[p2p-research] The State of Solid State Hard Drives

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: The State of Solid State Hard
Drives via Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood on 10/14/09

I've seen a lot of people play The Computer Performance Shell Game
poorly. They overinvest in a fancy CPU, while pairing it with limited
memory, a plain jane hard drive, or a generic video card. For most
users, that fire-breathing quad-core CPU is sitting around twiddling
its virtual thumbs most of the time. Computer performance is typically
limited by the slowest part in your system. You'd get better overall
performance by building a balanced system and removing bottlenecks.
One of those key bottlenecks -- and in my experience, the one typical
users are most likely to underestimate -- is the hard drive. I've been
a long time advocate of having a small, fast 10,000 RPM boot drive for
your OS and key applications, and a larger, slower secondary drive for
storage. The two drive approach is a smart strategy, regardless of your
budget.
Hard drives may not be particularly sexy bits of hardware, but we're on
the verge of a major transition point in storage hardware -- from
physical, magnetic platters to solid state memory. I was an early solid
state (SSD) drive adopter with my last laptop purchase, and it was a
profound disappointment. Those first and second generation SSD drives
turned out to be slower than their magentic equivalents, despite the
eager promises of vendors. On top of that, they were incredibly
expensive, and of limited capacity. Running Windows Vista on an early
32 gigabyte SSD was an exercise in pain and frustration on so many
levels. What's not to love? A lot.
I eventually sold that SSD and replaced it with a traditional hard
drive. I had grown deeply disillusioned with SSD drives. That is, until
I read Linus Torvalds' report on the Intel X-25 SSD:
I can't recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a
dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a
machine of mine.
The whole thing just rocks. Everything performs well. You can put that
disk in a machine, and suddenly you almost don't even need to care
whether things were in your page cache or not. Firefox starts up pretty
much as snappily in the cold-cache case as it does hot-cache. You can
do package installation and big untars, and you don't even notice it,
because your desktop doesn't get laggy or anything.
So here's the deal: right now, don't buy any other SSD than the Intel
ones, because as far as I can tell, all the other ones are pretty much
inferior to the much cheaper traditional disks, unless you never do any
writes at all (and turn off 'atime', for that matter).


At that moment, SSD drives came of age. And by that I mean, they began
to justify their hefty price premium at last. But that was almost a
year ago, and even the Intel drives -- as great as they were -- had
some teething problems. Not to mention that price and capacity were
still ongoing concerns.
But when Intel introduced the second generation, mainstream X25-M
drives, that's when I knew SSDs were poised to go mainstream. Now,
those drives are still anything but cheap, at $289 for 80 GB and $609
for 160 GB. But they offer more performance than the original X25-E
that Linus reviewed, at about half the price, with hardware fixes to
address the fragmentation issue that plagued the original model.
Intel was the only game in town for about a year, but fortunately for
us consumers, the competition finally caught up. The new Indilinx
controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as
the X25-M. And, best of all, they're cheaper, while also offering a
not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!

I picked this model up for $325 plus tax and shipping. And, frankly, I
was blown away by the performance difference compared to the 300 GB
Velociraptor I had in my system before. That drive is not exactly
chopped liver; it's incredibly fast by magnetic platter drive
standards. But it's beyond slow next to the latest SSDs. See for
yourself:

This is just an excerpt, browse the reviews for more detail, but I was
astonished how often this drive (based on the Indilinx Barefoot
controller) topped the charts. Suffice it to say, the performance
increase is not subtle. All those little pauses while your system pulls
some chunk of data off the hard drive? They simply cease to exist.
How much do I like this drive? I like it so very much I bought one for
every member of the Stack Overflow team, as a small gesture of thanks
for enduring new feature crunch mode. I couldn't sell my old
Velociraptor on eBay fast enough.
In my humble opinion, $200 - $300 for a SSD is easily the most cost
effective performance increase you can buy for a computer of anything
remotely resembling recent vintage. Whether you prefer the 80 GB X25-M
SSD or the 128 GB Crucial SSD, it's money well invested for people like
us who are obsessive about how their computer performs.
Trust me, you will feel the performance difference of a modern SSD in
day to day computing. That's far more than I can say for most of
today's CPU and memory upgrades. The transition from magnetic storage
to solid state storage is nothing less than a breakthrough. It's
already transformative; I can only imagine how fast, cheap, and large
these drives are going to be in a few years. So, if you've ever
wondered what performance would be like if everything was in RAM all
the time -- well, we just got one giant step closer to that.
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