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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?"
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!
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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Sort of; SRT is software-controlled though (basically software-RAID-based), and is limited to Windows. (Possibly you could set something up with the LVM or similar on Linux though.) Definitely a very different beast from hybrid drives, at least if my assumptions as to how the latter work are any indication.
(You also need a newish computer and it's Intel only.)
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.
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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.
Or secure enough.
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.
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.
Some performance increase?
Have you ever used one? Best upgrade (in terms of noticeable speed/responsiveness) increase since doubling the RAM on that old pentium box in 1996....
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Are you F** kidding? My quad-core Q6600 workstation runs *laps* around a Core i5 with server-grade SATA disks. Actually it runs *laps* around a server-grade P411 SAS RAID controller (RAID10, 4 disks) on everything I/O intensive, and it is a pretty shitty SSD. It is probably the best upgrade I've ever made, and when you go SSD, you don't go back. When you see dreadful slow apps like Adobe Photoshop opening as if they were Notepad, you'll know. Buying an SSD (instead of a new board, new cpu and new memory) allowed me to squeeze a couple of years more of my current desktop. Oh and don't get fooled by >100Mb/s benchmarks on spinning disks - throw a couple dozen of random operations per second, and they will calm down to a single-digit MBps troughput.