Solid State Drive (SSD), is it worth it?

E

EarthBrain

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 5, 2007
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SSD is so expensive. Does anyone think it is worth it to buy such a drive?

Do people buy such a drive to put in an operating system so that boot up time is faster?
 
Worth it depends on the perspective of the buyer and the uses he may have for it.
 
EarthBrain said:
SSD is so expensive. Does anyone think it is worth it to buy such a drive?
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Depends on the situation. Think ruggedized.

Do people buy such a drive to put in an operating system so that boot up time is faster?
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I tested several top of the line, military grade, SSDs in notebooks for a specialized application in 2007. Windows XP Pro cold boot time was between 12% & 15% improved, versus the original Hitatchi OEM drive.
 
Think of it this way:

Everything gets faster because of:

a) the incredibly low random access times of around .1 to .2 milliseconds. Physical hard drives can't do much better than about 4 ms based on today's technology - hard drives have been around for 50 years now and are as advanced as they're going to get. There's not much that can be done to make 'em any faster, seriously. So, comparing .1 ms to 4 ms means an SSD is automagically 40x faster for every read or write operation in terms of locating the point where the data is supposed to be read or written from.

Now, the other thing is a physical hard drive's random access speed changes based on how deep into the platters you go. While the very dead start of the storage - the outer edges - may provide 4 ms access time, as you get to the middle of the drive we're looking at ~9 ms on most... even deeper you'll get into the ~15 ms range... whereas on an SSD it doesn't matter where the data is, the random access time will always be somewhere around .1 to .2 ms - so you're looking at an overall max of up to 150x faster on random access time, with no slowdowns because of the physical drive mechanics getting in the way.

That's the biggest part of the appeal for SSD hardware: they don't slow down like hard drives do based on where the data is located. Beginning, middle, end, it's always found in roughly the same amount of time, .1 to .2 milliseconds, start to finish.

b) Because of that incredibly low random access speed, SSD hardware is capable of providing consistent read speeds that blow most physical hard drives away. If you run a benchmark like HDTach or HDTune on a real hard drive, you'll see the fastest sustained read speeds occur at the beginning of the drive and continue for about 20% into the capacity on most hard drives, then it starts that slow taper down into slower speeds as the head moves deeper into the platters. It's that way for every physical hard drive because the outer edges - the beginning of the drive - is the fastest point, and as you get deeper into the platters, it slows down and nothing can be done about it.

Now run HDTach or HDTune on an SSD and you'll be staring at a nearly flat line for the read speed from the start of the drive to the end, almost every time. That's what makes SSD hardware so attractive - it simply doesn't slow down just because the data is somewhere else. The beginning, the middle, the end, who cares, it'll all be read at the speed the SSD is capable of. A physical hard drive might give you 90MB/s reads at the beginning of the drive, but can't do better than 55MB/s towards the end. An SSD will give you ~90MB/s from start to finish because... <tada> it doesn't slow down based on data position.

That's the two biggies. And as Flash-RAM technology matures, so do the speeds. Just a year ago most SSD hardware was around 40-50MB/s sustained reads and they were ridiculously expensive. Right now on Newegg there's a 32GB SSD for about $160 that gives about 96MB/s sustained read speeds from start to finish, and no hard drive on the market can touch that. Write speed is where SSD technology falters a bit, but hell, hard drives are slower on write speeds too.

In time, I fully expect SSD hardware to mature to the point where it's almost as fast as chip RAM - chip RAM meaning your actual computer RAM which has random access times of .00001 ms or so, and can read data at gigabytes per second as well as write at similar speeds. SSD ain't there yet, but it'll get much faster over time. SSD technology is barely what, 2-3 years old on the big scale of things and look how far it's come this fast. If Moore's Law holds true, 18 months from today we'll see SSD technology that could be twice as fast as it is right now, at a cost about half to 1/3 what it is right now, and it'll just get cheaper and faster with maturity.

Is it worth it right now? Sure, it'll give you consistent performance you can't beat with any hard drive overall, it just depends on the particular brand or type of SSD you get these days. Some are better than others, so... that's where the price reflects the level of performance. High performance stuff costs more, that's just how it is. Buy a cheap drive, get cheap performance. But it'll get better...

If I had the money I'd grab two of those 32GB SSDs off Newegg and RAID 0 them in my box, that could be fun having consistent reads of 175MB/s or higher. :)
 
SSD speeds will continue to improve. It won't be too long until the price is more easily justified. For example, Intel claims their SSDs will have read speeds over twice as fast as other SSDs, something like 240MB/s. That's a fair bit quicker than the ~70MB/s a typical laptop drive can provide. For certain IO sensitive tasks, SSDs are well worth the cost.
 
I don't really like how flash operates in that it has a relatively low fixed write life compared to other technologies that are on the horizon. Also the way that writes are performed on a flash drive is inherently flawed, so no matter how cheap or reliable they get, there can always be something better.

I am keeping hard disks until this technology is available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM
 
You're going to be waiting an awfully long time.

Within 1-2 years, maybe even sooner, Flash-RAM will mature to the point where it exceeds physical hard drive technology easily, besting them on reads and write speeds. They already win on random access times, now it's all about read-write speeds. And while Flash-RAM is notoriously slower on the write side of the equation, so are physical hard drives, and to just about the same degree more often than not.

The write cycle lifespan is on the order of millions of writes to a cell/location, not just one or even a few thousand. It shouldn't even be a concern for someone buying an SSD at this moment unless they won't be doing anything but writing a file, deleting it, rewriting it, deleting it, over and over again millions upon millions of times. It's a non-issue, really.

In the short lifespan of SSD technology, it's truly amazing to see just how fast it's progressing. If it even takes a year to see some SSD hardware that bests even today's fastest hard drives, it wouldn't surprise me one bit... or a few gazillion. :)
 
Well current flash is not perfect true, but honestly the way the drives automatically spread writes out over the drive means that the lifespan on a flash SSD should be comparable to standard hard drives.

And I don't care what technology they use so long as the end performance is acceptable.. They could be training fleas to push around dirt for all I care just so long as the end result is good.
 
Has anyone enabled power management with these SSDs? Do they power on instantly unlike the slow spin-up that normal disks take?
 
J-Mag said:
Has anyone enabled power management with these SSDs? Do they power on instantly unlike the slow spin-up that normal disks take?
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I am fairly sure that they don't use power when not being written to or read from, so they don't have an "off" state. Laptops are already their biggest use because they save power over a HD.
 
J-Mag said:
Has anyone enabled power management with these SSDs? Do they power on instantly unlike the slow spin-up that normal disks take?
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They don't use power when they are not being accessed.
 
Ockie said:
They don't use power when they are not being accessed.
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Lazn_Work said:
I am fairly sure that they don't use power when not being written to or read from, so they don't have an "off" state. Laptops are already their biggest use because they save power over a HD.
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What I am trying to get at is the benefit in a mixed drive system due to software limitations in the OS. In windows XP you can only enable power management for all drives (is it different in vista?), so generally when I have it turned on I end up waiting for my primary boot drive to spin up whenever I leave and comeback to my PC.

Will SSDs will eliminate this altogether or is there still some "software or firmware lag"?
 
Ok, Agreed. FLash ram's big drawback is the limited number of writes.

So what ahppens when a cell wears out? Do you lose the whole drive? Does it lock out that cell and go to the next? How big are the cells anyway?

Does the drive getting to the end of its life just start to get smaller bit by bit? Or does it go belly up all at once?

Thanks
 
I looove my SSD. I can boot Ubuntu's desktop in less than 5 seconds, and I never need to worry to defrag my os volume.
 
"limited number of writes" orders in the millions - what part of that aren't people getting? How many times do you re-write the exact same sector on a hard drive over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year? Not that much, believe it or not, so millions of times translates to years of reliable service from an SSD as long as you don't scrimp and get the cheap shit. ;)

It's not a concern people should even focus on as the wear-leveling will handle it.
 
Mcot said:
Right because M-RAM is exactly the same as core memory from 50 years ago :rolleyes:

They are based on the same principals... I will give you that.
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But I wonder why the technology fell off the radar for so long? Had we kept investing in it over the decades things would look very different today.
 
Joe Average said:
"limited number of writes" orders in the millions - what part of that aren't people getting? How many times do you re-write the exact same sector on a hard drive over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year? Not that much, believe it or not, so millions of times translates to years of reliable service from an SSD as long as you don't scrimp and get the cheap shit. ;)

It's not a concern people should even focus on as the wear-leveling will handle it.
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For MLC SSD's it is less than that I believe but they could be around there. SLC are still way to expensive to justify buying them.

SSD's don't have the power benefits they should have due to the write process. There needs to be a charge built up which requires a "charge pump" so that they can operate at a constant voltage. Still, they should be slightly better than HDD's for power consumption, and they won't get nearly as hot as HDD's do. Once more filesystems are perfected for them, they are going to be perfect for laptops.
 
msabo said:
But I wonder why the technology fell off the radar for so long? Had we kept investing in it over the decades things would look very different today.
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Yes, that is my point and it is why I am a little bit bitter. Things don't progress because their better, they mainly progress due to marketing/sales performance. If something requires a lot of R&D and is costly it usually doesn't get implemented very quickly. Think holographic storage as well. How long have we been hearing about that? And all we have seen are a few demo's.

In the case of SSD, noone is going to switch their fabs over to start working on MRAM when flash memory is still VERY much in demand. Even if MRAM is 100x better. Its a catch 22 because you need fabs to be able to produce to get the cost down and advance the product, but you can't get them to switch over until you have a solid/mature product to show.
 
msabo said:
But I wonder why the technology fell off the radar for so long? Had we kept investing in it over the decades things would look very different today.
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Probably R&D cost, the cost of flash chips, and Microsoft for optimizing their operating systems for hard drives only for so long.
 
Absolutely. Insanely fast, quick response, and very rugged.

In other news: Holy post resurrection Batman!
 
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