Solid State Drives

[DJ]

Building a new pc at work (dev machine) and was just toying with the idea of having a SSD for the O/S drive. Was wondering if anyone else had tried this and what sort of performance boost they got (if any)?

[BrainDamage]

the expensive version of the new mac air, mounts one

what do you plan to use it for? continous write cycles tend to literally get electrons stuck in the insulating oxide layer of the MOS cell, you'll need to tweak the system to avoid to use the solid state memory as pagefile/swap or such section will quicly become corrupted, also trying to state the obvious you'd better avoid operations such as defragment , if you have the chance, use a low fragmentation filesystem

[AF]

Possibly, newer ssd technology is much better at these problems, so naturally there must be a reason that these drives are being used as the sole drives in various high end laptops.

[Relative]

I'm looking forward to getting one of those drives, once they come down to a more reasonable price. I've read that the performance on those things are quite impressive.

[DJ]

I was just toying with the idea really, I've seen a laptop running one and it was very impressive from an O/S point of view. really struggled with large file copies though.

Ideally two configured in a RAID 0 for the O/S drive would be my choice but i'm not sure there's any SATA drives available yet, or if I can talk the boss into it!

[CarRepairer]

Is fragmentation even relevant in solid state memory?

[Tobi]

Definitely not as much as on real hard disks since seek time on solid state drives is (close to) zero.

EDIT: I think I've seen SATA SSDs on the interwebs already, but for like $400 for 32G and $900 for 64G IIRC.

[BrainDamage]

i meant as space wasted, not overhead time, those drives aren't exactly cheap atm and losing space that way seems a waste for me, .. maybe i'm too cheap

[AF]

I'm sure you can get SATA versions.

As for raid arrays I'm not so sure that'll make that much of a difference due to the nature of SS drives for anything more than backup.

[Tobi]

You still get twice the read speed (120 MB/s), with RAID 0 that is.

(source: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/13/ ... page8.html)

[DJ]

SSD drives have a slow data read rate for large files, A RAID 0 configuration would double that speed, well in theory

--EDIT--

OK Tobi beat me to it

[CarRepairer]

I got a Western Digital Raptor (Sata1, 10,000 rpm) 150gb for $180. Good seektime and a happy medium if you don't want to spend $400 for an SSD with the capacity of a DVD.

[SinbadEV]

There are a number of new technologies "coming down the pipe" as it were, that will significantly reduce the cost of solid-state memory along with reducing power consumption and increasing read time significantly. Things like "Phase Change Memory" will be fast enough to replace ram and as cheap as flash memory with the added bonus of it holding it's memory with no power supply (REAL sleep mode anyone?) and I read an article about copper nano-fibers matrices being a replacement for flash memory.

It's definitely getting there and if you care more about low power-consumption then read/write speed and lifetime it's already here.

Yay Future!

[AF]

People vastly overestimate the read write lifetime of hard drives. A disk platter can only spin at 10k rpms for so long before the mechanisms start to falter, never mind moving the read write head across the platter.

[CarRepairer]

People vastly overestimate the read write lifetime of hard drives. A disk platter can only spin at 10k rpms for so long before the mechanisms start to falter, never mind moving the read write head across the platter.

Sure but the Raptor is a small drive for booting my OS and running my pagefile. I'm not praying that it lasts me a decade or anything. It's not used for storage of data (got a separate drive and backup for that). Just saying it's a far better deal than an SSD for a while in terms of cost/gigabyte if you want something faster than a standard Sata at 7200rpm.

[AF]

Oh indeed, I think they're great for what they are but still too expensive.