Pros and Cons of Solid State Laptop Drives
 

A number of new laptops have solid state (flash) drives as options.

Any reason not to take one?

Price is slowly becoming less of an issue, but I'd still hold off on buying one directly from the manufacturer. A 128GB SSD can be found online for around $250, but companies like Dell still charge an additional $575 for them...

Swapping out the drive for an SSD is often no more than a 10 minute job.

That said; I'd still wait. The speed increase is certainly there, but it isn't worth the extra cash just yet. SSD's are still pretty new, and until the big players (Seagate, Hitachi etc...) get into the market, it's all being dominated by small players.

My guess is that 2009 will be the year of the SSD, and that we'll see prices plummet to the point where they become only 20% more expensive than conventional drives.

Have the performance issues with writes and block size been addressed? I know that was a problem for folks, especially with PST/OST files in the earlier versions of the hardware.

A lot of the well-priced aftermarket SSDs you see have multi-level controllers (MLC). Most of the SSDs you see built-in to laptops and netbooks have single-level controllers (SLC). If you Google, you'll find any number of articles about the controversy between the two and even controversy about the particularly buggy controller firmware for specific MLC drives.

You should also be aware that:
1. Writes are slower than reads.
2. "Excess" writing will reduce the lifetime of your SSD.
3. Windows generally doesn't perform well on SSDs.
4. Dell deploys Windows on their new SSD Netbook. I presume they've worked about the problems everyone else has with #3.

I'm waiting for:
1. Flash prices to come down generally. I have high hopes for x4 technology, which will allow the storage of four bits per NAND cell.
2. MLC SSD controllers to get better.
3. Me to get comfortable with running Linux instead of Windows.

Price, capacity.

Note that not all SSD's are equal by any means. You can increase parallelism to get faster access but this drives the price up, also.

A couple of years ago I saw a prototype SSD at CES. It was in effect a whole bunch of drives in a RAID 0 configuration within a single package--it was capable of nearly saturating the SATA II connection.

I see that both Sony and Toshiba have SSD's on some of their new laptops.

Given the popularity of Outlook, how could they not address the issues of PST files?

:-: First - major disclaimer: I work for Intel but not in the SSD group.

That out of the way - I got a hold of one of our new SSDs (an 80GB version) and put it in my Lenovo x61 and it made a major improvement in performance. I have seen some of the reviews of our units that claim they are the fastest out there and I asked the senior technical guys in the group that designs them for their opinion and they really believe that they have done some things algorithmically that make them the fastest around. As a senior tech person myself (different area) I understand much of what they have done and I believe them. Also, it is nice not to even think about shocks to the laptop drive as I am yanking it around. Given my last month plus of experience with the drive I can tell you I won't have a laptop without one from here on. I think the only place where a hard drive may still have an advantage (slight) is for bulk sequential streaming (large file transfer or HD media perhaps).

I have a 8GB CF card in my Thinkpad X40 via a CF to PATA adapter. Some of these CF cards made for SLR cameras are very fast, faster than HDDs.

I have an SSD in my Macbook Air. It's a lot faster than the tiny regular drive that was its alternative. It's also much harder to crash an SSD than a physical drive, especially if you're a little careless with your laptop like I am. (I just don't baby mine.)

For me it was a no-brainer, and I'm quite pleased. I'll upgrade to 128G when they become widely available, however.

What is the physicial size of a 150 GB (approx.) solid state drive?

For laptops, they are the same form factor as standard 2.5" drives. If you look on newegg, most of them are 2.5" but there's also a couple of 1.8" SSDs.

-David

All the SSD's I've looked at are standard laptop 2.5" drive dimensions, with SATA connectors in exactly the same location as on a standard drive. Just swap out for an SATA 2.5 drive on a laptop or use 2.5" mounting hardware on a desktop.

OK. Looked it up - 3.9"x2.8"x0.4" seems to be the norm.

Don't you have wear leveling issues with a CF card?

I am using an HP2510P with SSD for three months now.

Pros - very quick startup time, applications load faster and astonishing battery life of between 6 & 7 hrs.

Con - noticing increased shutdown time compared to my other 7200 RPM HDD Dell. It could be unrelated, but there it is. Size - still only up to 128. Altho mine is ony 64GB.

Price - paid about $600 more for a comparable non SSD laptop.

Our drives come in 2.5 and 1.8 inch formats and are plug compatible with the equivalent SATA drives. They can go anyplace you'd put one of those drives. In my case, I had an 80G hard drive so I just ghosted that to an 80G SSD and replaced it in the laptop. Entire conversion took about an hour (time to copy the drive).