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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."
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.
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.
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);
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.
Data corruption - it's not just for hard drives any more :-)
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."
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.