SSD's - Solid State Drives Pros and Cons

Joint Chiefs of Staff · Tue Apr 27, 2010 3:16 am

Outside of the price and limited storage size. What is your take on SSD's...the pros and cons.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 4:54 am

Pros:

Fast
Quiet
Lower power consumption
No moving parts
+6 points to geek factor

Cons:

Limited lifecycle

terrancelam · Post by **terrancelam** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 8:56 am

Just adding to YoS:

Fast = Insane speed compared to regular HDs. Only the WD raptors come close to performance. But buyer beware, not all SSD are made the same, always check the specs first. The sustained read/write is very different from one drive / company to another

Far-N-Wide · Post by **Far-N-Wide** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 11:28 am

Put 2 SSDs in a raid 0 config... and drool.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 11:44 am

Crazy read speeds...bootups...fly! Launching programs...fly!
For those people who are heavy into stuff like video editing, CAD, editing photos...stuff that requires heavy writing...the writing speeds aren't all the way there yet. They're working on that...every few months new drives come out with improved writing speeds.

For laptops, IMO..fantastic. Fast bootup, low power consumption, little heat output, and...no moving parts...so less likely for a bump or an oops to tank the drive of a laptop. Better for a mobile environment.

As for length of life....too new to the market, jury isn't out yet. Flash devices are pretty much subject to a set amount of write cycles until it dies. For example..100,000 write cycles to each cell. But drive manufacturers are coming across ways to alleviate this..such as wear leveling. Meaning..as you write data in your normal day to day activity..it writes to different cells, spreads the load..spreads the wear..sort of speak. You could write data every hour to the drive for days...weeks...years...and never reach its peak in this manner. So this worry is pretty much no longer a legit worry.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 1:07 pm

YeOldeStonecat wrote:As for length of life....too new to the market, jury isn't out yet. Flash devices are pretty much subject to a set amount of write cycles until it dies. For example..100,000 write cycles to each cell. But drive manufacturers are coming across ways to alleviate this..such as wear leveling. Meaning..as you write data in your normal day to day activity..it writes to different cells, spreads the load..spreads the wear..sort of speak. You could write data every hour to the drive for days...weeks...years...and never reach its peak in this manner. So this worry is pretty much no longer a legit worry.

From what I've read they get 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 regularly and with wear leveling about 5,000,000. But how long(in theory) will a drive last with each limit?

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 2:31 pm

If they're up past 1,000,000....than I'd say they'll last waaaaaay longer than most people will have a computer last. The part I recall was talking about a few hundred thousand writes being enough for most users.

Brk · Post by **Brk** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 2:38 pm

The loading speed and order-of-magnitude speediness of the system is worth any con, imho.

I use the Intel G2 80 GB.

tHE_0ne · Post by **tHE_0ne** » Thu Apr 29, 2010 4:14 am

ssd makes the wd velociraptor look like a snail!

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Thu Apr 29, 2010 7:41 pm

tHE_0ne wrote:ssd makes the wd velociraptor look like a snail!

My raptor loads Win7 in less than 20seconds, plenty fast for me for now till prices come down on SSD's. They just are not reliable enough for the cost yet unless you get one for a laptop.

Andrzej · Post by **Andrzej** » Sat May 01, 2010 9:45 am

I have SSD Toshiba 256GB [THNS256GG8BAAA-FDE]
on ThP X200s with ram8GB (removed TurboMem 2GB)
pro: as above
con: as above
but also:
still unclean optimalisation for SSD
TRIM command problems {G1 ssd; ICH8 chipset (old); SATA to PATA interface}

see also SSD Tweaker 1.3
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Syst ... aker.shtml

my Toshiba HG2 (256GB) compared with others
Spring 2010 Solid State Drive Roundup, Part 1 | April 7, 2010 – 2:00 AM
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd ... ,2593.html
Crucial M225 (256GB);
Intel X25-M G2 (160GB);
OCZ Vertex (120GB);
Solidata K5 (64GB);
Toshiba HG2 (256GB)

Spring 2010 Solid State Drive Roundup, Part 2 | April 13, 2010 - 2:00 AM
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/6gb ... ,2603.html
Crucial RealSSD C300 (256GB, SATA 6Gb/s);
Kingston SSDNow V-Series (128GB);
Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue (256GB)

Shinobi · Post by **Shinobi** » Sat May 01, 2010 2:34 pm

http://gizmodo.com/5489933/leave-no-tra ... umb-drives

With SSDs, the erased file situation is even more complex. SSDs store data in blocks rather than in sectors as with magnetic storage. Overwriting a block was previously used involves copying the contents of the block to cache, wiping the block's contents, delete the block to be overwritten from cache, writing the new data to cache, and rewriting the block with the new data. As an SSD is used with files that are deleted or changed frequently, the performance can drop unless the drive (and operating system) support a technology called TRIM that wipes out deleted data blocks as soon as the file using the blocks is deleted. TRIM is supported by Windows 7 and by some late model SSDs, but not by older Windows versions. So, disk wiping can be both a security feature and a performance improvement strategy.