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SSD - Solid Investment or Sorry Surprise?
10 April, 2008 in Hard Drives
Solid State Drives (SSD) have been around for a few years in the commercial market, and they are building more and more hype as time goes on. The fabled drives are shock-proof, beautifully light on battery usage, and perform so much faster than your standard Hard Disk Drive (HDD) it might just make your head explode. Or so the marketing goes. To top it all off, the cheapest of these amazing gadgets will only set you back a cool, inexpensive $14/GB, or $449 for a low-performance 32 GB IDE drive (Team Group TG032G-S24I01S). Go up to an entry-level SATA II 64 GB drive and the price is nearly $18/GB, or $1,149 (OCZ OCZSSD2-1S64G).
Before we examine the pros and cons of SSD, let's take a look at that price, shall we? The most expensive HDD costs less than $1.50/GB. The average price for a notebook HDD is $.45 - $.60/GB, depending on the size and speed. A 200 GB hard drive can be had for anywhere from $95 - $180.
Desktop HDDs average between $.20 - $.30/GB, or less than $300 for a 1 TB (that's 1,000 GB) drive.
SSDs got their start years ago in military applications. When you are on a battlefield, you need a computer that behaves accordingly. You don't have time to worry about things like not shaking the computer, and a fragile disk read head is the last thing you want to have managing sensitive, vital data. Of course, computers purchased for use on the battlefield are purchased by the government, so cost is not really a factor. $50,000 for a shock-proof computer is pocket change when you have multi-billion dollar contracts with weapons, armor, and vehicular research companies.
Of course, the number of shock-proof computers that were needed dwindled pretty fast once that initial run had been purchased, so SSD makers started looking for other clients, but they realized that a $10,000 disk drive probably wouldn't fly quite as well with the average consumer as it did with Uncle Sam. Price cuts were necessary, but SSD makers believed that the advantages of SSDs would be sufficient to offset some of the sticker shock when compared to regular HDDs.
Unfortunately, SSDs are still trying hard to deliver on their promises. Their read and write speeds are actually not radically different from traditional HDDs (in fact, most SSDs write slower than HDDs, and their sequential read speed is only equal to HDDs). The blinding speed reported for SSDs comes from their random access speed and their initial seek time speed.
With no disk to spin, any bit of data can be accessed just as quickly as any other, with no need to seek between sectors of the HDD. This means that an SSD can load Windows in about half the time of a traditional HDD. There is no delay to initially spin up the heads, and all the data that Windows needs is read at the same rate. SSDs can also load programs faster initially, but copying from an SSD over a network is no faster than copying from an HDD, because the sequential reading speed is just as slow as a traditional HDD.
Even though SSDs use an incredibly small amount of power, supposedly a huge draw for notebook computer users, as it should mean longer battery life, the difference in battery life between identical notebooks running either an SSD or an HDD is negligible (life gains rarely peak 15 minutes). The fact is, traditional HDDs simply aren't that much of a power hog to begin with. If you are reducing the battery consumption of a device that is responsible for, at most, 10% of the total battery drain anyway, there is no way to get very much battery life from that reduction.
One of the most worrying aspects of SSDs initially was that flash memory, by its very nature, only accepts a finite number of writes before it quits working. Early SSDs were only rated for 30,000 writes. If you've ever listened to Windows churning away on your hard drive, you know that, even if YOU aren't writing that much data to the drive, it's entirely possible that Windows is consuming a nice percentage of your total writes every day. Fortunately, this issue has been resolved, and SSDs now support 1,000,000+ writes before they will quit working, but this could still mean that, even though a sudden jolt will not kill your SSD, it may well die of its own volition before your traditional, well-cared-for HDD finally gives up the ghost.
According to analyst group Avian Securities, at least one computer manufacturer (they would not name names), is still encountering a very high failure rate among SSD-equipped notebooks, with around 20% of their notebooks being returned due to drives that have failed outright. As many as 10% of their systems (in addition to this 20%) are being returned because users are not happy with the actual performance of their SSDs. By contrast, no more than 2% of this same company's systems were returned due to hard drive failures.
Faster SSD drives are expected this year, and hopefully the prices will begin dropping soon, but if you are interested in buying an SSD at this time, make sure you research your drive thoroughly before making a purchase to avoid a case of buyer's remorse.
Pros:
+Drives are shockproof up to 1500 Gs, making your data safe from disk-head crashes
+Random access times are near-instantaneous
+Power consumption is only a small fraction of a traditional HDD's
Cons:
-The cheapest SSDs cost $14/GB, with higher-quality models ranging as high as $25/GB
-Sequential read/write times (the most common kind of read/write process) are no faster than regular HDDs, and sometimes slower
-Older SSDs are limited to 30,000 writes before failing
-Current SSDs seem to have a much higher INITIAL failure rate than HDDs
-Current SSDs are limited to around 120 GB