Solid State HD's

[fringe_dweller]

boy i havent been this impressed with a development in home computers in years, no more stone age bottleneck in speeds! wow, has to be seen to be believed, mate has a 250GB in his new dell lappy, i know the next size up is pretty pricey to say the least.. anyway his laptop is faster than his kickarse desktop haha, so many got these in yer lappys yet? must be pretty handy for astro work?
cheers

[supernova1965 (Warren)]

Much better than HDD's with moving parts good for taking out in the field much more able to take knocks can't wait for the price to come down

[Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)]

'Bin waiting for these since January. Now the $$$ is coming down I'm ready to upgrade. No more silly click-whirrr and 3 times as fast. Bliss!

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by Waxing_Gibbous

'Bin waiting for these since January. Now the $$$ is coming down I'm ready to upgrade. No more silly click-whirrr and 3 times as fast. Bliss!

From my most recent reading on the subject:

SSDs have a finite life expectancy because each chunk of memory can only be written so many times. The firmware levels out the wear to maximise the life. You are probably best off having enough memory that you don't need a swap file. That gets written to continually.

Make sure you are getting a 2nd generation or later SSD with TRIM support.

Never try to defrag them. The firmware does enough by itself.

Never let them fill up completely. The firmware needs free space because it moves each block of data every time it rewrites it.

[Kal (Andrew)]

I bought my 80GB G2 intel SSD from the US on my new i7 system I just built. Buying it from the US saved me around AU$100 and I got it quicker (intel G2's only pre-order in Aussie shops when I ordered mine). I use it for the O/S and apps, and have a 1TB drive for data.

It is pretty quick I must say, sequential reads about 250MB/s compared to 75MB/s on the 7200rpm 1TB drive, but it really shows it's speed with small random files, where it completely blows the platter disk out of the water.

Here is a comparison of the two (not really fair because it is a benchmark that plays to the SSD strength but anyway )

80GB intel G2 SSD - http://ocau.com/pix/m5uzb
1TB Western Digital 7200rpm - http://ocau.com/pix/rfk2a

[rogerg (Roger)]

From what I see on Dell's website adding a 256GB SSD to a laptop adds about $1200 to the price, and buying a 100GB SSD drive as an upgrade starts at $2500ish. What am I missing? Where's the affordable option?

[Tandum (Robin)]

Originally Posted by rogerg

From what I see on Dell's website adding a 256GB SSD to a laptop adds about $1200 to the price, and buying a 100GB SSD drive as an upgrade starts at $2500ish. What am I missing? Where's the affordable option?

You are missing nothing ... wait .. it's too soon.

Little ones are going into those netbook things. It just takes time.

Same as LCD monitors. 20" monitors are now cheaper than 19" monitors and 17" jobs are expensive. It's what people buy on a global scale that dictates the price.

Wait ....

[Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)]

Originally Posted by rogerg

From what I see on Dell's website adding a 256GB SSD to a laptop adds about $1200 to the price, and buying a 100GB SSD drive as an upgrade starts at $2500ish. What am I missing? Where's the affordable option?

That'd be Dell 'avin a larf!
In June I was quoted +$523 for an 260GB SSD in a new-build i7 box from my local builders. Shop around before jumping in with Dell. If you have a trustworthy local boffin, use him, or if you feel adventurous, you can DIY.
Good luck!
Peter

[Kal (Andrew)]

The prices are still relatively high compared to normal HDD, I paid AU$330 for my 80GB drive inc. shipping, but as noted, prices will come down eventually once mass production (or perhaps improved production yields?) catches up.

[fringe_dweller]

my friend is a tech and all his top end lappys are virtual tax write off's, so price isnt such big deal for those lucky ppl i guess, he said he paid about 800-1000 for his samsung 250 MB/s read 256, full speed, but he got a slower kingston 100 mb/s read V series 128GB for his desktop, just for OS, cost about 250 bucks, and is still 10 times faster than his high end HDD's, i could bve remembering some details incorrectly, dont take my word for it, i only know what i saw!

[gary]

As Andrew noted, FLASH-based SSD's have an inherent limitation in the
number of write cycles a FLASH block can sustain before it fails.
SSD's employ strategies such as "wear leveling" to mitigate the problem.
The good news is that as the capacity of SSD's increases, so does their
statistical lifetime in typical applications.

Whereas SSD's once were the province of only specialized applications
where the developer needed to be in total control of the total number
of write cycles to the disk, the capacities of the high-end devices now are such
that far less regard needs to be paid to their finite write cycle limits
when used with mainstream computing applications.

Andrew made mention of TRIM which is becoming part of the ATA interface
standard. Historically, a hard disk "knew" nothing about the file system itself,
which was handled by the operating system. From the perspective of the
disk, it "knew" how to accept commands to seek, read, write and to
perform some other tasks such as self-tests and low level formatting,
but nothing more. When a file is deleted on most operating systems, the
operating system moves the deleted blocks to a free list, but as far as the
hard disk was concerned, it didn't really "delete" anything, it simply
performed some more seeks and writes. So at the disk level, it had no
way of telling that the blocks of memory that were "deleted" were any different
to blocks that were in use.

What TRIM does is allows the OS to tell the drive that blocks are no longer
in use. For SSD's, this can assist it in a couple of ways. The drive can now
use the deleted blocks in its low level wear leveling strategy and it can
consolidate free blocks into segments large enough that can be erased
(when erasing FLASH, the architecture requires you to erase a large
chunk at a time).

Windows 7 apparently supports the TRIM command and my understanding
is that TRIM support might appear in a Vista service release.

[Kal (Andrew)]

For me to enable TRIM under W7 on my SSD I needed to do two things.

1) I needed to update the firmware on the SSD which involved downloading an ISO image, burning it to CD, then booting that CD. The shipped firmware that the drive came with did not support TRIM operation.

2) I needed to install the intel SSD toolbox software which allowed me to set a schedule to run the TRIM operation. I scheduled it to run once a week as recommended. As far as I know, W7 only performs TRIM on intel SSD's if you are also running an intel brand mobo, else you need to utilise the toolbox software.

Your method of implementing TRIM may be different for other brands and O/S, but I thought I would post here as a reference incase it was useful to some.

[g__day (Matthew)]

Personally I'd wait till femrsistors are a mainstream technology - say 1-3 years and that wide spread deploymnet of Sata3 or USB3 is paying results - about 1 year away.

Shows promsie - okay for non heavily written file sources at the moment - don't put your swap file on one!

[Jules76 (Julian)]

Personally, I find SSD's a bit gimmicky at the moment for a couple of reasons.

1. Lack of size. Really all they can be used for at the moment (if you don't pay an arm and a leg for say a 256GB SSD) is just the OS drive with a few applications. If your into gaming, like I am, the latest games will quickly fill up a small drive which means users often have a larger "normal" HDD for extra storage. This in my opinion defeats the purpose of having an SSD. Sure your OS will be nice and zippy, but the game itself will still be stuck at a slower speed when loading textures etc. As the saying goes, your PC is only as fast as your slowest component.

2. Drive wearing due to a limited amount of write operations a memory chip can handle, which means moving the swap file off the SSD. Again like above, you still need to have a slower "normal" HDD to perform this operation. Really not ideal if you want the best performance.

Still waiting for the day you can completely replace the spindle drives. Give it time. I was just reading Intel has plans for a 600GB SSD by the end of 2010, so give it a few years and we'll be there.

In saying all this though, I'm planning to go SSD in the near future when things improve. I've seen first hand just how fast these drives go and it's jaw dropping. You think one SSD is fast? I've built high end systems at work with a couple of SSD's in RAID 0. Now they SCREAM! Would love to do something like that, but just one downside related to one of my points. Trim at this time is not supported in RAID. Like I said, they eventually get there....