[nelamvr6]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif I believe they're quite viable right now as far as capacity is concerned. As far as speed and reliability are concerned, I don't know. Maybe you need to pay a lot for that.

I just found this article. It seems that the big manufacturers are just now getting to 64GB. I suppose that's big enough for some folks, but there's no way I could get by with a drive that small.

Not to mention that the SS drives are a LOT slower that the standard drives.

I'd say it'll still be a while before these things are a really viable option, at least for me. Not that you can actually buy one right now anyways.

 

[Nebby]

Ah...I didn't realize the new drives were Flash based, I thought we were talking about the memory SSD's

 

[Chu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nelamvr6 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I just found this article. It seems that the big manufacturers are just now getting to 64GB. I suppose that's big enough for some folks, but there's no way I could get by with a drive that small. Not to mention that the SS drives are a LOT slower that the standard drives. I'd say it'll still be a while before these things are a really viable option, at least for me. Not that you can actually buy one right now anyways.

The latest gen of SS drives actually isn't that bad in performance terms. They don't hold a candle to the best desktop SATA drives, but compared to their laptop brethren they're not that bad.

Some Benchmarks.

As everyone else said, they're going to do nothing for sound quality, unless it's the last source of noise in your HTPC and you finally get to nix it. If they get cheap though they're going to be huge for many, many other uses.

 

[lan]

There's no way of coming to this conclusion unless you test the drives in those applications.

I plan on using some in my ipod when they become cheaper.

 

[nelamvr6]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chu /img/forum/go_quote.gif The latest gen of SS drives actually isn't that bad in performance terms. They don't hold a candle to the best desktop SATA drives, but compared to their laptop brethren they're not that bad. Some Benchmarks.

I'm not sure you look at those benchies and determine that these things aren't bad in performance terms, they look horrendous to me! Abysmal!

Look at the media encoding and file copy benchies! Look at the OS load times! These aren't bad performers?

Disk I/O being the biggest bottleneck on most systems, there is just no way I could live with a 16GB hard drive that was slow as molasseses!

 

[Chu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nelamvr6 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm not sure you look at those benchies and determine that these things aren't bad in performance terms, they look horrendous to me! Abysmal! Look at the media encoding and file copy benchies! Look at the OS load times! These aren't bad performers? Disk I/O being the biggest bottleneck on most systems, there is just no way I could live with a 16GB hard drive that was slow as molasseses!

Haha, ok. It's not good, but I honestly don't think it's so bad.

Yeah, that startup time is absolutely horrible, but the hibernate startup/shutdown time is actually 20% faster then a traditional hard drive which, well, yeah that is a little odd.

If you look at some of the raw data on storagereview the drive performs about 10% worse then 5400 rpm drives for sequential reads, which means overall it probably outperforms them because of the insane random access times. I mean, 5400 drives arn't exactly blazing fast, but they certainly are more then tolerable.

 

[HFat]

These benchmarks aren't bad at all and that drive is cheaper than I thought 16G would be.

The only thing that would concern me is reliability... how good is the "wear leveling" and how long would the drive last in real usage (no MTBF ********, thank you)?

 

[nelamvr6]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif These benchmarks aren't bad at all and that drive is cheaper than I thought 16G would be.

They're not bad?

I get frustrated waiting for my current hard drive!

In what world are those benchmarks not bad?

 

[HFat]

I'm frustrated with mine... but I'm not frustrated so much by its speed than by its noise. It's fairly noisy because it's fairly fast.

It's all about tradeoffs.

I'm not about to recommend such drives for servers or for media-editing workstations obviously.

 

[nelamvr6]

Well, I'm not saying they won't be viable in the future, I'm just saying they're not ready for prime time just yet.

 

[moj0]

IMHO, i don't think there would be any difference in 'sound quality'. There are both HDD and flash based players now.. but nobody's comparing them on that basis.
I'm guessing SSD's will be better in terms on power and speed. One interesting thing is that SSD drive doesn't need to be defragmented.. coz it doesn't get fragmented

 

[HFat]

wrong thread

to post sth on topic: in most cases, you don't need to defrag hard drives either.

 

[error401]

SSD drives have much better access times than standard magnetic drives, but rather worse sequential transfer rates. For most workloads, random access time is much more important than sequential transfer, and as a result the average real-world transfer rate can potentially be much higher, and access times for very small files will also be lower. In the real world, quickly accessing a requested block is much more important than streaming 120MB/s from the drive. This is especially important for application startup etc. where dynamically loaded functions must be pulled in from myriad files all over the filesystem.

I think that the device reviewed here has a rather poor memory controller. At 20MB/s and sub-1ms access times this device should be performing very well at e.g. Windows startup, which accesses a massive number of small files rather than one large one.

See this Tom's review where the SSD device bests the standard hard drives in every test except raw data transfer rate. This is more what I'd expect to see.

Of course, all of this is completely irrelevant to audio quality...

 

[Thelonious Monk]

i'm really really tired... when i read the topic title i was thinking to myself "there's no such thing as a tube hard drive"

 

[LeonvB]

Quote:

64 GB unit can read 64 MB/S, write 45 MB/s

Talking about performance, you do realise even a 15K SAS drive crawls around pumping out 1Mb/s if you stress it enough (ie small blocks)? And that Super talent drive isn't the best performer at all: it's an industrial design (20-25Mb/s), so it's more about reliability than about speed.
BTW 128Gb and 256Gb drives with higher speeds (R=69/W=55 Mb/s) are announced.