Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
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);
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."
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!
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.