1) aren't SSD's much more expensive than hard drives?
Yes, even at current spinning metal drive prices, SSDs are still ~5x more expensive per GB. It varies widely with the quality of the SSD. There's not a ton of price variability in the HDD land, but there is with SSDs. The technology on SSDs isn't as mature, so there's still a lot more variability in component quality and therefore price (and performance and, to some degree, reliability).
2) Wouldn't they make those in Thailand too?
Maybe, but there's not a huge reason to do so. Most of the chips come from Japan, Korea, the US (believe it or not, one of the biggest makers of high end flash memory is in the US), and some from Taiwan. I'd expect support components (PCBs, casings, etc.) to come from and final assembly to happen in China, Taiwan, or Singapore. Maybe some in Thailand, but there's not a particularly compelling reason to do it that way unlike with HDDs as many many components of HDDs are actually made in Thailand.
As an aside, do SSD's have the same limited life span that other memory does, like in USB memory? That is, whether you use it or not, it has a lifespan? If it does, then I'd still prefer a hard drive, since those things last a very long time if not used. My backup is on a portable hard drive that is only used when plugged in to back up for instance. That should last magnitudes longer than my computer...
Yes. All flash memory has erase cycle limitations. The endurance has been steadily going DOWN as chip geometries have gotten smaller to increase density. Some new chips are rated for as few as 1000 erase cycles (1 million used to be common). HOWEVER, with proper wear leveling, given the size of modern SSDs and depending on how much spare space they reserve, you can easily make this something of a non-issue. Note that cheap SSDs and USB flash drives often have little or no hidden reserve, while expensive "enterprise" grade ones usually have lot (often as much spare as active).
As an example, if you completely re-write an entire 250GB drive daily (very, very unlikely), then even with no reserve space, you get almost 3 years lifespan out of it. A more typical usage pattern would swap out an average of maybe 20-40GB/day at most. That would give you a lifespan of about 17 years (at 40GB, double it for 20GB/day) if you can spread the writes out evenly (i.e. the drive has reserve and/or is not entirely full); I think that particular SSD will be totally obsolete by then, and most HDDs would be dead, too. Adding reserve (hidden) space to do wear leveling improves things greatly. 1000 cycles is also something of a minimum spec; most devices will exceed that by 2-3x at room temp. Larger geometry and single level devices are often spec'd for 10000 cycles or more. Even when you do wear it out, it would be possible to essentially chuck the drive into read-only mode; you wouldn't be able to change anything (and the OS may crash as a result), but full data recovery would be easily possible, but see below.
By far the bigger concern seems to be buggy firmware. While an SSD should generally fail gradually and cleanly as you run out of usable erase cycles, they often fail catastrophically and without warning due to some firmware bug that causes massive corruption, often at a level below where the OS interacts with it, rendering it totally useless and causing total data loss. This isn't a fundamental problem with the technology, but it seems sadly common. The "enterprise" grade don't seem to do this nearly as much (and they use higher endurance flash, to boot), presumably due to better QA of the firmware, but I doubt you want to pay $10k for your SSD...
The firmware bugs really irk me. The underlying flash technology is well understood at this point. The makers just need to QA their damned controller firmware better. I still use spinning metal drives, though mostly for cost reasons. I'd love to put a 320-500GB SSD in my laptop; it's well backed up, anyway, and I could use the performance when running my CAD software and large compiles.
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Topic: HD prices going up fast (Read 11011 times)
