Quote: Original post by smr
Quote: Original post by lethalhamster
With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

How big of a swapper do you need? Upgrade to four gigs of system memory, which is many times faster than this solid state HDD, for about half the cost (assuming you've already got a gig).

Stuff has to get into RAM first. It might not make an ideal swap drive but loading your OS and some of those core aps might go smoother. It would be interesting to see it fire tested in a few tasks.

Anyone know what the reliability of something like this in contrast to a standard HD?

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Mushu

1,396

January 05, 2007 09:24 PM

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
Keep in mind, though, that a 32 GB hard disk hasn't been reasonable for quite some time, and having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

...

I've been using (solely) a 40GB HDD for the past 30 months without having any problems. The only reason I can see for needing a larger one is to have a bigger 'to-offload' cache - right now I can only hold about 15GB of downloaded anime/'assorted video'/etc before needing to burn it to DVD+R; however, that still gives me more than enough time to watch everything.

Granted, I question the performance gain on a personal computer - I was under the impression that this was primarily developed for large databases/servers which *need* the quick HDD access speeds, but the discussion in this thread suggests otherwise.

Also, shouldn't this be in the Hardware Discussion section?

smr

2,468

January 05, 2007 09:34 PM

Quote: Original post by Goober King
Stuff has to get into RAM first. It might not make an ideal swap drive but loading your OS and some of those core aps might go smoother. It would be interesting to see it fire tested in a few tasks.

Anyone know what the reliability of something like this in contrast to a standard HD?

Absolutely. I was only commenting on the swap.

As far as reliability, there is a caveat. They have limited write cycles. Excessive paging could reduce the life of the drive faster than what could be deemed acceptable. This could also have a negative impact on their usefulness as a database storage medium.

Mushu

1,396

January 05, 2007 09:39 PM

Quote: Original post by smr
As far as reliability, there is a caveat. They have limited write cycles. Excessive paging could reduce the life of the drive faster than what could be deemed acceptable. This could also have a negative impact on their usefulness as a database storage medium.

IIRC, SanDisk made some comments about that awhile back when I first read about this, how they have some system set up where the wear on the disk is distributed such that it dies evenly, and how that limitation is basically a thing of the past, and that their solid state drives will last longer than conventional ones or something. Lemmie see if I can dig the article up.

Oh, its also in the article posted by the OP -

Quote: Although flash memory can be known to eventually "wear out" due to writing to the same area repeatedly, modern flash memory controllers have automatic "wear-leveling" to ensure longevity of the device by making sure that sectors are being written to evenly and bad sectors are dynamically remapped to good ones. According to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)."

I'm not sure how accurate that is, or what they mean by 'two million hours', but they seem to suggest that it isn't a problem. Grain of salt, of course.

Promit

13,404

January 05, 2007 09:43 PM

It occurs to me that we have a hardware forum now. May as well use it.

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smr

2,468

January 05, 2007 09:59 PM

Quote: Original post by MushuAccording to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)."

Two million hours playing solitaire or two million hours playing world of warcraft on 256 megs of ram?

Avatar God

1,072

January 05, 2007 11:21 PM

Now that's pretty impressive.

I don't think it will become widespread until the price drops, but it's a great concept. The computer I'm on at the moment actually has a 32GB hard drive, and doesn't need any more, and it's a desktop. On a laptop, especially, this would be a great change.

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Mushu

1,396

January 05, 2007 11:29 PM

Quote: Original post by smr
Quote: Original post by MushuAccording to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)."

Two million hours playing solitaire or two million hours playing world of warcraft on 256 megs of ram?

Expect solitare.

owl

376

January 05, 2007 11:37 PM

Quote: Original post by Thermodynamics
The price tag looks like $600 right now but it should come down.

For a PC (assuming U$D 60.00 per Giga and if I could install them all togheter) I would rather expend that money in 10GB of RAM and have a smaller but a hell of a fast RAM-Disk.

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CrimsonSun

336

January 05, 2007 11:48 PM

The technology is going to be good, but only for some specific markets. The power usage, heat-generation, and lack of moving parts will make it very reliable and portable, but until the price comes down (and it will come down -- just look at how solidstate manufacturing prices have dropped in 20 years...) significantly, it will be overlooked by many.

Technologically, it's probably superior. But so was the betamax.

Solid state hard drive.

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