No more hard drive crashes?

[Let'sgoflying!]

A local computer co is touting the advantages of the SSD solid state drive on their newsletter, saying it will do away with the common scenario of HD failures.

"Hard Drives have mechanical parts, which one; can make performance slower, and two; are subject to failure due to environmental conditions, wear and general abuse. Customers replace disk drives 15 times more often than drive vendor's estimate, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University. Anyone who has been there will tell you, its no picnic. So, to cure this ailment our beloved Tech Nerds came up with the "Solid State Drive"(SSD). SSDs shine is in reliability, because they have no moving parts. "

Think they will overcome the wear problem, also low storage space and high cost?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

 

[Bob Noel]

> Think they will overcome the wear problem, also low storage space and high cost?

not anytime soon.

 

[mikea]

I'm seeing a lot of comments in hard drive reviews saying they'll go for an SSD drive when the price drops (Doh!).

I'd give it 5 years before the storage capacity is close.

For us, we can have "drives" that will work at 10,000 feet and above vs. now where they'll head crash due to the low pressure.

 

[gismo]

I'm seeing a lot of comments in hard drive reviews saying they'll go for an SSD drive when the price drops (Doh!).

I'd give it 5 years before the storage capacity is close.

For us, we can have "drives" that will work at 10,000 feet and above vs. now where they'll head crash due to the low pressure.

I don't think it's likely we'll see SSDs that compete on $/GB for a long time because the rotating magnetic technology is a moving target. Also AFaIK the flash memory technology is starting to come up against some geometry issues with their current architecture. Of course that doesn't mean they won't find a way around that, just that "refinement" probably won't go much further.

 

[TangoWhiskey]

SSD drives bring the promise of total reliability, and I believe in the future they will. The good ones have logic built in to accomodate the fact that you can only write to each memory address a certain number of times before it "goes bad". This might include using error-correction algorithms to allow recreation of a bad bit and store it somewhere else, or a dedicated section of memory to use to counter bits-gone-bad.

That said, there are environments (high altitude laptops, really dirty or vibration-prone scenarios) where SSD still makes sense. They also draw a LOT less power. So, like most things, there are pros and cons.

 

[RJM62]

I'm sure they'll eventually get to a point where they're practical and competitive, but probably not for a few years.

I set up an Acer laptop with an 8 GB SSD drive a few weeks ago. It also has an SD slot for storage. The main thing I noticed was that HD access was sloooooow. The second was that by the time I installed updates, a virus scanner, and Office, I was already wondering about how long it would be before he ran out of HD space.

Acer has disabled every possible service that requires storage (System Restore, most logging functions, etc.), and I removed the uninstallers for the updates that I know to be non-problematic. But you can only save so much space with tweaks.

My client travels a lot to exotic places, and he liked the idea of the reliability (which I'm not 100 percent sold on, personally), the small size, the long battery life, and the low price (I think the thing cost him less than $300.00). Also, he mainly uses it to access email and compose his various documents.

But for anything much more than that, the combination of the limited storage and the slow access makes it impractical, IMHO.

-Rich

 

[bullwinkle]

Computer memory can go bad too. I think SSDs will be *more* reliable, but not foolproof. And honestly, the added reliability does not justify the cost for most home applications -- It's really not the end of the world if your porn collection gets lost in a drive crash.

 

[ReverendSlappy]

....It's really not the end of the world if your porn collection gets lost in a drive crash.

I'd say that depends on the size and quality of your collection... So speak for yourself.

 

[gismo]

I'm sure they'll eventually get to a point where they're practical and competitive, but probably not for a few years.

I set up an Acer laptop with an 8 GB SSD drive a few weeks ago. It also has an SD slot for storage. The main thing I noticed was that HD access was sloooooow. The second was that by the time I installed updates, a virus scanner, and Office, I was already wondering about how long it would be before he ran out of HD space.

Acer has disabled every possible service that requires storage (System Restore, most logging functions, etc.), and I removed the uninstallers for the updates that I know to be non-problematic. But you can only save so much space with tweaks.

My client travels a lot to exotic places, and he liked the idea of the reliability (which I'm not 100 percent sold on, personally), the small size, the long battery life, and the low price (I think the thing cost him less than $300.00). Also, he mainly uses it to access email and compose his various documents.

But for anything much more than that, the combination of the limited storage and the slow access makes it impractical, IMHO.

-Rich

Flash memory (the underlying hardware for SSDs) can be very fast for reading (up to 10x faster than hard drives) but is often much slower for writes. This can be mitigated in many cases by caching writes which also helps with the write cycle limit issue). That said, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some SSD offerings limit both read and write speeds and lack caching. In some cases the throughput may be more limited by the computer's architecture (mostly where and how the device is connected on the internal busses) than the device itself.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

A local computer co is touting the advantages of the SSD solid state drive on their newsletter

Like profit margin?

, saying it will do away with the common scenario of HD failures.

No.

It will do away with motor failures, head crashes, and other such things but it may well end up introducing as many new types of failures - There is no type of RAM that is perfect.

That said, if you can deal with the limited capacity, in some applications the SSD is an excellent choice. It'll certainly improve battery life on laptops.

Apple has refurb MacBook Airs with 64GB SSD for $1299 right now. If you buy me one, I will report back.

 

[mikea]

Flash memory (the underlying hardware for SSDs) can be very fast for reading (up to 10x faster than hard drives) but is often much slower for writes. This can be mitigated in many cases by caching writes which also helps with the write cycle limit issue). That said, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some SSD offerings limit both read and write speeds and lack caching. In some cases the throughput may be more limited by the computer's architecture (mostly where and how the device is connected on the internal busses) than the device itself.

There are reports that the early China shack SSD drives are dirt slow. One guy tried to RAID a handful off cheep SSDs and it was so slow it was practically unusable. It's not too hard to stretch your imagination that these guys picked up old too-slow-for-SD-card flash memory and joined the flash hard drive bandwagon.

It's also not too hard to to imagine an Acer using such SSDs.

This is what happens when you use the real deal:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/13/battleship-mtron-the-absurdly-fast-ssd-raid-array/
http://i4memory.com/f9/4x-32gb-ocz-ssd-core-2-5-sataii-solid-state-disks-tests-8944/

 

[Cap'n Jack]

I'm sure they'll eventually get to a point where they're practical and competitive, but probably not for a few years.

I set up an Acer laptop with an 8 GB SSD drive a few weeks ago. It also has an SD slot for storage. The main thing I noticed was that HD access was sloooooow. The second was that by the time I installed updates, a virus scanner, and Office, I was already wondering about how long it would be before he ran out of HD space.

<SNIP>

-Rich

I got a mailer today from Dell that contained a similar system running an Intel Atom processor. It was a cute little thing- the picture showed a laptop a little bigger than the hand holding it. The price was ~$380 (plus minus). It too had an 8 Gb SSD. I saw Best Buy selling 8Gb thumb drives for $9 this past weekend.

 

[RJM62]

I got a mailer today from Dell that contained a similar system running an Intel Atom processor. It was a cute little thing- the picture showed a laptop a little bigger than the hand holding it. The price was ~$380 (plus minus). It too had an 8 Gb SSD. I saw Best Buy selling 8Gb thumb drives for $9 this past weekend.

Yeah, this one also had the Atom, plus a gig or two of RAM (I forget which), running XP. It was definitely the HD I/O that was slowing things down. On CPU-intensive tasks, it ran tolerably. But copying the setup files for Office took 20 or 30 minutes. (In fairness, it was a network install because it has no CD drive, but still.)

As a rule, though, I kind of like Acer. My Travelmate 4200 has lived in my backpack for years, riding in my trunk, the subway, and the back of airplanes, and suffering the indiginities of my two goddaughters' relentless game-playing (strictly on the Ubuntu side; it's a dual-boot), and has never given me a problem.

Also, Acer doesn't put quite as much crapware on as most other OEMs, in my experience.

-Rich