Acronyms FTW :dance: Anyway, does anyone have any experience with these flashy new SSD? Have any of you guys splashed the cash and put one in your laptop or PS3 or anything? From what I can see, the overall write time to the drive is longer, but the read time is vastly reduced. Oh, and they seem to be rediculously expensive. Is there actually any point to having one atm, other than being an uber nerd?
They are as good as the hype. Typical flash has a long write time, but modern SSDs are faster in every category. Further, typical flash has problems with writing sectors over and over again (which is why we never enabled swap files on flash based disks when I did embedded systems work) but modern SSDs have internal balancing of writes that keep them "fresh" longer than you will ever keep them in your application. I personally have a factory supplied SSD in my macbook air. In addition, I will receive a new mac pro on Monday and will immediately remove the stock boot drive and replace it with an SSD. The part I prefer is the Intel SSDSA2MH080G1C5 It is an 80 GB drive that you can get new on Amazon for $3xx.
They're good, but IMHO not worth the money. Get a bigger platter-based SATA drive for a LOT less money.
You can't compare 3,5" disc with SDD or 2,5" in speed. The 3,5" are tooooooo slow I would never ever buy any these days.
^Huh? The Raptors still decimate MLC SSD drives in write speed. 15,000rpm is still *really* fast. Even so, I wouldn't call 7200rpm "slow." It is definitely a bottleneck, but not so much as to be unusable. I bought a G.Skill 64GB MLC drive a few months ago, and I've been really impressed with it. Windows 7 boots within twenty seconds and shuts down in three. Loading a program is pretty much instant. When the start bar and desktop are showing in Windows, I know it's usable. Would I buy it again? Probably not, since I'm not currently using it in anything. Flash is getting cheaper at a pretty steady pace. If you have a few hundred bucks to burn, SSDs are good things to burn it on.
I would personally say that whilst the speed is blistering in comparison to a HDD, it'll be a year before the prices come down to competitive levels in terms of drive sizes. At the moment, you're better off with a couple of mid-range HDDs RAIDed together.
I just received a new Mac Pro and have ordered this: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/extreme/index.htm It's the Intel SSD that _doesn't_ have slower writes than a fast platter drive: Sustained sequential read: up to 250 MB/s Sustained sequential write: up to 170 MB/s The downside is it's 32 GB, but the mac comes with a 640 GB that I can use for music, etc.
We have two of the 64GB versions in a test server up here and they are quick, really quick. One of the best features about them is that they are quiet. If I could find some way of making the processor and p.s. have a passive cooling system the machine would be dead silent.
Those Intel drives are pretty cool. I think I'll wait a few months though until all drives are up to par with the Intel ones and the prices are a bit more manageable. I'd like to put one in the MacBook as that would benefit most from the speed increase. It'd be pretty pointless to put one in the PS3 or Mac Mini server.
The PS3 does have pretty slow loading times through Blu-Ray though...the only downside to the machine I've experienced thus far! Does the PS3 OS even support SSD yet?
I have seen people put in SSDs and the performance gain really doesn't justify the cost of the drive....
And whats the price/energy/noise etc. of that disc comapre to SDD and 2,5" ? Big I can tell you. In fact if you never work with SDD or 2,5" with decent cache you can't tell thats your 3,5" disc is slow ;-).
That's definitely true. Heat also goes way down with SSD. I like it, I just don't think it's worth the cost just yet (unless you're using it as a boot drive). I think they'll eventually take over HDD's though. 2.5/3.5 HDDs with good cache still don't hold a candle to SLC SSDs (or MLC as far as read speed goes).
