Hardware: SSDs Falling Behind Hard Drives

The Netbook Breaks Up With SSDs, Asks For Frien...

 

Well the SSD doesn't really offer any advantages currently. It's slower, more expensive per GB, smaller capacity.

Sure, they're silent, but when the cooling fan is spinning, that doesn't really matter. They draw less power, but the difference isn't that great, especially if you've got a 6-cell battery.

They're supposedly more reliable and shock resistant. On the other hand they've got everyone worrying about SSD wear, doing everything in their power to minimize writes.

When Netbook SSD's come in 60+GB varieties, with faster write speeds and virtually unlimited writes, at the same or lower price than regular harddrives, then they will truly become an option.

 

Meh, I never liked SSDs. XD Even though I was practically squirming to get an AspireOne, I didn't go for the SSD model, which first came out. I would rather have more space, speed, and have it last longer than for it to be "shock-proof".

Actually, HDDs aren't that not-shock-proof. I mean, just don't smack it against a wall or the ground or something, and it'll be fine. What would an SSD do? It is definitely shock-proof, but how much shock are you going to put on a little netbook? For a shock that would actually be damaging, the screen, or something else would probably break, even if the SSD didn't.

SSDs, I don't think, can take over HDDs anytime soon. It's not worth it to pay so much for something with so little advantages over an HDD.

 

I don't know much about SSDs, but they have had the write problem for quite some time now (10 years?). They are getting cheaper all the time and I've read many predictions that they will overtake the hard drives in time, particularly for smaller devices. I can see that a couple of years down the line. It is quite easy to damage a hard drive if one bumps it while it is writing to disk (i.e. downloading a file), so it's not wise to move it at those times. In that respect SDDs are probably a lot stronger.

At any rate, it comes as no surprise to me that the hard drives are more popular today. A 160 Gigabyte drive on a machine as small as this is irresistible to me. I was reading the other day about people upgrading their Asus 1000s to 320 Gig drives. It's really mind blowing what we can now accomplish and store on these tiny machines.

 

My eeepc has a SSD. I hate it. The hdd on my One is about 20x faster I believe. I can actually compile source code with good speed with this hdd. Don't get me started on how hot my eeepc gets even with the power saving SSD.

 

Well, I'm happy with my SSD. I use my One almost exclusively for web browsing, along with some ebook reading.

The only time write speed has been an issue is when doing system live updates, but I do those overnight. As for the space, I just have no need to carry a hundred gigs of data with me. The 8GB is more than enough to hold the OS. I also carry a few ebooks, which I store on a 2GB SD card (they would easily fit on the SSD, but for a while I kept reformatting it to try different distros). For me, it's not worth it to pay the extra money for a hard drive.

 

Are they... they are too! expensive right now but look at what you can get at Amazon:

OCZ OCZSSD2-2C120G 120GB 2.5-Inch Core Series V2 SATA II SSD
Technical Details
* Read: 170 MB/sec
* Write: 98 MB/sec
* RAID Support !!!!> imagine that in raid 0 ...

But now the bad news: Price After Rebate: $301.99

If and when we are talking about are beloved AA1 i agree that the SSD they used is sloooooow

I do not intend to use my AA1 with winxp and its main use will be: surfing, e-mail, open-office so i am not too worried.
I must admit that my next read in this *splendid* forum will be: Project - SSD Mods in the * Board index ‹ Technical Advice / Support ‹ Hacks and Modifications ‹ Hardware - Hacks / Mods section , hope it wont spoil my day

 

SSDs Grow to Half a Terrabyte

Solid-state disks hit half a terabyte

 

Re: SSDs Grow to Half a Terrabyte

It is great that the capacity is increasing, but did you see the retail price for a 256 gb ssd drive? Between $3,000.00 - $5,000.00. Can you imagine what the 512 gb will go for? At that price, they will not be a viable option ANY time soon.

 

Re: SSDs Grow to Half a Terrabyte

Yes, I'm afraid that it is going to be quite a wait. But the fact that it's there, in and of itself, is amazing. At the moment I'm keeping my eye on a 32 Gig hoping for a sharp decline.

 

Re: SSDs Grow to Half a Terrabyte

This is not a terrible price for a 64gb ssd, but I am hoping they come down in price from here as well.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... u=P33-6024

 

The SSD naysayers really get somewhat tiresome.

Yes, SSD is slow. It's getting faster.
Yes, SSD capacity was low, but not any longer,
Yes, SSD is expensive, but your memories seem somewhat short. When we were buying 30G HDD's for $300+, at the time you weren't complaining. I know I was thinking, wow! $10 a gig. That's awesome. Man! 4200rpm drives are fast

HDD is an outdated technology. Yes, of course, they will exceed SSD capacities for some time coming. But really, in a notebook how much do you need?

But as a general technology, SSD is coming of age and it's capacity has a long way to go. But it *will* exceed HDD within the next few years.

As for speed, the MLC, early SSDs are slow but they're now easily exceeding HDD in performance and most certainly in seek time. SSD won't always be flash based. There's lots of higher capacity technologies in the pipeline. All solid state storage.

So if you're so upset about capacity, stick with your HDD. I've gone through 2 in the last couple of years in my notebook. But in a couple of years, you'll be talking a different tune.

And has *ANYONE* *EVER* heard of an SSD failure? Any read errors? Write errors?

If you're naive enough to think that HDD's are uber-reliable, above SSD, check your SMART log for sector remaps.

 

SSD's are currently running flash memory just as that of a pen drive. Has anyone ever had a pen drive fail on them? I know I have had a couple of them fail on me.

I do believe that SSD is the future but they have a long way to go before they can compete with HDD's. As long as they are slower, not as large, and more expensive, not to mention the limited write cycles, they do not stand a true chance against hard drives. And as said before, from my experience, and impact significant enough to damage a HDD would damage many other computer components so I am not so convinced by the fact that they are impact resistant as most other computer parts are not. These are just my thoughts on the issue.

And yes, I have and continue to use a SSD in a machine. I am definately not against them and I look forward to their future improvement. However, I do worry about flash memory because when it is gone, it is gone and there is no getting the data back. Albeit difficult, if you have certain hard drive failures, it can be possible to retrieve data.

 

This seems to be brought up a *lot* with SSD. I think it's a bogus argument against them.

Case in point: I was working on a Gamecube game several years ago and one of the Nintendo checklist items was to make sure it worked even if there was a write failure on the flash storage.

So, I wrote a program that wrote to every sector on the memory card, continuously, ad-finitum (to override any wear leveling).

I gave up after 200,000 write cycles FOR EACH SECTOR (it's rated for 10k). It took a week of continuous writing before I gave up (with no failures).

That was the point of my 'has anyone ever heard of a failure' question. If you do the math, it's a *very* long time until a drive can fail. Even if you're hammering it really bad, the drive does the sector remapping by itself to prevent those problems. As for your USB stick issue, was it a mechanical failure (connector busted, etc?) or actually a media failure?

As for speed, the high end ssd's EASILY out perform rotational media. One single seek on a HDD will drop the bandwidth throughput by more than 10%.

 

Intel ships 160 GB solid state disk drives

 

Jeez, I must really be getting old.

I remember when a 10mb hard drive cost over $500.

Then I remember when I paid $285. for a 170mb IDE drive and thought I got a steal... and used that drive for several years...

Then I remember getting a 2gb drive for $100 and was amazed...

Now I get this whole new AAO for $350 with a 160gb drive and all the bells and whistles...

I also remember (not that long ago) when it was $1 per MEG on sd cards... (actually I remember paying $60 for a 128kb (yes as in kilo-byte) pcmcia memory card for my HP100LX) and now it's less than $20 for an 8GB sd if you catch the sales right (and a super fast is only $40)

The price will drop. The strength of the technology will improve. That's the fun of it.

I want a solid state model... but I need a lot of storage for extended operation away from any other device... so I got a 160gb model... I expect that within 2 years a 512gb model will be in the less than $100 range and well worth it... Yeah, that may be wishful thinking, but definitely within the realm of possibility.

BTW, I had a 32meg sd card crash on me. I still have it, and have decided to play with it a bit on my new machine... (it got pulled during a write and went goofy then) So yeah, it was abused, but it still definitely died.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820227372

30GB and only $75 thats seems pretty reasonable to me.

Sequential Access - Read up to 155 MB/sec
Sequential Access - Write up to 90 MB/sec
MTBF 1,500,000 hours (expected life)

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/f ... ii_2_5-ssd

 

SSD or not is depends what you demand from the technology.

If you used to normal XP and HDD, you won't able to live with the speed for SSD, XP default too many write cycles which is the true weakness for SSD.

However SSD is damn good for its reading speed, if you fine tune them (e.g embedded XP, EWF etc), it's has good performance.

 

Sandisk Pushes SSDs for Netbooks