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View Full Version : OT- Solid State Hard drives



Chuck Wintle
06-02-2009, 5:10 PM
Does anyone have one of these solid state drives? the prices are falling and capacities are rising so I may buy one. Supposedly they are way faster than the best mechanical drive available today.

Greg Peterson
06-02-2009, 6:01 PM
I'm just keeping an eye on this thread.

The hard disk drive is really an archaic device. The performance of SSD's alone is reason enough to use one. Hard disk drives have a lot of moving parts with incredibly close tolerances. Murphy's Law dictates that something will go wrong sooner than later and in direct proportion to your immediate needs.

SSD uses less power too.

Tim Morton
06-02-2009, 6:08 PM
I am considering one as well, i have read nothing but great things about them. I think as a start-up drive they would be perfect, but still along ways away from being able to use them as media storage.

Cliff Rohrabacher
06-02-2009, 6:31 PM
Almost 46 years ago I read in a loaner Popular Mechanics that there was a new technology afoot. One that used laser light to store and read data from a spinning disk.

Then one day some decades later the CD made it's advent.

Right then I said for sure that it was merely a matter of time till they got the moving spinning wobbling stuff out of the picture and went solid state no moving parts.

And here we are.

Next what'll it be?
A threshold above which technology can't advance because of materials sciences needs to discover new materials to do fancier things with?

I want that Biological computer they promised us.
And I want it in a package that looks and feels exactly like Grace Park.
Or Kate Bekensale. Either.

Curt Harms
06-02-2009, 6:36 PM
Does anyone have one of these solid state drives? the prices are falling and capacities are rising so I may buy one. Supposedly they are way faster than the best mechanical drive available today.

If I'm calculating right, they're no all that fast, especially in write mode. They do seem to be getting better and cheaper. MTBF1,500,000+ hrs. (!!) 1,500 g's shock, 20 g's vibration. One Example. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231255)
Don't know if this is good or bad but the write speeds seem much improved over earlier generations.

Scott Shepherd
06-02-2009, 6:44 PM
I remember when wired magazine came out for the first time many years ago. One thing they showed in the early editions was the glass cube made from glass that reacts to light. I forget what it's called. It was the wave of the future in drives, they said. Basically, they could take a 1/2" cube of this glass and they could very precisely hit tiny spots with a laser. So the entire thing was filled with tiny dots of discolored light to some degree. In those days, this 1/2" cube would be able to take more data than the largest drives many times over at the time.

I hadn't heard anything else about it for years until a couple of weeks ago. So maybe it's finally coming this way.

RickT Harding
06-02-2009, 7:24 PM
Most of the reviews find the intel models to be the best performing. Especially the SLC models. I've been watching them and would love to get one. A friend of mine put a MLC model into his Thinkpad and it's crazy fast. His laptop books in under 10seconds, and that's from cold boot, no hibernate/standby stuff, I think it was some $350 for 32gb though. I just can't do that yet.

There were a couple of announcements recently though, sandisk has some new tech coming out along with a couple of others. I'm holding out in hope the next gen models will have a little more performance/price and solve some of the issues with the current lineup.

Mike Henderson
06-02-2009, 7:29 PM
If I'm calculating right, they're no all that fast, especially in write mode. They do seem to be getting better and cheaper. MTBF1,500,000+ hrs. (!!) 1,500 g's shock, 20 g's vibration. One Example. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231255)
Don't know if this is good or bad but the write speeds seem much improved over earlier generations.
Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles. I know they've made a lot of improvements on that but I don't know what the number is any more (oops, I went and looked it up on Wikipedia and they say modern flash is good for about 100,000 write/erase cycles). So a flash drive would be great for loading the operating system (for example) but not for a data base that was updated a lot.

Mike

RickT Harding
06-02-2009, 7:35 PM
that's not really true any more. These drives have more than enough writes with all the wear leveling and other tech. they're even selling these thing in server situations because they are so much faster in many situations.

RickT Harding
06-02-2009, 7:41 PM
Just to back it up a bit:

Intel also claims to have improved the reliability of its MLC drives to a level in which a user can write 100GB of data on the drive each day for 5 years. On a more realistic average user scenario a 10 year life span should be expected. More demanding uses (servers etc.) could still strain the technology and for that reason Intel also introduced a different SLC based drive called X25-E Extreme which is more suitable for enterprise applications (providing 250MB/s read speed and 170MB/s write speed) and at least twice the endurance.

And a link to the sandisk announcement today:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=4636

Another good article:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Storage&articleId=9132668&taxonomyId=19

Mike Henderson
06-02-2009, 7:53 PM
Okay, thanks for the info.

Mike

Randal Stevenson
06-02-2009, 10:09 PM
We are starting to see more of this technology, but I think it will take another route it is starting. Look at all these os'es, that are booting from bios. Whether it be Asus's Expressgate, or Phoenix's Hyperspace. These benefit from this technology, but your files may not. How much you write to the device (flash, hard drive, dvd, etc), verses how much you really need to, and how much you can keep (finding), online, really can make the difference whether this is a good investment or not.

The writable part, is great for updates. Now, one of these, with an external hard drive (on/off, when needed), may be the way I might go, in a future netbook.

Cliff Rohrabacher
06-02-2009, 10:14 PM
Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles.

Well yah but if it is large enough you don't care.
Never delete just keep adding.

David G Baker
06-02-2009, 11:49 PM
I remember paying $500 for a 20meg hard drive for my Tandy 1000 and another $100 to convert it so it would work on the Tandy.

Craig Summers
06-03-2009, 12:12 PM
Seen this one?

6 terabytes of solid state drives arrayed into an awesomely fast computer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs)

Now if i had that kind of money, i might get that hook-up

~~
FWIW Solid State drives are a requirement in a high vibration environment, especially diesel powered vehicles. The diesel engine introduces a harmonic that destroys regular drives.

Tim Thomas
06-03-2009, 2:33 PM
I just had this discussion with a friend of mine who is considering the purchase of a new desktop. Our consensus opinion (which I am sharing with you for free, and you get what you pay for :D ) was that current SSD technology is awesome for laptops, but probably overkill for desktops. I think the key selling points of the SSD right now are that it draws much less power, generates less heat, and is more resistant to being knocked around. All of these are outstanding attributes in a laptop, and if I were in the market for a new one I would absolutely put an SSD in it. However, for a desktop I still don't think the price/storage ratio on the SSD is worth the cost. I would still go with a Raid 1+0 configuration of regular hard disks. (Splurge on 10,000 RPM drives if you really must) This gives you excellent speed and redundancy with more capacity and at less cost than an SSD. On most systems you wouldn't notice the speed increase of an SSD because you are more likely to be bound by the processor and/or memory. Now, if you are into making high-performance gaming rigs, maybe you would notice the difference, but I think the average user is still going to be happy with good ole hard disks in their desktops for a while. But prices on SSDs are dropping every day I think that eventually they will completely replace hard disks.