Anyone have an ssd?

jackofalltrades

jackofalltrades

2[H]4U
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Feb 7, 2006
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I am looking to hear from anyone with a solid state hardrive. How does it work better worse. Is it worth the price in your opinion.
This is just for a dialog I am curious for later I plan on buying a laptop and wanted to know what people think about the product.
 
jackofalltrades said:
I am looking to hear from anyone with a solid state hardrive. How does it work better worse. Is it worth the price in your opinion.
This is just for a dialog I am curious for later I plan on buying a laptop and wanted to know what people think about the product.
Click to expand...

I don't personally have one, so I can't offer personal experiences. There are definitely people who have them though. There's a reasonable thread on XS.

Whether or not it is better than a hard drive depends both on the kind of SSD and the kind of hard drive, hehe. As far as desktop enthusiasts go, SSDs are only worth it if they can beat two Raptors in RAID 0, but as a laptop user you'd benefit from an SSD as long as it surpassed a low-rpm notebook drive. It is also worth mentioning that they consume less power so for the laptop user that is an added bonus.

The kind of SSD has a fair impact on it too. Newer SLC NAND 'drives' are quite incredibly fast for everything except random writes (a limitation of NAND technology) but they can be quite expensive. Mtron's new "Mobi" line of consumer-level SSDs are quite fast for their cost. It's $500 for 16GB and $750 for 32.

You might notice that laptops are currently being offered with 64Gb for only like $940 (Dell) but keep in mind that those drives are lower quality and are somewhat old (it takes a while for a laptop to come to market, afterall). If I were seriously considering SSD right now I would buy a laptop with room for two hard drives with a single magnetic disk installed. I'd then get an SSD retail and put it in the spare slot. I'd use the SSD for system and apps, and the HDD for storage and multimedia.

If however you would rather sacrifice a little more performance for higher capacity (or a cheaper SSD) I'd suggest maybe waiting around a few months. STEC has begun sampling a new line of SSDs made with MLC NAND. MLC stands for multi-level cell and provides much higher density for the cost. MLC is however slower and more prone to wearing out. STEC claims that their controller is good enough to make MLC surpass hard drive speeds, and given the higher capacity the durability is 'improved' due to wear-leveling. Check out the news post on Storage Search for more info. The important message is that we could soon have SSDs for less than half what they currently cost, although there is some compromise. For a laptop, however, I think waiting for MLC SSDs is a smart move. But I'm not an expert.

I think it also goes without saying that SSD prices will continue to drop over time, so if they're too rich for your blood now don't sweat it.
 
I was reflecting on MLC durability and I got to wondering: Just how much do I write to disk in a given day? File downloads and stuff are obvious, I have no idea how active that pagefile is. How often is it written to? Would I go through the entire volume of the pagefile in a day? less? more? If all I do all day is play Oblivion, how much would that wear down an SSD?

This link says that SLC has a write endurance of 100k and MLC can do 10k. EDIT: It appears that 100k/10k might be a little on the low side. Let's suppose I jump on the SSD bandwagon when I can afford 64GB. If I write just 5GB a day, that's 350 years for MLC and 3500 for MLC, both which are ridiculous. If I were to write the entire volume of the drive every day, that's still 10 000 days which is 27 years for MLC. STEC says their MLC SSDs have sustained write of 60MB/s. Given that speed (5060GB/day) the drive could write continuously for 123 days... I keep hearing horror stories about how short lived NAND is supposed to be, but I don't understand how those stories could be true. EDIT: I guess wear-leveling hasn't been around long enough for people to have forgotten pre-wear leveling endurance issues

If MLC durability is as much of a non-issue as I think it is, I'll probably end up getting a bunch of cheap MLC drives and putting them in RAID 0. If STEC's claim of $5/GB is true, then I could have 3x32GB in RAID 0 for all of $500 which would hopefuly translate to about 250MB/s read, 150MB/S write. Zoom! (I just made those numbers up assuming that RAID0 would scale reasonably).

EDIT: I just read through this article which just comfirms what I've been thinking. Write endurance is a non issue now, so even with 10x worse write endurance it's still not an issue.

Aw, Jeeze, now I'm excited.
 
Yeah I was worried about write endurance until I read how long they last and shock proof too.
I know they are high right now but in 6 months they may be more affordable.
 
There are so many naysayers crapping on this tech, it's pathetic. Here at the H you've got a few, and there are some over at XS who are even dumber.

If these figures are anywhere near accurate on the write/erase cycle, these things will last decades on a desktop box. Servers .. probably not as long, but that's what hotswapping is for.
 
I just purchased a Mtron 32GB MSD 6000 for my gaming machine today, $650US. I'm expecting to receive it sometime late next week, or early the following week. I'll be posting a thread in this forum to find out what kind of benchmarks people would like to see run.

I do have a laptop and I may try it in there. However, it is a work laptop, so I'm not sure I want to go through the trouble of reloading all my apps.
 
I'm currently using a Dell Latitude D630 with a 32G SanDisk SATA SSD drive. It is nice and quiet and durability is probably a good point too, but overall I am rather unimpressed. Compared to the D620 I had before with a standard 120GB HD (I believe it was a 7200rpm, but don't quite remember now), the SSD feels slower overall. The extremely fast access times don't seem to translate to real gains in usability. I should mention I am running Windows XP. This is predominately a work machine so I am mainly doing office type applications. At times the disk seems to chug as well, when I am doing many operations that access disk at once, it seems to slow down the system much more than what I remember with the standard disk. Initial boot up doesn't really seem much better either.

For now, I would say its a neat toy to have if work is footing the bill, but definitely not yet worth the money. I just don't really see much (if any) benefit for my usage.
 
Alot of people hail SSD tech as being something it's not. You can experiment by getting a simple card reader and plugging in a 1 - 4GB SD or compact flash card into it. Try copying stuff back and forth, install an app on it. Guess what? It's really no faster than a HDD and in many cases it's slower. Low seek times go out the window when your I/O requests start to queue up, - which will happen once you saturate the available transfer rates(such as doing a file copy or extracting an archive).

I think SSD will be the future if they can boost transfer rates further and the cost continues to drop.
 
Klinky said:
Alot of people hail SSD tech as being something it's not. You can experiment by getting a simple card reader and plugging in a 1 - 4GB SD or compact flash card into it. Try copying stuff back and forth, install an app on it. Guess what? It's really no faster than a HDD and in many cases it's slower. Low seek times go out the window when your I/O requests start to queue up, - which will happen once you saturate the available transfer rates(such as doing a file copy or extracting an archive).

I think SSD will be the future if they can boost transfer rates further and the cost continues to drop.
Click to expand...
They will... in fact they have.

Compact Flash cards can do what, 50MB/s reads? Meanwhile even the cheaper consumer SSDs can do around 110MB/s now. The transfer rates you're asking for are already showing up. For desktop use, putting them in RAID 0 becomes a pretty smart idea since you're so much less likely to have a disk failure. Yeah, the SSDs you'll find preloaded into current laptops are on the slow side (that Sandisk SSD does 67read, 47write), and the price is not justified yet (personal opinion). Just wait a year, and SSDs will look pretty tempting.
 
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