Solid State Drivers explain what it is ?
- Thread starter psychas
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Soldato
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- 18 Mar 2008
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no moving parts, nand flash drive, therefore quieter, cooler and smaller
To the OP...
SSD is a flash based storage solution. In layman's terms, it's like having a large USB Flash pen as a hard drive inside your machine.
The advantages is that it has little to no seek times, it means booting into windows, loading up applications, task switching are almost instantaneous. Other than that, there's no moving parts, they generate very little heat and create no noise whilst using a fraction of the power that a regular hard drive uses.
The main problem with Solid State Drives in general however is that they've got longer than average Write times, which means that installing applications and saving documents can take longer than normal.
But this technology is still in it's infant stages in the grand scale of things, but it has rapidly improved over the last year or two. Micron are set to roll out a new set of Solid State Drives that rival regular HDD's in terms of Write times - so there really are no real disadvantages.
Other than write times, as I said it's a new technology so if your taking the plunge be prepared to pay through the teeth for it.
Breaking it down further, you've got MLC (Multi-Level Cell) drives and SLC (Single-Level Cell). MLC is cheaper to produce than SLC so you can get MLC Drives for (in some cases) £100's cheaper than their SLC counterparts.
The problem with MLC is that they're life expectancy is considerably... drastically... shorter.
SLC is the opposite, costs more to produce but it's much less likely to fail on you.
Prices are plummeting all the time though, so we may well start seeing SLC drives become the mainstream in the next few years or so.
Hope this helps
Read this article at Toms Hardware about Power consumption and SSDs.
This is by all means not the whole conclusion, but it is definately wrong to say they use 'a fraction' of the power. They do say beware and watch out for different models etc.
This is by all means not the whole conclusion, but it is definately wrong to say they use 'a fraction' of the power. They do say beware and watch out for different models etc.
That Tom's Hardware review has raised some controversy about how they did the benchmarking - basically the higher power usage is down to the cpu/chipset drawing more power because it doesn't have to wait in a low power state so long for the data to be available, ie with normal hard disks. Because the SSD latency is much lower, the data is immediately available and the CPU doesn't go into the normal halt state that it can with a HD. The power consumption of the SSD vs the HD's _is_ lower.
Yup, the one I linked to is actually the second updated review. They acknowledged the first one was flawed.
They still didn't mention the fact that as SSDs are not mechanical their power usage will logically be based on the fabrication process used for the chips. That means that as time goes by they can reach greater capacities at a lower power consumption. It just seems completely ignorant not to mention than and it does sound like Toms Hardware has a serious agenda behind those articles. Besides i see memory controllers used in drives still being produced on a 90nm process when those could easily be reduced to at least a 65nm process, these are things that will improve along with the constant improvement of fab processes on the chips themselves. Rumors are that the first Intel/Micron drives for the truly high capacities will be on a sub-40nm process and that's when it gets really interesting.
Other than that i have started logging data on flash prices today, so i will basically save the numbers from Dramexchange and will publish graphs each month showing pricing development on these things, so that people can see how quickly these are actually falling. Over 2 weeks the price of the largest SLC chip possible to track on Dramexchange has fallen over 2$, that's a massive drop in a relatively short amount of time, and shows that SLC drives will soon become a lot more affordable.
true, but i'm not switching for a long time..
When they produce disks with 5 years life and price them around todays mechanical HDD prices, then this statement will equal to true
When they produce disks with 5 years life and price them around todays mechanical HDD prices, then this statement will equal to true
Only if everyone had the same requirements.
Price point depends on the sector - multiple drives or single SSD for the same performance/reliability?
When they produce disks with 5 years life and price them around todays mechanical HDD prices, then this statement will equal to true
Which will be extremely soon and will already be true to an extent beginning next year. Besides, you pay a premium for the best new products, that has always been true.
does it has cashe ? how does it work is it much faster then raptors ? good for games loading time or im confused
edit: big chunk of ram to act like hdd?
Soldato
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more like a big chunk of SD card to act like HDD