Solid State Drives

[Nismo]

Noticed this...
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_sata_ii_2_5-ssd

What % faster are SSD drives? Will they be offering in SATA I or only SATAII?

Why are they making them for notebooks 1st, I'd have thought desktops would be the 1st ones.

 

[tel0004]

Why are they making them for notebooks 1st, I'd have thought desktops would be the 1st ones.

People want them for notebooks, mainly because they are much more energy efficent, so they can save on battery life. They can also make them smaller than traditional hard drives, so they can make the entire laptop smaller. Also, not producing any or little heat is great for a cramped laptop. They are also lighter.

Also, SSD are an even bigger improvement when comparing them to 5400 RPM notebook drives.

The jump isn't as big when comparing them to 7200 or 10,000 RPM desktop drives.

Those are the reasons they are more popular on laptops, there are tons of advanatages, more than just speed. On a desktop, the speed improvment isn't as great, and there are none of the other advantages you would get on a laptop, so it may not be worth the cost, at least right now.


As for the actual speed differences, I don't know.

 

[robman_rob]

i thought they were a great improvement over desktop's drives as well.

 

[Kaldskryke]

i thought they were a great improvement over desktop's drives as well.

There are a lot of factors that go into an SSDs speed, its not exactly easy to compare to a regular desktop HDD directly.

The one thing that remains relatively similar across all SSDs is the very short access times. If I'm not mistaken, it's about 0.1ms, compared to 8ms or 6ms for 7200rpm and 10krpm drives. This means random-reads are very fast on SSDs.

However, SSD sequential read speed can be more or less than desktop HDDs, depending on the type of NAND cells used and the controller. Even with slower sequential read speed, SSDs can be faster than an HDD in some applications where random reads predominate. But not all situations.

NAND flash is particularly bad for random writes, so in some circumstances SSDs are dismally slow.

Historially, notebook SSDs have been using MLC NAND which is generally slower, particularly for writing. Some SSDs, such as the OCZ ones mentioned above, use SLC NAND which is generally faster but much more expensive. However Intel and other companies are making efforts to bring higher performance to MLC without increasing the price too much.

Typical USB drives and CF cards use MLC and don't have nearly as sophisticated controllers, which is why they are so much cheaper.