What are your thoughts on a Solid State HD 2

[Johnthephoneguy]

Any opinions on these?

Do you think the price has come down enough to buy one to put the OS and maybe 1 or 2 frequently used programs?

Is the reliability there?



JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!

 

[wahnula]

As with anything else, it depends. There are SLC and MLC as the two types and "qualities" of drive, MLC is faster, more reliable, and more expensive. As with anything, research (Google) is your friend:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3036991

Personally I think they are too expensive, although their replacement of platter-based HDDs is inevitable.


Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[wahnula]

OOPS!!!...that was supposed to read "SLC is faster and more reliable". Sorry for the error, I was posting as I was running out the door.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

I could read google but I value the opinions of alot of the people I see here posting all the time, thats why i asked here instead of google. my bad.

JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!

 

[wahnula]

John,

Nothing wrong with your post, nothing meant by my reply, I agree opinions from actual users are valuable and sometimes more important than technical data. That's why I posted a question asking readers if anyone had personal experience with the Roku player.

The gist of my response to you was not "read Google" but that Google was a good place to learn the definitions of the terms/abbreviations used to describe the new technology that is SSD.

Personally I have not used any SSDs yet but do lust after one, to speed up my old dated laptop, but the cost is still too high for me. Anyone else?

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Grenage]

As wahnula stated, you will get what you pay for in this field. The earlier (and cheaper) drives had transfer stuttering issues, while the improved versions will cost a fair bit more.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[Sympology]

As a rulle there is Enterprise grade and User grade.

Enterprise is fast, reliable and pretty dammed good.

User is, "oh well it's died, ok send it back to us and we'll get one out in a few weeks to you" grade



You really get what you pay for. For the average man on the street, stick with a decent HDD for now...

Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[tresanus]

My dell mini 9 has a solid state drive and it runs beautifully.

Although I had an EEEpc with an 8gb SSD and it would freeze up every so often. Other users experiencing this issue did state it was the hard drive causing the computer to freeze once or twice a minute when it was read/writing.

Either way, I ditched the Asus for my Dell and haven't looked back.

 

[kmcferrin]

A lot of the newer SLC solid state drives give pretty good performance, but there are some tweaks that you would want to make if you bought one. For example, if you wanted to put your boot/OS drive on one, you would still want to set up your PC to put the swap file on a mechanical HDD instead of a solid state to reduce wear to the flash cells.

________________________________________
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MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[SimonDavies]

It really depends where and what OS you want to use it with.
The Intel X25 drive is getting a lot of good press at the moment where as the early OCZ drives aren't.

Alot of it depends on the controller you're using, those drives using the jmicron jmf602 controller on board should be left well alone.

As far as MLC and SLC goes, MLC offer more storage space but slower reads and writes where as SLC offer greater speeds but lower capacity. So again it comes back to what you want to use it for.

One thing worth noting is that Vista has had a lot of issues with SSD's and it's generally advisable not to go down the SSD route if you're using Vista atm.

SSD is great technology but it's still evolving, OCZ have already released updated drives due to earlier issues with their product. I like the look of them but atm I am sticking to my Raptors.

Simon

The real world is not about exam scores, it's about ability.

 

[kmcferrin]

From what I'm hearing Windows 7 handles SSDs really well. I'll probably wait for it to be released before making the jump. Prices will have come down a lot by then, too.

________________________________________
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MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[jurgen36]

I use a solid state 32 GB drive in a secondary system for the last 6 month. Yes they are still rather expensive but appear to be extremely reliable. I use the Sandisk compact flash cards in a CF to IDE adapter. The adapter came from Hongkong and cost me the "enormous" sum of one dollar for 3 of them. With Windows XP the boot up time is about 12.5 seconds from the time XP starts loading. With regard to wear of the memory cells I do not believe I do have to worry to much as according to the CF card specifications they should last a minimum of 70 years if you completely rewrite them daily. Well this might be optimistic but then they should in any case outlast me.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[kmcferrin]

I wouldn't be so sure about the "completely rewrite them daily" part. They're talking about a CF card that's usually used to store camera photos. They're referring to a single rewrite of any given cell once per day for 70 years, or 25,550 rewrites. But while you may not rewrite the entire card, ever, you will be rewriting certain cells far more often than once per day. Swap files, log files, whatever. There's a lot of re-writing that goes on all of the time in the background of an OS. If that weren't the case then companies would not be dedicating time and resources to developing efficient wear-leveling algorithms.

In other words, if your swap file or log file is written to 100 times a day, that's approximately 255 days until you're going to get a cell failure. And without the hardware to handle cell failures, if a crucial piece of data is there your system is likely to crash. SSDs take this into account in their design and are designed to limit the wear and work around failed cells when they occur. There's a big difference. On top of that, having an OS that understands SSDs can result in additional efficiencies and longer lifetimes.

On the reliability note though, since they tend to be (other than cell failure) much less failure prone than mechanical hard disks, running a RAID 0 array on SSDs is a much lower risk than on traditional disks. And a heck of a lot faster too.

________________________________________
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MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
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[jurgen36]

:kmcferrin

Yes I do agree with you up to a point. But do not forget in an IDE setup the log or swap file is not written to the same cells. The rewriting continues in the next free cells and so on. So I do not believe there will be much problem in this regard, well the future will tell. At the moment I actually consider testing a raid 5 array with 7 of my 32 GB CF cards.
I can not see any reason why it should not work with my normal IDE raid 5/10 controller. Well I will take this weekend to try it out. Another thing, as I have 4 GB of ram in the test machine I only use very small swap and cache files. The swap file is only 64 Kbyte. This of course also reduces rewriting of very large amount of data. I found no problems at all with the small swap file. everything works normally.
Best regards

Jurgen

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I think once the SSD's come down in price and up in storage they'll become the norm. I'd like to get one just to see what kind of performance difference there is between SSD and platter drives.

If they can get a 1TB solid state drive under $200, I'm so there.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[Grenage]

The performance on SSDs is excellent (model allowing); so I agree with them becoming the norm. I never utilize more than 32GB on a computer, so I have no doubt that my next build will be using them.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[kmcferrin]

I'd like to get one just to see what kind of performance difference there is between SSD and platter drives.

Me too. From what I've seen, performance varies from "it's not any faster than a standard hard disk and on some tests is slow" to "I can't believe it's this fast!!!" It mostly depends on which brand and model you get.

________________________________________
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MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[Sympology]

Intresting article about SSD performance on modern boards & processors

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-hdd-power,review-31532.html

Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[JimmiGee]

I have installed a 256GB Patriot V.3 Warp SSD in my Lenovo W500 for testing. So far it is running like a champ. Very fast and also very strange to hear no hard drive spool up when I power on. I will post any issues as I experience.

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

Thanks for the update JimmiGee! 256gb! wow And here I was trying to price 2 32GB so i could raid them lol

JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!