Solid State Drives: yay or nay?

[Arcadio]

I'm builiding a pc with the latest techmology and crazy speeds. Does you think that solid state drives are worth the price? Are they as fast as they say? what's the catch? Will I be dissappointed because I expect too much from them?

 

[n7]

Not yet.

They're fast, but unless you get the best ones, write times are still a lot worse than read times.

The catch is they cost a crapload.

Yes.

I'd say wait a little...

 

[sutahz]

The cost : Performance isn't good enough. Can it beat a raptor? marginally. Can a raptor beat a normal drive? marginally.

 

[Foxery]

You have good timing. From ArsTechnica today:
SSDs in 2008: fast speeds (200MB/sec) over price cuts

The products they're talking about are mostly thumb drives, but if a thumb drive capacity is up to 64gb already, this is great news for SDDs.

Question, though: Don't Flash modules wear out after a while? Something about only being able to write a few thousand times. Has this been fixed yet, or at least the limit extended immensely? Running an OS creates far more intensive usage patterns than a media storage unit.

 

[atbnet]

They have newer processes to handle the data so the lifetime expectancy exceeds mechanical drives. I would love to get a SSD, but the prices are still far too high. Hopefully since Samsung plans on rolling out 256 GB drives be the end of the year the prices will drop.

 

[Rottie]

SSD won't touch WD Raptor's fastest crown

 

[taltamir]

It depends on the SSD, first gen SSD are slow but with fast random access.

Current gen SSD are extremely fast, beating any conventional drive by a wide margin on any type of access...

The OCZ SATA2 32GB (I saw it for 600$) and 64GB (1200$) SSD are the current fastest.
The raptor actually looses in sequential writes the the new 320GB platter WD drives, but has triple the access time. (those new 320GB platter drives are faster on sequential but have degraded access speeds compared to earlier models).

With a current gen SSD the only drawback is the price

@rottie: you are completely wrong. that was in the past.
@foxery: yes there is a limited lifetime, but it is much greater then a conventional drive. Also the arstechnica article is actually not listing tumb drives, but hard drives (2.5inch). it lists intel prospective drives that intel claims will be ready later this year (200/100 speeds). But OCZ already released a 120/100 drive. That is by far the fastest drive on the market. And much less expensive then earlier models used to be. Good luck finding it in stock anywhere though. I saw one etailer that has it listed and it ran out of stock.

 

[Foxery]

Hum, I must have heard about the thumb drives somewhere else and mixed up the articles.

Newegg has the 32GB ones on sale already:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820220261

These are not nearly as fast as full-sized SDDs, but impressive nonetheless.

 

[imported_wired247]

I think it would be awesome to have one on a highly portable laptop. just because your data will be much more robust and you won't care if it's super fast.

I'm sure after about 10 years or so, there will barely be any spinning hard drives anymore. non volatile memory is really getting big attention in research, and it's much more reliable. I personally know a couple people doing research on novel applications of improving solid state memory. One guy did a really cool demonstration and he printed some solid state memory on a piece of paper using some polymers and gold nanoparticles to store the charge. He was able to read and write from 36 bits of memory in a classroom using a sourcemeter and a voltmeter. The reason it was only 36 bits of memory was that he made the memory rows and columns by hand using an exacto knife and a ruler. Pretty impressive nonetheless!

 

[octopus41092]

Yes, they're the fastest, but for the price it's pointless