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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.
I don't know about the cost/benefit for most people, but we're all running SSDs for our laptops now, and it's definitely worth it.
Once I realized that I could fit on a 64GB SSD comfortably if I didn't keep my ENTIRE photo collection on my laptop, it was a pretty easy decision to make to try them.
And after some testing, I've decided that it's enough worth it for us that we're all using them. In most cases it isn't a bit noticeable difference. But for some things it really does make a difference, and not having to wait for them is a big gain. The things that are a lot faster are: booting (rarely, but you're entirely "down" while doing it), opening big apps like OpenOffice, re-opening firefox or thunderbird when they flake out, and doing big find/grep jobs. Searching through e-mail and the like? Great.
For a long time, CPU increases were way outpacing the disc performance gains. We how have CPUs that are faster than most of my staff can really take advantage of on our laptops. But disc performance, even at 7200 RPM, was often the bottleneck.
So, we've traded volume for performance, and been very happy with it.
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.
I doubt you would. I have a 40 GB Fujitsu MPG3409AT-E hard disk from 2001 that is still running yet the so called best Seagate Pulsar - the "first enterprise-ready" SSD failed after less than a year of database usage.
Bottom line: Do not trust SSDs.
Super Star Destroyers are better value?!?!
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've seen, and have been able to reproduce reliably, hard disks losing their internal cache data, claiming to have written it to platter when in fact it was not. And I am /not/ talking about battery-backed RAID cache, OS write cache, or anything of that nature; I am speaking specifically of the internal hard disk cache.
When we figured out what was going on, needless to say we were all a bit shaken. But the lesson is learned: your storage needs to have a battery backup system.
Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
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.
Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
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.
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.
I dropped my latitude d620 on the concrete floor my desk sits on, and it crashed the hard drive instantly. For the replacement drive I let a friend convince me to shell out for the SSD. It's amazing. I no longer have to worry about bad sectors, my battery lasts longer, the machine is cooler, it's quieter, and the OS loads in like 5 seconds to usable state with virus scanner etc.
Have you tried dropping your SSD-equipped laptop onto a concrete floor for a comparison test?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Not to mention that thanks to Readyboost and SuperFetch you can get many of the advantages without the crazy cost. Using an 8Gb flash that I got for a whole $18 over Xmas and the above my boot time is under 45 second (wouldn't be as long if I didn't have multiboot set up) and my wake from sleep less than 4. In addition all my apps that I use most often are nearly instant thanks to superfetch learning which apps I use at certain times and loading them into memory.
The real market I see here at the shop for SSDs is in laptops, where lack of moving heads and lower heat help extend the life of the laptop, but even then the market is shrinking thanks to the increasing popularity of netbooks in the sub $500 range, where it simply doesn't make sense to spend 35% or more of the cost of the device to replace the HDD with a SSD. In those cases I simply sell them a sub $80 USB drive for backups and set Win 7 to back them up a couple of times a week.
I really hope they have a breakthrough with SSDs and we see the price plummet like we have with HDDs, but ATM the price is simply too high and the sizes too small for most of my customers. With cheap HD camcorders and 10MP+ cameras becoming common you'd be surprised how many folks can quickly load up a sub 300Gb drive, and as the chart shows a 500Gb SSD is truly crazy money.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We have started to deploy more multimedia intense apps and found most of our 3+ year old laptops where dogs at running them..
We then did some side by side benchmarks between an old laptop with the HD replaced with an SSD vs a new laptop with a new normal HD. Guess what? In MOST tests the old laptop performed BETTER than the new one, despite the new laptop having a faster CPU and main board...
Guess what, although they cost WAY more than a new normal HD per GB, they are WAY cheaper than a new laptop!
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
If you have a 10 minute boot up, and people on the road visiting clients, several times a day, (and standby is disabled because of security concerns with disk encryption) then a 3 minute boot can pay for itself in a few months.
If your laptops take 10 minutes to boot, you've got much bigger problems...and how is standby a concern with disk encryption? If you wake the machine, you should have to enter a password.
What are you storing that requires this level of paranoia with so many client visits? Clearly not defense.
Please help metamoderate.
I dropped a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB in my Macbook Pro for $130 the other day. It has a 4 GB SSD-like swap-space on it and it's totally boss. You don't get the performance of an SSD, but you do get better than average performance for not much more. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd
i dont know about you guys but i dont like the sounds that HDDs make. newer HDDs are much quieter but still audible, so i got a sweet SSD. now my PC runs nicely without moving parts with exception to my media storage HDD drive that spins up when i need it and DVDRW drive when it has media. yep, no fans or water cooling on anything, just silence.
i love my SSD.
No, they don't do the last-gasp writing. It simply takes too long to do it and it's too risky as the speed is uncontrolled and there's always a danger of overwriting critical areas by accident (servo tracks, firmware regions, control data, etc) which would render the drive unusuable.
In fact, this sort of power down is designated as "emergency stop" - the momentum is used to turn the spindle motor into a generator, and the power is dumped into the voice coils directly. It's quite a violent procedure and most drives are severely derated. I've seen one rated to 50,000 load-unload cycles, but only 10,000 "emergency unloads". It's just that all those pieces slamming into each other start wearing out the mechanical bits.
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...
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.
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.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Pros:
Lower power consumption, good for laptop battery life and energy bills
Immunity to low ambient pressure
Random reads are WAY faster than on HDDs. WAY faster.
Cons:
Finite write endurance (especially the newer die-shrunk SLC NAND, but the die-shrinking affects SLC, too)
Capacity / Expense (especially SLC)
Immature technology - most manufacturers still don't have it right. The original JMicron controller is a good example, having no wear leveling algorithm at all. The Indilinx controller is another, having horrible wear leveling that causes write amplification factors up in the teens. Sandforce is marginally better, but lacks any kind of caching that can be used to improve WA and/or reduce the number of erasures required. They claim WA less than 1 based on compression, but that's only under lab conditions with very deliberately-chosen write patterns.
Also, SSDs completely lack any kind of elegant O/S support. Windows sits there and churns away 15kB/s of writes 24/7, slowing eating away at the write endurance of the drive. It also makes no effort to block write, so it'll sit there and send a few bytes at a time, exacerbating the write amplification problem. TRIM is nice, but only a bandaid to the larger problem. OSX still doesn't support TRIM that I know of. I don't know what Linux would do to one... I haven't tried, and am kind afraid of investing a few hundred bucks to find out.
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.