with SSDs where is the new bottleneck?

[JasonCoder]

To my knowledge the slowest thing in the box has always been hard disks (okay, maybe network communication if you're on dial up). I don't care if you have 15k SCSIs, they ain't touching solid state for real world scenarios. I know synthetic benchmarks have good spindle drives keeping up with SSD but when you sit down and do actual real work it's never even close.

So with the imminent move to SSDs (at least for a boot/system drive), where does the bottleneck in the system then lie? Is it the bus? CPU cache sizes? Will we need ninja heatsinks for our SATA controllers as they heat up from moving the new avalanche of data from an SSD?

Anyone out there in the know? Or perhaps share your informed opinion?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: JasonCoder
with SSDs where is the new bottleneck?

* Price per GB
* Write speeds

 

[Slugbait]

Originally posted by: Blain
* Price per GB

This has any kind of relationship to performance [fill in blank]

Originally posted by: Blain
* Write speeds

This is incorrect. An SLC-based SSD drive will beat a VelociRaptor on sustained write speeds. Not by much, but it puts your Maxtor drive to shame...

Other than installs and patching, this does not impact system performance nearly as much as anybody cares...we want insane load times. And in the near-term, we aren't saving anything to SSD: that's a mass-storage task. MLC-based drives will die (i.e. discontinued) within five years, and SLC-based drives will improve in performance during that time, and also increase in capacity. But if the VelociRapter and the F1 are any indication, platter-based drives still haven't hit a brick wall, and will be around for awhile to come.

The current king of the hill is Intel's X-25M...while it's an MLC-based drive, it will utterly destroy a VelociRapter for sustained read speeds. Even most of the current SLC-based drives can't make that claim.

But I digress. In answer to OP's question, the system bottleneck is still the drive.

 

[mpilchfamily]

The biggest barier for the drives is there price per gig. It will be very hard for SSDs to match or overcome the PPG of HHDs. But i think we will see that the speed advantages of the SSDs will soon make that price difference a non-issue.

 

[0roo0roo]

its still the bottleneck in a computer.
its faster..but not ram fast. never mind cpu fast. most things don't require reading from drives constantly once loaded.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...howdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=6
look at the read write speeds just for ram. 17GB/s..19GB/s....
dont worry about anything other than the storage being the bottleneck.

 

[Slugbait]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
The biggest barier for the drives is there price per gig. It will be very hard for SSDs to match or overcome the PPG of HHDs. But i think we will see that the speed advantages of the SSDs will soon make that price difference a non-issue.

The thread is about system performance, not component price. If it were always about price, no one would have ever purchased an LVD drive, a Plextor 12/4/32, an Extreme Edition proc, water-based cooling solutions, etc.

Current SSD speeds will need to increase phenomenally, while platter-based drive perf improvements simultaneously becoming stagnant, to make the current price difference a "non-issue". Otherwise, as prices drop and capacity increases enormously for SSD over the next five years, the actual result would be that platter-based drives themselves will be a non-issue (i.e. obsolete).

Not saying that they won't become obsolete, they quite-likely will. But by that time, there will be a new storage tech that will be putting enormous pressure on SSD...and it'll be expensive, and we'll be having this discussion all over again.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

 

[biostud]

It depends on what kind of work you do. The harddrive is only the limiting factor in programs that are heavily dependent of the harddrive. A game doesn't run faster because of SSD, it loads faster, but once it's loaded into the memory the HDD speed doesn't matter.

For gaming it's the GPU and to a lesser extent the CPU there are the limiting factors. For hard drive intensive tasks the SSD is still the bottleneck.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Originally posted by: biostud
It depends on what kind of work you do. The harddrive is only the limiting factor in programs that are heavily dependent of the harddrive. A game doesn't run faster because of SSD, it loads faster, but once it's loaded into the memory the HDD speed doesn't matter.

For gaming it's the GPU and to a lesser extent the CPU there are the limiting factors. For hard drive intensive tasks the SSD is still the bottleneck.

^ This most things people do aren't harddrive limited. Atleast for me they're either GPU limited or network speed limited.

 

[JasonCoder]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
its still the bottleneck in a computer.
its faster..but not ram fast. never mind cpu fast. most things don't require reading from drives constantly once loaded.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...howdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=6
look at the read write speeds just for ram. 17GB/s..19GB/s....
dont worry about anything other than the storage being the bottleneck.

Not ram fast... why not? It's just memory chips in the SSD isn't it? So then is it the controller? Does the CPU simply have a wider memory interface to main memory and hence the bottleneck to the SSD? Or does the SSD device use

If it's indeed the interface I can certainly understand that. I wouldn't expect the CPU to have the same (or similar) interface for accessing a few gigs of very fast volatile memory with a set range of timings as it does terrabytes of storage.

Yeah... time for some research. While I'm being lazy... AT needs to do one of those deep dive technical backgrounders on this technology.

 

[0roo0roo]

flash memory is different, it has nothing to do with interface holding it back. it is SLOW.
google wiki it
it is not the same type as dram
at doesn't need to do a deep dive, its a basic difference.
just visit wikipedia or something.

 

[aceO07]

I don't remember if the AT review of the Intel SSD has read/write test of files of various sizes. From my research on various forums and tests, SSD seems to be slow on small files whereas regular harddrives are not.

I have a CF card that write/read around 40MB/s, but on a small files it will crawl.