Solid State Hard Drives

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Apple's new MacBook Pro laptops have solid state hard drive as an option.

Anyone have experience with these? Are they faster/slower than a standard 7200 drive? Pros? Cons?

http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC373LL/A?mco=MTc0Njg1ODE

[Super_Dave_D]

I am sure more will chime in

Pros
-No moving parts means more reliable - doesnt care bumps and thumps
-Does not produce as much heat
-Totally quiet running
-Performance - some say faster but not slower
-works in extreme conditions - hot cold - high altitudes.

Con
-cost - its an option right

[RKC]

Have one in a MacBook Air. Hasn't seemed quicker (maybe just a bit), but certainly no slower. Makes sense in a laptop as the prices come down just in case you drop the computer, as no moving parts means better shock tolerance.

But, having said all that, the prices seem out of line with that advantage at this point, and feel I would have been just as well off keeping an older MacBook Air I had with a standard hard drive.

[stomachmonkey]

Have had not such great experience with SS drives when they fail.

***** to recover.

[island911]

they are faster, and quieter.

I've had one in my Dell notebook for a while, and the best is knowing that it won't be affected by a jarring ride on the floor of a 911.

From what I've heard, the few that fail, do so rather quickly (bad build).

[legion]

Have on in an ACER Aspire. MUCH slower than a regular hard drive. They will also only withstand about 100,000 read/write cycles on the same bit, much lower than a spinner. And once one bit goes bad, the whole thing is toast.

[GH85Carrera]

We have to use them for the computer in our airplane. Spinning drives stop working at about 12,000 feet. The solid state drives boot up REAL FAST.

[widebody911]

I manage a bunch of HPC7000/BL490cG6 blades which use SSD's; the OS runs off the SSDs, but the data lives on a couple of EVA8400s. The SSDs have an unholy-fast seek time (< 1ms) but their sustained throughput rate couldn't touch the EVA LUN with 64 disks.

[GH85Carrera]

Wow, 64 disks arrays must cost a few bucks.

[Neilk]

From what I have read, if you get one, you need to either get the Intel X25 drive or one based off their chips. Some of the others are no better than standard hard drive.

I would consider buying the SSD from Newegg and installing it in your Mac and keeping the standard 500gb drive as a portable backup.

Disclaimer: this is from memory, so please take with a grain of salt.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

That's exactly what I needed to hear, thank you. Will just go with the 7200.

[jyl]

The main advantage of SSD is lower power consumption, but this is not a big practical impact since other components in the notebook consume most of the power, and reliability, since flash memory deteriorates gradually and the controller detects and avoids using the failing bits, an SSD is not likely to fail suddenly and all at once like a HDD might. Well, unless it is defective.

With the technology that detects g-forces and parks the HDD head when high vibration or a fall is detected, I don't think shock resistance is a big issue for HDDs. Apple uses this: Sudden Motion Sensor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SSD is also faster at retrieving data when you are pulling a bit here and a bit there, while if you are reading a contiguous area (e.g. a single file) there isn't a real practical advantage. This data retrieval speed is an advantage in super high-performance enterprise data storage for limited applications.

A SSD is always ready to deliver data, unlike a HDD which has to spin up if its been idled or if the computer is being booted up. So if the O/S or certain applications are stored on SSD the computer can launch faster. But this potential hasn't really been exploited in Macs or PCs yet.

The basic disadvantage of SSD is cost and capacity. Flash memory is still a lot more expensive, per bit, than hard drives. And that cost is extremely volatile - NAND flash price is a rollercoaster.

Finally, flash memory can fit in a small space, but in notebooks they reserve room for the HDD alternative anyway so there is no space advantage.

I'd get for an SSD in a notebook if someone else was paying and it was a corporate notebook, but not if spending my own $ or if I was going to use the notebook for personal/consumer type stuff. All the files I'll produce in a decade of work are fewer GB than a single ripped DVD.

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Wow, 64 disks arrays must cost a few bucks.

Hah! This single LUN on the array is using 64 disks. The array in question (the smaller of the two) has 216 450Gb drives. The new one I just got a month ago has 216 600Gb drives. In a couple months there will be a 1Tb drive available in this form factor. I don't know what the "street price" on this h/w is (somewhere between "a lot" and "holy *****"), and I'm not at liberty to divulge what the "internal price" is.

[widebody911]

The SSDs that are in these blades are about the size of a credit card.

Another advantage is less heat generated, but that's cold comfort in a blade that puts out as 4k BTU/hr

[MysticLlama]

An Intel SSD for a couple hundred dollars is the best single upgrade you can do to a machine for that price, given a reasonably recent processor/memory. i.e. at least a Core2Duo and 2GB of RAM or higher.

SSDs are not all created alike, only the Intel and some quite new higher end ones have the speed advantage, $100 isn't going to do it.

Unfortunately, most OEMs, Dell, HP, maybe Apple, run with Samsungs. reliable, but quite expensive and just a bit faster than the 7200.

I have a fair amount of experience with them in different circumstances, have an Intel in my full PC, my personal laptop, two work laptops that run POS databases (I went with laptops for the onboard battery backup angle), and higher-end OCZs in the company Controller's laptop and another personal laptop. The OCZs in real life are much better than spindle disks, but aren't as fast as the Intels, even though the benchmarks are faster.

So I'd go with the advice above, buy an Intel from Newegg, use that, the the other drive in an external box as a backup.

[island911]

Yep, the Intel x25 was good advice - thanks Rob.

Originally Posted by Shaun 84 Targa

That's exactly what I needed to hear, thank you. Will just go with the 7200.

uhmm . .what did you hear that had you conclude that the spinner was the way to go?

[EarlyPorsche]

I installed a solid state drive in my 2007 macbook pro last year. Boy is this thing fast. I would say that if you get a mac with snow leopard (64bit), 3+GB of ram, and any intel processor coupled with a solid state drive and you pretty much have hit terminal velocity of computing. My computer is only 2.2ghz intel core2duo and it flys. Also BATTERY LIFE is wonderful when you do not have to spin a motor all the time and not to mention the bottom of my mac isn't running at 200degrees all the time on my lap.

[Z-man]

I know this is a little late to the thread, but here's my $0.42:

One thing not mentioned there -- the SSD "disks" have a rather limited write-life. After so many writes, that spot on the SSD will no longer accept writes. Reads also effect the life of the SSD, but not as much. Granted, conventional hard drives also have fail-rates, but IIRC, they have more writes than SSD.

The only advantages I see for SSD are:
1. Speed. If you are a regular MAC user, you won't see a huge difference. If you are doing a database lookup on a 1,000,000 line tablespace, then you may see an advantage with SSD.
2. Power costs - again, on a laptop, you won't notice a major difference. But in an enterprise application (think IBM DS8700, EMC V-Max Storage arrays), you will see a reduction in power and cooling.
3. Extreme conditions - in my realm of datacenter storage, this isn't really an issue, since the modern datacenter has proper cooling and (hopefully) no altitude changes. But unless you are planning on climbing Mt. Rainier and Half Dome with your lap-top in tow, this isn't really an issue for you either!

I work in SAN Storage (I managed ~200TB of SAN storage). At this point, I don't see a need for SSD in our company. (Then again, I've got other performance enhancing appliances -- IBM SVC). SSD is just too expensive to implement on the large scale that I would need it for. For a laptop --it is more cost effective to have regular backups to external hard drive and DVD than to replace your hard drive is SSD technology.

-Z-man.

[red-beard]

With a lot of work, I swapped out the Compact Flash Hard Disk for a Compact Flash in my Palm Life Drive. A lot of the speed depends on the read/write speed of the Solid State drive. I had a cheapo unit at one point, and it worked fine. I swapped in a Class 6 and it was speedy, especially on book.

The speed and drive lag was gone. The other big advantage was battery life. I didn't reach the read/write life problem before the unit was totally obsolete.

[RPKESQ]

Also turn off "defrag" in windows as that is not required on a SSD and will extend the life.