Performance of Harddisks

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Bart said:
Now meet the future: SSDs devices.
Simply saying SSDs are huge USB-Sticks, that look like HDDs and can be plugged into your PC like normal HDDs.
SSDs have no rotating disks, that's why it's so wicked. No noise level, no fear to damage your laptop disk.
Their flash technology were pimped so much, that they dont lose long stored data like USb-Sticks.

Access time and data rate stability are unreached. Too bad their are still expensive (several hundreds of dollar for 32GB).

1 SSD
hc_188c2m.jpg

2 SSDs Raid 0:
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3 SSDs in Raid 0:
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4SSDs in Raid 0:
hc_247er8.jpg

4 SSDs in Raid5:
hc_250s8x.jpg

Impressive how they doubled / tripled their transfer rate when added to Raid0.
Click to expand...


Any harddrive would double performance when put in pair with another one in RAID 0. On the other hand, if they'd gotten a better RAID controller, they would actually have been able to scale to more then just 3 disks.
The main problem with SSD's is still random write access, which is very sporadic and often worse then normal harddrives.

Like Timo mentioned, i'm looking forward to OCZ's new MLC SSDs that are very affordable. They will likely not be the fastest there are, but with native SATA II interface, and decent looking performance, they could very well be the start of some real competition in price/performance to normal drives.
 
SSDs are still quite young.
Just imagine how long the tradition harddisk technology needed to develop to gain this state.

Now consider where those SSDs will be in a few years :tasty:
 
I read that SDDs got a lifetime of over 100years when they are better developped (in 2009), now i wouldnt trust a normal HDD for ~10years thats why i wait till 2009 when they are also more affordable
 
100 years, where did you get that from?
I thought the main problem with the drives at the moment other than their high price was the limited life span, the need for write leveling so that sections of the flash media wouldnt reach their write limit too early. MTTF is currently at 2M/hrs on SSDs so not that bad! although 10 years for a storage device is pretty much the end of its life cycle in my opinion so its not a major concern either way.
 
Some cons I thought of...
- Supposedly SSD's consume more energy than their mechanical counterparts. There's been some reviews about it, I'm not sure if this is all true though. /google
So they're not really as good as people say for laptops... ofcourse for your gaming rig you could care less.
- SSD can only write a number of times on the NAND... in which case you'd theoretically get lots of 'bad sectors' at places like where you put your swap file/partition. Or places like that which gets rewritten as much.
- Electrostatic shock/overvoltage/etc. would probably fubar the whole drive. In a mechanical drive all it can do is fuck up the controller chips, the data will remain since it's magnetic.
- And maybe a silly one but: You can't hear if it's actually doing something... like if you think the drive is broken, in a mechanical one you could hear it fail at spin-up, ticking, etc. Or when your PC froze for a bit it could be just your hard drive waiting for some file. In SSD's case you wouldn't really know.. except for silly activity leds, which (in my case) seem to lit up way too much, even when I'm hardly using the PC...

But yeah... that access time and data transfer rate look lovely :drool:
And I would definately buy some for in a RAID-0 for my desktop pc once they get affordable... :)
If they come with a decent warranty I could care less if they break. Backups are done on my RAID-5 and I would probably make an image of the OS every week or so. Only a complete fool would put important stuff in a RAID-0 anyway.
 
pinhead said:
Some cons I thought of...
- Supposedly SSD's consume more energy than their mechanical counterparts. There's been some reviews about it, I'm not sure if this is all true though. /google
So they're not really as good as people say for laptops... ofcourse for your gaming rig you could care less.
Click to expand...
That depends a lot on what SSD we're talking about.. Toms hardware did indeed test this, and he ended up making another article because his first results were wrong. The new article showed OCZ's new SLC SSD with a native SATA II interface (no SATA bridge chip) consuming less power then a conventional harddrive.

pinhead said:
- SSD can only write a number of times on the NAND... in which case you'd theoretically get lots of 'bad sectors' at places like where you put your swap file/partition. Or places like that which gets rewritten as much.
Click to expand...
This is what wear level algorithms are for. Basically, when you write to what looks like the same place on the SSD device a lot of times, the bytes are actually written in different cells each time, so you'll never get cells that are overused, compared to other cells.
pinhead said:
- Electrostatic shock/overvoltage/etc. would probably fubar the whole drive. In a mechanical drive all it can do is fuck up the controller chips, the data will remain since it's magnetic.
Click to expand...
If you manage burn/flash/clear/corrupt your flash disk, you can be pretty sure the same effect would destroy a normal magnetic based drive as well. Of course not the data on the platters, but the electronics + firmware would be gone, and the drive would be useless unless you pay loads to get some professional company to replace the electronics.
pinhead said:
- And maybe a silly one but: You can't hear if it's actually doing something... like if you think the drive is broken, in a mechanical one you could hear it fail at spin-up, ticking, etc. Or when your PC froze for a bit it could be just your hard drive waiting for some file. In SSD's case you wouldn't really know.. except for silly activity leds, which (in my case) seem to lit up way too much, even when I'm hardly using the PC...
Click to expand...
I used to feel that way about my old noisy sub-10GB drives as well. Now my only noisy drive, a 15k disk annoys me when it starts doing random access. I'd like my drives to be silent, i can still watch the LED's flash.
pinhead said:
But yeah... that access time and data transfer rate look lovely :drool:
And I would definately buy some for in a RAID-0 for my desktop pc once they get affordable... :)
If they come with a decent warranty I could care less if they break. Backups are done on my RAID-5 and I would probably make an image of the OS every week or so. Only a complete fool would put important stuff in a RAID-0 anyway.
Click to expand...
Eventually i think SSD's will be way more reliable then conventional HDDs, because of smart wear algorithms, and because chips are more reliable then mechanics. You're way less likely to get a major disaster which would render all the data on the drive useless (eg. head crash, motor/servo failure)
 
m1cr0 said:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/SD-Karte-fuer-ein-Jahrhundert--/meldung/110954 its in german, it basicly says that they are planning a SD-card with a lifetime of 100years which is almost the same as a SDD so I guess they could do the same with them
Click to expand...

What your article refers to is a 128mb flash device from Sandisk. Article also seen here in English:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/15/sandisk_pitches_sd_worm/

The device is pretty simple, in that it probably just being a normal flash device, with the twist that you can only write to it once.

Since flash memory cells pretty much lasts forever, and the only wear you make on them is when you write to them. Sandisk simply made a device you can only write to once.. Big deal :rolleyes:

This technology looks more interesting:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2221522/flash-chip-long-life-created
 
Sorry but I just cant see that from that review, it shows marginally quicker loading times for windows and UT3 maps where its obviously reading but anything that involves writing it fails dismally.

Surely your OS disk is going to involve a fair amount of read and writes and from that review the 5x cost over even the most expensive SATA available (GB per GB) seems to show its not worthwhile at the moment.
 
That is a pretty poor benchmark if i may say so.

Pretty much the only tests done in that review involves sequential reading and writing, in which SSD's today provide no advantage at all.
 
Well, we dont need to talk about the price.
How less GiB you get for over 130 bucks may be laughable, but you also get benefits no mechanical harddrive can provide.
Ofc modern harddrives could provide good performance, quality, less noise and less power consumption, but they have still one huge weak point.
But they also cant deny that they have spinning disks inside. Meaning that they are affected by shocks and are still louder than any SSD.
When i look at notebook disks, i cant say that they are superior to SSD. Whether thos spinning devils are silent but very slow or they are fast but also very loud.

it's argueable if SSD is worthwhile to spent money at today.
My response for that price would be a clear "no".
But for 80euros i would consider getting one.

What exactly do i expect from a system disk?
- It should boot up quickly (What SSD does)
- It should be silent (What SSD is)
- It should be reliable (what SSD seems to be)
- It should stay cool (what SSD does)

Perosnaly i can life with the fact, that the writing performance doesnt seem to be that good.
In my case the big stuff that needs much writing power would be placed on a normal SATA disk anyway.
 
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notebook: SSD vs HDD

old promo video.
although it's somekind of an old advert for samsung ssds, this might be interesting for some here


Ofc it says nothing to sequential reading / writing tho. Would be nice to see such a comparision with new SSDs.
 
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Performance would be the major reason to go for these and they dont perform that amazing..

My samsung spinpoint is quiet runs at 32c and has very good performance in comparison to the OCZ drive.
 
Hmn. am happy with my raptor for the time being thanks.
Just shaded MYM even.
As if I would notice any real world difference...
 
wow are my hard drives really bad, is there anyway to improve the results?
 

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So how bad is my hdd? I can't read this stupid program at all :confused:

halp plesehz!
 

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Nah not notebook HDD - it's a regular IDE shitty old one :p:

I've been noticing slowdowns through and through lately, can't even do the most simple of stuff without pc lagging/freezing. Take for example browsing da www with firefox 3! I can't listen to winamp at the sametime because then i can't change pages (pc locks up for about 10 secs) or music starts studdering - Could this be because of the hdd? :f


edit: defragging doesn't work, i've tried three times.
 
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