Low-end SSD question...

[tlbj6142]

I've read many reviews on Tom's, Anand's and PCP on SSDs. All, more or less, tell you to stay away from the inexpensive drives (ex. Jmicron controller) as they "just suck".

Yet there are dozens of XP and Linux based netbooks available with SSDs. And I have to assume they are not using $350 Intel SSDs, but inexpensive drives. How is it that users of those devices are not suffering all of the huge write latency and stuttering problems I read about in the reviews?

Are the tests performed in the reviews not "typical" end user behavior??

 

[dawza]

I have a Supertalent SSD for the Dell Mini 9, and I can tell you that it is definitely not stutter-free. The same can be said about the stock SSD made by STEC.

I think the main issue is that on a Netbook, with its wimpy Atom CPU, processing power will quite often be limiting, to say nothing about the fact that there is only so much multitasking one can do on a 1024x600 screen- with a tiny trackpad no less. Most people are also using netbooks for nothing more than surfing and light word processing (which is what they were designed for) and reserve resource-intensive tasks for "real" computers.

So bottom line- yes, they do "suck," but the expectation is that netbooks (and their SSDs) will not be high-performance devices, so no one really complains when they get what they expect.

 

[tlbj6142]

Thanks. Never thought about usage patterns making that much of a difference. I had assumed since their SSD was their only drive that temp files (OS and browser) would overwhelm the SSD, resulting in excessive lag issues. But I guess not.

What about movie watching (hulu, etc.)? Don't those streaming applications have to write some data to the drive while running? Wouldn't that affect the viewing experience? I sort of thought streaming A/V as a primary usage of netbooks ("thick ipods").

 

[dawza]

Not sure about hulu, but IIRC, SD youtube videos are OK, even in full-screen; HD fullscreen is choppy. I do know that if I watch a DVD rip with MPC, CPU utilization is maxed and everything is choppy unless I go full-screen. I assume that MPC does not use the GPU to offset some of the load in windowed mode. There may be some settings I could tweak to make windowed mode use the GPU, but the point is that the bottleneck is probably at the CPU, and not the SSD. Flash, being CPU-dependent, would not have the option of GPU assistance-which is why, I believe, people have reported that HD Hulu does not work with their netbooks.

This is not to say that there aren't SSD-related lag issues. For example, little CPU power is needed to open several explorer windows in succession, but if I try to do so on my Mini 9, there is definite lag. Then, there are times where the system hangs when I navigate to a new page while trying to open an application. This is with 2GB of RAM on Vista with the page file turned off.

In general, I am perfectly content with the overall performance of my netbook. I accept that it is not a multitasking workstation, and am OK with not being able to watch a movie, surf the web, compress backups, and process data at the same time, while sitting on the couch and listening to my wife talk about her day