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Are SSDs Finally Worth the Money?
Lucas123 writes "The price of 2.5-in solid state drives have dropped by 3X in three years, making many of the most popular models less than $1 per gigabyte or about 74 cents per gig. Hybrid drives, which include a small amount of NAND flash cache alongside spinning disk, in contrast have reached near price parity with hard drives that hover around the .23 cents per gig. While HDDs cannot compare to SSDs in terms of IOPS generated when used in a storage array or server, it's debatable whether they offer performance increases in a laptop significant enough that justify paying three times as much compared with a high-end a hard drive or a hybrid drive. For example, an Intel 520 Series SSD has a max sequential read speed of 456MB/sec compared to a WD Black's 122MB/sec. The SSD boots up in 9 seconds compared to the HDD's 21 seconds and the hybrid drive's 12-second time. So the question becomes, should you pay three times as much for an SSD for twice the performance, or almost the same speeds when compared to a hybrid drive?"
If you're pushing the cloud so much is storage much of an issue at all? Seriously I can put Chromium OS on a 4GB thumb drive and boot up a laptop and do web stuff all day long.
Sometimes people don't have access to the internet but still need a computer. Remember the old days before the cloud existed? Yeah - you can't get on the Internet everywhere. Some of these rural areas people still think dial up is not only an option but they still think it's normal.
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The post makes it sound like Hybrid is close to SSD ... it is not ...
Max. read speed (4K blocks)
SSD: 456MB/sec.
Standard: 122MB/sec.
Hybrid: 106MB/sec.
Max. write speed
SSD: 241MB/sec.
Standard: 119MB/sec.
Hybrid: 114MB/sec.
1.19GB file transfer
SSD: 15 sec.
Standard: 34 sec.
Hybrid: 29 sec.
But for the most part on the desktop Solid State doesn't make too much sense.
Are you kidding? SSDs are about 5-10 times faster than HDD. Considering that in many computers, the HDD is by far the slowest component, not a bottleneck for some applications, but usually a minor one for everything (everything comes from storage at some point). Upgraded to an SSD and saw a stunning gain in responsiveness for nearly every single usage on my desktop. It was obviously massive for boot times (probably ~3 times faster), but overall everything is vastly snappier. And I'm only running a SATA II connection from my motherboard, which means I'm only getting about 1/2 the top speed of the SSD.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
As in all things, the value is in the eye of the buyer. What matters to you may be unimportant to someone else.
SSD offers speed, lower power requirements, and low heat but can't match spindle capacities and has a higher cost.
Spindle drives have large capacity and low cost but high heat, and higher power requirements and poor performance by comparison to SSD.
Hybrids have capacity and low cost, good performance, higher power requirements, and high heat.
SSD's are an easy choice for laptops (in general) unless the laptop has a large storage capacity requirement.
If portability isn't a concern, you can easily stripe 3 standard HDD's and get near the same performance as an SSD for the same cost but with higher capacity.
There are simply too many variations and 'solutions' to use a cookie cutter approach, but if you break it down into the major categories above, and grade on which is most important (Price, Power, Speed, Capacity, Heat), it becomes easier to judge which is a better fit.
If you are getting a desktop, then you are either in it for raw power. In that case you get a system with a lot more memory, and faster physical drives, if you are not in it for raw power then you are in it for budget reasons. But for the most part on the desktop Solid State doesn't make too much sense.
As a primary disk an SSD is truly a joy a to work with. There's no need to use them to store tons of movies or MP3's, a simple 64 or 128 GB drive to run the operating system and most commonly used applications is more than enough to experience a truly significant increase in speed.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.