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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?"
The summary mentions hybrid drives, but I can't seem to find any for desktops - am I looking wrong, or do hardware makers assume a desktop user like me doesn't want one?
Joy! Beautiful spark of the gods!
Remember, no spinning platter means you don't have to worry about bumping a gyroscope - an SSD is inherently more shock resistant. I'm under the belief an SSD uses less power than a HDD.
I have one SSD. It's in my netbook, I removed my perfectly functional factory HDD and replaced it with a smaller SSD since I really don't need my storage space, 90% of what I do with my netbook is on the web browser, and a netbook with Kubuntu and the netbook/tablet desktop is way cheaper than a Chrome book. I wish those were cheaper, I would practically be a marketing exec for those without the outrageous pricetag, but never mind that.
There's advantages other than performance to an SSD.
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I bought my first SSD-equipped laptop back in 2007. It was a Dell XPS. The laptop still works great today and flies in comparison to this brand new, work-issued HP laptop -- even with it's 7200rpm drive.
There isn't any comparison whatsoever. And throughput is almost moot, it's the IOPS that matter.
or about .74 cents per gig
Wow, $0.0074 per GB! That's cheap!
I am willing to pay a large premium for storage device that won't break if I drop it a smallish distance.
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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There appear to be a couple of extraneous decimal points in the post. If there's someplace that I can buy hard disks for 0.23 cents per gigabyte (a bit over $1.00 for a 500-gig drive), I haven't seen it.
Dropped by 3X? Dropped by three times what?
Is that the same sort of thing as "todays temperature is twice as cold"?
I think you meant "the price has dropped by 2/3rds" or "prices today are 1/3rd what they were 3 years ago".
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.
The biggest performance boost of an SSD compared to a traditional harddisk is random access times, this is what matters a lot more than sequential read performance.
That and a computer without any moving parts is just so nice and quiet.
Since bandwidth is not unlimited, nor is it always connected, I would say the paradigm is as valid is it ever has been.
Cloud Storage is just a re-branded version of what people have been already doing for decades, and thus factors in the same basic manner. There are what, about half a dozen levels of memory between a remote server and your CPU? Each one is a trade off between speed, size, and cost.
Putting a SSD as my OS/game drive has made by far the largest difference I've ever seen in a single upgrade.
In the past it was: "More ram..ooh yeah bit smoother...Faster CPU, bit peppier..." Etc, helped but not blow your socks off.
You put an SSD for your main apps, OS, and games, and it will astonish you how quickly things go. Firefox and other apps load instantly. When I had a macbook pro I swapped to SSD and normally the icons for my startup stuff would bounce for a bit as they loaded etc. After SSD like 5 icons would do a half bounce and bam all 5 loaded done.
So for a desktop, do what I do. Throw a big spinner in there as a drive for games you don't need a fast HDD on, media, etc. Then you will have the best of both worlds. It is by far the least buyers remorse I've ever felt on a PC upgrade.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
If you compare sequential reads it's obvious HDs seem to have a chance against SSDs. It's in non-sequential reads where SSDs completely outclass any HD.
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.
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.
It's still useful. The random access latency on an SSD is still about 1000x slower than RAM, but SSDs can store data without consuming power.
Keeping a terabyte or two of current RAM technology active requires substantial power supply and cooling, whereas these amounts of SSD or more can be kept and used in mobile or residential situations.
$0.74/gig is very different from $0.0074/gig...
I'm pretty sure that OP used to work for Verizon...
coding is life
An item yet unmentioned at the time I post this, is SSD lifetime. The are finite, you know, and probably a lot more finite than a well-protected HDD. The manufacturer states the number of write operations the storage cells can take on average before going kaput, and its up to the controller & OS to "age" them all equally to ensure maximum longevity (thanks, TRIM). This and speed are the main determinants of the cost of the devices and the differentiator between user and server-grade SSDs.
Nowadays with shady outfits jumping onto the SSD bandwagon, we'll see really crappy devices made from rejected storage chips hitting the markets, which will fail prematurely and give the technology a bad rep.
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.
Some of these modernized areas internet access is not fast enough, even for the home user.
When it matters, I still can't depend on my wi-fi connection via my cellphone - which, to my mind, means until someone tells me the entangled particles in said device are good anywhere in the universe or my money back, then "the cloud" is not something I want to rely on having.
Or secure enough.
After 25 years or so of slapping upgrades in computers of various sorts, I'd have to say an SSD made the most immediate, noticeable difference of any upgrade I've done. Better CPU? Yeah, the new one's a bit snappier...I think; or maybe I want to think that because I spent money. More RAM? Seems like it's not swapping as much, sure. Replace spinning platters with SSD? Did someone just secretly swap out my old computer for a new one? Everything seems faster (okay, not ripping DVDs in Handbrake).
Forget boot times, who reboots enough to even notice? App loading, compiles, anything involving disk access is nearly instant. I'll sacrifice capacity for what an SSD buys me.
Now I'll admit that I wasn't as impressed as I thought I should have been. Two years ago when I bought my first one, bloggers were wetting themselves a bit much over the extra snappiness of an SSD. But SSDs are still a damned impressive upgrade. I really noticed the difference when I went back and forth between my SSD-equipped MacBook Pro and my iMac with a better CPU but 7200 RPM hard drive. When the iMac hits disk, it's annoyingly noticeable.
In summary, SSDs have been worth the money to me for over two years now. The only spinny hard drive I'll be buying from now on will either be a secondary drive, or will go in the NAS.
Having done a number of HDD->SSD upgrades for friends and family, I can tell you this quite simply. Anyone asking the question has never used an SSD, because if they had they wouldn't be asking it.
How a desktop "feels" to the user isn't about raw throughput, but it is very often about IOPS and more importantly latency. It may not seem like waiting 5-8ms for the rotational latency of a drive is a big deal, but spread that out over a pile of IOPS and it is a huge deal. The original post even shows how much, boot time with an SSD was 9 seconds, HDD 21. That's 50% faster. Now probably most people don't care if the boot time is 9 or 21 seconds, but I bet most folks would like their system a lot better if every application load time was 50% faster!
SSD is the single biggest no-brainer upgrade to me, it's even surpassed the "add ram" no brainer. The only time SSD's get questioned is for bulk storage. If the users needs include large music, photo, or video archives then it is worth asking questions about the cost of storage. Even in those cases, going with a hybrid drive or two drives is always the right answer.
I smell FUD, and that's kinda bad in view of the power consumption figures being explicitly stated in *easily* publicly available datasheets
Let's see how much supply current is needed to self-refresh a 1 terabyte of DDR3L SDRAM.
Let's look at 8 gigabits MT41K1G4 chips from Micron. The chip takes 28mA max at 1.35V. That is 37.8mW per 8 gigabits. A terabyte has 8000 gigabits, or 1000x as much -- that's 38W or about as much cooling as a CPU found in someone's desktop PC might dissipate.
If powering and cooling one CPU is "substantial power supply and cooling", then, well, obviously we've got different points of view on this stuff.
Do notice that those chips dissipate more power only if you access them, so 38W is the idle state but even if you *do* access them, you don't dissipate all that much more -- you'll be probably only accessing a couple of chips at a time. The worst case all banks interleaved read current on those chips is 320mA, so if you access 4 chips at a time, that's still only 1.8W of extra power on top of refresh power.
Of course the logic used to piece together all the chips into a storage device will also use up power, but that logic is in idle low-power state when the chips are not being accessed, so it's a big deal.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
s/it's a big deal/it's not a big deal/. Slashdot, seriously, make a time-limited edit button, will you?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Not to mention the same reliability and security issues we've been dealing with since it was called client/server.
I've found the best strategy is a multi-level backup solution. My customers have their important data on their systems, backed up to USB hard drives they carry off site (not large enough for tape drives to be viable) and in the cloud. This way even the worst events won't wipe out the data. Last year I had a customer who came back from vacation to find his business burned to the ground, he simply picked up the USB hard drive he had left with a relative before leaving and I slapped the data on one of my spares which i let him hang onto until he could get the insurance mess straightened out, he was back up and running before the end of the day.
So I don't think anything is replacing anything, at least not if you're smart. they all have their pluses and minuses, best to use them in concert for best results.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
It's only debatable if you are severely limited in budget or have SSDs have pretty much every advantage except price. Even if the price is 3x as high, the cost of the hard drive is only a smallish percentage of the whole cost of the device - maybe 20-30% total. While price is an important consideration, if my budget can accommodate an SSD I'll go with it every time. Sure, if/when I need a few terabytes of storage space then a spinning platter is the way to go (for now) but that's not true of most devices anymore. I have a server for mass storage needs but 128GB-256GB is usually more than enough for any day to day needs and a SSD in that range is affordable already and dropping fast. My phone and laptop and my primary desktop all have solid state drives. I have two spinning platters in my house - one in an older desktop that sees limited use and the other on my file server. The new laptops we're buying for work have are solid state as well. I don't see myself ever buying a laptop without a solid state drive ever again.
Each one is a trade off between speed, size, and cost.
Well, and like you said, availability. And features, I suppose. The "cloud" storage buys you a little safety, but (excluding local cacheing) is pretty darn slow and expensive. Working the MRC on most storage services against a real drive, the outside service is going to lose on $/gb alone. It's still handy though.
True SSD's, on the other hand, are speedy and are a good addition in laptops for their lower power use and lack of moving parts. They're just more expensive. But I figure, it's not like swapping a six cell to a nine cell is cheap, either.
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
SSDs are, in case of a typical desktop system, a hardware solution to a software problem. The software problem lies squarely with braindead legacy APIs that last made sense in the 80s. Those are exposed by seemingly every operating system out there. The issue is as follows: when an application accesses storage, it has no way of telling the operating system what are its plans besides the very next access*. The OS can't plan any hard drive access patterns nor do any sort of large-scale elevator access coalescing because, for the most part, it only knows about the very next access a thread wants to do. Using threading as a workaround to this issue is just silly, you don't need multiple threads, just better async and queuing APIs, and programming languages that can actually deal with them.
Say you know that you want to read the entirety of, say, a dozen configuration files, and also want to read some known byte ranges on other files. It's not simple or even possible, as things currently stand, to tell the OS: here's all that I want to do, wake me up when it's all done. There are asynchronous APIs, but those are not in widespread use because widely deployed C-like programming languages are a very poorly suited to dealing with such problems. As in: the code becomes a royal mess. That's why many GUIs get blocked by every file access and whatnot: it's messy to code an event driven application in a C-like language. Clean, linear-flow code becomes fragmented across functions/methods or case sections. Ugh.
On top of that, all higher-level APIs: those that encapsulate file- and network access, almost universally hide the low level operations and do not allow any sort of asynchronous operation from the caller. Just look at every single damn database library: it's all blocking access! Compression libraries: blocking access! File format libraries (scientific, GIS, office, XML, make your pick) -- same thing. There's no way to use such a library to essentially queue a bunch of requests with the OS, that the OS can then elevator sort on, etc.
Same goes for the runtime linkers/loaders: there's no provision, usually, for any sort of parallelism in queueing the file access requests to the OS. The linker/loader will deal with one file at a time: open it, read some of it, process, rinse and repeat, in spite of knowing a priori a large number of such requests that could all be optimally accessed.
Sure, a realtime database system that needs to have lots of random *read* transactions probably must have an SSD, there's no way around it. A realtime system with mostly random writes can use a log, though, data from the log can be fed back to the database pages after being elevator sorted and coalesced as appropriate, trading off battery-backed RAM for HD performance.
*Let's discount the file access hints as those don't make much of a dent in typical use.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
No, it's not debatable. They offer a huge performance increase in both laptops and desktops.
Not only do programs open much faster, files open instantly, hibernation faster etc, but there's no moving parts (in case the laptop is dropped, at least the data is safe), and also SSDs use much less power (improved battery life).
Yes, they are pricey. But it's the best investment to speed up a laptop.
If you think you can get by on 60Gb or less? You are one of the less than 10% that don't run Windows. In another one of Ballmer's boneheaded moves all Windows since Vista has "anytime upgrade" which means it has ALL the files and ALL the patches of Windows Ultimate, even if its Basic or Home.
Because of this a fully patched Win 7 SP1 can easily get up into the 70s when it comes to Gbs and it sure as hell ain't easy to strip all that anytime upgrade shit out. Just one more way the marketing drones fuck up what should be a simple idea.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It is disingenuous to call it a "software problem". The underlying problem is a hardware one, ie that seeks on spinning media are fundamentally expensive. You could write software better to mitigate exposure to that problem but that would only be attempting a 'software solution to a hardware problem". You add software complexity and can't solve the problem, only (attempt to) minimise it.
SSDs are a hardware solution to a hardware problem.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
s/it's a big deal/it's not a big deal/. Slashdot, seriously, make a time-limited edit button, will you?
Proofread your comments.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I find the whole article stupid.
ssd's have been well worth the money for two years now. it's just that much faster.
the blurb sounds like a hybrid drive advertisement. smartdrv only gets you that far before you'll need to hit the disc. sure, a hybrid with 100gb of nand would probably compare favorably in the long run, but a regular hdd vs. sdd... then it's not really a debatable which one is faster, except in the sense that you can also have a debate about if hitler lost or not(revodrive which is mentioned in the article has 100gb and goes in pcie - actually even mentioning it in the same article with the seagate is stupid, like mentioning a ferrari hybrid that has a power boost from the electric when someone is trying to sell you a hybrid yaris which makes no sense, even if it technically does the same).
the current momentus hybrids have 8 gigs of ssd in them(this information is not thanks to computer world or seagate! the older smaller model has 4gb btw). sure, it makes for faster boots if you do three boots in a row. but consider this: it's not now unusual for games to take over 4 gigs, sometimes over 10 gigs(hell, max payne 3 is 30 gigs installed from steam) and many other things as well. so the optimizing algorithm is going to have fun time figuring out what to keep on the ssd portion - it's pretty much a benchmark cheat more than anything else.
in short, computer world sucks as usual and the article is a hybrid hdd advertisement. "save a few bucks and get one of these! it's excellent if you're budget oriented!".
(disclaimer, my laptop has both ssd and hd. and yes both a car analogy and a hitler reference)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
Solid state drives are pretty much better in every meaningful way except price per GB. Speed, shock resistance, noise, heat, latency, and power consumption are all better in solid state drives. If you need a lot of storage space (terabyte+) a spinning platter remains the way to go for now just due to cost but otherwise there really is no other advantage to them. Price is an important consideration sometimes but unless you are on an extremely tight budget or need huge amounts of space, I can't really see any reason to pick a spinning platter drive.
An item yet unmentioned at the time I post this, is SSD lifetime. The are finite, you know, and probably a lot more finite than a well-protected HDD.
The evidence that HDDs have a longer lifetime than SSDs remains rather inconclusive. Most of the data I've seen is either manufacturers data that should be taken with a huge grain of NaCl or anecdotal evidence with tiny data sets. Even if they do actually have a shorter life, I'd argue that the difference is relatively small basically meaningless. You really shouldn't trust either type of drive to be reliable. Data should be backed up and you should basically assume that your drive is going to fail at any moment because it might. SSDs don't actually have to last longer than HDDs, they just need to last the useful life of the computer. Anything longer is basically pointless.
Ah. You are right of course it's not too much to use residential power. It is enough to be a noticeable power bill (potentially more than the cost of the SDD over the life of the computer). I got the impression from the ggp that he was referring to reasonable, not absolute max possible. 38+ Watts in a mobile device of any kind is certainly not reasonable. In a desktop that doesn't absolutely need it, seems overkill as well even if will run just fine.
They weigh less than a mechanical drive, whereas swapping from a six to nine cell battery is a weight addition. To be fair, 3 additional cells would probably buy you more time than an SSD change, depending on model of drive and how you use the machine. I don't have hard stats on that though.
Personally, I'd always do an SSD change before upgrading a working 6 cell battery to a 9, though. Batteries are expensive. With an SSD you might lose some storage space over the stock mechanical drive (per $), but you gain speed, run time, don't have to think about jostling the laptop around so much, you'll probably spend less out-of-pocket over a new battery, and you shave off a bit of weight. I've done it for workplace machines and everyone seems really pleased.
They make a lot of sense in laptops as the price comes down, which is why we're seeing them in the slimmer, lighter, faster, longer running laptops. Of course it makes even more sense if the machine ships that way and you don't have to replace a working part... though a laptop drive has some utility of its own after it has been replaced.