At this price, I might be going SSD

[Cakemeister]

http://www.kingston.com/press/2009/flash/10c.asp

$115 + 10 for 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor.

40 gigabytes.

[ChadTower]

Life expectancy: 1 million hours MTBF

How do you even determine that?  A million hours?  That's more than a hundred years.  And that's just the mean.  Do they really expect us to believe that some of these things are going to churn away for centuries?

[HaRuMaN]

No moving parts...  so I can see it as being feasible.  I've been thinking of getting some of these as a backup for stuff I really don't want to lose (digital pictures, etc).

[ChadTower]

No moving parts...  so I can see it as being feasible.  I've been thinking of getting some of these as a backup for stuff I really don't want to lose (digital pictures, etc).

Lots of electronics have no moving parts.  They don't last 100 years.  Sure, moving parts dramatically increase failure, but there's a long way between "more reliable than a hard drive" and a whole century.

For me, cost is still too high per gig.  I'd still rather buy a pair of large traditional drives and automate a redundant backup than reduce the storage capacity to a fraction and still be at the mercy of device failure.

[Ginsu Victim]

Yeah, the prices are still too high for me to consider for general use.

[Cakemeister]

The price premium per GB is for the extra speed. $3 per gigabyte for SSD vs. about $0.07 per gigabyte for magnetic drives. But you've got to have some perspective. Just a few years ago (2002) magnetic drives were selling for $3 a gigabyte. So I don't think $3 is too high per gigabyte for SSD.

http://www.alts.net/ns1625/winchest.html

[ChadTower]

Extra speed here in a desktop is an illusion... what's the point of taking high performance wheels and dropping them on a Ford Taurus?  You're still working off a consumer motherboard with a narrow bus and probably running Windows.

If throughput is that much of an issue the solution is a machine with a wider bus and a more optimized OS.

[HaRuMaN]

Surely the power consumption has to be less?  And they'd be impact resistant so ideal for notebooks.

We're actually using them at work for data collection machines for flight test since they can take up like 1000 g's.

[massive88]

http://www.kingston.com/press/2009/flash/10c.asp

$115 + 10 for 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor.

40 gigabytes.

Go big or go home, imo.

[ahofle]

I've been considering one of these for work as well.  There are a few caveats...you have to pay attention to writes.  Like flash USB drives, there are limits to the amount of writes the memory will take.  That's why the ad says to put 'documents/files/pics/etc' on the conventional drive.  This rules out what I was hoping to get the extra speed out of -- development/programming compilation/builds.  You are also supposed to turn off things like background windows defrag on the SSD drive as that will significantly shorten its life.  This particular drive doesn't have very good speed numbers compared to others (check them out on newegg.com).  Still, I'm very interested in trying one of these for a boot/windows partition and this is by far the best price I've seen.  I may ask Santa for one.

[wp34]

I've had one in my work Dell tablet for several months.  I really like it-- makes my laptop very quiet and cool running.  Appears "faster" but I've not done any benchmarking.

I'd like to get one for my cabinet but the price does need to come down.

[Xiaou2]

The worst part is.. When a certain number of writes / re-writes has occurred,
some of the banks will fail.   This will create a problem... because now your data has
to be fragmented all over the place.   That fragmentation, means more time trying to
find the relevant data position to read from.  Performance will then drop like stone.

 There is also the fact that many of these use a system which tries to write the data to
various different sections to equally distribute the amount of writes and re-writes equally.
This too will slow down the performance... AND, when sectors do fail,  that performance
trying to calculate things gets even worse.

 It would be much better and faster as an OS only drive, to use DDR type ram,
and a battery back up system.  Data is still best stored on HD, with a backup HD.

 A compromise between no batter backup, could be an OS that loads from the HD,
then immediately transfers to Ram.. so that the entire environment would be ran in
ram only.

[Ummon]

http://www.kingston.com/press/2009/flash/10c.asp

$115 + 10 for 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor.

40 gigabytes.

Go big or go home, imo.

Yeah, someone posted that here a month or few ago. Neat, but....

[divemaster127]

I just rebuilt my sytem this weekend, with a 80 solid state & a 2nd drive 750gb, the os only is on the 80 gig & it is very fast.  Much better than my raptor which i am going to ebay

[ChadTower]

That's backwards if the SSD drive is finite write... the OS will kill that thing dead.  Sure, it's faster, but you only have so many writes, so your OS paging is going to trash it.

[HaRuMaN]

Here's a good read on why you shouldn't put an OS on SSD:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669

[Cakemeister]

Here's a good read on why you shouldn't put an OS on SSD:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669

That article's a little old, it doesn't take TRIM into account.

The drives went on sale today and I pulled the trigger. We'll see how it works out.

[ahofle]

I think you just need to tweak a few things, such as pointing your windows/internet temp directories to an HDD, turn off defrag, move swapfile, etc.  I think in the near future, you will start to see operating systems include features/settings that make using a SSD a lot easier.  At least I hope so.  If you could somehow set it up so just the (mostly) read only stuff like windows files and programs are stored on it, it would be a big step forward.

Please let us know how it works out. 

[Cakemeister]

Of interest is this article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

[ahofle]

Cool, I did not know that.

[HaRuMaN]

Hmmm...  after reading that, I want to build a Win7 SSD machine

[divemaster127]

I am using windows 7 & I did some research before I took the plunge the speed improvement is unreal, i guess if the SSD dies I will be the first to find out

[Cakemeister]

Windows 7 has been installed. It's pretty easy to change the directories that files go into, to point to the data drive. I'm installing applications now. The big one will be Office, haven't done that one yet. Boot speed is excellent. Noise level is excellent. There's nothing not to like so far. I need a new backup solution, however.

[SavannahLion]

Good god... running the OS out of RAM?  Are we back in the 386 days?

Did that back in er.... '98, '99 or so. An engineer and I jammed a server with IIRC 8GB (or was it 16GB?) of RAM, four Xeons, installed some virtualization software, "partitioned" the RAM to fake a hard drive, then installed NT. It was an interesting experience. Flew through the burn in test.

[Xiaou2]

 What do you think is faster:   DDR II  ram,  or  a  SSD Flash drive?

 There is a reason they use such memory attached to the CPU.  There simply
isnt anything faster... unless they decided to integrate all that ram directly inside the CPU itself.

 The  "Hyperdrive5"   can support 8 x 8gig ddrII sticks for a total of 64 gigs of power and speed
which wont burn out in 5 yrs like a SSD will.  It will never develop bad sectors, and have to deal
with software defragment performance issues.
 
 It boots windows XP in 4 seconds.


http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/


=== Full Company specs ===

Takes 8x 240 pin DDR2 DIMMS from 2GB - 8GB.
2x SATA2 interface ports.
CD ROM Drive Form Factor.
175MB/s Read rate.
145MB/s Write rate.
65,000 IOPS. Hard disks do 200-300 IOPS (File Inputs or Outputs Per Second).
10  microsecond disk access time. Mechanical disks take 5-15 milliseconds.
It finds files 500x faster than the world's fastest mechanical SAS hard disk.
No drivers needed, connects like any other SATA HDD.
Boots Windows XP in 4 seconds!
Most operations become instant!
Formats Instantly!
Never needs to be defragged. It's Random Access!
Silent Solid State Disk, no moving parts, no NAND flash to wear out!
Compact Flash card backup port in case of long power outage.
Takes any UDMA capable CF card with capacity as big as installed DDR2.
Automatically backsup to CF in the event of power loss.
Automatically restores from CF in the event of power gain.
Lithium Battery 7.4V 2400mAH. Powers unit for 2-3 hours. 500 charge/discharge cycles.
External DC adaptor port for keeping data when PC is powered off.
LED indicators for power, activity and battery charge %.
The Drive has built in ECC so it can safely take cheap non ECC DDR2 DIMMs.
Designed to take any unbuffered non ECC 400-800MHz CL5/6 240 pin DRR2 DIMMs.
Tested with Kingston, Corsair, Qimonda, G.Skill, OCZ, Mustang.
DDR2 underclocked to reduce power consumption, enhance stability and prolong life.
FCC Certified. CE Certified. VCCI Certified. BSMI Certified.
15 month RTB Warranty.
MTBF of underclocked DDR2 is several generations (a lot longer than our financial system!)
100% secure file deletion if required.
The simplest and cheapest way to get mainframe performance from your PC.

[Cakemeister]

Any DRAM is much faster than flash. Unfortunately, it loses its data when the power goes off. I would have lost my operating system had I had one of those during Hurricane Ike, when I had no power for a week.

That drive is about 4 times more expensive than the Kingston SSD.

[ChadTower]

The practical answer here is that this architecture is not ready yet.  The drives aren't quite up to it yet and the OS is not designed for it yet.  I'm sure eventually the two will meet but for now it stays in the realm of overclockers and case modders.

[Ummon]

There's other technologies being developed all the time. Perhaps fortunately, it's often-times lately materials scientists, who are filing their own patents and stuff, and may end up bringing such stuff to market more quickly.

[Paladin]

Watch out for your OS size if you're using Vista or 7.  I have a dual boot system with Vista 64 and 32 bit XP, and was doing some work in Vista and my 40 gig OS partition ran out of space.  I was able to change and app that was storing files on the C drive to fix that, but still noticed most of the disk gone.  I've always maintained a small OS partition and only install apps like audio/video editors, office, etc.  All my actual files go to other disks, so I can keep the OS partition tidy and fairly defragged.

It turns out it's the new winsxs folder that slowly gobbles up your drive.  My Vista environment only has about 4 applications and one game (the game is on a different drive), but the winsxs folder is 20gb and has over 75,000 files.  I did a little research and found that it actually contains many 'hard links' to .dll files, but Vista (and 7) still count the links as using the same space as the actual file.

Since I first looked it up a couple months ago there have been more and more questions popping up on the net about it, some specifically directed at running smaller sized SSD's.  Just google 'winsxs folder' to find more info.

[Cakemeister]

There are some interesting articles on the winsxs folder. I had never heard of such a problem because I went straight from XP to 7.

I was thinking about installing my most favored applications on the C drive because I have 20 gig free on my SSD. I guess I'm not going to do that now.

I wish Macrosoft had never invented Dirty Loser Libraries. Now we are paying the price for their lack of vision.

[ChadTower]

Improper file size reporting isn't caused by the DLLs here.  It sounds like it is caused by recording links at the same size as their target in the master file table.  I have no idea why they would do that.  I wonder how it calculates the size of a link whose target doesn't exist...