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Why do you want an SSD?

They’re overly expensive and when used on the SATA interface not really that much faster. I mean yeah they’re faster than a conventional drive but as long as you’re using the SATA interface you’re pretty much stuck with a certain limit.

If you’re going to buy an SSD, and you’re going to spend $300 or more on it, you might as well spend a little bit more and get one of the PCIe x8 SSD cards coming out later this year. At least that way you have a direct 4GB/s bi-directional link to the northbridge (CPU, RAM, other PCIe) and don’t have to go through the much slower, and typically overcrowded, Southbridge.

From the start of this SSD nonsense I’ve said that using a SATA interface is tantamount to viper engine in a hybrid car. The technology is capable of much more speed but the designers are/were motivated by quick profits so they tossed on an existing bus (SATA) and sold it as fast. Yeah it’s fast, yeah if I had unlimited funds I’d buy one, but for 3-5x the cost they’re not fast enough, or large enough, for me to even consider buying.

Classic MasterP vs. Nickname tech argument, Round 1. FIGHT!

Nickname said:

you clearly know nothing about the advantages of a SSD… or the capabilities of one vs a standard hard drive for that matter.

The last SSD I used was in a dell and was slower than the 5400 RPM drive in my HP mini.

I said they were fast, expensive, that the SATA bus is slower than the PCIe x8, that they’re small, and relative to the 10-12x higher price tag aren’t really all that useful. I think you’d be hard pressed to argue with any of those statements.

To comfortably house Windows7 you need a 32GB drive but then you’ll probably have to put all your games on another drive. If that other drive isn’t an SSD, what’s the point? All you’ve really done is decrease your boot time, gaming performance won’t have increased at all. With most modern games being 6-12GB even a 128GB SSD is pushing it on a gaming computer.

When you consider that the newer high-cache spinning drives have 120-140MB/sec read/write I can’t really imagine needing a SSD except to brag. I don’t mind it taking 40 seconds to load windows or 20-30 seconds to load a game level.

As to SSD technology, until they break the 20V write requirement current semiconductors have we aren’t going to see any real improvement to the technology, just more logical steps. You’ll notice manufacturers are choosing to use many 4GB and 8GB NAND chips rather than a single 64GB chip. SSDs only perform faster because they’re essentially giant RAID0 arrays. In fact many of the 1st gen and early 2nd gen SSD controllers actually used RAID0 natively to increase performance. Were they to use or access a single NAND chip at a time, as mechanical drives access one platter at a time, the performance would be abysmal, even by 1990s standards.

As far as reliability, let’s say you bought a typical 128GB SSD. Most use 16x8GB NANDs. If any of those 16 chips fails, the entire drive fails. Now correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t that more potential points of failure than a mechanical drive has moving parts?

Unfortunately, SSD technology may be stuck in place for a while. The leading research on it was being conducted in Tokyo. They just reduced the drive voltage from 3V down to 1V and the write voltage from 20V down to 6V. This decreases access time significantly and frees up more power so they can use up to 110 NAND chips in parallel to achieve write speeds of 9.5 GB/sec. Were they to adapt this and use several large NANDs, as opposed to many small NANDs, the speed would still be equal to or higher than existing SSDs but the cost would plummet. This is the type of needed improvement I referred to above.

Nickname said:

I know you aren’t basing your whole argument about SSDs due to the fact that you used a dell mini with a slow SSD… I mean thats the same logic as comparing a 5 yr old 7200rpm drive to a new one from today. Besides having the same technology, they are monumentally different. I will admit though that you do have to closely research a SSD or you will get boned. All SSDs are not created equal, or even close for that matter. Considering with a standard drive you pretty much know what you are getting if you get a 250gb 7200rpm drive, you would think that most 128gb SSDs would be the same to one another. They aren’t; so if you are basing your arguments on that then… well… ok i give up right now.

That was the last I used, it wasn’t the only one. There were also 3 of those minis, all were just as slow. Now it could have been that dell used cheap SSDs in their computers (OMG WTF??!) but I think that whole generation of 2.5″ SSD was pretty much that terrible. A number of students came in with computers that were “slow” and it ended up being an SSD problem. There’s really nothing we could do but explain they wasted their money.

The consumer market offerings are definately better, I’ll grant you that, but the offerings of PC retailers are, or at least were, cheap and terrible. This has definately skewed my opinion of the technology and it’s going to take a couple years for me to get over that bad start.

Nickname said:

I will argue with the “aren’t really all that useful” and the whole pcie x8 thing; yeah the pcie x8 bus is faster but since no current drives are hitting the threshold of the sata2 bus (let alone sata3), there isn’t really a good reason to spend more for the pcie based SSD.

The 3Gbit SATA2 bus has a serial speed of 375MB/sec, depending on the controller quality. In terms of the 3Gbit, yes, the current generation of drives is at the limit of the bus but since no SSD has been released on the 6Gbit standard idk if that’s a real limit or a self imposed one. PCIe x4 SSDs often hit SATA 6Gbit speeds and PCIe x8 SSDs almost universally exceed it, although it’s usually cheaper to get 2 SATA2 SSDs and RAID them than it is to get a PCIe SSD.

Nickname said:

Oh yeah and IO performance (result of access time), where you are going to get 10000+ I/O’s per second vs maybe 200 on a good standard drive. Yeah, that is a huge deal, and in certain situations is a huge benefit

Well that’s the thing, most SSDs slow down considerably after several mintues of sustained access. You don’t see if often but every now and then a benchmarker will run the IO test for an hour and while it normally maintains 10000 IOs/sec it almost always drops down to around 2000 after 30 minutes or so. Mechanical drives drop as well but not by 80%

But yeah you’re right, the random access is place where SSDs really shine. An interesting note though, most access tests only have a queue depth of 3 or 4. In SSDs this is fine but it also eliminates several key queuing features in mechanical drives and IMO skews the results. Most mechanical drives will re-order read/write operations to create a more fluid motion with the drive head and thus decrease the access time, without this it’s almost like taking a step back to the 1990s in terms of disk access speed. SSDs also benefit from this technology because they can access many sectors of NAND at once, which is why they intentionally lower it from the mechanical drive test default of 32, but in a real world environment mechanical drives will perform faster than they do in that type of synthetic test. Slower, yes, but better than the 2MB/sec random seek that most benchmarks claim.

In terms of actual read/write speed, I contend that $400 worth of high-end mechanical drives in RAID0, with a real controller, will perform similar to that of a $400 SSD. That’s like 6 drives. You know I’m right

Nickname said:

I thought that you not mentioning their benefits and only their downfalls was being too biased, but that is par for the course with you I suppose…

When there’s a negative side to be portrayed you can count on me to show it

I was just trying to show that SSDs aren’t as rosey as the hype leads you to believe. They definately have some good uses but with that said they certainly aren’t for everyone. With most people all you have to do to convince them to start looking into facts themselves is punch one or two small holes in their perceived reality. I’m good at raining on others’ parades

Western Digital has publicly stated that they have no intention of committing to any part of the SSD market until technology quits shifting around every 6 months. The hybrid drives are likely where it’s going to settle for the reasons you stated. They cost so much less to produce and give a good measure of the benefits.

WD had one production run of SSDs. They sold out fast and have had really good reviews. If I had to recommend an SSD brand, it would have been them. Barring that, I would rather buy a Seagate hybrid SSD than one from Crucial or OCZ.

WD bought a small SSD manufacturer with a solid product line, made a few changes, and released their line as the Siliconedge Blue and SiliconDrive lines.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/30/western-digital-enters-ssd-market-via-65m-siliconsystems-acquis

Basically instead of R&D’ing their way into the market they said FU to the product lifecycle and bought their way to a surprisingly decent first-release product. True to the WD Blue series it cost a little more and was a little slower than the top-tier competitors but that’s par for the course with WD. Regardless of who made it, I’d rather have a WD branded hard drive any day.

o lawd…

I read some of it. I know a little bit moar dan i did befo