Reasons not go get an SSD

Say money wasn't an issue, and you had a choice between the current 7200rpm hard drives and the SSD in the latest generation MBP - is there any reason not to buy the SSD? Read will presumably be fast, but are write speeds still slower on SSD as they used to be? I presume the MBP would run cooler with an SSD. Any reasons or situations (other than purse!) where an SSD would be a bad idea?

 

well I would say spend the money and get a better SSD than is packaged from apple themselves and install it yourself.

other than the fact that an SSD has a lower capacity and you may want to use an optibay for a mechanical drive for extra storage if you need it there is absolutly no reason why an SSD would be a bad idea

 

Almost any in-depth discussion of the characteristics of SSD's points out the finite write capability of the individual memory addresses, but rarely touches on the practical limitations of the phenomenon. I wonder if the application a user may task the drive with, is a busy one with repeated writes, whether the drive will have such a short life expectancy or meaningful decline in capacity, as to be impractical as compared with a HDD.

It is my nature to be bothered by the prospect that a SSD should almost be considered a consumable media in certain applications, if that is the case. Certainly I've had flash drives fail, only to be told that it is the nature of the beast until they find a means to create durable flash memory.

Maybe it's just me, but I have found magnetic media to be more reliable. I definitely have tossed more flash drives than ever I have had to throw away HDD's .....or even floppies. LOL. (But of course, this is entirely anecdotal and far from conclusive, even to my circumstance)

 

IMO the only reason not to buy a SSD is if you need more capacity, or cant afford the cost.
Other then that Ive found them better the HDDs in every way.

 

Are you saying that ssd is not reliable?
Is ssd use better chip (even with the MLC SSD) than flash dirve?
I just pick up an Intel ssd x25 160gb G2 for cheap last week and now you are saying this really makes me worry

 

Your SSD will become outdated before it will fail.

 

Tell that to the failed SSD's that came in the Lenovo T400's out of 15 T400's about 5 of the SSD's failed.


I would say the biggest issue is data recovery. if a HDD starts to fail I have a chance in my home to recover data. With an SSD a back up is 100% mandatory, not just a very smart/logical thing to have. You can't hope to recover a failed SSD with out sending it out and spending lots of money.

 

He bought an Intel SSD. He didn't buy something crappy like the SSD Lenovo sourced for the T400.

 

Friend works at Intel, neither him nor I want an Intel SSD, and he gets an EPP discount on them.

 

That's great, but it really doesn't mean anything. Lots of people work at Intel.

 

I'm just saying 100/150MB write is a joke.

 

Yeah, that's why I went with the Vertex 2. The Intel has a better $/GB ratio though.

I thought that you were saying that Intel SSDs are unreliable or something.

 

Hmm I am curious what you might need the extra sequential write speeds for...

 

Space wasn't a concern for me, so I bought the best performing drive that I could with at least 40GB. The C300 64GB would have been a better buy, but I ended up getting the Vertex 2 regardless.

 

To address the origianl question of the thread, here's a good wikapedia entry that explains the negative aspects of SSD.

Write amplification - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

That's not a "negative aspect." It's just a technical fact of SSDs. Factoring in write amplification, an SSD will still outlast the usable life of the notebook it is installed in. I would be the very odd user who writes tens of gigabytes per day, 365 days, who would be able to say that they reached the end of writes in a short period of time.

 

If Write Amplification did not exist, then that would be a positive. The inverse is negative. I'm not saying it is cataclysmic, which you infer that I am.

In fact, it is due to Write Amplification, TRIM and Wear Leveling that benchmarking of new SSD drive is usually very misleading. The benchmarking does not take into account the radical decline in performance that occurs in a drive which has an enormous amount of "housekeeping" activity as it nears capacity. While it is not a devastating problem, is is relevant information of significant value to some users. I don't mean that it applies to you, per se.

 

That's not a good analogy. It's neither negative nor positive. It's just a fact of the technology. One which is factored into drive life. Which, again, will last longer than the usable life of any notebook.

Being the owner of five SSDs that use Indilinx controllers for two years I can say that the above is not exactly correct. The difference in performance from new to used (even near the 20% threshold) is not a real concern since the percent difference is low enough that only a benchmark "junkie" would really consider it. In real world use, there is no real noticeable difference in performance. But even at an SSD's worst it is still significantly faster than a HDD at its best.

Moreover, TRIM and garbage collection keep the drives in excellent working condition.

While SSDs and flash drives use the same storage technology, per se, SSDs have a controller that alleviates the deficiencies that a flash drive (such as a USB flash drive) is subject to.

There is only one wholly meaningful disadvantage to SSDs compared to HDDs; price per gigabyte.

Everything else is mostly academic and has no real world meaning for end users.

Just ask SSD owners.

 

Thanks for all your thoughts. So, why is an SSD failing that much harder to recover than an HD? Do you not get the equivalent of bad sectors, and instead all the data just go plop? I'm guessing you mean that.

Wondering what the reliability of SSD's is compared to HDs now.

 

There really isn't enough data yet to give reliable life-time estimates, as I understand it.

I have read that the expected lifetime of an SSD (under normal use) is 10 years, but I don't know if this is taking average lifetime reductions due to failures into account.

I think it is a safe bet to say that the drive will last longer than your laptop's useful lifespan (~3-4 years), which is what really matters.

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From a performance, noise, and temperature standpoint SSDs are better. They are supposed to be better in terms of battery life, but I don't know if that is actually true (an article from about 1-1.5 years ago states that it is not, but I don't know if it holds with the newer generation of drives).

I recently purchased a 256gb ssd for my alienware, and I am very happy with its performance and durability (no worrying about coddling the computer while the drive is in use, since there are no moving parts to upset).

 

I was talking about when any SSD fails in general. I wasn't being brand specific.

 

Let's just stop now before anything gets further misunderstood.

 

I haven't read this article yet but it might shed some light on the subject and give more info on SSD's in general. Granted, it's 2 and a half years old now, and the newer tech may resolve many of the problems SSD's had 2 years back, but it's something.

 

Bottom line - current generation SSDs are reliable and fast.

 

the quality of the NAND flash is a ing joke.

they can not be compared in ANY manner to the NAND chips used in even the cheapest SSDs

 

Yeah, does he really work at Intel and is stupid enough to think that sequential write and read speeds actually matter that much?

Intel is still up top at real-life usage.

 

The reason to not get a SSD is no trim support in OS X.

 

Hence why (if you want the most performance) you get an SSD with the Sandforce controller (like the OCZ Vertex) that does trim on-the-fly, so no need to worry about OSX not having it.

 

(Vertex 2, not Vertex 1)

 

If money is not an issue, get a SLC SSD drive. This is tried and true technology that has been used in government, military and large business applications that are sensitive to reliability for the past 2-3 decades.

For the rest of us, consumer MLC drives are still fairly new and every drive has had their kinks to work out but overall, the technology is still far superior in pretty much every way except price compared to traditional spinning platter HDDs. You can store more capacity using flash NAND in any form factor (limited really only by cost), access time are orders of magnitudes higher (which is the main factor in operating "snappiness"), and power consumption can be better in several drives (the best being Samsung, Toshiba, and Indilinx). For the fastest random R/W speeds, you should look at Sanforce, Marvell (Crucial C300), and Intel, but with increased performance, there is a slight hit in power consumption. For most users; however, the first three drives will be fast enough. TRIM isn't really that important overall as there are other names for similar non-OS dependent technologies such as garbage collection.

 

... and what is the ramifications of such?

 

Vertex 1 has garbage collector

 

He said sandforce. The Vertex 1 does not have an SF controller.

 

Smart enough to be one of the SandyBridge dev's.

 

With 1 SSD it will run cooler but with two running raid it can run a bit warmer. Stick with 1 SSD and you will be happy. I like my Vertex 2 SSD.

 

lurking on the mac forums... My 2 cents:
a very close relative of mine is an Apple retailer and owns two MacBook Pros. He told me he would never get one of the SSDs apple field with their laptops. After comparing performance between the SSDs and 7200rpm HDD there wasn't enough performance gain to justify the price.

 

Any SSD that notebook manufacturers put into a laptop is going to be the cheapest that they can find. The sole exception to this is HP's 160GB G2s that they ship out. Otherwise, just get these things aftermarket to get the best performing drive for the lowest price possible.

 

I've been using an SSD for about 6 months now. Absolutely love it. I just got my MBP and day one I put in an intel SSD and this thing is just sick. Absolutely sick. No reason not to get one. Money an issue? get a smaller one. Size an issue? get optibay. need ODD? get external HDD or ODD. worth it.

 

Well it looks like no SSD for me
Because of my OCD, I have to play ping pong with my large data files.

ping... pong... ping... pong... ping... pong... end of writes

 

bah.

my Intel 160GB SSD G2



and all reads/writes above 2MB were ~254MB/~106MB, respectively. all as good as my first day with it.

my SSD has been given the hardcore treatment over the last 2 months. hype over lack of TRIM looks like all hype and no real-world significance, IMO. she's just as fast as the day I first installed her.

I tried using my brother's MBP today (5400rpm) and damn near cried waiting for Pages to load. I could never go back now.

 

Dell and others also use Samsung or Toshiba SSDs, which perform much better than any HDDs and are a lot better than Intel in terms of cost per GB and power consumption (hence also heat and noise).

 

Those savings are rarely ever passed on to the consumer though, so what good are they to us?

 

Wait...noise from an SSD?

 

I think space is obvious and overlooked. I am already filling up my regular hard-drive with pictures. I would have to spend a ton on an SSD to able to to keep my pictures on my computer without an external drive and even then I would be low/out of space.

 

They were a while back, Dell and Lenovo sold their 256GB SSD for $500 or less at one point.

I meant that SSD has the benefit over HDD in the department of noise (since it makes none and the lower power consumption leads to less heat output which in turn means less fan noise).

 

The intel SSD is the best when it comes to power consuption... Check over google. If you ask me I get 8 hours on my m11x.

For price per GB you cant be more right, the samsungs are VERY good SSD's, the kingston ones are cheap and I heard they are very decent. Cant teall about Toshiba I hate that brand...

I dont know this is my 2nd SSD and with this intel Im more than impressed, my first patriot was eeehehem not really nice I hated the stuttering issues.

 

I don't know what reviews you're reading or even from users from NBR have experienced high power consumption with Intel. Samsung blows the Intel out of the water in terms of power consumption.

 

No... the Sandforce 1200 SSDs are more power efficient than Intel G2s.

 

I have switched to an SSD 3 times now.
I have found each drive very cheap and then jumped on them otherwise I would not pay retail prices just yet.

To say there is a huge speed difference is an understatement.

I have a 64gb Kingston,128gb Kingston and a 256gb Samsung.
Each of these has the Trim feature and regardless of the real and perceived differences between SSD brands they all SMOKE any hard drive I have tried in performance and battery life.

I have not found the drive I want to stick inside my MBP mainly because it is the one machine I have that I do need space more than anything else.

I also feel the Mac already runs better than any PC I have and has no glaring problems compared with a PC.

Things with SSD are only going to get better too.

Ed

 

I believe the question has been answered.

Thread closed.