Solid state drives vs. HDD (quick survey)

Hi all,

Maybe this thread should be merged in with the other SSD one, but it seemed like my question would get lost in the mass of messages.

I'm just wondering, does anyone think solid state drives will become more common/CHEAPER within the next 2-5 years... perhaps to the point of replacing traditional HDD?

Opinions?

 

They will become cheaper and more common, yes. definetly

Replacing HDD's, no. At least, not for a while. I dont think.

 

For people that need less than 100GB of storage, SSDs will start to make pretty big gains in the next few years.

 

of course they will.

HDDs suck because of their nature. Chips FTW.

SSDs are replacing traditional HDDs as we speak

 

I agree, they will become more common and cheaper, but will not replace hard drives (since ssd's do not yet reach into the terabytes like a hard drive).

 

Not yet, but the question was in 2-5 years. Keep in mind that there already exist 256GB SSDs and the 512GB ones are coming out later this year. Unless SSD growth slows dramatically, I am fairly confident in 2 years we will see multi-terabyte drives and in 5 they will be well on their way to replacing hard drives (almost certainly in laptops, perhaps in desktops too).

Here is my reasoning: it's true that current SSDs have problems. There are issues with controllers and firmware, the price per GB is quite high and operating systems aren't really designed for them. However, these just mean that there is room to grow: the Samsung and Intel controllers are better and sooner or later even JMicron will come out with something decent, the price per GB is dropping like a rock on Jupiter and Windows 7 will at least refrain from trying to defragment them. Their issues are well on their way to being overcome.

On the other hand, the problem of hard drives is fundamental: there is only so much you can do with a spinning disk with a moving arm that reads stuff off of it. Take a look at the graph on this page and you'll see that while it's true that they can pack terabytes of data and are relatively cheap, it's also true that they will bottleneck the hell out of anything that requires heavy usage of them. Finally, they aren't really fond of motion (and thus are particularly unsuited to laptops). HDDs have served their purpose, but now they're a technological dead end.

 

There are greater than 1TB SSD drives from BitMicro and PureSilicon.

 

Remember, they will always be costing more than regular HDDs too, alot more. They will go down In price, but so will harderive prices. Which in 5 years, still leaving regular HDDs as the main. Progression of regular hdds is faster than ssd's as well. When there is a 1TB SSD, there will be a 2TB HDD, and so on. In my opinion.

 

Do you have any data to back that opinion up? As far as I can tell, SSD price per GB is dropping very, very quickly because the capacity of commercially available drives basically quadruples within a year. HDDs are still growing and still getting cheaper, but SSDs appear to be catching up.

 

Yeah, but there is no proof that they will catch up enough, if they do great , but I don't think the chances of that are too high

IMO, I agree with ahl here

I mean many big HDD manufacturers still haven't entered the market, and are still working on mechanical drives, and SSD are still not easily available in mos parts of the world.

In a few years definitely (I'm all for it), but in the near future I'm not so sure

These are my opinions, don't hate me for them

 

Great discussion, keep it going!

 

Seriously SSD's crawl compared to RAM.

SSD might just be a short interim. 10 years ago we used to use software RAM drives, alot faster than SSD.

What I need is inexpensive 32GB RAM that's 100's of times faster than any SSD.
There are only two hurdles, power due to volatility and a bus connector that can handle the bandwidth.

Either use a PCI express lane and PCI express card or some mobo maker needs to come up with an ingenious way to add 20 DDR2 slots on a mobo, with a long term battery backup for the storage housed in the PSU.

It may be around the corner. Watching SSD's performance grow the last few years was like watching paint dry compared to actual RAM performance.

 

This is wrong. You want large capacity ram and a fail prone hard drive for storage instead of a quiet no moving parts ssd?

 

gigabyte iram. tops out at 4gb of ddr400. (i think)

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

 

The Gigabyte Iram will own any SSD in todays market. A Ramdisk is much faster than any SSD. The FLASHIO drive is so fast because it uses ramdisc technology.
The Iram is insanely fast. You can load the operating system in less than 10 seconds. It is extremely fast, but its a shame that the largest capacity is 4GB. I know a guy who has 4 in raid 0, and it puts any SSD on the market to shame. The IOPS are much higher than 4 Intel SLC drives in raid 0.

The only downfall to the ram disc is size and power.
Once the power cuts out everything is lost. So its great if you have a big APC on your system, or if you never shut your system down, but otherwise if you can live with a 4GB drive its amazing.

I am considering putting one in the octitron cause I have tons of extra PC3200 memory

K-TRON

 

I suspect the reason nobody has made larger versions of these is that people just aren't interested in volatile storage. It's one thing to have a medium with a given rate of failure and quite another to have one guaranteed to fail in the event of a lengthy power outage. Volatile drives simply aren't in the same category as SSDs and HDDs.

If memristors become more common or people finally manage to get RRAM or something of the sort working, it is possible that we might see RAM-like storage in large quantities. However, this is on a far longer timescale than SSDs -- a whole lot of big companies are pouring resources into the latter right now whereas commercially available, non-volatile RAM looks to be at least a decade away (barring a miraculous breakthrough).

 

i remember seeing one storage solution using volatile memory, forgot the capacity but i think it was rated at 500w. lol

 

One thing you haven't considered about SSDs vs. HDDs.

HDDs - proven technology with reasonably well know reliability
SSDs - new, based on older Flash memory, however, don't like too many write cycles and reliability isn't as well known as for HDDs

 

I wouldn't be surprised if SSDs overtake HDDs end of next year.
currently, they are still a premium option over hdds but prices are coming down fast and capacities quadruple per year.

Look at some of the charts intel has made for ssds.
I forgot what time frame they provide for ssds to overtake hdds but ssds will follow a similar trajectory as chips ... while the speed/price/capacity increases for hdds are not THAT impressive.
one must also not forget that ssds usually come in 2.5 or 1.8 form factor.
if you cram 2x 2.5 in the space of 1x 3.5 one could probably make an argument that they will be equal to or will have surpased hdds before the end of this year. then only price remains as a hurdle ...

 

in 5 years having a HDD will be like using 3.5" diskettes now, lol

just look at the USB memory sticks, when did those become available to overtake the diskettes

 

I dunno if USB flash has really replaced floppy disks. After all, I only have 2-3 USB sticks but I've got boxes of hundreds of floppies. Why is that? We tended to put things onto diskettes and then keep them forever, while I copy things to flash temporarily, and overwrite them when I want to copy something else. Diskettes are a long-term storage medium, we still don't have anything to replace that use-case.

I personally would love to have a storage device with 32 DIMM slots in it. These things don't even need to run faster than 100MHz and they would still blow the doors off every other storage mechanism out there. One of the problems with Intel's perpetual drive to release new products that obsolete existing products is that it prevents you from making perfectly usable products out of that old technology. We don't need DDR to make a good RAM disk. Plain old 100MHz SDRAM would have been good enough, and if it had stayed on the market it would be cheap as dirt/sand today. But no, it had to get phased out in favor of more expensive DDR, and so on and so forth. Somebody needs to start assembling memory modules out of today's DRAM cells (since they're more power efficient) that don't operate at the blistering fast bleeding edge speeds, so that they can be cheaply assembled into huge arrays. Imagine a system with 8GB (or whatever) of primary RAM, with a massive array of 64GB of slower secondary RAM sitting between it and your I/O subsystem. Then it really wouldn't matter whether you still use HDDs or Flash for long-term storage, because most I/Os would still be running at RAM speed.

 

Five years ago, I was using a CRT space heater, my laptop had a P3-M, and my dually AthlonMP desktop was the bees' knees.

Nowadays, even laptops have quad-core processors and are faster clock-for-clock than my P3-M, so yes. I do think so.

 

I haven't used a floppy drive (or maybe even a computer in over half a decade. I don't think they even sell them anymore and there is no conceivable use for them that other things aren't better suited for. You can buy a 1 GB flash drive for $5, never erase anything from it and it will be far cheaper and more convenient than lugging around a floppy drive and 700 ( ) floppies.

Wrong. Electronics companies do not throw away old technology if it can be effectively used elsewhere. For example, Intel's 4-bit and 8-bit processors are still used in embedded systems (electronics that need to do a only specific task, like elevator and traffic light controllers). The reason they don't do this with RAM is that nobody is interested.

I'm imagining it. The 64 GB of slower RAM probably consumes more power than my entire laptop currently does ( Anandtech says around 2W per DIMM, but that is for DDR2 which is more power efficient than previous iterations). It's also not clear how exactly this thing gets all of my data to non-volatile storage.

 

volatile storage will never be a replacement for non-volatile storage. same like caches on ssd's are not allowed to cache writes.

every write has to be done to memory that is save, ram wouldn't help.

but flash ssd's will get replaced by memristor ssd's once hp got them working good enough. they'll replace one day any form of ram and transistor-logic anyways somehow.

 

i am slightly confused by SSD's myself, HDD's use magnetism to store data, correct? but ssd's use chips, won't the chips need to be powered up every once in a while to keep them from formatting themselves? also what's the benifits of an SSD compared to HDD as i want to build a desktop pc in the next year or so

 

Your own opinions are nothing related to facts, so i can't see how you can ask him to back up a personal opinion That's just how one thinks how it will turn out to be; in their opinions.

 

For a desktop:
Only benefit at the moment is read/write speed.

For a laptop:
SSDs are 100% shockproof (as in mechanical shock)

 

hmm, what if i were to have an SSD as an external drive and say i accidently knocked it off the desk like i did my external hdd would it wipe the data/stop working? and by read/write speeds i'm guessing you mean they're faster?

 

A SSD should be fine - as long as nothing is dislodged you can drop it off a building.

Read Write speeds, yes, they are faster/higher.

 

SSD can tolerate to be handled however it wants, you can simply ducktape it to a wheel on a car and drive in 60mph while having it powered and it works normal. As it doesn't have any moving parts it's not sensitive against being moved or dropped. Ofcourse aslong as nothing disconnects inside the drive A normal HDD is very sensitive against shocks and so.

 

I suppose very sensitive is difficult to say - different HDDs have different "shock limits" - and some will retract the head to prevent dmage if the HDD notices acceleration.
And a mild bump here or there doesn't kill an HDD.

But overal - I agree fully - HDDs are shock senisitive.

 

hmm i see, would i get better off getting a normal HDD or an SSD for a Desktop pc? and how much are they lol

 

Compared to a SSD it is

A mild bump can kill a HDD when it's powered, but not when it's off! This is just because the head is so close to the platter, the risk is there! But it may not be very common to kill a HDD with a mild bump, but i think you know what i mean

 

A normal HDD for a desktop is what you should get as a desktop isnt moved around while powered. Though SSDs has much greater perfomance if you buy a good SSD(SLC-based).

 

I do
I know I once just about smashed my old Medion laptop onto a windowsill... I got a predicted SMART failure quite some time later...

But overall, my Medion went through a lot of abuse - my Vaio fears better

I suppose its down to luck too...

Anyway - HDD = not shockproof

 

Ah ok, thanks for the confirmation, also about SSD's being wiped if not powered for awhile is that true?

 

Is your USB flash drive wiped if not powered?
Don't think so.

 

Hmm ok xD but how does it remember it then

 

Thanks for all the input, I ask mainly because I'm actually hoping for the SSD to make significant leaps within the next year or two. Both in terms of price and storage capacity.

I personally, have had a couple of HDD crash, probably because I'm pretty mobile with my laptops.

I wouldn't mind if desktops stuck with the HDD, because most would suggest that they'll traditionally have more storage space at a lower cost for at least 5 years to come. But to me, there's no doubt that laptops should be moving towards the solid state drives for better durability and reduced power usage.

 

The same way as a USB-stick does! So no worries that it will "forget" what is written to it or such.

 

its not only that the SSD is shock-prof, but its access times rocks over the HDDs.

with the time, MLC drives will improve dramatically IMO.

and if one plans to keep data like forever, then use CDs/DVDs/BRs in a climate-controlled somewhat environment. Also, include the computer with the devices that can read those .. since that may be a problem in the future