When Apple rolled out the MacBook Air with its solid-state disk (SSD) inside, it felt like a new era in laptop computing had begun. Are solid-state state drives poised to replace those spinning hard disks we've become accustomed to over the past few decades?
Not so fast. Although there's a transition underway, for all that sexy new technology, you'll pay a whole lot more to be an early adopter. In this case, solid-state drives will cost you at least $1,000 more for a 64GB drive in laptops from Apple, Toshiba or Dell, but offer you less space and sometimes slower speeds than conventional hard drives. I talked with experts and analysts about the latest solid-state drive offerings, trying to find out if the time is right to go for the latest disk tech. Follow the Continue link to read my findings.
Dave Zavelson, Senior Manager for Precision Mobile Workstations at Dell, also points to the lack of speed advantages of today's solid-state drives, which he's noted on his company's Precision M6300 laptops with an optional 64GB SSD ($1030 additional cost). "You are looking at performance roughly on par with the conventional hard drives. I think you'll probably get a little more performance out of a 7200-RPM hard drive." Well, that's disappointing.
Solid-state drives will get faster as soon as operating system software is optimized for them. Semiconductor analyst Jim Handy of market research firm Objective Analysis says Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista are designed to take advantage of spinning hard drives, not SSD. "A lot of it has to do with software," Handy says. "The operating system does tons and tons of little tiny writes. If they were able to consolidate those into less frequent writes that were larger, solid-state drives would all of a sudden look enormously better than a hard disk drive."
Solid-state drives are indeed more durable than their hard-drive counterparts, and that's why the U.S. military has been an enthusiastic consumer of SSD for a variety of harsh battlefield conditions, especially in its fighter jets. In an environment where your fillings can be shaken out of your teeth, a hard drive might suffer from all that vibration. Besides ceasing to function at all, this can cause reading delays, something that might be highly inconvenient at supersonic speeds.
SanDisk (the part of SanDisk that used to be M-Systems) has been making huge solid-state drives for the military for more than a decade, and many are so packed with flash memory chips, the drives challenge designers to fit them all inside a normal-sized laptop case. These can be enormously expensive, though. Says analyst Jim Handy, "The highest-priced military laptop I've heard of is $70,000. The military likes stuff like that. They can afford it. It isn't a question of how much you can put in there; it's a question of how much you can pull out of your wallet."
Graphic courtesy Aqeel Mahesri and Vibhore Vardhan
My take? Solid-state drives certainly are less power-hungry, are durable, and have speed advantages over conventional hard disks, but until the price of these drives descends significantly, it's not really going to be worth it to spend an extra thousand dollars for their marginal benefits.
editor@dvice.com
By Curtis at 2:25 AM ON 02/15/08
I dunno if you considered this, but data recovery has to be well-nigh impossible with an SSD, which would make the drives pretty optimal for sensitive data storage, but pretty horrible for poor schmucks with stale backups.
By Sarah at 9:04 AM ON 02/15/08
I was considering the purchase of a MacBook Air but wasn't sure about making the switch to an SSD. I think I might wait for the next generation. The article was very helpful! Thanks!
By Jacquesd at 9:05 AM ON 02/15/08
What are the read/write cycle contraints. Will SSD works with MS Windows OSs that requires high read/write activity
By Jay at 9:25 AM ON 02/15/08
Since so many manufacturers are jumping into the SSD market, prices will start to fall like crazy. Five years ago, I paid $150 for a 256M flash drive; now you can get 2G for $20.
As operating systems become optimized for SSDs, that means they will lose their optimization for the platters.
The death knell of spinning platters has been sounded; they are like floppies were in 1995 -- widely used but soon to die. Two years from now, spinning platters will not even be an option in retail PCs and will only be a niche product for mass storage backups (remember tape drives?).
So why buy a laptop doomed for obsolescence? Maybe if you know you will dump your laptop in a year you should go ahead and buy one with a traditional hard drive; otherwise, wait a couple of months until prices come down and then pay the extra bucks to keep up with the curve.
Oh, and in the long term think about shorting the stock in the hard drive manufacturers as they are in the exact same position as the manufacturer of buggies were when cars started to be produced.
By edborden at 1:41 PM ON 02/15/08
Hey Charlie, the thing you didn't take into consideration here is that Apple is using SSD drives aren't built for performance. Same thing, Dell and HP put out some releases in the last few weeks touting their SSD offering, but all of them suck, honestly. There ARE drives out right now, though, with many more still in engineering from other companies, that have performance far better than these drives you're talking about (100MB/s +). In fact, we're already selling them in our systems! They're awesome!
Also, the comment about hard drives and "tons and tons of little writes" is a little misleading. SSD drives have less than 1ms seek times, which is AWESOME for lots of little writes. Whether conventional hard drives would be better or worse is sort of irrelevant, because SSD is definitely better.
Price will tank very quickly. This market hasn't even got started yet. SSD is big.
By infiniteadmin at 3:02 PM ON 02/15/08
Despite Apple's extremely high premium on ssd, I don't think that we are far from reasonably priced drives. However, the deal breaker for me is the lack of encryption support:
http://infiniteadmin.com/index.php/windows-whole-disk-encryption-software-review-truecrypt-bestcrypt-bitlocker/
I'll take slightly less performance for increased security. I have written a lot about ssd technology on my site at:
http://infiniteadmin.com
By Fapiko at 3:02 PM ON 02/15/08
I enjoyed reading your comment on how it takes 50g of force to kill a hard drive while spinning. I'd like you to tell that to my external HD that fell about three feet and became inoperable.
By Come_on_people at 3:28 PM ON 02/15/08
Ed and Jay, the point is: Is SSD worth it NOW? This article make a compelling case that should be acknowledged. Price/performance for SSD isn't expected to be compelling enough for mainstream applications for at least another 4 years. Sure, you can (and probably will) overpay for SSD now and one or two years from now. But why? And if you dont want to overpay, go ahead and wait -- but you'll be waiting a while.
By Avid at 3:28 PM ON 02/15/08
The slow write time results from the way people have learned to accommodate spinning-disk drives.
In other words: the SSD's are "slow" because operating systems are currently built around a quirky technology, which is not optimal for this new, more promising technology.
When operating systems start catching up to the capacity of the new hardware, whoever has the lead in SSD technology at that time will be rolling in dough.
Are solid-state drives really better than hard disks?
If you're buying a MacBook, no. All it means is a lightning startup time.
In the future... yes.
By RonM at 3:34 PM ON 02/15/08
What about the longevity of SSD? I keep reading that these things fail after a certain number of R/W cycles. How do today’s SSDs this compare with today’s hard disk failure stats?
By Bill at 3:48 PM ON 02/15/08
I just want to see the specs of the $70,000 military laptop.
By Xtronic.be at 3:56 PM ON 02/15/08
Personally, I think that the fact that these SSD's nearly NEVER crash is the big difference.
Everyone that has some experience with computers (especially with mobile computers like laptops or vehicle computers) knows that the failing rate is extremely high. 50G is only in theory, and for a brand new drive.
The cost of losing data is what will drive people to SSD's, not so much performance.
You don't have to believe me: just drop your laptop with the screen open (as if you were working on it) on your desk from 20cm high while reading/writing to your HDD. Repeat several times and you can be sure it'll damage the HDD in no time.
This is why we use SSD's for some time now in our mobile computers. We still add a traditional HDD for mass storage of non-important data (media), but the OS, maps etc. are stored on an SSD.
By RonM at 4:07 PM ON 02/15/08
The nice thing about the web is that we can answer our own questions. Interesting page on "write endurance" here: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html#endure
By Jpr at 4:47 PM ON 02/15/08
I don't see anything mentioned here about the pure and simple fact that SSD's do not have any moving parts. This is the main contributing factor to the lifespan of a disk and since SSD's have no moving parts they should in turn have a longer lifespan than a typical hard disk.
By epuck at 5:03 PM ON 02/15/08
SSD will obviously become mainstream. IMO But..
Contrary to one guy's comment Tape drives are still being used today! They make great backup media. A single tape cartridge can hold 1tb of data. So saying HDD will become obsolete when tape certainly hasn't is not well informed.
By Generic at 5:23 PM ON 02/15/08
I agree that if you are operating your laptop in a normal work environment, there is no real need to go with a SSD. However, if you are working or are planning to work at elevations over 3500m, SSD is the way to go. Thin air is death to HDD heads.
By edborden at 6:08 PM ON 02/15/08
@Come_on_people - Yes, I agree the price is prohibitive. But that wasn't the question was it? The question was "Are they better?" Yes! And to the enthusiast market, a product like this is very well received!
By notallthat at 6:26 PM ON 02/15/08
Just because SSD's don't have moving parts doesn't mean that it doesn't wear out. SSDs currently use flash memory technology which can only flip on and off so many time before it fails to function. Flash card controllers have randomization logic in them that spreads out access across the memory cells to even out the 'wear', but they will eventually fail. If you're using it for OS swap space, the failure timeframe might not be that far off. By some estimates I've heard, that can be as soon as 2 or 3 years. I personally have hard drives that have lasted much longer than that.
By Smog at 7:19 PM ON 02/15/08
"By some estimates I've heard, that can be as soon as 2 or 3 years"
exactly the life expectancy of any Apple product.
SSD is no good if it's a non-standard hard wired module. Our customers use Compact Flash card in IDE adapter to boot the OS (euh, ...Linux...) then run entirely in RAM to make sure they never burn out the CF cards (we are selling CompactPCI embedded computers to telecom customers)
By shea at 7:20 PM ON 02/15/08
On the topic of flash read/write cycles, SSDs employing proper wear-leveling can endure an enormous number of write/erase cycles. For most people, this number will probably translate to at least 50 years. By some estimates, a 64GB flash drive could be entirely erased and over-written ten times a day, and it would be well over 100 years before the maximum read/write limit is reached. There are a lot of well documented studies on the subjects, with real-world data too, search google! :-)
This article also disappointingly fails to mention the incredible difference in seek time, which is a huge bottleneck for mechanical drives. I've seen SSDs rated with seek speeds as low as 0.1ms, and this speed does not vary depending on where data lives on the platter -- since there is no platter of course. This gives random read/write performance a boost of almost 20 times that of a traditional hard drive in some cases, which is not something you should to ignore.
And last, SSDs can withstand temperatures of about 30C greater than most hard drives -- which top out at about 55C. This makes them much more reliable in less-than-ideal conditions for the long term.
Still though, the article hits some important truths -- SSDs are far too expensive currently, their power savings don't really measure up to much in the grand scheme of things, and their sequential performance is beaten by most high-performance hard drives. Hopefully these things will turn around in the near future so we can have something that is superior in every respect, ditching those old mechanical things once and for all :-)
By Gail Carcetti at 8:48 PM ON 02/15/08
Remember that flash-based SSD's are the ones taking all the headlines, but they're by no means the only types of SSD's. SRAM-based SSDs are everything they're cracked up to be--fast as heck, expensive as heck, and not too capacious.
By Graham J at 10:08 PM ON 02/15/08
With regard to SSD write speeds I've been wondering if the controllers in them can write to multiple chips in parallel. The poor performance number I've seen would suggest they do not, but if that's true I could see huge improvements as soon as that is implemented.
By Hupart at 1:05 AM ON 02/16/08
The author should look over the physics :)
Sure, if your body experiances 50g's of force as a whole for a sustained amount of time, it will die. But thats not how these things are calculated.
You experiance a 10g shock when you plop down in a chair, a 4 g shock when you get slapped on the back.
http://www.hypertextbook.com/physics/mechanics/acceleration/
A hdd could experiance something like 20g's impact force dropping just FOUR inches!
So 50 g's sounds like a lot, but its not really nearly as much as it sounds like.
By Suricou Raven at 3:38 AM ON 02/16/08
Actually, data recovery from an SDD is not much harder than from an ordinary drive - in theory. They use many flash chips, and its unlikely more than one will fail, so its a simple task of taking them out one at a time and putting them into a reader, then reconstructing what you can. Or moving them all to a new drive, if its the board or controller rather than the chips. The greatest problem for now would be finding a data recovery company equipped to handle such new technology.
By Da_Alc at 6:52 AM ON 02/16/08
Thanks for stating the obvious!
By QuietPlease at 10:44 AM ON 02/16/08
The two big things I like about SSD that ae not mentioned in the article is heat generation and no noise. Without heat generation the noise and power consumption of fans goes down. Without moving parts vibration and noise from the drive itself is zero. That's what I would buy an SSD for.
By me at 11:59 AM ON 02/16/08
Perhaps one unknown factor is how people's requirements for storage capacity will chance in the near future?
I can see it developing that SSD is the way to go for low power use, low heat generation, low noise, durability, possibly even speed for users who don't need vast amounts of storage space - while HD's continue to give the most Terabytes for the buck. Similar to the way only hard core gamers now need top-end graphics cards with multiple 12cm fans in a desktop case.
So it partly depends on how much applications and OS's continue to increase their minimum HD space requirements, no?
By otcpdx at 12:46 PM ON 02/16/08
I'd like to second Hupart, not so much in the straight physics realm, but in real-world experience. I run a PC shop, and have had the unfortunate experience of unpacking HDD shipments, dropping one approx 3 feet on to a carpeted floor, and the first time it powers up, click of death, DOA. So the author of the article is correct to point out that HDDs are more durable now, but to consider them rugged is a bit of a stretch.
By Tyler at 4:42 PM ON 02/16/08
SSD and laptops are match made in heaven, no moving parts equals longer battery life
By Qicmee at 7:55 PM ON 02/16/08
I liked this article - factual & easy to absorb.
As commentary:
Some individuals assume HDD companies won't be developing their own SSDs. According to public annoucements, HDD companies disagree.
It was also suggested that in a couple of years, SSDs might fill today's role of HDDs in Internet server farms, DVR/PVR units, security video servers, network servers, PC drives, external backup drives, and other consumer devices. Based on the factory capacity necessary to accomplish that, nobody would be more surprised than today's SSD manufacturers.
HDD technology continues to improve, and some drives are optimized for different applications. For a higher cost (not at Best Buy), HDDs are available for "some" challenging environments: higher temps, higher vibration, higher altitude, etc. Today, even with a cost premium, these designs are nearly 10x cheaper than comparable SSDs.
A final, obvious comment: As with all electronics, I try to spend my money on what I need when I need it. For me, despite the excitement and hype, SSDs haven't arrived yet.
By jrob at 12:22 AM ON 02/17/08
This analysis is really not looking at the important factors. Maximum seek time on a hard drive simply cannot compete.
By John Doe at 4:02 PM ON 02/18/08
There are some advantages of SSDs that a conventional drive will never achieve and which SSDs will not loose, maybe even improve (low power, no noise, fast access time, better durability against shock).
On the other hand, there are clear disadvantages: High price per GB, low capacity, meagre bandwidth. But all those points are changing quickly.
I wouldn't suggest buying SSDs to anyone now, but if you wait a year, you will be surprised how fast said disadvantages disappear (with larger, cheaper drives) or even turn into advantages (bandwidth will fast surpass conventional drives, as the MTRON drives already do).
By morgo at 6:59 PM ON 02/28/08
why has nobody mentioned the asus eeepc... UMPC just over £200 with a 4gb ssd
infinitely more practical than an airbook
By matt21811 at 10:45 PM ON 03/08/08
Based on recent trends, it looks like it could be only 4 years before every laptop will have a solid state disk. http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
By Dimon Karmilo at 1:28 PM ON 03/20/08
Some day the solid state drives may be as fast as the ram. I wonder why this cool deviced where not invented a long time ago.