So when do we really need an SSD?

M

mutantmagnet

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 13, 2009
Messages
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What makes SSDs a controversial product is that they have a completely different focus from traditional hard drives.

Their difference in cost is based moreso on other factors like speed and not storage capacity.

The press releases and reviews out there just don't give a good enough picture of when anyone needs to upgrade to an SSD.

So my question to the more experienced and knowledgeable Hard users based on the following activities what type of SSD performance I should be looking out for?

-Hosting a gaming server
-Hosting a filesharing server
-Hosting a streaming service
-Acting as a hub for a programming project
-Email/IM server

-Photo editing
-Video Editing
-Heavy torrenting and download streaming
-daily virus scanning/creation of system backups
-Heavy spreedsheet and other accounting systems usage

-etc.

Another way of rephrasing that question is what activities are we supposed to be doing that makes the performance benchmarks and marketing bullet points more meaningful?

Seriously who needs bandwidth of 100 MB/s let alone 500 that some SSD set ups can achieve?

Why should random read/write matter more than sequential read/write?

Hard drives already provide data encryption and methods to secure data. Why spend the extra cash on SSDs that use more advanced technologies?

When should I start considering NOR flash over NAND flash?

etc., etc., etc.
 
More like "For those that actually have a need for such high performance, it can be worth the cost, as for the rest of the enthusiasts, it's far far from being a need and falls squarely on being a want more than anything else."

I doubt seriously that any single person at this forum needs to have such hardware in their own personal computers. I can't think of any situation where one would need such bandwidth given that today's physical hard drives are quite damned fast, and can easily outperform a single SSD with multiple drives at far less cost so in terms of price to performance, you can exceed the basic read and write speeds of any SSD on the market today for less than the cost of that device with actual physical hard drives from my experience.

SSDs = Something you want, not really REALLY something you need.

That's how I see it. Sure, I'd love to have a nice fast one in a decent laptop, but that's a want, not a need.
 
EnderW said:
if you have to ask, then you don't need one
Click to expand...

That's on overly simplistic answer when people are pushing it as the greatest thing out there and aren't communicating correctly why we should get it.

So how about you humor me and assume I actually need one but completely ignorant of the thresholds where I should say I don't need the extra performance this ssd offers over another. Can you clear up the confusion or only offer pithy one liners?
 
If we're talking mainstream computer users, then people will probably "need" SSDs when they're priced competitively with hard disk drives. I don't mean price-per-GB since most people don't need a lot of hard drive storage, but rather when it becomes cheaper to get a Dell with a 256GB SSD than a 250GB hard drive.

Of course, enthusiasts and business users follow different rules.
 
I think the real market that SSDs will take over quickly once they become mainstream is notebooks where heat, power draw and susceptibility to damage from falling / jarring are major factors.
 
If you've ever thought "My computer can process >12 billion operations per second and more video memory than I had hard drive space 10 years ago, why the HELL are the HD spindle speeds the same and why am I sitting here listening to that monster grind away as I try to open/search through a handful of tiny files" then you need an SSD
 
The only time I can think of needing a ssd, is in a laptop.. and that's only a preference for extra drop-protection and a minimal gain of battery life.

High-transactional servers (email, web, database) would wear down the life too quick to bother.
Desktop, ha... why oh why.
 
SSD is targeted to two different markets:
1) Laptop Enthusiast: SSD is much more faster and uses less power than current 2.5" hard-drive. Remember that the Raptor is not an option for laptop.
2) Desktop Extreme Enthusiast: Speed at all cost!
SSD is also quiet but I doubt that peoples will pay many hundred $ more for the benefit of noise reduction of only one component.
 
I'll humor you: people that want a great computing experience, and figure that they don't mind paying a $250 tax to get it. In many day to day things, SSDs have made my computing experience smoother so I'm no longer thinking "alright, so let's just wait for this to load". They are by no means a haven (don't expect RAM-like speeds, which are more than an order of magnitude faster).
 
mutantmagnet said:
Seriously who needs bandwidth of 100 MB/s let alone 500 that some SSD set ups can achieve?

Why should random read/write matter more than sequential read/write?
Click to expand...

Those stats matter when you have multiple users accessing data on the drive.
 
SSD drives will take place in mobile computing - laptops, cellphones, PDA...etc for desktop computers they are expensive and with low capacity.
 
What i'd be interested to see is failure rates of SSD vs HDD .... i dont think they've been in mainstream use long enough though. One reason that would make me buy an SSD for a desktop is if they were far more relialbe than a hard disk
 
Nacho said:
The only time I can think of needing a ssd, is in a laptop.. and that's only a preference for extra drop-protection and a minimal gain of battery life.

High-transactional servers (email, web, database) would wear down the life too quick to bother.
Desktop, ha... why oh why.
Click to expand...




i presume that is why eve's tranquility server is ssd based
 
Here it is, cut and dry, sir. The people who tell you that you do not need SSD's are people who A.) dont own one or B:) own such an old one it is a pain in the butt to use easily. With the new generation of SSD anyone who owns one will tell you, YES! you need one. You will get a much greater boost in performance from the transition of HDD to SSD than you will get going from socket 775 to 1366, that much i guarantee. There is no greater advancement for your computer now, baring going from onboard video to a gpu LOL.
And for those of you who do not own SSD's, shut yer yap. you have no idea what your talking about.
 
I think people won't know whether SSD's are that great until they try it, and with current prices it won't be likely for SSD's to be going mainstream.
 
the thing that many people overlook is the fact that most processors spend very little time actually running at 100 percent, or only a small portion of the time during normal use, so the conventional thinking has become faster and faster processors, BUT the speed of even socket 775 proc's is being wasted because storage is THE bottlneck to your computers performance, in previous times it was gpu, cpu etc, but not anymore especially with the 1366 procs. What is the point of having a extremely fast processor if you cannot get data to it at a reasonable speed? What performance increase do you think you will get if you can provide data to that processor two or three or ten times faster? I personally have a i7 920 rig that is overclocked to 4.4 stable, and when i have it on platter (HDD) drives, it is slower, and i mean WAY slower than my q6600 rig at 2.4, when i have the ssd's on that rig. That is the kind of tremendous performance increases that you need to use to realize.
 
Well atleast someone else agrees with me the SSD market creates a lot of confusion for consumers but he goes further and points out manufacturers are in the dark as well.


I like to do my own research on these type of matters but I also like picking the brain of others and some good responses so far. To further add to this.

I came across a good article meant for nontechnical (it still is pretty technical) engineers in the business of making and selling SSD what benchmarks really matter.

* Data placement. Careful placement of data across the chips of an SSD is critical not only to provide load balancing, but to effect wear-leveling.
* Parallelism. The bandwidth and operation rate of any given flash chip is not sufficient to achieve optimal performance. Hence, memory components must be coordinated so as to operate in parallel.
* Write ordering. The properties of NAND flash present hard problems to the SSD designer. Small, randomly-ordered writes are especially tricky.
* Workload management. Performance is highly workload-dependent. For example, design decisions that produce good performance under sequential workloads may not benefit workloads that are not sequential, and vice versa.


If you are asking yourself why these should matter as benchmarks consider these scenarios.


Data Placement- Windows does a lot of writes over the lifespan of your machine. Do you want Windows to perform basic routines that degrade the entire SSD or only a certain sector of of that SSD reserved for windows?
For the time being SSDs are too small to act as dedicated storage drives so you would want to swap in out installs of programs into the drive. Do you want this writing of new data to cause degradation on the entire SSD or only a small sector of space you choose?
The correct answer is the most intelligent placement that supports your needs and expectations. Thus there are many strategies to achieve this affect.

Parallelism- THe biggest selling point for SSDs write now is that you can open multiple apps simulataneously. But every few years the programs we use get larger and as a result their will come a point where more harddrive bandwidth is neccessary to achieve previous performance with older programs.

Write Ordering- You've relied on benchmnarks for IOPS and Random writes in the pst for platter drives so this doesn't need an example.

Workload management- OCZ vertex/Agility outperforms the Intel X-25s in sequential writes. When it comes to random writes the order is reversed and by a far greater magnitude. If you do a lot of simultaneous torrenting the Vertex makes more sense. If you are running a server Intel makes more sense. (even this is an example. Other SSDs are entering the market that offer very different capabilities)

Lastly it should be pointed there is one factor that should be IMO benchmarked that wasn't listed.


*Data corruption

Just for simplicity sake MLC is prone to corruption on a greater magnitude than SLC and the more intensive your workload the more this factor becomes relevant.
 
I think the person who described SSDs as part of a better overall computing experience really nailed it.

Who needs a smoother and more responsive UI? Who needs a higher contrast display? Who needs an efficent data storage and retrieval device? Few people need these things, but having them makes for a very pleasant computing experience.
 
A single SSD is almost as fast in transfer rates as my 8 drive RAID array, but consumes less power, takes up less space, doesn't require an expensive controller, and has nearly instantaneous access times.

That right there IMO shows why an SSD is so worth it if you can afford one.
 
Use SSD's if you need high I/O or bandwidth or access speeds in a "small package". By which I mean not a 16 drive SAS array. Even the crappiest (non JM602) SSD will out perform one or two spindle drives in pretty much every way. Cons: Smaller space, more cost.

So good for OS/Apps, not good for mass storage. Should be great for other high I/O tasks as well (webserver, DB server, etc...) but get SLC drives, and have spares on hand.
 
Umm, when do you need an SSD? I dunno, 10 years from now when they're standard on all new systems? Maybe. Technically speaking computers have been "fast enough" for most uses for a while now, hence the rise of netbooks and other cheap systems. Even for more advanced tasks an SSD, or a faster processor, is still a luxury; but in the case of SSDs it's a luxury that'll help across the board with a lot of things (on a day to day basis)... Much more so than almost any other upgrade you could make to your rig right now (unless you're running something pre-C2D or less than 4GB of RAM).

I mean do you need an i7 if you have a C2Q rig? Or even a C2Q if you have something like an A64? Probably not, anything you can do on one of those systems you can do on the other, just slower (in some cases). As for some of your concerns based on that article you linked... You should do some further research into modern SSD controllers and how they handle most of that. Windows isn't gonna be writing and rewriting the same block of flash memory on any half-decent SSD.

Beyond that, I don't think they'll ever be any more or less reliable than HDDs (other than obviously being more rugged on mobile systems), it's not like flash memory in general is any more reliable, just more durable under abuse.
 
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