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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?"
Bingo - drop survivability and heat generation. These are two of the best reasons to use SSD in a laptop, and not HDD. Nothing to do with performance.
Even two years ago, I configured my then new laptop with a 160 gig SSD for $150 more and I felt it was worth it given the speed gains. That same SSD now boots Windows 8 in 7 seconds, Photoshop CS6 in 5 seconds (first boot), Word 2010 (first boot) in a fraction of a second. I use an external drive for media. After that first SSD, I now always configure my laptops and desktops now with a SSD on the primary partition for the OS install and application installs.
For a serious computer user, an SSD has been worth the money for a while now.
* If you need to do serious disk I/O with a mid-size or smaller notebook, RAID isn't even an option for increasing speed.
* Running multiple virtual machines? Want them to boot quickly? An SSD makes them feel native.
* Running Windows as a native operating system, and have more than one or two programs that you legitimately want to launch at boot, and can't/won't disable? An SSD makes your computer usable within tens of seconds as opposed to multiple minutes.
* Doing compilation? Syncing of filesystems with a system such as Unison? Doing anything filesystem heavy? The speedup is insanely awesome.
If all you care about is running Your Web Browser and editing Word documents, or storing a few photos, obviously an SSD is a more questionable upgrade, and probably will be for the foreseeable future.
Insert self-referential sig here.
One interesting side effect of having a legitimately fast SSD is even though you save power power on not spinning a platter around you can end up using that power (or more) with increased CPU usage. Ex: Semi-Random reads from mechanical drive might be pulling data ~40MB/sec on a good day... the CPU doesn't have a lot to process at once or just does in chunks so all that nice power saving tech comes into play (reduced clock or cores or what have you). Now, pop an SSD in and start getting 300-500MB+ semi-random read speeds and your CPU will find itself a hell of a lot more busy having to actually process all of that.
It's a good "problem" to have, if you can even call it a problem ;)
The cloud isn't nearly fast enough or cheap enough to replace any sort of local storage. That's not even getting into the obvious question of reliability and availability that so many people like to just gloss over.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I actually ran the numbers on this for my company. Based on average usage on our standard laptop image and typical employee salary:
$1.82 saved in salary time per bootup (assume one bootup per day)
$2.23 saved in salary time per day due to files opened/programs launched
That's $4.05/day saved due to time I'm not waiting for my hard disk.
ROI for a $300 aftermarket SSD is 75 working days, after that they're effectively earning back ~$1000/year. Considering that our replacement cycle is 3 years, that pays back the purchase cost of the hardware. My boss now buys SSD upgrades for all of our new laptops.
On a personal note, I happily payed $1.00/GB for a hard drive several years ago, and thought it was a pretty good deal. I retired that drive only last month (too small for even my kids' computer these days). Now that SSDs are $1.00/GB it's an easy sell to my wife, and she sees every day the difference in boot times between her desktop and the kids' one (which she used to use until a year ago). I don't think I'll ever run a spinning platter HDD as a boot drive again.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
This. Many of my older computers became useless when running a virus scan. The hard drive is constantly busy reading files, vastly slowing down hard drive accesses for other tasks. With my current SSD system, I can run a virus scan and two anti-spyware scans simultaneously, and continue using the computer like normal.