4 ms·

It's getting pretty close, with various 32 gigs under $100 and 40gigs and 60gigs in the $100-$200 range. $130 for a 40gig Intel for example: http://www.newegg.c

by drats 17y ago

It's getting pretty close, with various 32 gigs under $100 and 40gigs and 60gigs in the $100-$200 range. $130 for a 40gig Intel for example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...

fnid2 17y ago
That's easily within reach. I remember there being issues with read/writes. You could only write so many times or read so many times. Is this still true? How long will an SSD last?
- drats 17y ago
  Theoretical reliability and lifespan is much higher than that of mechanical drives. There have been bad "batches" of SSD drives from one or two companies, but there are from mechanical drive companies too. "Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact." http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4 http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34... People should have backups anyway, so I guess if the companies are standing behind these drives and all the users so far are pleased it's not really an issue, though it doesn't beat the mech drives really (although in mobile applications shock resistance is higher) but there seems to be no cons. It's just price, size and speed to decide on them now. Still, given the prices, for home applications I imagine people just want a boot drive and storage on a larger mech. On the server side there are probably quite a few databases that could benefit from 1TB with good random access and throughput.
- barrkel 17y ago
  If you believe this - http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html - a 64G drive might last 51 years of 24-hour, 365-day continuous writing at 80M/sec. But that assumes SLC, with MLC it looks shorter - http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html - 6 months at the same rate. Personally, outside of data capture or similar applications with sustained turnover of large amounts of data, I think it's a non-issue in practice; and for those applications, the SLC drives are available at a higher price.
- gvb 17y ago
  Flash has a wear mechanism for writing, limiting the number of erase (and thus write) cycles. The firmware in the device does "wear leveling" which spreads the wear around as evenly as possible rather than concentrating it. The net result is that the SSD will probably outlast the computer it is in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages Depending on how the "garbage collecting" (moving active sectors out of erase blocks and erasing the blocks, number of erased blocks held in reserved, etc.) is implemented, SSDs can be fast for initial writing, but slow down significantly after they are used a while. Some manufacturers use better algorithms, but the algorithms are based on heuristics and trade-offs, so what works well for your neighbor may not work as well for you. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-box-40-performance-increase-mass-ssd-death.ars http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-bo... http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-...

by drats 17y ago

fnid2 17y ago

That's easily within reach. I remember there being issues with read/writes. You could only write so many times or read so many times. Is this still true? How long will an SSD last?

drats 17y ago
Theoretical reliability and lifespan is much higher than that of mechanical drives. There have been bad "batches" of SSD drives from one or two companies, but there are from mechanical drive companies too. "Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact." http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4 http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34... People should have backups anyway, so I guess if the companies are standing behind these drives and all the users so far are pleased it's not really an issue, though it doesn't beat the mech drives really (although in mobile applications shock resistance is higher) but there seems to be no cons. It's just price, size and speed to decide on them now. Still, given the prices, for home applications I imagine people just want a boot drive and storage on a larger mech. On the server side there are probably quite a few databases that could benefit from 1TB with good random access and throughput.
barrkel 17y ago
If you believe this - http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html - a 64G drive might last 51 years of 24-hour, 365-day continuous writing at 80M/sec. But that assumes SLC, with MLC it looks shorter - http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html - 6 months at the same rate. Personally, outside of data capture or similar applications with sustained turnover of large amounts of data, I think it's a non-issue in practice; and for those applications, the SLC drives are available at a higher price.
gvb 17y ago
Flash has a wear mechanism for writing, limiting the number of erase (and thus write) cycles. The firmware in the device does "wear leveling" which spreads the wear around as evenly as possible rather than concentrating it. The net result is that the SSD will probably outlast the computer it is in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages Depending on how the "garbage collecting" (moving active sectors out of erase blocks and erasing the blocks, number of erased blocks held in reserved, etc.) is implemented, SSDs can be fast for initial writing, but slow down significantly after they are used a while. Some manufacturers use better algorithms, but the algorithms are based on heuristics and trade-offs, so what works well for your neighbor may not work as well for you. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-box-40-performance-increase-mass-ssd-death.ars http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-bo... http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-...