what are solid state drives?

No spinning Plates in a SSD - no moving parts. Kindof like a Big flash drive that doesn't have to be limited in speed by a USB port :good:

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Tech Report said:
Solid-state drives have an inherent power consumption advantage over their mechanical counterparts, so the energy efficiency isn't much of a feat. What's more impressive is the X25-M's performance. Thanks to a 250MB/s sustained read rate and a smart Native Command Queuing implementation, Intel's first SSD sets a new standard for MLC-based solid-state drives. Unfortunately, though, Intel can't escape the relatively slow write speeds that plague MLC drives, and that results in a performance profile that's decidedly mixed.

When the X25-M is good, it's exceptional. The drive absolutely dominated our IOMeter workloads and ran away from the field in our sustained-read-speed drag race and in our real-world file read tests. The X25-M also posted speedy game level load times and a higher WorldBench overall score than any other drive—solid-state or mechanical.

Start to stress the Intel SSD's relatively slow write rate, however, and things don't look nearly as impressive. The X25-M excels with iPEAK multitasking workloads that are heavy on read requests, but not those that favor writes. Its real-world write speeds aren't all that hot, either, with the Intel drive turning in particularly poor file creation speeds in FC-Test. Flash can be very fast indeed, but the slower write speed of MLC memory is still a weak link.

14 Pages of article with Benchmarks
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Solid State Drives are really expensive because the technology is new. Normal hard drives have a read data transfer rate of around 60 megabytes per second. The Intel Solid State Drives have about a read data transfer rate of around 220 megabytes per second.

If you had an Intel Solid State Drive your cold boot startup times for your computer would be drastically better.
 
2048Megabytes said:
Solid State Drives are really expensive because the technology is new. Normal hard drives have a read data transfer rate of around 60 megabytes per second. The Intel Solid State Drives have about a read data transfer rate of around 220 megabytes per second.

If you had an Intel Solid State Drive your cold boot startup times for your computer would be drastically better.
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60mb/s would be quite an old drive. Modern drives can push over double that(the 7200.12 500gb can hit 130-140mb/s). The main advantage to owning an SSD is instead of 12ms random access times(or 8ms on a raptor), you are down to 0.1ms.
 
What are some programs you can use to measure the read speed of a hard drive? I have a 250 gigabyte Seagate Barracuda Model ST3250310AS that I would like to measure the read speed on.
 
hey guys just to add a bit to the thread i havent seen mentioned although everyones talking about ssds the now they will make your boot up quicker and all that but for those that dont know ssds have a shelf life cant remember exactly what it is 20 thousand hours or summit so unlike an ordinary drive that will run until it breaks which if your lucky might never happen in the pcs life where as the ssds have a fixed lifespan for me to even consider using one they have to not just come down in price but they would have to be cheaper than a standard hard drive.
 
Thanks for the link. That program is stating that my Seagate hard drive is reading data at around 88 megabytes per second.
 
So, if you were to leave on a Solid State Drive 24 hours a day 7 days a week you would reach 20,000 hours in about 2.2 years. Normal people power down their personal computer every night so that would give you over a three year life span. That isn't too bad but I agree that the cost on a good Solid State Drive is way too high presently.
 
2048Megabytes said:
So, if you were to leave on a Solid State Drive 24 hours a day 7 days a week you would reach 20,000 hours in about 2.2 years. Normal people power down their personal computer every night so that would give you over a three year life span. That isn't too bad but I agree that the cost on a good Solid State Drive is way too high presently.
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he got his numbers wrong. i just picked a random intel ssd on newegg and its MTBF is 1,200,000 hours!!! that about 135 years of 24/7 use

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167024
 
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