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they are the future, but at the moment are impractical for a lot of situations.
Solid state drives
- Thread starter Bobario
- Start date
mrthingyx said:There's one SSD out at the moment that does 100Mb read/80Mb write (but not on Intel chipsets, bizarrely).
If you're feeling flush, check out reviews of the Mtron 2.5" SATA SSD Drive.
But the price comes in numbers of kidneys, arms and legs... so don't say I didn't warn you.
Fast as a very fast thing, however.
Just over £50/gb - holy bankjobs batman, that's not cheap
But as said - over the next couple of years as the costing comes down - could well be a very interesting technology - especially used along side existing Sata drives - or perhaps hybrid is the future?
Considering how cheap/relatively quick Flash is becoming I'm still surprised how pricey these are - but I guess that'll be all the extra technology built into them to give them redundancy and survivability - but considering the fact that 8gig 166x flash can be had for around £50 with ide adapters costing £1ish - I know what's going into my next media pc
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flash still has one downfall, it doesn't last forever. the problem being that, 100000 read/writes is fine, if every byte was used equally, its not, page file is going to be in general over the lifespan in a similar place. so while that game on the final 1gb is fine and rarely writen to and read from not that often, the pagefile is going to get writen/read from very VERY often. price is high as it needs high quality chips to not fail early basically.
as for speeds, they should, for very little cost be able to completely max out the bandwidth of the sata port, even a 300mb/s sata 2 port. but the tech sucks, for no reason at all as far as i can see.
a current IDE/sata drive has large internal parts, rotor's, platters, spindle. the internal chips on a flash drive are basically tiny, more than enough room to fit in a tiny chip to handle what could essentially be hardware onboard raid 0. rather than write to one internal chip slowly, or read from it slowly. have multiple tiny chips and a controller chip that spreads out the read/write operations across multiple chips increasing speed like with raid 0. raid 0 with sata/ide drives is very scalable, 4 drives can give close to twice the speed of 2 drives. no reason you couldn't have 16 internal, cheaper 4/8gb chips and a controller chip. super speed, should be cheap, but they are expensive and slow. like i said i can't see the reason for the price, or lack of speed/innovation with solid state drives at the moment.
as for speeds, they should, for very little cost be able to completely max out the bandwidth of the sata port, even a 300mb/s sata 2 port. but the tech sucks, for no reason at all as far as i can see.
a current IDE/sata drive has large internal parts, rotor's, platters, spindle. the internal chips on a flash drive are basically tiny, more than enough room to fit in a tiny chip to handle what could essentially be hardware onboard raid 0. rather than write to one internal chip slowly, or read from it slowly. have multiple tiny chips and a controller chip that spreads out the read/write operations across multiple chips increasing speed like with raid 0. raid 0 with sata/ide drives is very scalable, 4 drives can give close to twice the speed of 2 drives. no reason you couldn't have 16 internal, cheaper 4/8gb chips and a controller chip. super speed, should be cheap, but they are expensive and slow. like i said i can't see the reason for the price, or lack of speed/innovation with solid state drives at the moment.
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drunkenmaster said:
Bzzzzt!!
Actually, virtually all flash drives employ a technique known as wear levelling, where writes are indeed smoothly distibuted over all blocks as you suggest, so the limited endurance of flash drives (or rather, of a particular block on a flash drive) is in fact not be as big a problem is it may appear at first. E.g. even your pagefile's write will be spread, over time over the entire disk, avoiding the problem you're worried about.
cavemanoc said:Considering how cheap/relatively quick Flash is becoming I'm still surprised how pricey these are - but I guess that'll be all the extra technology built into them to give them redundancy and survivability - but considering the fact that 8gig 166x flash can be had for around £50 with ide adapters costing £1ish - I know what's going into my next media pc
But will an 8gb flash card (compactflash/SD) give you faster boot times? I assumed yes? Anyone got any actual experience they can comment on here, would be v interested.