This & That

This & That

SSD fever

Lots of folks are looking for the solid-state disk drive to take over from the mechanical ones. But, it isn’t going to be that straightforward. And, quit picking on the hard drive! They are fantastic devices extremely reliable, extremely low cost, and just all around wonderful.

One area that is often touted for SSDs is lower power. This is more complex that one might imagine — as read, write, idle, and standby for various applications have to be looked at. But, some tests done on laptops have shown run times the same as or worse than with a hard disk.

But your PC will boot faster and load applications faster — probably 50% faster. And for server applications that load a lot of small files, SSDs can do 5,000 read I/Os/s, while HDDs are limited to a few hundred. It is only the write speed will not keep up to a HDD.

Krishna Chander, Senior Analyst, Storage Systems, for iSuppli (www.isuppli.com
) thinks that this year 1.1% of laptops will come with solid-state drives. Next year they predict 5.9%, 2010 18%, 2011 27%, and by 2012 a whopping 35%. They do not see much use of SSDs in desktop systems.

The Samsung 128-Gbyte SSD uses MLC flash, with an error correction and wear leveling processor. MLC flash is not quite as fast and not nearly as durable/reliable as SLC flash — but a lot cheaper. SSD data sheets sometimes do not reveal which type of flash is being used — something I see as an alarming trend. I would not want to use an MLC drive in a high-throughput application.

The only price I could find for this 128-Gbyte drive is $3,888, and 64-Gbyte MLC models from other manufactures are about $990. You can get a 500-Gbyte hard-disk drive for $90 (remarkable!). So, unless you really need the shock-resistance virtue of SSDs, you better stick with your hard disk.