metric where SSDs and spinning rust are anywhere close is on linear read/write speeds. Sadly, that's of no consequence, because that workload only exists in benchmarks.
(Also, god help you if you put a database server on RAID 5... goodbye performance! RAID 10 or bust.)
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
high altitude computing. I was reading an article about mountaineers with laptops, when you get up around 15 or 16 thousand feet the air pressure is so low that the Bernoulli effect no longer works properly in your hard drive, so your drive makes lots of nasty noise and is more prone to failure. With SSDs you just have to worry about the lack of oxygen damaging your brain and your internal organs, but not about endangering your data or the performance of your laptop.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.