SOLID STATE HARD DRIVES

EdinburghGary

EdinburghGary

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I know nothing about them, but I can think of a few guys here who will have pretty expert knowledge on them, I'm merely curious at the moment...

  1. How reliable are they?
  2. Is there a common point of failure?
  3. Do they require special care? For example, keep away from magnets, don't drop...etc.
  4. Are we still talking GB's? When will TB's be available?
  5. Any other comments or discussions :)

Gary.
 
Too expensive unless you really need the speed.

Give it a year.

1) ok
2) number of writes
3) solid
4) oh yes gb's only unless you have $$$$$
5) as above, cost too much at present.
 
Flash technology is partially limited in the number of write cycles each bit can do,

ie wear out.

This has improved with over the last number of years but is limited
 
2) they're usually rated. Not meant to be much of an issue with decent new ones. The intel Xsomething ones offer best bang for buck iirc atm, though confirm this.

They're insanely expensive, however, an operating system drive with windows 7, photoshop and lightroom would only need an 80gb or so one... :D
 
awesome system drives or scratch disks cos they have a great seek time, but a bit crap for mass storage as they are loads more expensive (£/Gb)
 
You'll need Windows 7 to allow the rewriting to be managed and thus extend the drive's life.
 
I've got one in my netbook for mechanical strength (I check it into my luggage sometimes) and it has been fine. 5 years at 20Gb a day is plenty for what I need. Mine is running on XP but I have turned off lots of stuff following guidance from the internet to increase caching and minimise uneccessary writes
 
If you installed one of these, would you use purely as system or also install applications (Program files) ?

Everything I read indicates technology / price not quite ready yet.
 
john-oh said:
If you installed one of these, would you use purely as system or also install applications (Program files) ?

Everything I read indicates technology / price not quite ready yet.
Click to expand...

apps if its big enough

some people use small raptor drives in a similar way but they are slower
 
So, ssd pros = better reliability, cooler, quieter, faster in some situations.

cons = slower in some situations, size, price.

In the middle, lifespan. like most things it seems the more you spend the better the quality but even at the cheaper end the lifespan is measured in years, bearing in mind that an ssd will not just fail one day without warning (probably). As blocks wear out the drive software will mark them as bad or change the way they are used, your ssd will begin to lose storage space slowly over time as blocks fail. People say the finite life of an ssd is a problem but think of it in terms of moving technology. A drive you buy today will last a long time and by the time it needs replacing the technology will have advanced and prices are sure to have fallen to the extent that replacing it will not hurt your wallet.
 
john-oh said:
If you installed one of these, would you use purely as system or also install applications (Program files) ?

Everything I read indicates technology / price not quite ready yet.
Click to expand...

It's very strange how people are willing to spend a lot of money on super-fast processors and masses of hyper-fast ram, just to have all that power sitting there twiddling metaphorical thumbs as it waits for data to slowly trickle up from a piece of technology that dates back to the stone age.

I use an Intel 160GB SSD for the OS, Program Files, Lightroom Catalog and the pics I'm currently working on. The difference it makes to the speed of everything is just incredible. There's no way I could ever go back to using a HDD instead. As long as you're running a trim-aware OS and you've got a trim-enabled drive there should be no problems with degradation of performance for several years, by which time SSDs will be much bigger and cheaper and running SATA-600.

I believed it was worth spending about 35p per day to save myself several minutes of thumb twiddling a day.


Steep said:
cons = slower in some situations
Click to expand...

Er, in which situations is an SSD slower than a HDD?
 
reading a few reviews compared to a decent mechanical drive with a good cache (veloci's etc) SSDs only really blow them out of the water on random reads.

for me PERSONALLY the cost of SSD isnt worth the 10/20 mbps gain. as that cost drops im sure my opinion will shift.
 
hollis_f said:
It's very strange how people are willing to spend a lot of money on super-fast processors and masses of hyper-fast ram, just to have all that power sitting there twiddling metaphorical thumbs as it waits for data to slowly trickle up from a piece of technology that dates back to the stone age.

I use an Intel 160GB SSD for the OS, Program Files, Lightroom Catalog and the pics I'm currently working on. The difference it makes to the speed of everything is just incredible. There's no way I could ever go back to using a HDD instead. As long as you're running a trim-aware OS and you've got a trim-enabled drive there should be no problems with degradation of performance for several years, by which time SSDs will be much bigger and cheaper and running SATA-600.

I believed it was worth spending about 35p per day to save myself several minutes of thumb twiddling a day.




Er, in which situations is an SSD slower than a HDD?
Click to expand...

I think the read write times for really big files are a bit slower than the spinny sort, not much of an issue as ssd's are generally only system drives
 
neil_g said:
reading a few reviews compared to a decent mechanical drive with a good cache (veloci's etc) SSDs only really blow them out of the water on random reads.
Click to expand...

The key feature where SSDs really do blow any HDD out of the water is in access times. For a HDD the time it takes for the drive to be able to start reading any data at all is around 6 ms - for an SSD it's closer to 0.1 ms. So, while the HDD is still trying to find the right place to look for the data, the SSD has already started accessing it.

And I don't know which reviews you've been reading but this one at Anandtech gives the following numbers for the Intel X-25M vs the WD Velociraptor....

Sequential Read: 230 MB/s vs 118 MB/s
Sequential Write: 71 MB/s vs 119 MB/s
Random Read: 54 MB/s vs 0.7 MB/s
Random Writes: 23.1 MB/s vs 1.6 MB/s


So it's only on sequential writes (writing a large file to a contiguous area on the HDD) that the Raptor is faster. In the random read/write tests (where seek time is an appreciable part of the total time) we see the SSD really hammering the HDD. This is why LR loads so fast for me - there are a lot of fairly small files to open. It's almost worth the cost of the SSD just to see LR pop up in a couple of seconds.
 
surely thats subjective though and will vary on the size of files being used and what youre doing with them..

im not denying the potential for SSD to replace mechanical drives isnt massive and isnt pretty exciting (as exciting as these things get?!), but personally for the cost/size ratio compared to mechanical to save a whole 2 seconds opening a 500mb file just is not worth it.

YET..
 
Have to agree with that big YET..
Will be great when prices drop a tad,at the moment though they a little too costly really.
(Though as said make excellent system drives)
If you have more money than sense,there's always the option of a huge RAID array using them..Seen that Youtube video of some guy from Samsung having 24 or something linked up?
Opens up a bucketload of applications with no slowdown and pretty much instant opening of everything...
 
neil_g said:
im not denying the potential for SSD to replace mechanical drives isnt massive and isnt pretty exciting (as exciting as these things get?!), but personally for the cost/size ratio compared to mechanical to save a whole 2 seconds opening a 500mb file just is not worth it.

YET..
Click to expand...

Yes, it's obviously up to the individual to decide how much they want to spend to save sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Like everything else in this world, some people are willing to spend the cash to make things easier for themselves.

I'm trying to make two points that people don't seem to think about when making the decision...

First is that spending £500 on a super-duper processor while using an ordinary, £100, HDD may not give as much of a speed boost as spending £200 on a processor and £400 on an SSD.

Second is that the real time savings aren't in opening 500MB files a couple of times a day but in opening thousands of tiny files all the time. Because the latter is what Windows does while you're working. It's the saving of 0.1s a thousand times that really does make an SSD system feel so fast.
 
Right! I have installed an OCZ vertex 60gb drive purely for windows 7, lightroom 2 and cs4.. I have both editing programs linked to start-up as thats all i use and it all boots and loads in probably 15-20 secs...OH and that also includes virgin pc guard internet security load up too..

What I really want to know is what I need to do to keep this all running tip top...? You say something about NO defragging??, TRIM?? and iirc someone in a previous thread of mine said you should move some of the CS and LR folders to a standard drive??? Any help much appreciated...

OH and sorry Gary for thread hi-jack.. ; D
 
Got an OCZ Agility SSD arriving today to use on my HTPC. Will see how it performs running W7 + Mediaportal which should in theory fly compared to a mechanical drive.

If I'm suitably impressed I will probably end up getting a 256GB one for my macbook pro for lightroom :)
 
onform said:
What I really want to know is what I need to do to keep this all running tip top...? You say something about NO defragging??, TRIM?? and iirc someone in a previous thread of mine said you should move some of the CS and LR folders to a standard drive??? Any help much appreciated...
Click to expand...

Congratulations on your new purchase. I'm not familiar with the OCZ drives, but there's lots of help on their support forum - here.

Windows 7 is the best OS to use with an SSD. Your drive, assuming it's fairly new, does support trim. This clears used blocks on the drive, preventing deterioration of performance with time. It's all totally automatic and invisible to the user - so much so that it's hard to tell if it is working. If you download and run Crystal Disk Info (for free) then that will tell you if your drive supports trim (it'll be in bold in the list of supported features).

Windows 7 should also be intelligent enough to know that the drive doesn't need defragging, but you can check. Type 'Defrag' into the search box and select 'Defragment your hard drive', then 'Configure schedule' and 'Select disks'. If your SSD is in the list then deselect it. If it's not on the list then Windows has decided it doesn't need defragging.

You'll find lots of other recommendations, but I leave everything on the defaults with zero problems.
 
cheers mate will do..

Can anyone help me with which cs4 and LR folders i should move off the ssd to prevent it getting clogged up with data..
 
Solid State is used a fair bit in industry now, at my place we have some SQL database backups which are about 4Gb each and moved them from tape drive to Solid State, now it takes about 30 mins to backup each database rather than 6 hours.
 
martyncoup said:
Solid State is used a fair bit in industry now, at my place we have some SQL database backups which are about 4Gb each and moved them from tape drive to Solid State, now it takes about 30 mins to backup each database rather than 6 hours.
Click to expand...

im not sure i understand the point of that? its a really expensive way of doing a 1 off backup, unless im reading that wrong?
 
neil_g said:
im not sure i understand the point of that? its a really expensive way of doing a 1 off backup, unless im reading that wrong?
Click to expand...

Time is money, while that is backing up every night (because the law says we have to in pharmaceuticals) we cannot make drugs because the database control what level of what chemical is entered into the drug.

We have to store daily backups for one year.
 
Yeah that's spot on, the point is that you can get your backup then move it to the site and off-site locations after this is done without impacting the system.

I hate legislation :( See your in IT Neil, who for and what you do? I'm just nosey.
 
im a systems tech (desktop support, server/SAN/network admin) for a well known "surfy" brand of clothing :)

i imagine its a damn site easier shifting a few SSD than tapes too (never fun taking those off site) lol
 
Cool sounds fun, pretty much the same as you've probably gathered. Stopped doing the desktop stuff now but I work mainly with AD, Exchange 2010, SQL and SCCM 2007 (this is my speciality).
 
martyncoup said:
Cool sounds fun, pretty much the same as you've probably gathered. Stopped doing the desktop stuff now but I work mainly with AD, Exchange 2010, SQL and SCCM 2007 (this is my speciality).
Click to expand...

How do you find exchange 2010? We're putting that in later in the year - moving from Domino.
 
I bought £700k's worth of Sun storage at work recently. The primary storage is all SSD based and the secondary is those old spinny things. According to the guys on the data centre floor, the SSD-based stuff just flies.

I tried to get a 320Gb SSD for "home testing use" :D but no success. I will however get myself an Intel based TRIM compatible SSD imminently, bolt it into my home PC, set up Windows 7 on it, and use the other 2 spinny disks on the PC for my photo, docs, movie storage & page file, with the apps & OS on the SSD.
 
I just added a 30GB OCZ Agility SSD to my living room PC that runs my home cinema system at the weekend. Makes a hell of a difference having Windows running on it, plus it's silent and cool which is a big bonus for a HTPC :) Makes the interface fair fly around compared to the old spinning platters too.
 
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