What are the disadvantages of SSD?

[Dari]

I see that newer laptops come with multiple hard drives. I would like to put an SSD in place of one of the hard drives. Are there any disadvantages to using SSD over regular hard drives?

 

[her209]

On laptop hard drives that are 5400 RPM? Probably none.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: her209
On laptop hard drives that are 5400 RPM? Probably none.

Yeah.

Write times are the big weakness with SSDs; that's where good desktop drives will still beat SSDs in a lot of cases.

But for a notebook, i'd say an SSD is a pure win/win situation.
Better performance overall, less heat output, less battery drain, etc.

 

[DSF]

What about wear? I understand that there are leveling algorithms, but would you ever reach the point that you'd wear out an SSD?

 

[Tempered81]

no moving parts to wear out? maybe if you smash it or something

 

[Goldfish4209]

Unless you're considering capacity, get a SSD and never look back.

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: jaredpace
no moving parts to wear out? maybe if you smash it or something

No, I mean the fact that you can only perform so many reads and writes on flash media before they are rendered useless. With a pen drive the limit is high enough that it essentially doesn't matter. With a system drive, I'm wondering if that's the case.

 

[Sheninat0r]

SSDs can read and write just as fast as old school hard drives, if you buy the right ones - Mtron makes ridiculous SSDs that have >100MB/s reads and writes, coupled with 0.01ms access times makes a very delicious cheesecake. Unfortunately, once you factor in the cost [>$1000 generally] then your cake is looking less delicious each second.

 

[Mondoman]

Sounds like typical flash is guaranteed for 10k-100k write cycles; I could see running into problems down the road with SSDs if they use similar components and are used as system drives.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: DSF

Originally posted by: jaredpace
no moving parts to wear out? maybe if you smash it or something

No, I mean the fact that you can only perform so many reads and writes on flash media before they are rendered useless. With a pen drive the limit is high enough that it essentially doesn't matter. With a system drive, I'm wondering if that's the case.

Checkout just about web article on SSD's and they will talk about why this is not the concern it was for thumbdrives of a few years ago.

(if you have not seen these reviews then you are missing out on some good tech stuff, hit Anands/Toms/XS forum reviews/XBit labs etc they all have great articles on SSD's)

The cliffs are that all available SSD's have been engineered with either better flash chips and/or superior leveling programs such that their lifetimes are now expected to equal or exceed conventional harddisk drives.

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: DSF

Originally posted by: jaredpace
no moving parts to wear out? maybe if you smash it or something

No, I mean the fact that you can only perform so many reads and writes on flash media before they are rendered useless. With a pen drive the limit is high enough that it essentially doesn't matter. With a system drive, I'm wondering if that's the case.

Checkout just about web article on SSD's and they will talk about why this is not the concern it was for thumbdrives of a few years ago.

(if you have not seen these reviews then you are missing out on some good tech stuff, hit Anands/Toms/XS forum reviews/XBit labs etc they all have great articles on SSD's)

The cliffs are that all available SSD's have been engineered with either better flash chips and/or superior leveling programs such that their lifetimes are now expected to equal or exceed conventional harddisk drives.

Interesting, I'll check it out.

(Not that I have the money for an SSD of sufficient capacity anyway.)

 

[imported_wired247]

For my tastes, all of the affordable SSDs are way too slow, and the fast ones are way too low capacity and too expensive.

For a laptop where you need virtually no storage... like maybe just your music and nothing else, it would be great. But I would still wait at least a year (IMO) for the price to come down, storage to go up, and speed to get there as well.

 

[Idontcare]

The beauty of the OP adding the caveat of "aside from price" is that all things negative about SSD'd can be eliminated if price were no object.

Don't care for the write performance of a single SSD? Me neither. But get yourself an Areca 1280ML with 2GB onboard cache and Raid-0 (or 5 or 6) enough SSD's together and you'll eventually trump the read and write performance of any non-SSD disk array out there.

Expensive? heck yes. Cheaper ways to get similiar performance? Absolutely. Is is relevant to the thread topic as defined by the OP? Yes, yes it is.

 

[Yellowbeard]

The wear leveling on current SSDs is supposed to be VERY good. Also, with some drives and depending on the laptop and firmware combinations, some testing is showing 20% more battery life over a standard rotating drive in the same system. Price aside, I would not hesitate to get an SSD. The MTBF should be as good as a rotating drive.

 

[Lorne]

As Sheninat0r mentioned, Mtron dominates all SSD but only the price is the bitter taste in the cheesecake, Mtron has rated its drives a run time of 150 years under normal HD usage, I belive that even if they were only 50% right that would be 15x longer then normal HD's of today not to mention 1/8th the power usage and heat buildup.
There are 3 other copanies Ive looked into one with a 64GB and speeds better then the Raptor in all test.
Time will bring down the prices as it does with all thing, 5 years most will be SSD, 10 Spindle HD's will almost be extinct except mass data servers.