Solid State Disks

[Fubar512]

Has anyone tried them yet? The price per MB is still quite high (a 250 GB SATA II SSD goes for $730 US), but they're claiming a MTBF in excess 1,500,000 Hours, and read/write speeds on single drives that handily exceed those of mechanical drives. One feature I like, Intel claims that their drive has a shock resistance rating of 1000 Gs.....just what every PC builder needs....if he's selling computers to Han Solo

[column5]

I'm teetering on the brink of buying one. The IBM X25-E is very highly rated:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820167013

 

Although the capacity is small I think an SSD would be best used to boot the OS, and not for applications, so 32 gig would be adequate. Its rated for over 2 million hours and the performance numbers are incredible.

[JediMaster]

I'm waiting for them to get at least one more generation down before I try one. Price should drop further and performance should increase. I've heard they're not as good for laptops right now as you might think because they actually take more power than a standard HDD. After decades of work, they know how to make an HDD use the bare minimum of power necessary to work in a given situation. The issue with an SSD is the entire thing runs on binary power, it's either ON or OFF. So anytime you access the drive for the slightest thing it uses as much power as booting or loading a program or even watching a video stored on it.

 

I think hybrid drives might be the future, with large multi-GB caches for the boot/system side and the rest a standard spinning platter.

[column5]

I've heard they're not as good for laptops right now as you might think because they actually take more power than a standard HDD.

 

This is not true. Check the power consumption section of this review:

 

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16848

[JediMaster]

Unfortunately that's not a "real world" test. The tests I saw were done on laptops running on battery power with both standard HDDs and SSDs performing a variety of tasks. In every case the SSD-equipped laptops ate up the batteries faster than the HDD-equipped ones. Depending on the drive brand some were slight, like 30 mins, but some were actually severe with like 90 mins less time.

Now I don't know if this was a hardware or software defeciency that improved drive controllers or drivers would alleviate. The given explanation was that the SSDs in the test were unable to just activate that portion of the memory where the data needed was located and had to activate the whole thing during that request. This test was done about a year ago, however, and it's possible these listed drives have indeed solved that particular problem, but I know in 2007/8 it was a real issue.

[column5]

You've been reading Tom's Hardware again?

[JediMaster]

I haven't been there in a long time, I don't recall when. So no, I don't recall if that was there or elsewhere.