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 