
Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives - twampss
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html
======
spudlyo
From the article:

" _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!_ "

This kind of hand waving irritates me to no end. There are a ton of different
ways of measuring i/o performance, and I'm sure the author knows this. To say
that the Indilinx based SSD drives are "just as fast" as the Intel SSDs is
simply not true. Let's take my favorite way of measuring drive performance,
4KB random write speed.

Intel: 5923 IOPS (23.1 MB/s)

Indilinx: 1275 IOPS (6.47 MB/s)

Source:
[http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535&p=3](http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535&p=3)

Granted this article is a few months old, perhaps the firmware for the
Indilinx controller has gotten faster, or perhaps the Crucial 128GB drive uses
a different Indilinx controller than the 'barefoot' model profiled in the
article, but I doubt it.

~~~
invisible
Are these the equivalent tests (he links to this review)?
[http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1651&pageID=7404](http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1651&pageID=7404)

If so, the Crucial 128GB SSD doesn't look half bad versus the Intel SSD. If
this isn't the tests, the rest of the tests in that particular review have the
Crucial doing really good.

------
boredguy8
If you're interested in a comprehensive review and understanding why the early
drives had some problems, visit the extensive review by Anand Lal Shimpi over
at AnandTech: <http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531>. I liked
their site before this review, but the detail and writing made me add their
name to my 'weekly visit' list.

~~~
spudlyo
Their reporting on SSD technology has been excellent and comprehensive. They
should win some kind of excellence in tech journalism award.

------
rufo
I picked up a 160GB X-25M G2 for $450 on Newegg the minute they were posted -
I have it installed in an otherwise-maxed 17" non-unibody MacBook Pro.

It's an amazing and surprising difference, one that reminds me of my first
dual-processor machine. It's not that your system feels faster when doing one
thing (although it does), but that no matter how much you throw at it, it just
_doesn't slow down_ \- a tremendous difference from the chug I experienced on
the 250GB drive that was previously installed.

Easily the best $450 I've spent on an upgrade in a long, long time - far more
effective than replacing my MBP would'be been.

~~~
thismat
I have an OCZ SSD in my desktop machine and I can agree with you, the biggest
noticeable difference to me is in moving and deleting large files.

I can't remember the last time I had to wait on a file to do the whole
moving/copying/deleting dialog.

~~~
rufo
I almost grabbed an OCZ, but I'd seen enough reports in their forum of odd
problems with Macs that I decided to stick with the Intel.

When I bought the G2, it was reasonably competitive with the other drives - I
think the pricing on competitive drives has come down quite a bit since then,
but the G2 is fast and stable - I have no complaints.

~~~
thismat
I hear ya, and yeah I've seen the issues related to the Macs on the forums,
though I think they've come a long ways in the recent months.

On that note, the OCZ forums are awesome, that company deserves heaps of
praise for it's communication with the community. Developers are constantly
releasing beta firmware and pre-release (fresh builds) there.

------
chadaustin
When the Intel X25 SSDs first came out, IMVU bought them for every engineer in
the company. From a cold boot, Visual Studio starts in half a second.
Subversion got dramatically faster. Boot times are a fraction of what they
were before.

Some of my computers are _cpu-bound_ on disk operations now.

If you run an engineering team, make the investment.

~~~
TimothyFitz
Specific numbers (that I used to push for their purchase at IMVU): Cold-disk
grep of the entire codebase: HDD 110s, SSD 7s Cold-disk svn no-op update: HDD
140s, SSD 14s

------
KirinDave
If you'd like to see exactly how a macbook pro with an Intel X25-M feels like,
I made a video to give you an idea: <http://vimeo.com/7057850>

~~~
crystalis
What is the colorful circle?

~~~
dreish
Looks like iPulse.

[http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/09/ipulse-a-system-
reso...](http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/09/ipulse-a-system-resources-
monitor.html)

<http://iconfactory.com/software/ipulse>

~~~
KirinDave
Exactly that. I've been a fan of it for laptops for years. I've yet to find
another sysmon that can display so much area in such a small space in such a
easy-to-consume format. It's also much less of an impact on the system than
many other tools I've tried, which is pretty important when you're on battery
power.

------
ubernostrum
OK, so.

A couple months ago I bought a new MacBook Pro and picked up the 256GB SSD
option on it. The drive's Toshiba (Apple ships Toshiba and Samsung drives -- I
don't know model numbers).

So far it's been wonderful. Everything in this machine (processor, RAM, etc.)
is a significant bump up from what I'd had before, but the SSD performance
boost is still easy to notice; even though it's not the fastest drive you can
get, the impression I have from watching the various videos of people with
Intel drives is that the difference -- for the sorts of things I do -- is
basically negligible (in order to notice it I'd have to be regularly writing
huge files and timing the process).

Typical time from turning the machine on to having a desktop in front of me is
around 15 seconds; that goes up if I have lots of peripherals plugged in (as I
often do at work, where I end up using every available port), but still makes
my older laptop painful even to contemplate.

Of course, both boot time and cold launch of applications are really just for
show (though it's all _very_ fast). The real point, for me, is the sorts of
mundane but read-intensive things I do all the time: grepping over big log
files or large codebases, getting status and diffs out of local checkouts,
etc. There's just no contest here; that stuff happens stupid fast, and by
itself would make the SSD worth having.

It should be noted that I haven't really paid attention to or particularly
cared about write performance; the only time it would be noticeable is when
pulling lots of stuff from a remote repo (lots of small writes to a bunch of
files), but any write-performance problems with that get drowned out by things
like network latency.

I'm also not particularly worried about wearing the drive out or anything like
that; Toshiba's estimates for the lifetime of their drives are almost
certainly a bit optimistic, but a more conservative and realistic number
(confirmed by various places where I've seen it discussed) is that I'd need to
sustain a pattern of writing around 20GB/day to have a significant chance of
wearing out the drive in five years.

------
ezy
I'm still a little wary of the reliability of these drives. I think it's
prudent to wait at least another half-year. It isn't the long-term lifetime of
the memory itself, which is fine. It's the tendency of the drives to be dead
within a couple months.

Go to newegg and sort the reviews by date on some of the most popular ones.

~~~
jpcx01
Smart move. I got bit last Dec with my 80gb Intel X25m completely crapping out
on me. The drive stopped being recognized and despite a week of
troubleshooting, and trying to restore, it was completely lost.

However, the next drive I bought was an 80gb Intel X25m. The speed difference
of these drives are truly amazing

Buy yeah, I now back up my drive to an external disk.

------
pavs
Is there any estimated self-life comparison of SSD vs HDD for "average"
computer usage? I wanted to migrate to SSD earlier this year - but I did some
research the information wasn't very convincing. There seems to be a
compromise in self-life and performance decrease (over time) for overall speed
gain.

~~~
jerf
The performance decrease is mitigated or eliminated with TRIM support. The
idea that you can wear out your SSD appears to be little more than urban
legend at this point, as even with absolutely absurd and obscene levels of
load, they will _still_ last longer than your magnetic drives.

Oh, yeah, BTW, you _do_ realize that it's not a question of _whether_ your
magnetic drive will die but _when_ , right? No fair comparing SSDs to a
hypothetical magnetic drive that will "never" die. If you're actually worried
about data integrity, I'd trust a well-manufactured SSD over a magnetic drive
any day, though whether or not the current crop qualify as "well-manufactured"
is something that is hard to determine. (I have no data either way.)

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Either way, KEEP BACKUPS!

------
Andys
Linus' recommendation to buy the Intel X25-M still stands, because they have
the fastest small-block random I/O performance.

Why would you buy an SSD only to do large sequential transfers with it? Just
use a 1.5TB HDD to store your media files.

~~~
DannoHung
Why would your transfers have to be sequential?

~~~
DrJokepu
If you only access large media files (due to the very nature of media files,
you want to read them sequentially from the beginning to the end) and your
hard drive is not too fragmented, it is a reasonable assumption that you will
mostly access the hard drive sequentially.

However, if you need a large hard drive for a database and not as a media
storage, obviously random access is just as important as sequential access.

~~~
DannoHung
What about reading several large media files concurrently?

~~~
jrockway
Why?

Personally, I can only watch one TV show at a time...

~~~
anigbrowl
Sure, but if you're making a TV show or the like, it's not unusual to be
compositing multiple video streams. TV companies have massively expensive
hardware for this of course, but this will be a real boon for anyone who makes
a living with multimedia.

~~~
DrJokepu
Professional video editing has developed workarounds for that problem as far
back as the 80's. Basically they do the editing on a low-res version of the
footage (it's called an "offline edit"), then export it as an "Edit Decision
List (EDL)" and then the big computers crunch on it overnight using the
original, hi-res footage and produce an "online" edit. Companies like Avid
sell specialized servers that have an in-built LCD screen on their case so
that you can see the programme as it is being processed.

Online editing is still quite CPU intensive so I don't think that SSDs alone
will change that workflow but it might still help somewhat at offline editing.

~~~
anigbrowl
Quite so, but if you're greenscreening or color correcting in, say, After
effects it's nice to be able to work at full res whenever you can. Right now I
use RAM preview to get a quick idea of how something looks, but I can see an
SSD obviating a lot of the usual disk-bashing for longer previews. For final
render, as you say CPU becomes the dominant factor.

------
cpr
I'm using one of the 120GB Samsung SSDs that Apple ships stock in the MacBook
Pro. It's definitely faster for things like program startup, etc. (many things
start in less than one dock "bounce"), but otherwise not so clear.

Sure wish Apple would ship the Intel drives. Perhaps they can't get a low
enough price on them.

Or, alternately, that Samsung would get with the program and do the kind of
controller work required to make these things go faster. (Whatever Intel's
doing--see the anandtech.com massive article.)

Or, perhaps both Apple and Samsung could get together and implement the
critical TRIM command (see
[http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=8](http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=8)).

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Why are you waiting for apple to ship it? Just go to a store, buy one, and
install it to your laptop. It's not exactly hard, even if you are not a hw
geek.

~~~
ahlatimer
Replacing the HDD in a pre-unibody MBP isn't exactly easy, either. You have to
take off the whole top case just to get at the drive. That one action voids
the warranty, and if you don't do it properly, you can bend the case or damage
components or connections.

------
davidmathers
Jeff Atwood is wrong on the internet... again! Tell me you're surprised. There
are too many mistakes in the post to bother correcting. Just read the
anandtech.com article if you want accurate info.

For accurate price info you should know that the second generation 160 GB
X-25Ms originally listed for $450 but shot up in price due to excessive
demand. It's only in stock at stores that price gouge and MIA everywhere else.
Amazon, not price-gouging, has the 80 GB for $260 and the kit version of the
160 GB for $500.

~~~
randallsquared
The term "price gouge" is counterproductively pejorative. Being able to get it
for _some_ price is an improvement over not being able to get it at all,
which, as you point out, is the alternative.

~~~
davidmathers
Ok, so what idiom should I use instead? I can't think of anything.

Is this the market-economics version of political correctness?

~~~
Eliezer
The phrase you're looking for is "market clearing price" or just "market
price".

See also Obama's elementary explanation of why lowering gas taxes doesn't
lower gas prices when gas is in limited supply: the market clearing price is
still the price at which the amount of gas that people want at that price
equals the supply of gas. Setting the price lower than this will result in
shortages. It doesn't matter whether gas taxes go down.

"Price-gouging" really is a terrible phrase for what you do in a supply-bound
market. The people who raised prices have drives if you want one, and if
nobody wants one, they lose their bet - have unsold inventory. The people who
set lower prices sold out their inventory, but now they don't have drives if
you want one, which isn't exactly a favor to you either. There are four
methods of allocating resources and the method that our hunter-gatherer brains
don't understand is market prices, so people think it is "unfair".

~~~
davidmathers
_The phrase you're looking for is "market clearing price" or just "market
price"._

Those are definitely not the phrases I'm looking for. They don't contain
enough information. I hope I can unwrap this without being too confusing.

First, you're preaching to the choir here. I'm pro-market-prices. I don't
think there's anything unfair about the practice of price gouging. I support
it 100%.

The issue here is you, and the others, aren't playing Gordon Gekko: "Gouging
is good". You're playing Margaret "society doesn't exist" Thatcher: "When
supply is constrained then prices go up. That's just the market at work. There
isn't even such a thing a price gouging. Stop hallucinating."

Do I really need to spell out why and how it's different than a market-
fluctuation? I got into it a little bit in a neighboring message, but I didn't
go into the manufacturer/retailer dynamic. I think just the fact that it makes
so many people irrationally angry is evidence enough that there's something
unique about it.

Thought experiment: if gas prices doubled overnight would anyone get upset at
gas station owners? Exactly. That's why it's not price gouging.

All I'm doing is defending the concept's existence and saying that because it
exists I need a way to refer to it. If "gouging" is too pejorative then give
me another word _that actually captures all the relevant non-value-judgement-
related meaning and is not just a sleight of hand attempt to pretend there's
no there there._ Because there is.

~~~
randallsquared
_Thought experiment: if gas prices doubled overnight would anyone get upset at
gas station owners? Exactly. That's why it's not price gouging._

Something's _not_ price gouging when people get upset? Or maybe you weren't
paying any attention to sentiment when gas prices were soaring a few years
back? People hated gas station owners, and there certainly were accusations of
"gouging".

~~~
davidmathers
_and there certainly were accusations of "gouging"_

That was a bad example. But those accusations were obviously made by idiots.

My point was that if the manufacturer doubles the price no one gets mad at the
retailer. Except idiots.

------
aolnerd
I signed up for a newegg.com alert and immediately purchased a 160GB X-25M g2
for ~$450 minutes after they announced they had stock. I put it in a late 2006
mac mini (1.8GHz Intel Core 1 duo) and it has transformed the feel of the
computer. There are far fewer pauses. Big apps launch instantly. Extremely
satisfying.

The only problem is that it started reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors.

~~~
martey
Then get it replaced:
<http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029645.htm>

------
gtuhl
If shopping for an SSD at least consider the OCZ Vertex. I've been running one
in my Santa Rosa MBP for 7 months with no issues and excellent performance.

See ([http://blog.gtuhl.com/2009/03/26/ocz-vertex-ssd-
in-a-17-sant...](http://blog.gtuhl.com/2009/03/26/ocz-vertex-ssd-
in-a-17-santa-rosa-macbook-pro/)) for install and before/after xbench runs.

~~~
collinvandyck
I have an OCZ Vertex in my MBP. Great performance, but has definitely gotten
slower over time. The folks at OCZ have just released the non-beta 1.4
firmware release that has better garbage collection.

[http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=634...](http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63499)

------
gohnjanotis
The day I got my 15" MacBook Pro it was obvious the hard drive is what was
limiting the performance. I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks
since I have it maxed out at 4GB.

For example, intense BitTorrent downloading (and uploading) on a RAM disk
frees my hard disk from the constant reads and writes so I can have high speed
downloads (and verification of d/led data) and still do disk intensive
activities in other applications.

I can't wait for the day where my mass storage can have that kind of speed!
(and it looks like it's closer than ever now)

~~~
gruseom
_I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks_

Can you go into a bit of detail? How do you do that?

~~~
trin_
you can mount portions of your ram and use them, but you should be aware that
the files need to be put back on a disk before you turn the machine of ;)

------
misterbwong
Does anyone know much about the lifetime of an SSD like this? I keep reading
that with all SSD's, you only get a limited number of read/write cycles before
they go bust. I can't seem to find out if this is something that should
concern the average user or if it's just some FUD.

The speed benefits look enormous but I don't want to have to go through the
trouble of replacing this in a year or two.

~~~
rufo
Intel claims you can write 100GB of data every day for five years before the
flash burns out - I don't know what other companies provide as statistics.

------
Keyframe
In other, somewhat related, news - has anyone noticed there are 256GB usb
sticks around (namely, Kingston has one)? Sure, they are expensive - but come
on, 256GB! I wonder what are read/write speeds of those monsters. I have 16GB
stick and it takes a mini eternity to copy stuff onto it.

~~~
science4sail
I'm under the impression that current USB connections can not move data as
fast as SATA links.

------
scorpioxy
Does anyone know if that big performance effect is also noticeable while
running a couple of VMs?

I have those dreaded pauses when my VMs(typically 2 at a time) are busy doing
something and I decide to untar a file for example. Does anyone have a similar
problem?

I still run on a 32bit environment so use only 3GB of ram.

~~~
mseebach
It sounds a lot like you're out of CPUs (from the 3-GB limit I'm guessing
you're on a Core Duo MacBook), not disk-IO.

~~~
scorpioxy
No, I'm on a desktop that i put together. The 32bit limitation is because I
use Ubuntu and there were some reports of misbehaving apps under 64bits....

------
billswift
Those complaints about the cost are hilarious. Either the person making them
is a kid, or they have no "on-board" memory between their ears at all. The
first 5 Gig HD I bought was a cheapo Maxtor at Staples and it set me back $500
about 10 years ago.

~~~
ajg1977
Cost is and always will be relative.

~~~
sjs
Especially when things move as fast as they do with memory and storage. Just 5
or 6 years ago I was buying a new 80gb SATA disk for just over CAD$100 (iirc).
We've gone from around $1/gb then to almost exactly 10¢/gb. Probably cheaper
for you guys south of the 49th.

edit: DirectCanada has disks cheaper than NCIX by almost 2¢/gb as well.

In comparison the average price for an SSD is CAD$375 for ~120gb, so let's
call it $400 to make things easy, it's going to cost more with tax anyway. So
it's around $3/gb or $3.50/gb which is 35x the cost.

However if you are building a new box and spending $1500+ anyway then an SSD
is probably a very wise choice.

------
lpellis
Does everybody here use laptops? Is a SSD still useful if you use a desktop? I
cannot seem to find any 3.5' SSD's, can you connect the 2.5 to an desktop? Is
there any performance penalty?

~~~
wmf
2.5" SSDs work fine in desktops; the benefit is just as large.

------
ScottWhigham
Timely - I bought an X-25 80GB on Sunday. Can't wait for it to arrive

~~~
cschep
Yeah, I just ordered a Corsair p128, should be here tomorrow or the next day.
Cannnn't wait.

------
hugothefrog
When I when from 7.2k RPM to 10k RPM the performance increase was very
noticeable.

It'll be the next upgrade I do to my laptop when it starts feeling a bit
sluggish.

------
rmason
Does anybody know which drive Apple uses on the Mac Book Pro? Is it the X25 if
you order the 256 gb option?

------
proee
Is there any speed improvement in have two SSD's setup in a raid
configuration?

~~~
liamk
Likely yes. Neat video with 24 SSDs in a raid configuration:
[http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/24-samsung-ssds-get-
strun...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/24-samsung-ssds-get-strung-
together-for-supercomputer-fun/)

