Solid state hard drive

[gerrydoire]

Being a sucker for new toys, I bought a 32GB Solid State HD not to be confused with a USB Drive.

It has a SATA Connector.

So I installed XP on it, I have to admit its not as fast as my Hardware SataII, but far faster than I thought.

Compared to a CF to IDE, much better!!!

It's made by Pilican.

[pontus]

SSD's has the potential to rock, and I will get one sooner or later. However, this is a (loong) article everyone should read:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Pretty technical, but informative.

[NeXT]

I can't wait for them to really drop down in prices. Just for the small ones it's still not worth the price for me and my systems.

[Unknown_K]

How much did that 32GB drive cost? SSD are too pricey for their size, and will probably stay that way for a long time unless Microsoft decides to cancel all OS work and revive Windows XP for 20 years.

[snq]

SSD's has the potential to rock, and I will get one sooner or later. However, this is a (loong) article everyone should read:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Pretty technical, but informative.
After spending the past couple of hours reading the entire article I have to agree.. Everyone thinking of getting an SSD should read that :)

[amouse]

Ah yes,

I've already been there. In a nutshell

a) First generation SSD had visibly bad performance specs and were also genuinely slow

b) I bought the 2nd generation disks which proclaimed good(ish) specs e.g. 80MB/sec performance. But like the article commented not always realised in real life. My 32GB SSD drives are DEFINITELY slower than even my old IDE disks!

c) Current generation SSD disks, are apparently a lot faster (.e.g upto 200MB/sec) and resolved latency issues. Well if the prices drop much further, it might be time to try again.

One thing I'd like to recommend to manufacturers is to produce a 3.5 plug replacement unit. I don't want to be buggering about with converter plugs, wires and mounting brackets.

[Chuck(G)]

The best SSDs are those that use 25+ year old technology; battery backed RAM. Unfortunately, the cost per byte is stratospheric--but maybe not for vintage applications with more modest storage needs. After all, what does a gig of RAM cost anymore?

[chuckcmagee]

Yes, I know. The drive is watching carefully and moving those bits around when it thinks that area is getting "tired". Still, having a Windows SWAP file on a SSD!! Lots of areas are gonna get tired fast! I watch XP, it hits the swap at least once a second, sometimes it is pinned to the mat.

And we have ALL tried Windows using only real ram (yes?) Sorry guys, Windows has the swap file idea glued into everything. If you have 4GB ram, it still takes 700MB of the swap file "for kicks". Loves to take large chunks of the kernal and force them out to the swap file.

[Unknown_K]

Yes, I know. The drive is watching carefully and moving those bits around when it thinks that area is getting "tired". Still, having a Windows SWAP file on a SSD!! Lots of areas are gonna get tired fast! I watch XP, it hits the swap at least once a second, sometimes it is pinned to the mat.

And we have ALL tried Windows using only real ram (yes?) Sorry guys, Windows has the swap file idea glued into everything. If you have 4GB ram, it still takes 700MB of the swap file "for kicks". Loves to take large chunks of the kernal and force them out to the swap file.


One thing I liked about classic mac OS is while the VM sucked on it, it was easy to turn it off. I have a B&W G3-400 with 1GB of RAM, runs nicely with VM off so no swapping at all and none of the apps I use take even half of that RAM.

Linux seems to like using some swap for no real reason also.

[snq]

One idea would be to place the swapfile on a ramdrive, or a "battery backed ram" ssd.

I guess the first one would be impossible because the driver would have to be loaded before the pagefile is being used, and I just assume that that pagefile is being used pretty early during the starting of windows.

The 2nd would be a great solution I think, but where does one find one of those? The only somewhat modern device I know of is the Gigabyte I-Ram, but even that seems to be impossible to get a hold of over here.

This whole pagefile stuff is a bit stupid anyway, I have 4 GB of memory and I don't think I've ever used more than 2 GB, and 99+% of the time I'm well under 1 GB. But disabling the pagefile results in some applications not working properly.

As for the SSDs and reliability, the wear should be evenly distributed no matter what. SSDs can't overwrite data, they can only erase and re-write entire blocks. So even if you're only updating 1 byte of a file the entire block is going to have to be read into cache, erased, updated, and written back. As it has to go through that entire process anyway, there's no use in keeping the data in the same location. So if your file is at a particular location, and you update the file, the old spot is going to be marked as available (but not erased) and whatever needs to be updated will be written in an available location that has been written to less times.
The good news is also that the drive itself knows how many writes it's got left and it can give you this information using SMART. And once it's run out of writes it'll become pretty much read-only, but no data loss.
Personally I'm not too worried about the whole limited amount of writes thing.