Thoughts on SSD (Solid State Disks)

Now that SSD's (Solid State Disks)--which is funny since there are no "Discs" in an SSD device, have progressed passed the second generation I'm seriously considering them. Their prices have come down dramatically. Has anybody bought an SSD for their laptop or desktop systems? Obviously the storage capacity is FAR inferior to hard drives, but for me the big deal is latency advantages over mechanical storage devices during high concurrent read operations. Right now, my laptop takes FOREVER to boot up due to (what it seems) is the hard drive thrashing all over the platter trying to satisfy a bunch of startup items. I can reduce the issue somewhat by removing items that start up, but it would be nice if I didn't have to do it.

My concerns are primarily reliability; Are these any more likely or less to fail? What about write leveling? What is the practical real world expereinces with these devices? My experience watching CPU utilization has led me to think that jumping to SSD might shift the bottleneck over to the processor cores. I'd be interested in anybody's experience.

Here is a link to the recent slashdot article on IBM's new 34nm SSD products that will be available next week. They look sweet, but are they worth the price (around $330 for 80GB)?

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/07/23/1524202/Intel-34nm-SSDs-Lower-Prices-Raise-Performance

SSD stands for 'Solid State Drive'.   Anything that says 'disc' is wrong.

And the answer is 'no, they are not worth the price'.  Not even remotely.  Maybe for that niche market where you need 'rugged' portable devices that survive frequent 8ft drops onto raw granite.

But $330 for 80GB?!  Are you kidding me?  Talk to me again when the price:volume ratio is about 1/10 of that.

Did you do the math?  That IBM SSD clocks in at ~4, whereas a typical 1TB SATA3 drive is 0.09.  I.e. the SSD is (brace yourself) 44 TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE!

You know that 'early adopter' is a synonym for 'sucker' right?

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that boot times could be dramatically reduced with an SSD, but I've not done homework on that, it's just a gut feeling.

The thought had occured to me on the acronym but I figured "eh..nobody will notice", of course Hoss is not nobody since you have a BS detection device implanted in your skull!

Update on the price, I got it wrong looks like the starting price for the 80GB drive will be $230 and 160GB will be $434.

Does the latency on the typical 1TB SATA drive stay that way with multiple concurrent reads simultaneously trying to read different areas on the disk that are far apart? Where did you get the 4ns figure? The specs I have are 65usec.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=750&type=expert&pid=2

Previously David Hostetler wrote:

SSD stands for 'Solid State Drive'.   Anything that says 'disc' is wrong.

And the answer is 'no, they are not worth the price'.  Not even remotely.  Maybe for that niche market where you need 'rugged' portable devices that survive frequent 8ft drops onto raw granite.

But $330 for 80GB?!  Are you kidding me?  Talk to me again when the price:volume ratio is about 1/10 of that.

Did you do the math?  That IBM SSD clocks in at ~4, whereas a typical 1TB SATA3 drive is 0.09.  I.e. the SSD is (brace yourself) 44 TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE!

You know that 'early adopter' is a synonym for 'sucker' right?

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that boot times could be dramatically reduced with an SSD, but I've not done homework on that, it's just a gut feeling.

The 4 and 0.09 numbers are the price:volume ratios.  Probably shouldn't have used the phrase "clocks in at...".

Yes, obviously SSDs have better latencies.  The real question is: are you doing anything where it really matters?  I would wager that for that kind of price difference the answer is 'no'.  And I'm including high-end gaming, too.

Jason does have an SSD on his ruggedness laptop, and the boot times are much faster.

For pure storage, as a storage solution, they are not worth it.  For a laptop, as a portable device, without high capacity storage needs, they already make sense.  If the question when shopping for a laptop is 'how much space do I get for my budget' instead of 'how much does the space I need cost', then an SSD is in play.