Solid-state drives slip into the mainstream
Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.
Alienware 128GB SSD option adds $550 but on the Dell XPS M1530 this option adds only $450.
(Credit: Alienware)SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.
These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.
Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook 2530p with an Intel 80GB solid-state drive option and Dell this month announced the 2.2-pound Dell E4200 with a 128GB drive.
Dell E4200 ultraportable can be configured with 128GB SSD
(Credit: Dell Computer)Dell also offers solid-state drives on more mainstream laptops such as the 15-inch XPS M1530 laptop. The SSD option on the M1530 is twice the capacity and half the price of drives offered to date: 128GB for $450. The first generation of solid-state drives in the MacBook Air, for example, added almost $1,000 to the cost for only 64GB of storage. Dell lists it as an "Ultra Performance" M1530 option.
Solid-state drives are almost synonymous with the new category of tiny laptops called netbooks. And the category continues to grow. Lenovo is the latest high-profile entry. Earlier this month the China-based company introduced the IdeaPad S10 with a 4GB solid-state drive option.
More notable is the 10-inch Asus Eee PC 1000 that comes with a 40GB solid-state drive and that's priced at just under $700.
HP VP Keith LeFebvre holds a new EliteBook 2530p ultraportable. The laptop comes with an Intel 80GB SSD. Larger 160GB drives from Intel are expected in the fourth quarter.
(Credit: Intel)In the gaming space, solid-state drives are just beginning to be aggressively marketed as the ultimate high-performance storage option. Last week at the Intel Developer Forum, Chris Saleski from Intel's Storage Technologies Group demonstrated an Intel 80GB X25M solid-state drive crushing 7,200-rpm, 500GB Seagate Barracuda drives in benchmarks. The single Intel drive hit 44,000 IOPS (input-output operations per second), while the Seagate array did under 550 IOPS.
If this benchmark holds up in the real world, solid-state drives could catch on at game PC makers like Falcon Northwest, which demonstrated its FragBoxes at the Intel forum also beating high-performance hard-disk drives.
Dell's Alienware game PC unit currently offers a 128GB solid-state option for $550 on its Area-51 M15x laptop. "Solid state drives are the best performance options Alienware offers hardcore gamers," Alienware said in a statement. "These drives offer them shorter load times and faster access rates that put them at a much higher level of performance than traditional hard drives."
Alienware currently offers up to a 256GB SSD in a "RAID 0" configuration.
Brooke Crothers is a former editor at large at CNET News.com, and has been an editor for the Asian weekly version of the Wall Street Journal. He writes for the CNET Blog Network, and is not a current employee of CNET. Contact him at mbcrothers@gmail.com. Disclosure.
I'll bet you ten dollars I can get my 600 gigs of data on my two 500 gig drives a lot faster than I can get my data on two of their 80 gig SSDs. Doesn't really matter how fast it is if it can't store my data. How long are we going to have to wait until SSD storage space comes up to par with regular drives?
$50 in RAM will probably speed up your computer more than a $600 SSD will. Sure, the program loads faster with an SSD, but once it is loaded, unless it's a disk heavy app, you're running at the same speed. The $50 in RAM will make the program boot faster plus run faster too. Also, an SSD may help when the operating system swaps to disk, but more RAM may mean your computer doesn't swap to disk in the first place. As long as you're not swapping to disk it doesn't matter how fast the drive is. You won't be using it. RAM is currently a way better value.
Now, if I had an SSD to put my OS on and then a HDD for storage, well that still wouldn't work. You see I have 300 gigs, 325 now actually. The other 325 gig is just a backup of the first onto the second drive for a working backup. The SSD would still need to be 300+ gigs or I'd have to lose my working backup. I'd lose data protection. I can't afford a $300 SSD. I just don't have that kind of money to even buy an 80 gig SSD. I'm sorry they just don't fit my needs. We shouldn't be going backwards in storage space.
The problem that is masked in the benchmarks is that of the limited number of writes to any given area of an SSD. The higher the density of the SSD, the lower the number of writes in the lifetime of a given memory cell. Hence, SSDs are particularly good in write-rarely, read-often scenarios, but mixed in others.
You're perfectly correct on your points, but fail to mention that the average home user will mostly be reading from their drive, not writing to it over and over (except automated logs, which are tiny things, and any decent SSD will come with wear-leveling firmware anyway).
Also, what disk-based drives write all data sequentially?
@SJ2571:
Standard drives have about 100,000 writes per cell, not 100,000 over the whole drive.
High endurance cells last 1 - 5 million writes, apparently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages
So no, they are not useless. You'll be running out of space before you run out of cells.
Also, DRAM-based drives are both faster (particularly on write) and do not suffer from cell burn-out. Ever. Unfortunately, you can't disconnect the power unless you transfer the entire contents to a non-DRAM backup drive.
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by The1egend
August 29, 2008 10:55 AM PDT
- What the average user needs to understand about SSDs as they make it farther and farther into the market, is that they will provide much faster access to your data. Faster boot times, faster program loads. Especially when you are reading data, not manipulating it, i.e. just viewing videos, pictures, loading levels of your favorite games, these drives will be faster. In terms of storing these things a seperate HDD would be key. Either an external large HDD, or a seperate internal HDD would be great for storing all of your photos and videos as you don't necessarily need the fast load times. Why get one? Especially in the notebook market, which is getting larger and larger by the day, these drives will provide great performance, and low power usage, leading to longer battery life.
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by Imalittleteapot
September 2, 2008 12:47 PM PDT
- I'll just rewrite from another of my replies. What's wrong with your computer that it's going so slow? Even with a standard drive my computer boots and loads programs almost instantly. I'm not saying an SSD wouldn't make that faster, but I wouldn't be able to tell much difference. You sure your computer doesn't have a virus?
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(11 Comments)Also, remember that these drives are just starting out and that they will get faster and larger. Yes SSD's have been around a long time in industrial applications, but they are just now blooming for the mass market. They will get better.
$50 in RAM will probably speed up your computer more than a $600 SSD will. Sure, the program loads faster with an SSD, but once it is loaded, unless it's a disk heavy app, you're running at the same speed. The $50 in RAM will make the program boot faster plus run faster too which an SSD won't do unless it is a disk heavy app. Also, an SSD may help when the operating system swaps to disk, but more RAM may mean your computer doesn't swap to disk in the first place. As long as you're not swapping to disk it doesn't matter how fast the drive is. You won't be using it. RAM is currently a way better value.