Weekend Open Forum: Your take on solid-state drives

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If we were here in 2007 I'd have bought myself an affordable 80GB - 60GB - even 40GB - SSD by now, plenty room for Windows XP and a couple games installed at a time, with all my media, documents, etc. on a seperate 1TB workflow drive, or archived on my Drobo.

In the last few years however, I've been running Windows 7 since the RC, and gotten into Steam (with over 100 games on it already), and really even 160GB is struggling to be enough; I'd need more like 250GB or 500GB to give myself a bit of breathing room, and at present those kind of capacities are just much too expensive.

I might give in, as I am very tempted, and shunt the Steam games onto a seperate drive and work something out, but my intentions are to wait and see what the upcoming 25nm SSDs from Intel and the end of the year are like with regard to capacity and pricing before making a decision.
 
Just recently built a new computer with a intel x-25m 160. I can honestly say that I can hardly stand to use my other home computer or my laptop. Programs respond so quickly with the SSD that is truly amazing. I wanted to purchase the Crucial real SSD 300 but after reading a not so good review at anandtech I ended going with the tried and true Intel drive. If you are considering it don't let the price scare you away you will not be disappointed with the outcome.
 
Ever since i bought my first SSD i haven't looked back.

Laptop 1 - G.Skill Falcon 64gb
Laptop 2 - Intel X-25V 40GB
Laptop 3 - Intel X-25V 40gb
Desktop - Intel X-25M G2 80GB

my velociraptor is collecting dust. i use a 1.5TB for storage. SSD is nice and quiet. speed is very nice. but have any of you who own a laptop see the difference with heat? i noticed my laptops doesnt run as warm with SSD.

I've seen reviews for sandforce but i'm staying a way and sticking with intel. my first SSD was the G.Skill.... and the customer is crap.
 
I like the idea of lower power draw and heat, no moving parts, and less space usage. In the SFF systems I build, this is especially attractive. Of course, the faster times are great too. The price is the only thing that has held me back. I don't think the prices are unreasonably high, but it's just a value proposition when less expensive and perfectly usable HDDs with higher capacity are available at a much lower price. Another value consideration, however, is buying components that might soon be phased out (not that I think HDDs will disappear in the near future).

I'm thinking about buiding a second system, so I'll probably get an SSD for that one. I'm watching for sales.
 
Lou3 has hit the problem right on the nose as far as I'm concerned.

Let's say it once more as a final wrap-up. SSDs are incredibly fast, very small, produce little heat, require little power to run, and are delightfully quiet. But on a space-to-price ratio, SSDs are out of the question as far as I'm concerned. If I were to buy one, I would want to use just one drive instead of managing a series of drives. And for that, I would need a drive of relatively decent size. This means that I would need to reach for at least 250 gigabytes of space to feel somewhat comfortable. Unfortunately, the way things are currently priced, I'd be spending almost as much money as I've spent on my entire computer as I'd be spending trying to purchase such a large SSD. What does that equate to on the ratio I mentioned? Well, for every dollar I spend I would get about 0.4 gigabytes per dollar. 409 megabytes?!

If I were to get an internal HDD with 1 terabyte of storage, I would be getting about 9.3 gigabytes per dollar. From that sort of a standpoint, for me an SSD is absolutely out of the question with prices the way they are. For an SSD to be of any appeal to me, they would have to reduce the prices to nearly 1/10th of what they are. That would mean I'd get about 3.5 gigabytes per dollar which would be much more practical and frugal.

I just simply cannot see prices coming down to that sort of a range for quite a long time to come. Perhaps a year from now, they will have come down by an appreciable amount. But for me? I think I'll stick with my HDD for a while yet.
 
I have not purchased one yet as the price is simply too high for me. I get pretty decent performance with my current hard drives and my system in general. I have no real reason to jump in at this time, so until prices drop I'll just being reading and learning from others experiences.
 
They are as reliable as rotational drives, but they are slow, and have limited capacity.
Price, capacity, and speed are the big issues. The most recent drives are faster, and larger. The cost is coming down monthly.
I suspect part of the problem is that manufacturing assembly lines are not yet converted, and there is too much manual labor still involved... along with manufacturer greed.
These drives don't cost any more to make that a regular hard drive, and in volume, they will be less.
When the manufacturers stop taking advantage of the rarity and drop their prices... which will likely occur after high school and college graduations, then real change will start to occur.
When the capacity reaches 100 GB, and the price is under $100, we will see rapid change. By March, 2011, we will see significant changes in those used for laptops.
 
raybay said:
They are as reliable as rotational drives, but they are slow, and have limited capacity.

You better start reading up on their performance for SSDs released in the latter half of the last decade. Calling them slow is about as far from the truth as you can get. That is unless you're comparing them to RAM based drives. The last commercially available (industry available ones aside) that I know of is the Gigabyte iRAM, which has a max capacity of 4GB.

raybay said:
When the capacity reaches 100 GB, and the price is under $100, we will see rapid change.

Capacities have now reached 500Gb, and the price for some 30Gb models are already under $100. As far as I know, rapid change has already begun, you just didn't realise it yet.

Given the "simplicity" in producing SSDs compared to whats required in HDD production, if the price per gigabyte of SSDs reach 400% of HDDs, I'm willing to bet HDDs will no longer be manufactured. Right now the figure is above 2000%.

The one other thing that comes to mind when I think about SSD's taking over the scene is the fact that Windows 7 comes prepared for them. Take into account that Microsoft was dumb enough not to see FDDs being phased out when releasing WinXP.
 
Just my user experience with a mid-range ssd...
Got a intel v series fro Christmas from my wife after I had decided to wait a while on price and implementation. Nearly sent it back as it wasn't a second gen M series. Never the less, installation was flawless and relatively easy. I can see were some might flub the firmware updates, but i read the directions and pulled it off.
I upgraded the os drive from a pair of 7200 160Gb drives in raid 0 and run a core 2 duo with a 5770 gpu. I have been very happy with the results overall. Minor hassle to monitor where to install different programs, but worth it. Computer is easily faster than before, certainly load times are much faster.
Still, it does not make game play any different. The difference is no better than buying a new computer every couple years with a new cpu and gpu.
Bottom line IMHO, for $100, a similar midrange SSD can give you a solid "new computer" experience provided you are reasonably hardware savvy.
The minor complaint is monitoring storage. One expected plus is that my case makes installing a new HD a bit of a pain. With this I just plugged it in, shoved it inside the cover and closed it. Runs like a champ with no mounting at all...
One negative is optimization. Not required in my experience, but a lot of info available to keep the antsy occupied. In my case, ran benchmarks and then a recommended cleaning utility only to see my scores fall.
I would not buy a top end SSD now until prices come wayyy down. If I were rich and had hours to optimize there would be four raided in my box.
 
I made the jump on dec 2009, I'm running an X58 chipset with a i7-920 so the chioce in brand was easy. I stuck with intel and it was the right choice, 160GB G2 SSD was needed to really allow the i7 to flex itself. I won't go back to using a regular HD has a boot drive ever again.

The choice between the intel drive vs vertex was simple. The X-25M has much faster random read and write and this matters most for an operating system drive. Even with the capped write speeds on the intel drive i'm vary rarely writing to the SSD so it matters not.

If you can afford it make the jump!
 
I plan to buy a smaller SSD just for my OS install and keep everything else on a separate hdd. Thats how my install is right now, just using partitions on a 500 gig drive.

But I have never been one to jump right into a new product. I always wait a while for the kinks to get ironed out.

And as it is now tho, there is a new flavor every week, with new improvements. I'm going to wait until the rate of the improvements slows down, and the price becomes more reasonable. I love my tech gadgets, but my apatite for them and my amount of cash left seem to be inversely proportional :(
 
I'll probably get one in Q2 2012. That's when I will be finishing up my Master's degree and will (hopefully) have enough income to actually rebuild my entire PC. Until that time, I just pray my 8800GTS and e6400 are capable of holding me over for games. If not, my PS3 might see a bit more action :p
 
I took the leap in August of 2009. I was so impressed by the speed difference of my OCZ Vertex on my desktop I went so far as to purchase an OCZ Agility and install it into my work laptop. I have absolutely loved the performance. It is a night and day difference. My laptop SATA controler is only capable of 1.5Gb/s so I don't even take full advantage of the performance. But the seek time alone makes it worth my while. I have many co-workers with the same laptop and 7200RPM drives and they all find their systems painfully slow. With an SSD in mine I really have no need for anything more. That is a pretty significant difference.

On a different note, my Vertex bricked a few months back. That has left me a little shaken. I had almost no warning that things were going bad and they went bad very fast. I use Mozy for backup so I had all of my data consistently backed up (I'm moving off Mozy btw. Going over to Carbonite). OCZ replaced my drive under warranty. So with that combination I guess I am willing to deal with a little trouble, but it would be nice if they could work out some of these issues.

I don't ever want to go back to slower drives, but I'm not ready to recommend this to "non-power users".
 
Everyone wants an ssd but noone wants to pay the price/performance hit. I'll stick up for conventional HDD's in my argument as no one else has really.

1. They are a more reliable source for storing data and don't require another hdd to backup your data just in case of either fail or becoming full quickly. I.e most people who buy ssds and still require another hdd anyway to backup in case of fail and for all other larger info like programs and vids.

2. Having bought 2 mechanical hdds (spinpoint f3's) and putting them in raid 0 my write & read speeds are 300meg/sec for a tiny $130 dollars with 2 terabyte of space. If i bought an ssd for the same price write read would be lower at maybe 160 read 80 write and I'd end up with 64gig and still needing another hdd for storage. Windows 7 boots in about 10 seconds anyway and games boot super fast as well as paint-shop and larger programs.

I believe a lot of people who upgrade to ssds there previous mechanical drives were poor to start with making the upgrade seem even better. The older mechanical drives are old school and maybe run at 50meg/sec a second to start with rather than the newer generation mechanical hdds that run at 150meg/sec(or in raid 0 x2 300meg/sec write and read). At the price rate compared to a decent ssd you could buy 4 raid 0 drives and run a smooth 600meg/sec write read speed with 4 terabytes of space for $260. or 3 raid 0 with 1 as backup raid 1 mirror if you prefer.

Only main advantage to the ssd is the lower sized sequential write/read speeds i.e 4kb sized info and also the seek times although my mechanical drives seek at 8ms. Compered to ssd's which cost more, have slower write speeds at the top end and have ridiculously low capacity.

To sum up you CAN buy high performance mechanical hdds that perform close to a ssd for everyday use with massive capacity at a low cost.
 
As a reply to what Guest said 2 posts above.

Traditional HDDs are NOT more reliable as a storage media. When HDDs fail, they fail catastrophically (ie: sudden and complete loss). In SSDs, the main worry is not about actual failure of the drive, but the loss of ability to write over previous data (ie: you can read, but you cannot write). There is no mechanical construct that is more reliable than a solid state equivalent that I know of in any field.

However, I agree that anyone who uses SSDs would have a HDD for large media such as movies.

Secondly, mechanical HDDs in RAID as you mentioned can reach 300mb/sec when data is read SEQUENTIALLY, and this rate is NOT sustainable. If you took that raid drive and compare it with another SSD which is rated at 300mb/sec, and raced them to see which drive will load something faster, or copy a file faster, the SSD will undoubtedly win. Unlike HDD which will have to move mechanical heads to the required position to read data, SSDs... just reads it.

I think a similar comparison will be reading a book: the HDD is like a good ol' paperback, searching for a particular paragraph means turning the pages to look for it. SSDs is like an e-book: just enter the page number and you're there. How fast you read that paragraph will be the same in both cases, but you'd be reading the paragraph first with the SSDs.

Also bear in mind that data stored in either HDD and SSD may be fragmented. What looks like 1 file to you can be split into innumerable parts. This will particularly be true with program data which gets altered every time you use the program. Following the above scenario, its like reading old style rpg game-books where you turn to particular pages for each decision you make.

Again, one of the last comments the same guest posted is innacurate for a few years now: SSDs have faster, or comparable write speeds than HDDs for sometime now.
https://www.techspot.com/gallery/member-galleries/p3864-corsair-nova-64gb-x-228raid-0-29.html
Its not the perfect comparison, but go ahead and divvy up by two for the raid. Just remember that when you put 2 drives in RAID, you don't get 200% the performance of one.

To sum up: You're comparing and old Toyota to a brand new Ferrari (feel free to substitue Ferrari with any high-performance car brand). Yeah, you pay more for the ferrari, get 2 seats instead of 4, and if you can't tell the difference, you need your head checked.
 
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