solid state hard drives

i see these coming down in price now, wondering what the advantages and disadvantages are. i would assume; faster boot & shutdown, no defrag, noiseless, better stability?

i've read integration and benchmarks with Vista are good, anyone used one in a Mac?

No idea about them but I'd love one. I've had bad experiences with traditional drives...

no moving parts, better battery life, better performance in many applications. by next year, they're probably going to be standard on most laptops.

from what i've read, the intel x25-e will add about 30 minutes to a macbook battery over using the standard hard drive.

i've heard that the ones out right now are most a rip off and/or don't even exceed the speeds of 15,000 rpm hard drives

Shorter lifespan though, no?

I find that my SD cards often stop working, but that a format in Windows fixes them right up. I'm guessing that "sectors" of flash are failing and the format just marks them as bad.

I'd like to think the controller on an SDD would do this marking on the fly.

  Awepittance said:

i've heard that the ones out right now are most a rip off and/or don't even exceed the speeds of 15,000 rpm hard drives

yeah, i would not buy one now unless you have money to throw around, and are going to use it in a laptop, where you benefit from the lower power usage and lack of moving parts.

the price/performance ratio is going to overtake spinning platters very soon, though. in 3-5 years, ssd will have done to the hard drive market what usb drives did to the floppy/zip drive market.

  analogue wings said:

Shorter lifespan though, no?

 

I find that my SD cards often stop working, but that a format in Windows fixes them right up. I'm guessing that "sectors" of flash are failing and the format just marks them as bad.

 

I'd like to think the controller on an SDD would do this marking on the fly.

this is the biggest problem with these. not sure if the new ones addressed it, but a flash c:\ will need to be reformatted ~once a year (ballpark) depending on a huge number of variables such as total time the pc is on, time it spends doing certain s/r/w operations, quality of design/construction of the drive, how it performs with the rest of the system, etc.

they also require power, whether they're s/r/wing or not.

yea I thought they're faster for accessing small files but disc drives function better for getting to large files on the fly.

not to mention solid state is way more expensive right now. 99$ for 1tb disc drive vs. 200-400 for 128 gigs? hmmmmm

this is crazy. 24 ssds.

why the fuck doesnt earth have this computer shit figured out yet? i mean cmon its gonna be 2012 soon and we still dont know what kind of hard drives to be using on our computers, its pathetic. everyone agrees that computers are going to revolutionize the future, but how much government money is going into computer research? probably none

lol

  Glass Plate said:

isn't it supposed to be computers double themselves every 2 years? (or 3?) what's the name of that law? I forget it.

moore's law

isn't it supposed to be computers double themselves every 2 years? (or 3?) what's the name of that law? I forget it.

i think its called moore's law

not really worth it... I just have my OS drive in a raid0 with 2 cheap 80gb sata2 drives and have all my important shit on a 750gb drive that i backup weekly. My buddy has a setup with 3 ssd's in a raid0... the dummy used his onboard controller though so basically the raid0 means nothing... but if he got a decent controller that's things would scream.

  maoam said:

this is crazy. 24 ssds.

that IS crazy, quite impressive

the x-35s are the only really good ones at the moment.

read this for the reason some ssd's are rubbish and some (x-25s) are good. its to do with the memory controller. yeah the x-25s are really good at small size memory chunk read/writes, and that equates to better smoothness when using real-world applications. the others are thrown together really badly.

this enlightened me:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

  Mesh Gear Fox said:

Apparently the read/write speeds are crap.

not at all, especially on the x-25's.. true they can get 'clogged up' (read the article) but look at these charts. one of them (random read/writes) the normal hd's arent even on the same scale :angry:

if the r/w speeds were crap there would be no reason for these to exist, silly.

What I've read about them is that over time, they get slower and slower, thus needing the occasional format to restore them back to parity. For me, this is a huge dealbreaker (price not withstanding), as who wants to format their drive occasionally just to get performance back?

im just gonna deal with what ive got for another few years, inevitably they will get about 10 times better.

I'll wait until these get a lot cheaper. did have a lot of hd failures in the past few years but they were mostly the fault of a bad psu. moral of the story: don't skimp on psu. more than you think you need is better.

  tv_party said:

I'll wait until these get a lot cheaper. did have a lot of hd failures in the past few years but they were mostly the fault of a bad psu. moral of the story: don't skimp on psu. more than you think you need is better.

there's also no need to overbuy. you'll need a decent psu if 1) you have more than 1 HD 2) you have a fancy video card (or 2) or 3) you are regularly running intense graphics apps (or data processing apps, but in order to be a strain on your pc you need to be calculating some super complex shit, worlds from any current DAW).

also, if you have a bigger power supply it's always going to use more power, regardless of what the pc is doing.

and yes, current ssds will require a reformat over time. i'd say most people could get away with doing it once a year, but that depends how quickly your performance degrades. it would be easy to get by this if you had an external storage device. Just keep an image of a fresh xp (or osx, or ubuntu) install with whatever programs you want on your external data source and load that up every time the drive starts being a faggot. keep things that you will update (music library, games, etc) on the external and you can take advantage of the rediculous r/w speed while having important things on less corruptable external.

i'd say for most people though, stick with regular HDs till the price drops drasticallly and you can buy 2 for cheap.

i'll wait for them to iron out all the problems with these. i don't see any reason to start using every new technology that comes out, you'll get the same stuff later much cheaper and better.

With HDs getting as cheap as they are per GB, I don't see solid-state HDs dominating the market anytime soon. It's funny, because considering how many SSD products there are out there (iPods, phones, flash memory, etc.) you'd think it would be ridiculously cheap at this point to manufacture. Then again, I guess making a thin metal platter still is a lot less labour intensive and cost-prohibitive than silicon.

what happens, basically, is that you have to overwrite large blocks of data at one time, instead of just marking them for overwriting, like you do on a normal hd. so they end up being clogged up, as they automatically write to a new memory block, so even if you delete a file and write a new one, the old file is left.

they are getting round this by having extra memory on the drives for shuffling round data, and windows 7 has a new write function which will overcome this.

they'll be fine sooner rather than later.