SSD Solid State Drive Roundup: The Ultimate Definitive Guide

Posted in computers, diy, gadgets, hardware, tech news, windows on Oct 18, 2007

I think the most exiting thing to happen in computing in over a decade is the SSD or Solid State Drive. Many believe Solid State Hard drives will eventually replace spinning disk hard drives (the slowest part in a PC). SSD’s certainly are the buzz right now because of the allure they offer in speed and data transfer, in addition to making laptops and gadgets like iPods and cell phones both lighter and more powerful (more storage). I will teach you everything you need to know about Solid State Drives in this article, and provide you with all the places they are currently available and why or why not you should get one, and maybe even give you enough information to decide for yourself if they are the “next big thing” or not.

This post of part of The Smorgasbord Tech Reviews series!

First, let’s talk about what a Solid State hard Drive is. You get the definitive answer from Wikipedia of course. Let me give you some details from that Wikipedia entry:

A Solid State Drive, or SSD, has no moving parts. Think of it as a huge flash drive. Because it has no moving parts, it eliminates the seek time and latency of a traditional spinning disk hard drive – and it’s faster. So because you’ve eliminated electro-mechanical delay, you’ve also eliminated electro-mechanical failures. It’s not to say an SSD wont go out, but at least you know it can’t go out due to moving part failure.

A Solid State Drive is comprised of either Flash RAM or SDRAM. SDRAM SSD’s are “fast access”, and data access is less than 0.01ms (250 times faster than the fastest hard drive in 2004). SDRAM SSD’s have an internal battery, and if the power goes out, whatever is in memory (RAM) can be copied to disk. There’s a distinct advantage over a spinning disk. Flash memory is slower than SDRAM, but because it’s more durable and rugged – it’s more widely used in SSD’s. Flash based SSD’s do not have a battery and use non-volatile memory.

SSD Pro’s:

Faster startup and boot time

Faster I/O (data access, see time)

Longer lifetime (10 years of normal use)

No moving parts

Easy to ‘wipe’ clean

Lower weight and size

SSD Con’s:

Price ($8/GB compared to 0.25 cents/GB for spinning disk)

Data possibly harder to recover with drive failuer vs. spinning disk

Possibly affected by magnetic fields / static charges

Slower random write speeds

Now, let’s give you a better perspective by sampling some information about SSD’s from across the net. Popular Mechanics calls the Solid State Drive the 3rd most Brilliant Gadget of 2007. They also mention the use of the term “solid state disk” as an oxymoronic term.

Register Hardware reports that Dell XPS and Alienware m9750 laptops now have an SSD option, but the 32GB drive adds $500 to the cost of the laptop, and the 64GB version adds $1,100.

In a weird twist of events, recently Seagate announted a Hybrid spinning disk flash memory drive. What you get in a drive liks this is a spinning disk with 256MB flash memory, and Seagate advertises that as a result the drive only spins 10% of the time. Sounds good doesn’t it? Well the hybrid drive’s “ReadyDrive” technology is targed for Windows based PC’s, and largely targeted at Windows Vista. A lot of geeks will be flying the finger at this one real quick. Sounds to me like this is a great idea that’s just not quite ready yet.

Tom’s Hardware reviewed the Solid State Drive a year ago, and one of the things that I noted was the fact that they said their test unit literally didn’t get hot at all and was virtually silent. In addition to being smaller than a traditional hard drive, it’s power consumption was way less than a spinning disk, and nearly nothing at all when not in use. These are definite distinct advantages that didn’t seem to come up in the Wikipedia article. I’ve had many computers in the past that had 3-4 hard drives installed, and they not only sounded like an airplane hangar – some of the drives would get very, very hot. SSD drives would definitely completely change that picture. They also mentioned that the drive could be used in nearly any environment, which I didn’t think about. Spinning disk would not work as well (or at all) in extreme heat or cold, but an SSD should. In this article you can view the performance graphs taken during testing showing how much faster and better performing the SSD was compared to 20-odd spinning disk hard drives.

Trusted Reviews reviewed the Samsung 32GB SSD and the thing that sticks out about their review is they say “SSDs do have one Achilles heel, though, sustained read and writes speeds can’t yet compete with those of HDDs. So, if a hard disk has its data organised properly and doesn’t have to do a lot of seeking (moving the read write head back and forth), it will outperform an SSD.” If you looked at the benchmarks at Tom’s Hardware, you’ll notice that the SSD seemed to do great in every test – EXCEPT for the database one. And now that makes sense to me, if Solid State Drive’s aren’t good in sustained read/write scenarious – they would not be good to use in a database server at all.

TweakTown’s Review of a 16GB SSD drive points out the dramatic power savings that can be achieved with a Solid State Drive. The solid state drive they tested used just 0.5 watts of power, and the average notebook drive uses 2-3 watts. That’s a pretty dramatic difference, and they pointed out that the 7,200 RPM drives use as much as 13 watts of power. End result – your notebook battery should last longer with a SSD. Also in this review they point to Trusted Review’s article on Sony VAIO’s VGN-TZ12VN, a laptop with a Solid State Drive. In that article what strikes is that Sony VAIO laptop is less than half the weight of a Macbook. They also boast of 7 hours of battery life in addition to the absence of a “hotspot” where the spinning disk HDD normal is.

So let’s recap what we’ve learned here…

SSD Solid State Hard Drives boot faster than spinning disk drives
SSD’s weigh less, don’t get hot, and use less energy than traditional HDD
The SSD cost much more, but prices are coming down
You see how well an SSD can function in a mobile situation – like a laptop or portable
Solid State Drive’s are worse than traditional HDD is sustained data transfer – which means it’s not well suited for saving, moving, copying lots of large files or functioning in a constantly data intensive situation, like a database server
SSD’s should last longer and be way less succeptible to failure than traditional HDD

If you’re considering getting a Solid State Drive: