The solid state hard drive comes of age
I spend a lot of time at my PC, and I use quite a number of programs in my tasks at keeping WUWT updated. I use browsers, word editors, PDF viewers, paint programs, graphing programs, Google Earth, and an MP3 recorder/editor for my daily radio forecasts. My PC gets a real workout daily.
With so much to do, I’ve noted that I get impatient just waiting on things to load these days. And so after some trepidation and research, I took the plunge and bought myself a solid state hard disk replacement for my Windows 7 HP slimline desktop in hopes it would speed my tasks. I’m happy to report the results significantly exceeded my expectations and I thought WUWT readers could benefit from my experience. Every one of my readers has a computer, so what better post could I make than something that shows them how to be happier using it?
My experience with flash memory has been so-so so far. Some USB flash drives I’ve tried stop working after a while. An SSD I tried a year ago didn’t give very good performance on small file sizes, and the MTBF wasn’t that great, so I sent it back. I’m glad I waited until now.
My research led me to choose the Kingston SSD Now V 100 128GB SSD drive. I only had about 60GB in use out of my 500GB drive, so I could choose a smaller SSD that didn’t cost a fortune. Prices have been plummeting. I looked at drives from Intel, OCZ, Supertalent, and Crucial, and decided the Kingston drive offered the best bang for the buck – plus it comes with a nearly idiot proof program I’m familiar with -Acronis, which re-images your mechanical hard drive to the SSD.
Kingston advertises this as “the ultimate upgrade” on the box, a pretty bold statement.
Here’s the desktop upgrade kit I bought from Amazon (image from the manufacturer):
Installation was pretty simple and went like this:
- Powered down, opened up the case, gave it a good cleaning for dust bunnies.
- Plugged in the SSD drive SATA cable to a spare SATA port on the motherboard.
- Plugged in the power cable for the SSD to a spare Molex power connector from the power supply.
- Left the system open on the table with the SSD sitting to the side on the tabletop, powered it all up.
- I put in the CD ROM provided by Kingston, which the system booted the Acronis OS loader from automatically.
- Followed the dirt simple on-screen instructions. Decided to be brave and choose the “automatic” setting for the Acronis software. Crossed my fingers.
- Waited about 15 minutes, it was done. It offered to make a backup recovery CD for me, which I accepted, that was done in about 5 minutes.
- I powered down, and pulled out my old hard drive. Dang it was warm. No wonder I had to add the second fan to my case.
- I attached the 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter rails to the new Kingston SSD, put it in the drive bay in place of the old hard disk.
- Closed up the case, powered up, kept my fingers crossed.
- To my complete surprise and satisfaction, the Windows 7 desktop booted in 15 seconds! And even better, there was no driver angst, no reboots asked for, nothing. It just worked.
- What was really wild was that the Windows startup sound didn’t have time to finish before the “logged in and ready” sound played. It got truncated. That was a first.
- I opened up Firefox, no wait, zero, none, nada; it was just there.
All of my apps now load nearly instantly. I could not be more pleased. My Dual core Athlon X2 processor is now the weakest link in my Windows experience index:
You know you really have something when your “hard disk” is faster than your 800 MHz DDR2 RAM in the performance index.
I ran HD Tune benchmarks on it…as father Frank used to say on “Everybody Loves Raymond” TV show, HOLY CRAP!
Not quite to the 250 MB/s rating on the box, but I’m betting some of that had to do with my CPU loading, which is now the weakest link.
The drive I replaced, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 had this HD Tune result for performance:
Which is why it now sits on my desktop, forlorn, pretty much useless:
I gotta tell you, the results of this upgrade are spectacular.
- Power up boot time ~18 seconds
- Restart soft boot time ~15 seconds
- Time from Desktop to Sleep Mode ~ 5 seconds
- Time from Sleep mode to running Desktop ~5 seconds
I no longer need the extra case fan, which I’ve unplugged (my wife says it was loud but I can’t hear it, but then again I’m nearly deaf ) since the case runs way cooler now. My CPU core temp also reduced since it no longer has ambient heat from the mechanical drive to deal with in the case.
Minus the mechanical HD and the case fan, total PC power consumption according to my 120VAC “Kill-a-Watt” power meter dropped about 29 watts from where it used to be, because the SSD uses about 6 watts power in operation, and 1 watt standby. That’s 29 watts less heat to dissipate. In a small PC case like I have, it’s significantly cooler.
If you are looking to upgrade your computer, whether it be Windows, Mac, or Linux based, I’m convinced this Kingston SSD is the best investment you can make. Here’s the specs (PDF).
Available in 64GB, 96GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB sizes, these high-performance SSDs are equipped with MLC NAND flash memory chips, a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, a MTBF of 1 million hours and an improved controller offering up to 25 percent better performance that the original SSDNow V series. Not to mention, they’ve also adopted the ‘Always On’ Garbage Collection technology, which Kingston says will cleanse redundant data from the drive to prevent performance degradation and maintains the drive over its life cycle.
If you have a laptop, that Kingston upgrade kit is even more useful, because they give you an external USB case to continue to use your old hard drive in, just costing slightly more than the desktop kit:
I got mine from Amazon.com which has the best deals going that I found. I had it 2 days after ordering. If you have the cash, this upgrade is (IMHO) well worth the time and investment. With a 3 year warranty and a million hour (11.4 years!) Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF), lightning speed, and ultra low power, how could you go wrong? The Acronis disk cloning software will clone your disk no matter if it is Windows, Mac OSX, Or Linux, it just works.
Here’s a video review on the product:
I predict that in about 2 years or less, SSD’s will begin to dominate the market. For now, it’s a great way to double or triple the operational performance of your existing PC. I realize many WUWT readers might not be early technology adoption fans like I am, but this product is really ready for prime-time.
If you are interested in getting one, here’s links to the two upgrade kits at discounted prices:
Some people might need more storage, and in that case you could get one of these to boot the OS from to get the performance, and use the older hard disk for media or offline storage.
Either way, I can’t ever see myself going back to a mechanical hard drive now, I’m spoiled.
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My understanding of solid state memory is that each storage element has a “write” limitation. The element will wear out after a given number of erasures and rewrites.
That would make them better for storage of data/software, but not so great for the types of data which is often rewritten to the disk.
Something to consider.
Sorry, I see write life is already discussed.
Dave says:
January 10, 2011 at 2:01 am
Why thank you Dave. I appreciate the warning.
CRS, Dr.P.H. said on January 9, 2011 at 6:24 pm:
Oh, that’s easy. Get the correct smartphone with appropriate available apps. Buy a matching Redfly to have a usable keyboard and monitor. The combo is the functional equivalent of a netbook, so you should be able to manage getting that report out. You should be able to also use online apps like Google provides. There’s also an upgrade benefit. The Redfly is just a terminal. You can switch to another compatible smartphone without needing a new Redfly.
Also consider the security aspect. If some moron steals your “laptop,” you haven’t lost your files! ☺
The SSD is very cool, but I wish they would give the specification for the limit of the number of writes per cell. My understanding is the the newer technology can deal with 1,000,000 write operations, but there is a point where the flash memory fails.
The newer designs have a controller to move the location around, so the same bit in memory doesn’t get re-written all the time.
It will be interesting to see what the long term life of the product really is…
In the mid 1990s, the two founders of Kingston received an offer for the ~15 yr old company in excess of 1.5B as I recall.
They had a philosophy that the key to success was your employees. So for roughly 100 employees (and this is all from memory) They set aside several Hundred Million dollars. They paid off homes (In Southern California) and opened trust funds for college, etc for every employee. Amazing.
PhilW1776 says:
January 10, 2011 at 5:17 am
>Flashback memory. In the mid 70s I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as the guy bringing in the ‘new’ 100 MB disk technology for the PDP-10 timesharing computers.
RP06? I had my own RP02 diskpack at CMU and was surprised I filled its 25 MB
capacity with crash dumps and whatnot. Took me less than a year.
> Engineers were amazed that 8 of these could be chained together to get almost one gigabyte, an amount of storage that nobody would ever need. 🙂
I worked at DEC from 1974-1978 (and again from 1992-2007). At least we could chain the disks together in the operating system to form a single file system. Of course, all that space was shared among the hundred or so users the system supported.
In the latter stint I remember walking down the hall with each hand holding a disk “shelf” of 1 GB SCSI disks. Someone noticed my goofy look and broke out laughing realizing I was mightily impressed I was carrying 14 GB of disk storage.
And, of course, a Terabyte was the holy grail of storage since IBM’s robotic tape cartridge system in the 1960s. A TB just isn’t what it used to be.
Thanks for this Anthony! 🙂
Very nice of you to post it.
I’m loving the stories commenters here are sharing about working at DEC and IBM etc and the perspectives on the old days.
Anthony, I’m now salivating for a SSD, but my computer expert son says my computer is too new and I don’t need an expensive upgrade right now. Layne Blanchard’s story about how well Kingston treated its employees makes me want to buy their products, although obviously the ownership has changed. I’ll trot that story out to counter the anti-corporate views of my students when the occasion arises. Thanks, all, for sharing your expertise and memories.
Oops forgot to escape that darned blockquote. 😛
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*sigh* Anthony, haven’t you heard? The PC, even the laptop, are DEAD! As dead as the crabs piled up on the shores of the Thanet coast!!
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_17011895?nclick_check=1
Now, how the hell I am supposed to compose a 200 pp. report, with tabs & appendices, on a hand-held mobile device escapes me for the moment, but the kids all tell me not to sweat it!
>>
There’s not way I’ll be “trusting” google , amazon or anyone else to be cloud-spy-host for my work.
If you have no private life and your professional life has no importance or confidential content I suppose it could be useful. There’s vitually nothing I would want to do on a service that snooping my every word and indexing what I do.
Anthony, don’t confuse MTBF and how long you can expect a device to work for before it breaks. It’s not the same thing! Under heavy usage I’d give that device a year or two , so keep your backups upto date.
NAND based devices burn out after a certain number of write cycles. So even quoting a figure based of “years” is pretty meaningless and probably dishonest, as is providing MTBF figures to the general public who will almost certainly misunderstand what it means.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/qual/specMTBF-c.html
I’m not saying they are bad, the speeds are excellent as you note. It may be a better idea to split you disk usage. If you can organise Windows so that this device is predominantly read only (c:/windows ; c:/Program Files ; etc. ) and keep data areas like your home folder/desktop on another device, that would offer you longest life whilst benefiting from fast start up times.
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I worked at DEC from 1974-1978 (and again from 1992-2007). At least we could chain the disks together in the operating system to form a single file system. Of course, all that space was shared among the hundred or so users the system supported.
>>
As you can now on a PC running linux or mac OSX.
I have two drives, one with 23 partitions the other with 15 . Bits are used as needed and always show up as one filesystem hierarchy. I can remotely log in to machines elsewhere as an independant user while the main user is independantly using it and probably not even aware. I can even integrate part of their hard disk into my filesystem and still see it as a single file system.
All that with a ONE core processor that does not need three of four anti-virus programs running back to back.
Cost of this amazing OS : zero cents.
“I feel the need – the need for speed!” Sign me up!
This thread has certainly stirred up a spirited discussion by all the old and young geeks out there. Very good information for the most part. What I haven’t seen is a comment about what is coming (SSD: warming or cooling??). So here is my two cents based on many years tracking the progress of computer technology.
First, I too think the long term speed and reliability of current SSDs is suspect, given the write limitations. The best mfgs are over-provisioning the drives (a 100GB drive actually has 128GB of installed capacity, for example) to account for cell failure. For the purposes of this post, I am going to use Other World Computing’s drives, since I am familiar with their strategy and pricing and not sure about the rest. However, I am pretty sure that you are not going to need your SSD for more than a year or two, because new shiny, cheaper, bigger and faster ones are coming down the pike.
To understand what to expect, we need to loosely invoke Moore’s Law, which originally stated that CPU power would double every 18 months. This is most usefully interpreted as power-per-dollar increments, and 12 months is a more accurate figure currently, as the development cycles have speeded up. It also applies to storage.
While CPUs have reached a plateau, storage media (HDDs and SSDs) are right on the steep part of the curve. So how do they compare and where will we be in 2013? My contention is that the demise of the HDD is, in Mark Twains words, “Greatly exaggerated.”
For the purposes of discussion, I am going to use the OWC 100GB Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD 2.5″ Serial-ATA 9.5mm Solid State Drive. It is over provisioned by 28% and costs $300, which makes the arithmetic easy and is in the cost/capacity sweet spot. Make your own comparisons. http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/SSDMXRE100/
First the basics:
100GB SSD @ur momisugly $300 = $3/GB (depending on what you bought, you milage may vary)
And a typical HDD:
2TB @ur momisugly $100 = $.05/GB, a 60:1 cost per stored byte ratio
This is Christmas 2011. Let’s look in Santa’s stocking and see what’s in it for 2013:
SSDs are now $.75/GB. However, like HDDs, the minimum retail price point for current capacity will probably settle at $100, so we get a 133GB SSD for $100.
Meanwhile, for $100 we get an 8TB HDD. HDD technology is far, far from any kind of plateau (we are now in the early stages of perpendicular recording, still to come is nano-lithography, with potentially 1000x more capacity).
The next year, 2014, we get 266 GB of SSD for $100, 16 TB of HDD. And so it goes.
There is no question that the “Need for speed” is real for all of us humans, who are quite tired of waiting for computers to do their business and get on with it. I’m hovering over the “Buy Now” button myself. So what might happen to change our picture of the future? What might happen to accelerate the progress of SSDs?
For one thing, today the MFGs are focused on replacing laptop HDDs, their sweet spot. They are peddling high cost/high profit SSDs to amortize their very high development costs (last time I checked, a FAB was more than $2 billion) for smaller feature-size chips. In the early phase of marketing, this will be the rule. However, in a couple of years, some upstart company will arrive, having contracted with one of the slightly out of date FABs, to deliver slightly behind the curve chips at ridiculously low prices.
NOW, consider that all of the current SDDs are in the 2.5″ form factor. Imagine stuffing a 3.5″ form factor (all desktop computers) with SSD chips which are a little too big for competitive 2/5″ SSDs, but at 1/4 the price. 5X (maybe 4X accounting for the size of the “Out of date” chips) the volume at 1/4 the price/stored byte in 2013 =
530GB for $100.
So there you have the fearless predictions. 30 years of experience has shown that despite all the technological advances (marketing hype), this is the development curve that will be followed. We will see.
In the meantime, we are going to see very rapid development of computer system technology- I would expect that Apple will no longer offer HDDs in the next generation of laptops and that in the next generation after that (2012 or 13) the SSDs will be integrated into the motherboard, with another huge speed bump as some PCI cards are doing today. iPads will have 100+ GB of storage. The desktop computer as we know it may be going bye bye, (but oh please, not that fantastic 27″ screen!) but I am very sure that in every system, there will be a big HDD somewhere pumping out zillions of terabytes of storage. What for? Not for word processing; not for pictures; not for movies. How about for incredibly detailed and complete 3D virtual realities (stored actual-realities among other things) with, oh, say all of our Facebook friend’s avatars meeting in Cancun for, oh geez, let me guess, a global cooling conference. Any questions, read Snow Crash again.
Click – Buy Now.
SSD’s are OK for small storage needs. You stated yourself that you only use 60GB. I’ve got multiple terabytes myself. There’s also no way they’re going to take over the storage market in two years. The simple fact is that they are too expensive and pretty much always will be. A modern 300mm fab costs billions to capitalize and the number of bits it can ship is pretty limited. MLC is a trick for getting more bits out of the same silicon, but you pay a high endurance penalty. The industry is pushing at the 22nm node and things are really ugly below that. The 10K write limit for MLC is very real. They’re hoping you won’t notice it by using wear leveling and hoping you don’t pound on the unit too much, but it’s a gamble. They may be right, but I’d be nervous having a sizable swap file on an MLC unit. On top of that the leveling algorithms get pretty sluggish as capacity is approached on a unit as it struggles to keep all of the pages at about the same write count.
I’m also surprised at your reported power savings. You mentioned something about a fan, so I wonder how much is there. I couldn’t make out the drive model, but a modern 3.5″ disk should consume about 11W max and be far less than that most of the time. The big power pigs in computers these days are the cpu, the screen in laptops (backlight), and the RAM which must be refreshed, i.e. read and re-written, about every 2ms. I don’t know the exact draws of chipsets, but take a look at the heat sinks and you’ll see they get toasty as well, not to mention the graphics cards that require their own molex connectors. A laptop drive will use less than 10W maximum load and more like 2-4W.
A much more likely scenario is that hybrid drives take over the market. You can get nearly all of the performance gains by placing a small amount of flash on the drive and using the large and cheap (and more recoverable) rigid disk for main storage. It’s really a pretty obvious choice. Pay a $25 premium over a plain rigid disk for 80% of the pure SSD performance. You also get 10-20 times better cost/capacity. Given how price sensitive the markets still are and how much people complain about even spending $50 for a 1TB drive and expect laptops to cost $4-500, I don’t see how consumers are going to tolerate an SSD taking up half of their computer budget for 5-10times less capacity.
Windows experience index……..LOL……..
Thank you for this. I think I would benefit alot. I keep all my data on a terabyte and my OS on 30 GB of which I only use 17GB.
Hard drives keep getting higher capacity and better energy efficiency. Typically a larger drive at the same RPM will have a higher transfer rate due mainly to there being more data zipping past the heads in the same time.
Crank the RPMs higher and the transfer rate gets even faster, boot times drop and so do application load times.
Mid to low end laptops and even some high end ones tend to be equipped with slower spinning drives. These days a 5400 RPM is common. Not too long ago 4200 RPM was most common. I had a circa 1998 Toshiba Tecra 800 which came with a 4200 RPM drive, 40 gig. It was a mid-high end business laptop but with Win 98SE it took about 6 minutes to boot. I swapped in a 5400 RPM 120 gig and boot times dropped to less than 2 minutes.
Similar tale with my current Acer Aspire. I changed the OEM 80 gig for a 500 gig and it’s like a whole new laptop, significantly faster overall. Battery life should be better too, if the power consumption specs of the new drive are real. Now if I could just find an affordable dual core Socket P CPU that has core technology contemporary with or newer than the Conroe-L Celeron 530. (CPU-World and Wikipedia for some reason say nothing about the Conroe-L core solo 500 series Celerons.) I’m *not* going to pay more for a CPU than the laptop plus the new hard drive cost. The laptop was a doorbuster Wal-Mart special 3 years ago for just under $300 and the 500 gig was $45.
So if’n you can’t throw down the $$$ for an SSD, you can give a computer a very good boot in performance simply by buying the largest, fastest spinning hard drive you can afford. (Which is very affordable from places like geeks.com )
P.S. To put storage prices in perspective, I remember when drives first got down to $1 a *megabyte*. That was for a 500 megabyte drive. Half a thousand bucks for only 500 megabytes! Storage prices sunk past $1 a gigabyte so fast the computer media industry didn’t even have time to comment on it. 😉
Can you tell me where it is made? Thanks.
@Tsk Tsk
“the RAM which must be refreshed, i.e. read and re-written, about every 2ms.”
RAM does not have to re-written in a refresh cycle. It doesn’t even have to need a complete read cycle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random_access_memory#CAS_before_RAS_refresh
John F. Hultquist says:
January 10, 2011 at 10:52 am
My first (and only) true blue IBM PC was a prize I won in a programming contest. I was working in a game programming company in 1981. We got a contract from Nolan Bushnell to develop the hardware and a half dozen games for a project of his called AndroMan. It was basically a freewheeling robot controlled through an IR tower attached to the one of the game controller ports of an Atari 2600 VCS. There were four programmers assigned to the project. Various prizes were offered to the first programmer to finish his game. I won. Handily. I nearly finished a second game before anyone else finished the first. As a prize I selected a fully loaded IBM PC with a price tag of $4000. Hard drives weren’t offered on those first IBM PCs so I added my own – a pair of 5MB Syquist removeable hard disk drives that I had sitting around from a previous project at a different company. I had to prototype my own hard disk controller board and write the firmware for it and that was the first (of many) expansion card designs I did for the IBM PC. In effect I had an IBM XT before IBM came out with it. For my next trick a friend and I did the first knockoff of the Lotus/Intel/Microsoft (LIM) Expanded Memory card. My buddy did the hardware and I wrote the knockoff utilities that came with the real LIM cards plus I added a utility of my own – a hard disk cache with a bitching least frequently used and predictive look-ahead algorithm. At the time, it bloody screamed. Those were the days.
All this talk of gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes reminds me of the joke:
“Q: If an audio geek is an audiophile, what do you call a computer storage geek?
A: A petaphile.”
Anthony,
The Kingston is an ok drive, but only ok… there are much better choices in SSDs. I’d also suggest waiting for a couple of months before purchasing, as drives based on the new generation of Flash memory and related chipsets have been shown and announced recently, and should be available over this quarter and the next.
On a more general note, while it’s fun to speculate about the future of storage, I don’t think any of us can say what the market is going to look like 5 years from now, much less later than that. The tech changes, often for reasons that we can’t see until it happens. Flash isn’t the only tech in play either (for non-volatile storage). But as for right now, over the next several months, the decision to have a SSD boot/app drive is a really good idea… as long as it’s a fast SSD.
the 128 GB desktop kit(i think it’s the same model) is on the frontpage of Slickdeals right now – at Buy.com after a $75 rebate and a $10 off $200 E-coupon, the final cost is $124.95 dlv…. 🙂
wish i had the cash now…it’ll prob be sold out soon…
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2614953