Solid State Drives : What a disappointment

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d4005

New Member
Anyone else totally underwhelmed now the SSD revolution is finally here?

I was impressed a couple of years back when I heard that these would be on the way. No noise, no vibration, no heat and an insignificant power drain. All of a sudden one of the biggest noise-makers in a computer would be gone, giving us silent machines. Not only that, we'd have less need for fans, as part of their job was to remove the heat that the drive generated. Now it would just have to worry about the processor (and they're running cooler these days).

All of that aside though, I thought that we'd finally get drives that could catch up with the rest of the PC technology in terms of SPEED. Let's face it, hard drives haven't improved much in speed in the last decade. The SATA interface might be fast, but the drives aren't. Finally though we have solid state drives, so we have a chance to increase drive performance by a factor of 10, or 100, or 1000. Do they deliver? No they don't. The first wave of SSD's barely even manage to keep up with an "average" speed drive. Something as fast as a WD raptor kicks SSD's butt. I think I'll be waiting for the second generation when we start seeing coefficients applied to them like with memory cards and CD drives perhaps. I'm waiting for a 16x SSD :)
 
Well it's the first generation, so you can't really expect that much. Which drive did you get? I read some reviews on newegg and it seems like nothing but the absolute most expensive ones offered much performance gains.
 
diduknowthat said:
Well it's the first generation, so you can't really expect that much. Which drive did you get? I read some reviews on newegg and it seems like nothing but the absolute most expensive ones offered much performance gains.
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I didn't get one yet. I had my credit card in hand (figuratively speaking) ready to buy one. The tech specs of even the most expensive ones were a huge disappointment. My main motivation for getting one, was the expected improvement in performance over a standard drive. In all the hype of the last two years, I hadn't even bothered to look at performance, it went without saying (in my mind) that an SSD would be at least ten times faster than a regular drive. If I'd known this a year or two back, I wouldn't have even bothered looking forward to them coming.

Here's looking forward to the second generation drives. Unfortunately though, it seems like the biggest desire at the moment is to increase the capacity of the drives rather than making them faster. Bring on the day when these drives are so fast that SATA-300 (or SATA-II or SATA 3.0GB, whatever they want to call it today) is the bottleneck.
 
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Yeah, im sort of disappointed at SS drives, but like the guy said before me this is the first generation of solid state drives. Personally, i prefer conventional hard drives over solid state drives mainly because of the price tag and value. You can get a 750GB conventional hard drive for $160 while a 128GB SSD costs around $3,000. You do the math.
 
Yeah I would honestly wait until SS drives go down in price but they're still amazing. Can you imagine how fast booting up a PC would be? And how silent they are? no moving parts? It's crazy.

I also heard Dell is coming out with a laptop that will have a 256GB SSD sometime soon. Priced around $6,000.
 
there's already SSD implemented in laptops. i have an asus Eee PC701 with a 4GB SSD. that's not much space at all, but wow it's silent.

so what is the difference between solid state drives vs regular memory cards to justify such huge price differences? aren't they both just non volatile memory?
 
A guy on mp3car.com put one in his carputer and had a boot up in like 6 second, 3 of them being the bios flash :eek:
But it was also a striped down version of XP, but still...
 
Calibretto said:
It'd be faster than than most conventional 7200RPM HDDs.
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Faster than most, yeah maybe, but at a price. If you want to compare it against a merely "average" drive then it might win. Which of us here would buy such an average drive though. We'd pay 50% more for a fast drive, and we'd still be paying less than 25% of the SSD price right now.

Also, I don't think these first-gen drives are going to make any noticeable difference, even against a slow drive. Maybe booting up will take 28 seconds instead of 30. Hardly worth paying 3, 4, 5, 10 times the price of a normal drive.

Like I said, if you're buying it for low-noise, low-power or low-heat reasons, then you're onto a good thing. They'll not disappoint in any of those areas. Performance though won't be impressive. I've read a few direct comparisons against a whole bunch of application tests. The SSD won a few by a small margin and lost a few by a small margin. Overall though, it was just average.

I'm imagining the insides of one of those drives to be just like a big array of 4GB chips that they took out of some flash drives all slapped on a little circuit board with some electronics that works out which chip your data is on. If that's true, then the next gen can improve that by making it one chip with performance equivalent to these "Ultra" or even "Extreme" spec flash drives.

footballstevo75 said:
A guy on mp3car.com put one in his carputer and had a boot up in like 6 second, 3 of them being the bios flash :eek: But it was also a striped down version of XP, but still...
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We can't really know how good or bad that is though. We don't have a normal drive boot up time with that stripped down XP to compare against.
 
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I immagine SSD drives to be really nice to have for say, a laptop. I mean, normal hdd's are dead when they fall while running, even a small nudge can be enough, wich could happen with a laptop. I dont think SSD's are THAT fragile.
as for the cost issue, all new technology that isnt standard costs a lot. wich i think is because a) its not around much, and manufacturers love people who pay big money so they can buy something exclusive, and b) they arnt produced in big numbers yet, so producion costs could be high (since the production process most likely is far from optimized :o )

I'm curious what the future brings tbh :)
 
You can't compare a technology still reletively in its infancy with the HDD's we've all been using for decades - on my atari st I could load up a game as quickly from the floppy drive as I could from the hard disk.

There's no doubt they are the future though, give it a couple of years. And the fact they're silent, that's the biggest pull for me, if they're quick then that's a bonus
 
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=b4jFpIt6bw8

that stuff is where its at

its a card that goes into a pci slot for power, then connects to a SATA port. the card takes DDRII ram and uses the pci slot power to keep your data stored. you can put like 4 slots of RAM in so u can get like 8 gb of storage which isnt much, but its damn fast
 
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