Why would Solid State Drives have SLOWER read/write time?

[StalkerZER0]

The good news is that in about a year the cost of a solid state drive per GB will drop by almost 50%. Great.
The bad news is that the read/write times of those drives will be like 20mb/s. Well, at least the inquirer thinks thats bad. Is that bad? Whats the average speed of the average hard drive.....and what about the SATA raptors?
In any case, what do you think about the inquirer's article about it?

16GB flash drive costs $400 to make.....costs to drop soon.... (http://www.theinq.com/?article=32336)

[mikeblas]

Because they're flash-based; flash memory takes a very long time to write, and isn't so fast for reading, either.

[unhappy_mage]

And no information on the seek times? C'mon!

Drives like the Raptor get sustained transfer rates >70 MB/s, with seek times of 8ms or so. Solid state drives may have lower STR (the Inquirer tends to report on things before they're confirmed (and in a misleading (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32171) way), but 20 MB/s is the only number I've heard so far) but the seek times are often much lower, on the order of μs instead of ms.

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&tm=33&id=150072)http://www.hardfolding.com/utag1.php/mem/428/1.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=36&id=428&type=1)

[StalkerZER0]

What the hell?
Isn't the point of SSDs is to have a system that is MUCH faster? I mean, seconds to boot the OS and whatnot.
What gives? :confused:

[drizzt81]

What the hell?
Isn't the point of SSDs is to have a system that is MUCH faster? I mean, seconds to boot the OS and whatnot.
What gives? :confused:
SSDs are much, much faster, the random seek time is orders of magnitude lower than the radom seek time on a regular HDD. As U_M stated and as shown by SR with their RAID-0 benchmarks, game loads are not STR limited, but improve with better seek times.

If you have the urge for STR, just buy a couple of them and RAID-0 them.

[TheArchitect]

Currently, I do not believe they are set up for high transfer rates. Think of every access as a random access. This can easily be changed by implementation and buffering. Put all the flash components in parallel instead of series. 1 access now gives you N Bytes instead of a single Byte. Much more scalable. I can't wait for these to become cost effective even if i have to RAID some smaller drives together to get the bandwidth I want.

[StalkerZER0]

Well, according to the article the cost of such drives in general will go down by at least half this time next year. Very soon we will find out how good they are. I wouldn't care if by then when I can afford one that they would be generation one drives and not very good. It will still be loads better than a regular drive....in general.....right? :confused: