Solid State Hard Drives - Comments Page 1

according to this article http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html SSHDs may actually consume more power - the article does say that power saving mechanisms have not been built into the SSHD as yet - so that may change. Do you have any further information on this?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Here's another article which may help to clartify: http://www.rahulsood.com/2008/07/ssd-power-consumption-hoax.html

128-GB SSDsare currently available from CDW and others... http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1547607

EDITOR'S NOTE: Thanks, I missed that. But $1900 for 128 gigs? I also found some 256GB SSD's for $4000 and higher. Ouch!!

Is there a USB drive that uses A "wear-leveling" algorithm? I have heard that there is but no info on who makes it.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I think it's pretty common. A google search turned quite a few hits on various mfr's.

How long does the average computer last? I had a laptop become irrepairable in three years. A hundred year guarantied hard drive would not add to the longevity of a computer.

EDITOR'S NOTE: No, but it sure would be nice to have a digital storage medium that's readable 50 years later. Family photos on CD's may last only 5-10 years.

When researching towards my goal of buying the Asus eee PC 1000 netbook, I learned a lot about solid state drives. And what I learned steered me away from the SSD option; instead I got an Asus netbook with a standard hard drive "turntable".

As it turns out, these SSD's being sold for netbooks are not good quality; they are actually slower than today's hard drives, and prone to glitches. IOW: they are made very cheaply. Or, more accurately, reviewers claim that the 4 or 8 gigabyted SSD that comes with the netbook is pretty good...but the SSD's sold for expanding the drive (8, 16, 32 gigs) are cheaply made.

I also understand that SSD's have slower write speeds. From the Wikepedia page on "solid-state drives":

"Slower write speeds: As erase blocks on flash-based SSDs generally are quite large (e.g. 0.5 - 1 megabyte)[9], they are far slower than conventional disks during small writes and can suffer from write fragmentation,[28] and in some cases for sequential writes.[15] SSDs based on DRAM do not suffer from this problem. It should also be noted the smaller the blocks being written the more pronounced the problem becomes."

SSDs are also more susceptible to static, moisture, magnetism, and other nano issues that do not affect the standard hard drive. I also suspect that, due to their extreme sensitivity to super tiny particles, they may also be affected by telepathic waves and other psychic phenomena! (Just kidding.) :/

Apple has been careful to state that the SSD in the MacBook Air will *not* recover data notably faster than the standard 5400rpm hard drives, and reviews by MacWorld report only modest speed increases.

Nonethless my MacBook Air reboots in about one quarter the time of our standard MacBook. That alone seems worth having.

Is there a minimum O.S. configuration that you can use with SSD's? Such as, does it have to be NT based O.S. or can you use it with an O.S. such as 98SE or does it not matter? I have an old Inspiron 3800 of which the 4Gb harddrive just gave up the ghost but I utilize a 4Gb SD card with it and it is still perfectly functional. And now, very quiet! That old Travel Star hard drive that was in there made you feel like some one was pulling the base note wire from a concert grand piano through your head after about an hour of work!

EDITOR'S NOTE: I think it's more a matter of whether the motherboard has an SSD-style connector.

I don't understand why my usb flash (rated at 133x) is so much slower than a clunky mechanical disk. Surely (as in Moore's law) in the not too distant future they will be as fast as current volatile RAM and as cheap as current rust coated disks. SO for now I opted for the Asus eee 1000 with a 160 gb HD. It's not really so much a net book but a really portable PC. More portable and less sexy than a MAC air but very functional. I use it for showing movies to my students, Power Point. And it's also my portable office and entertainment system. My laptop is now a permanent fixture on my desk. (sorry, this seems a bit off topic, but I wanted to bring out the current shortcomings of SSD)

I wonder if we won't see "hybrid" notebooks (and desktops) in the near future, utilizing SSD's for booting the OS, and then a cheaper "traditional" drive for storage. Seems as though that would be the best of both worlds, without breaking the bank.

I have wondered about heat issues with the SSDs - for sustained use, wouldn't they require significant mechanical cooling of some sort?

"There seems to be no doubt that Solid State Hard Drives will eventually replace the traditional hard drives ..."

As I see it, there's considerable doubt. Capacity of reasonably-priced SSDs is still 1.5 orders of magnitude less than disks, according to your article. And disk capacity has been increasing faster than Moore's law in recent years. I don't see SSDs catching up to disk capacity in the foreseeable future.

Hawkers of new technology often make the mistake of saying, "We're only a factor of n worse than the old technology, and we know we can improve by a factor of n in a few years." But the old technology may also improve by a factor of n in that time.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Very true, Bill. Like the song says: "You may be right... I may be crazy!" But if SSD does catch up (or comes reasonably close) on price and capacity, then I think the other benefits would make it a more attractive option than platter-based drives. My gut feeling is that advances in electronics will eventually trump advances in mechanical.