¿solid state drives?
 

Are these like USB Pen Drives.... or do I have this concept totally wrong? Ive been looking around for high-end notebooks and this item comes up with some manufacturers.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Alex

Well, the concept is the same. Regular hard drives are basically spinning platters sort of like a CD a different way of storing the info and they spin a lot faster than a CD. The problem is that the spinning requires power. Not a problem in a desktop (at least not much of one) but in a laptop it cuts your battery life. Also, the slower it spins (and the less energy it uses) the slower your information comes off. Solid state drives are memory like a USB, they dont spin So their advantage is that they drain your battery much less (I think virtually not at all) to use them and they are faster. Main disadvantage is that they are way more expensive in terms of cost per amount of storage.

yup and usually the max is 32gb which is in my opinion not enough these days

Thanks guys... ^

The other problem with spinning hard disks is that, relative to memory chips, they are extremely slow.

A downside of flash memory like a USB stick is that it reads fast, it is relatively slow to write to, and has a finite life in terms of writes. For normal use, this isn't an issue but if very heavily written to by an application or operating system it will eventually fail. I've heard the figure of about 100,000 write cycles being a reasonable life expectancy for a flash drive. I'm sure Wikipedia could shed some light.

The technology isn't mature enough just yet. I'd wait a few years.

Toshiba has just announced the Portégé® R500-S5003 which will have a 64gb solid state drive starting at $2,699.00.

http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/...r500micro_prod

Alienware is also offering 64mb solid state drives as an option on their laptops.

Another plus for solid-state drives in a laptop is that they're less vulnerable to vibration and shock. (Less of a factor in desktops, natch.) Modern disk drives are pretty good in terms of how they're mounted and with features like automatic head parking if the laptop senses too much acceleration, but they're still mechanical devices with incredibly close tolerances that can go totally pear-shaped if something bounces the wrong way. Solid-state drives are also smaller and lighter than disk drives, so you can build a laptop that is too.

Personally, I'd take a chance on them if they were part of a package I wanted. If you're concerned with long-term reliability, keep your backups current - but you do that anyhow, right?

They are an interesting technology but I would wait even on a high-end machine.

So far they are simply too small for most use.

The performance depends on what you are doing. In straight-up reading and especially writing the performance is bad. However, there's no seek time, no latency time--in most real-world situations they considerably outperform HD's.

They also are much more shock resistant than an ordinary HD, there's no vibration and they draw less power (but HD power is tiny compared to processor power anyway.)

http://www.dynamsim.com has several subnotebooks with 64GB drives

We've been testing a few laptops from Dell (Latitude D430) with the SSD hard drives. The general performance has been pretty good, though the max size of 32Gb and extra $500 cost make them somewhat cost-prohibitive.

Another thing we noticed was that the write performance on the drives is rather slow for Outlook in cached mode. The issue appears to be that instead of being abe to write in reasonably small block of data like a computer can to a normal spinning drive, it has to write larger blocks of data. So there is a read + change + write action that has to happen, not just a write.

Overall, they're good and fast for a lot of things, but Outlook in cached mode is pretty crappy. We've actually had Dell confirm the performance "issue" and one client looking at exchanging a few dozen drives for the normal ones.

They are generally faster than 4200 RPM drives, but if you can get a 5400 or 7200 RPM drive in your laptop those are likely to perform better.

Another advantge of the SSD is lower power consumption, which equates to longer battery life.

SSDs don't save much power. HDDs consume about 4-15% of the laptop power (mostly at the low end if you're not constantly thrashing the drive), and the SSD power consumption is about half that.

Here is data on HDD power use: http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mahesri/cl...t_cs497yyz.pdf

Samsung web site says SSDs give at best a 50% savings.

Bottom line: HDD to SSD should cut consumption by only a few percent.

what about size/weight?

Sony just added a new TZ ultraportable to their web site, 48 GB is now the max SSD. I don't think it was there yesterday when I was drooling over the 32 GB model. :D But it costs an extra $400 over the extra cost of the 32 GB. Also, I read that the 32 GB model only has 20 GB free after a fresh installation.

On the TZ, the SSD cuts the weight from 2.7 lb to 2.6 lb. Size is pretty much irrelevant because the case has to be big enough to hold an HDD in the event you ever want to swap.

PC World did real world benchmarks, and the extra battery life is minimal. Testing 3 different laptops they got a maximum of 9 extra minutes and a minimum of 3 minutes.

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/art...printable.html

And then there is this:
http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Will-...d=0330003UKI6F

(Note: I'm posting this message in an attempt to convince myself not to buy one. :D )

Right now, I am using my Sony VAIO TX650 laptop to type this response out; of which I purchased on Feb 2005 and I can tell you right now that I have had nothing but pure enjoyment on it! ^:)

This laptop like all of the current models in the Sony VAIO TX line have always featured solid state hard drives. In my case, I have a 50.1Gb Solid State HD manufactured by Toshiba and it has never ever given me any problems. The startup is great and the few times that I had to defrag the drive was very painless as the process takes a significantly faster amount of time over traditional hard drives with disk platters and heads.

There are other features that I could tell you about my laptop such as a 11" diag XBRITE LCD screen with a screen depth from outer lid to surface of less than 2mm thick to weighing in at just under 1.8lbs (.76kg), but the point is: if you are willing to make the extra investment in hard drive technology, then go for it.

I paid about $2800 for my laptop and ever since then I have never ever regretted this purchase since. Quite simply put: you get what you paid for.

I have a Sony Vaio G1, with a 32GB SSD. If I opted for the 4200rpm standard hard drive, I think that would have been the main bottleneck of the notebook. Bootup times in Vista are fairly quick, and I'm more than happy with the notebook's performance, although I'm not a power user. I get excellent battery life out of the notebook for everyday web browsing, email, and watching DVDs.

I think that fairly low ss drive sizes (32 gig in particular) can be workable. I can get away with <30 gig on my work lappy as I don't have music/photos/movies on it. Coincidentally, that's the one I schlep around the most.

PS. I've killed three 30 gig hard drives on my work lappy in the last six months.

So sign me up.

Yeah, if your work doesn't involve dealing with lots of data or the like it's quite viable.

To give you some idea, after installing Vista and Office 2007 (full version), I had about 13GB left (out of 32GB).

The real issue isn't usually the data, unless you work with video, large graphics files, big music libraries, or things like that. Typical business data in databases is tiny by the standards of any modern storage device, including those discussed in this thread. Formatted data in word processor files, spreadsheets, presentations and e-mail is bigger, but shouldn't be a problem either unless you have a heck of a lot of it. The storage concern with small drives tends to be the OS and application software, as the previous post suggests.

Precisely. Biggest database I've worked with yet was about 7 years worth of individual sales transactions and even that only came to ~750-800MB and was a veritable mountain of data.

Good timing on this thread. I have an LG A1 subnotebook and just swapped the 80GB HDD for a 32GB SSD. Smaller Sony, LG and Toshiba notebooks use 1.8" hard drives as opposed to the more standard 2.5" size. At 4200 RPM the drives are SLOW. I'm used to 7200 RPM drives (I put 'em in every notebook I buy as soon as possible) and there's definitely a significant performance delta with the smaller, slower, drives.

The SSD makes a significant difference. Writes do seem a bit slower, however read performance is SO much faster. The sluggishness complaints I had are totally gone. 32GB is very small, but it's still workable. There's just not room for the iTunes library, the huge games and a bunch of DVDrips. But I have 7gb left over and have quite a lot on it (a 7gb game, MAME and a few hundred ROMsets, Office 2k7, about 2gb worth of work files, and so on).

VS a standard notebook drive, I wouldn't recommend it. A 7200RPM drive will be faster overall. But for subnotebooks that use a 1.8" drive (Sony TR, TX, UX and TZ, Fujitsu 7230, LG A1, C1 and T1, Dell 430, and so on), the SSD is a significant improvement in performance. ZERO clue on longevity or reliability. I will find out the hard way!

The Solid State Disk (SSD) technology is fairly mature and the use of SSDs predate the availability of laptops by over a decade. I've been involved with SSDs dating back to 1975 that were then used on systems that required very high reliability & uptimes supporting ATM networks. The use of SSDs on mainframes is old; on laptops it is relatively new.

High cost per byte compared to rotating media resulted in SSDs being used generally only for the operating system functions that required low access times such as swap disks for virtual memory. SSD disks way back in 1975 had access times of 5 msecs while the traditional rotating media had access times in the 30-50 msecs access times.

True at the concept level - my first job in the computer industry was in the 1960s - but the specific circuit technologies used in today's laptop solid-state drives are very different and weren't around then. Their use in devices such as thumb drives and digital camera memory cards doesn't exercise them the same way as using them as a computer's main storage device does. While I'd personally be willing to gamble on one, the other view has some validity. The fact that solid-state disks using other technologies have been around for years doesn't, IMHO, change that.

SSD in the traditional sense--real RAM backed with a rotating disk: good.

SSD in the "chunk of flash memory in a laptop": eh?, at best.

As has been mentioned, "solid state" drives have been around forever. The difference between one that you might hang off your SAN to increase the transactional speed of a huge database versus the stuff they sell for laptops is like night and day. As is the price differential.

Unless you regularly play basketball with your notebook, I simply don't see the point as yet.

The weird thing is that I can recall Sony once upon a time saying that by 2008 or so Memorystick's would have 32 GB of capacity. As cards now regularly have up to 8GB on them it seems to me that this technology has somewhat fallen behind.

You mean I actually have more than you guys??

The file containing the heart of the plant operating instructions + some production history is a bit over 1gb. I got an unpleasant surprise when someone wanted to do some data mining on old orders not set up for it--oops, it's over 500gb and I don't have any 750gb drives around. I couldn't make a copy.