Anyone messing with Solid State Hard drives?

pwjohnston

I’ve been looking at SSD’s and thinking about getting one of these 2.5” SATA II drives for my laptop. Anyone messing around with this, have any thoughts?

Newegg.com - Express Card, Solid State Disk, Solid State Hard Drive

tiersten

SSDs aren't superior to HDs in every aspect. Whether it'll work for you depends on what you want to do with it.

The main issue with current SSDs is that their write time is terrible if you're doing many small writes. Some SSDs have cache RAM in them now to alleviate this to a certain extent but it doesn't totally cure it. Most SSDs don't even have a cache. This will affect things like installation and startup of the OS.

If you just want something quiet with no moving parts then a SSD will be good for you. If you have certain performance requirements then you will need to test it first.

jryantech

I don't think they are worth the 'speed to memory' price right now.

I would rather have 120GB of space for $60 then 32GB for $100 (estimated prices) and give up the speed.

Netbooks are the ones getting all the crave for these SSD's right now.

Ahriakin

HyperOs Systems

Andretii

Ahriakin wrote: »

HyperOs Systems

More insights?

pwjohnston

tiersten wrote: »

SSDs aren't superior to HDs in every aspect. Whether it'll work for you depends on what you want to do with it.

I have VMWare workstation 6.5 on my laptop. It's a 1.6 GHz Intel Core duo, 2GB max DDR2-5300, 120GB 5400 rpm SATA drive. So my RAM is maxed, can't replace the processor, my only option is the HDD.


I was looking at this:
Newegg.com - G.SKILL FM-25S2S-128GB 2.5" 128GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Solid State Disks

G.SKILL FM-25S2S-128GB 2.5" 128GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail

* Sequential Access - Read: 155MB/sec
* Sequential Access - Write: 90MB/sec

It's $215


G.Skill Titan 128GB SATA SSD FM-25S2S-128GBT1
Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage

G.Skill Titan 128GB SATA SSD FM-25S2S-128GBT1 | G.Skill Titan,FM-25S2S-128GBT1,Solid State Drive,G.Skill Titan 128GB SATA SSD FM-25S2S-128GBT1 RAID-0 Solid State Drive Performance Benchmark Test Product Review | Benchmark Reviews Performance Tests

I donno those numbers look better than these.

Charts, benchmarks 2.5" Hard Drive Charts, Average Read Transfer Performance

tiersten

I'm not sure how much of a performance boost you're expecting from this. Whilst I/O will be better in some cases, you'll still be limited by the processor and amount of RAM.

The way flash SSDs work means that they slow down when you've used them for a long period of time and are nearly full. They do write combining to pack little changes into the least number of actual writes to the flash. This means that eventually you'll get a very high amount of fragmentation which the SSD controller needs to work around. You can "fix" it by reformatting the SSD and starting over so it isn't actually a permanent change.

Read this and make your own mind up about whether it'll be worth it for your case.

Don't get me wrong, I think SSDs are great but only if they're used in the right application.

pwjohnston

tiersten wrote: »

Don't get me wrong, I think SSDs are great but only if they're used in the right application.

So what would be a better use for them?

tiersten

pwjohnston wrote: »

So what would be a better use for them?

Where reliability is most important. A SSD has no moving parts at all which means moving your SSD based laptop when it is on won't cause a fatal head crash. A side effect of having no moving parts is that it is completely silent.

Read the article I linked anyway. They explain how the massive numbers quoted by the manufacturers aren't quite the whole picture.

Ahriakin linked to a RAM based SSD which have been fairly common for many years now in enterprise environments. With those SSDs, you have extremely high performance for sequential and random read/write. You see them used as caches and database storage. If you're keeping your database on it then you get ones with a flash or HD backup system built into it with enough battery capacity for it to write the RAM contents.

pwjohnston

tiersten wrote: »

Read the article I linked anyway. They explain how the massive numbers quoted by the manufacturers aren't quite the whole picture.

So ya I just got a chance to look this over, been busy with work.

That was a very interesting article, but that was def what I was looking for. I know SSD are the future and they're coming down the pipe, but the TRIM issue seems like one that needs to be resolved. If it's built into W7 than it shouldn't be that big of an issue. A crop a drives will come out and then maybe I'll upgrade.

astorrs

tiersten wrote: »

Ahriakin linked to a RAM based SSD which have been fairly common for many years now in enterprise environments. With those SSDs, you have extremely high performance for sequential and random read/write. You see them used as caches and database storage. If you're keeping your database on it then you get ones with a flash or HD backup system built into it with enough battery capacity for it to write the RAM contents.

Like tiersten said, don't confuse consumer grade SSDs for Enterprise Flash Drives used in large SAN arrays. Aside from IOPS, response time/latency and other differences, the pricing is... "a little" higher.

Oh and by "a little" I mean about 10x the price of a comparable sized 15K fiber channel disk.