Techie gadgets: the SSD

[blackram]

The SSD might not be one of the gadgets that you may have heard of amid all of the hype these days surrounding tablets, smartphones, etc. But believe me, it's one of the gadgets you should be desiring if you have a desktop or a laptop PC that you spend a lot of time in front of (like most of us). Unlike other gadgets, it's not a full standalone device, it is just a component which gets installed inside a PC. But I really think this should be at the top of most people's list of items to desire for your birthday or Christmas, it'll probably be more useful than a tablet anyways.

SSD stands for Solid-State Drive, and what it is is a replacement for the venerable Hard Disk Drive (HDD). The HDD has been the premier medium for long-term data storage on PC's for 30 years now. How is the SSD different from the HDD? The HDD is a spinning mechanical platter of magnetic material that gets read and written to by a magnetic head not much different in concept than a magnetic cassette tape or VCR tape head of the olden days. It's one of the last refuges of mechanical & magnetic storage left in electronics today. SSD on the other hand has no spinning disk, or any mechanical components, it's all just a bunch of computer chips, which makes them very fast. The SSD is similar in concept to a USB thumb drive, in that it uses a type of non-volatile memory chip to store data rather than a mechanical magnetic material. However, an SSD is much faster than any thumb drive, and in fact it's much faster than any HDD.

Okay, so it's faster, but is it noticeably faster? Yup. If you boot from an SSD rather than an HDD, your boot times can drop by as much as 8 times, literally! On my old HDD, I used to boot to the Windows screen in about 45 seconds, that has now dropped down to 15 seconds! Some people report as little as 10 seconds. And as you know, in a PC booting to the Windows screen is not the end of booting, there's plenty of loading that goes on even after you get into the Windows screen. I measured from the time the computer starts to boot Windows to the time the disk goes totally quiet was as much as 8 minutes in my case, on the HDD. On the SSD, that entire process is just 1 minute! Programs load a lot faster too, such as the Firefox browser or Thunderbird email. Thunderbird used to take upto 10 seconds to load completely, now it just takes 1 second. And of course, there's no mechanical parts, so you can't hear any disk noise at all.

If you've seen the Windows Experience Index in Windows 7, one of the measurements they do is the primary hard drive speed test. The fastest hard drives only get a rating of 5.9 out of 7.9 on this test. The same test on an SSD yielded 7.6 out of 7.9!

So what are the disadvantages? Capacity, HDD's still hold a ton more data than SSD's can. For the same price, an SSD would probably have a capacity of 250GB, whereas an HDD would be available at 4TB's (i.e. 16x more)! The price/capacity ratio is much higher on an HDD. Even the smallest, cheapest HDD's these days will hold at least 4 times more data than an SDD. However, the capacity of HDD's are getting to the point of "good enough" for most purposes. Early SSD's from about 4 or 5 years ago only had capacities in the 20 or 40GB range (which really isn't good enough for holding Windows), and now they are upto 250GB (which is "good enough").

However on most desktops, it's not an either-or scenario, you can have both an SSD and an HDD at the same time. I have re-purposed my old boot HDD to become just a data storage drive, where I store videos, pictures, songs, etc., while the SSD stores the Windows OS. You get the best of both worlds, the speed of the SSD and the storage capacity of the HDD.

 

[A J]

https://thessdreview.com/

 

[Lorenzo]

Thanks Blackie.

 

[BEER]

Don't know what you are talking about but thanks anyway :wink:

 

[Art Mann]

Been eyeing Solid State technology for a couple years now, watching size increase and price drop. Still waiting and anticipating.

Best I can find to date in solid state drives are in the 480-512GB sizes, with prices ranging from $690 to $870. That's still not adequate space for my needs. My boot drive is 1 TB capacity, of which I use almost 600GB for programs and applications. My other 4 internal drives are all 3TB, used for storage, as are a dozen external drives. I can buy a 3TB drive for $179.

I suspect it will be 3-4 years before we see SS drives offer competing capacity at decent prices. And in about 5-6 years standard hard drives will start losing market share, as SS drives replace them. Sooner perhaps in consumer-level laptops and desktops than in professional equipment.

When I see 1TB solid state become available at under a grand, I'll consider replacing my boot drive.

Meanwhile, still waiting and anticipating.

 

[blackram]

Been eyeing Solid State technology for a couple years now, watching size increase and price drop. Still waiting and anticipating.

Best I can find to date in solid state drives are in the 480-512GB sizes, with prices ranging from $690 to $870. That's still not adequate space for my needs. My boot drive is 1 TB capacity, of which I use almost 600GB for programs and applications. My other 4 internal drives are all 3TB, used for storage, as are a dozen external drives. I can buy a 3TB drive for $179.

I suspect it will be 3-4 years before we see SS drives offer competing capacity at decent prices. And in about 5-6 years standard hard drives will start losing market share, as SS drives replace them. Sooner perhaps in consumer-level laptops and desktops than in professional equipment.

When I see 1TB solid state become available at under a grand, I'll consider replacing my boot drive.

Meanwhile, still waiting and anticipating.

I'm pretty sure that most of that space that you're using up is not programs and applications, but the data files generated from those applications. Just like you, I started eyeing the SSD's a couple of years ago. So back then I started preparing to pare my boot drive down not to a bare minimum, but to a "comfortable" minimum. I moved all of the non-essential data off of the boot drive, without going too crazy and jumping through hoops to do it. I cut the old boot drive into two partitions, a boot partition, and a data partition. I managed to get a very comfortable minimum of 120GB for the boot partition, so I made my boot partition 200GB which gave it enough wiggle room to grow as necessary, and made the data partition the rest of the disk. Once SSD's of sufficient size showed up that could hold that entire boot partition, I went for it; so I could've gone for one of the 120GB SSD's, but that would've been too close to the edge, so I waited a bit longer until the next generation 250GB SSD's showed up. I'd say if you can do the same analysis and move all non-essential stuff off of it to another partition, then you can fit your boot HDD to a smaller boot SSD.

There are various programs available for analyzing where the majority of your data lies, directory by directory. Just use them to figure out which directories you will need to move out. I like a program called Jdiskreport.

And on a desktop, you usually have room to keep your old hard drive still, so I kept the old boot drive, but it's now only a data drive. You only really need the SSD for the boot drive, everything else can still stay on HDD's.