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.