Are Solid State Drives Worth the Money?

http://lifehacker.com/5616023/are-solid+state-drives-worth-the-money

by patrickk • 16 years ago

3 20 16 years ago

macemoneta8• 16 years ago

It really depends on the platform and requirements.

On a desktop, a three-drive RAID0 provides about the same performance, and gives you nearly 40x the storage for a given price-point.

On a mobile platform the physical space, vibration/motion, and power constraints coupled with the increased performance may make SSDs worthwhile.

moe8• 16 years ago

On a desktop, a three-drive RAID0 provides about the same performance, and gives you nearly 40x the storage for a given price-point.

Quite a terrible idea unless you enjoy backup recovery sessions.

If the noise of 3 drives doesn't bother you then you can just as well get 4 and setup a RAID10, which is nearly as fast but much less likely to fail.

macemoneta8• 16 years ago

I back up several times a day, automatically. I've run RAID arrays for years with no problems, but all drives eventually fail. An SSD is internally a RAID0 that can be up to 16 wide (that's how they get their performance). Used and managed properly (including proper backup and recovery), RAID0 works very well with good quality drives. If you have noise problems, then you likely have vibration issues that will shorten the life of your drives. I use anti-vibration mounts for all hard drives, and I hear my (quiet, anti-vibration mounted) fans more than I hear my drives. I also spin down the backup drives when they are not in use, so they add no additional noise.

chrisbolt• 16 years ago

I'm spoiled by SSDs now. I've had an X25-M in my primary computer for almost a year now, and other computers feel so slow that I can't imagine going back. Even in servers, one X25-M can replace 4 15k RPM disks in RAID 10 for I/O load, not to mention the power savings.

ahoyhere• 16 years ago

I would never go back to regular HDDs. Quiet, cool, sipping battery life… go go gadget SSD!

AndrewDucker• 16 years ago

The Momentus XT seems to be a good compromise (4GB SSD that caches frequently used parts of a normal HD).

I know a couple of friends with them, and they say that applications load vastly faster, and their machines also boot faster.

It doesn't help with sustained throughput, but that's not normally a problem.

trustfundbaby• 16 years ago

Totally worth it with one major caveat.

SSD drives don't actually delete stuff when you 'delete' them, it just tells your OS that that it can write to that space. Normal hard drives do this too, the problem comes when you actually go to write stuff to the space that is 'marked for deletion'.

Unlike normal hard drives that just overwrite the disk space, SSD drives can only write to disk in groups called 'blocks'. So when the drive is filled up with stuff (or you've been using it for some time), it has to corral the block, make sure its safe to write to, if it isn't, it wipes it, before finally writing to it ... which is really slow.

This manifests itself in your system basically freezing on you from time to time after you've been using it. Its fully explained here http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8

It can be REALLY frustrating, but even with that ... I would NEVER NEVER go back to a normal hard drive. Why? My photoshop opens in 7 seconds, Netbeans (bloated Java IDE) in 10, Windows XP boots in bootcamp in 2 minutes, and OS X is fully loaded in 30 seconds. So yeah ... you can pry my ssd from my cold, dead, mutilated fingers.

There is a TRIM OS command that allows your OS to basically clean out the space on your hard drive that is marked for deletion while you're not using the computer, so that this problem does not occur, but OS X does not support it ... Windows 7 and Linux are the only OS's I know that do. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/10

The other thing to consider is that SSDs are very fast on sustained writes ... copying a 1GB file from one location to another. However, modern OS'es employ frequent but small writes in their operation ... and certain drives that look good on paper stink up the joint in this department (things have changed recently though, since anandtech called them out on it).

What you want to do when you're looking at specs is find out what the throughput is (MB/s) for writes on 1KB, 4KB pieces of data, and compare it to the sustained write speeds, to see how big the difference is. If you want a shortcut ... buy an intel SSD ... and thank me later.

Are Solid State Drives Worth the Money?

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