Solid State Drives vs Hard Disk Drives

[oz]

SSDs are gaining in popularity very fast, and prices are gradually coming down while storage sizes continue to increase, but how would those of you that have actually tried both, HDD and SSD drives, compare them based on your own experiences?

Are SSDs presenting any special problems for you when it comes to installation, partitioning, system imaging, daily usage, etc, or would you say that solid state drives have been no more problematic than mechanical drives?

[ryokimball]

Frankly I'm still shy of them because of that limited read/write, but so many hard drives have been failing around me lately I'm about to think that's not as fearsome as previously thought.

[rokytnji]

So far so good with my PCIE SSD drives. Dogs knocked my EEE 900 off of 4 foot high round nightstand to concrete tiled floor. Nary a problem. Screen stayed intact also (lucky me).

If I could wedgey/shoe horn one of these into my EEEPC 701SD or 900. I would. Saw one a few days ago for $49.00 after rebate but the sale is over now. PCIE SSD is my only option (without major case mod) with my units though. Although when the price drops to a reasonable level. My Acer Aspire One 9" LCD with platter sata drive might see a change.

[onederer]

SSD's, I'll be staying away from them as long as the prices are too high and the storage capacity is too small, as compared to their mechanical counter-parts. I think that the prices are being kept artificially high. I don't believe that it's that much more difficult to manufacture one of those SSD's than to manufacture any other type of solid state memory device.

[Freshmeadow]

Greetings from Guelph Ontario! I have had an Asus EeePC 701 with a 4 gig SSD since May 2008 and it has been a treat to work with. I have partitioned it and installed several Linux OS' to it the same way I would to a mechanical drive. I like the SSD so much I am thinking of adding a second one to the Eee with a larger capacity to enable dual-booting with another OS. No complaints from me on this type of drive. Also, it is quite fast.
Cheers!

[philferrar]

I purchased a 60Gb SSD from eBay about 18 months ago for approx £60 - bargain !!

I fitted it in my laptop which now dual boots with XP and Ubuntu 10.10 - the whole experience has been good. It's very fast [boot times reduced] and quiet - would recommend to anyone.

[yoav_by]

I've been using intel 80GB G2 SSD for the last 9 months with ubuntu and it's a real pleasure. After installing the OS I upgrade kernel to 2.6.33+ and edit fstab (add noatime,discard options) to ensure TRIM command is executed, and that's all the extra work needed. The speed increase is nice - ubuntu boots in seconds, Firefox starts in 2-3 seconds etc. I've measured read speed of 220MB/S compared to 98MB/S on a standard HD.

[r31griffo]

Frankly I'm still shy of them because of that limited read/write, but so many hard drives have been failing around me lately I'm about to think that's not as fearsome as previously thought.

This isn't the concern it used to be. Manufacturers now have wear-leveling algorithms that help extend the life by not writing to the same bits over and over again...although if your SSD doesn't have built in wear-leveling you could use a file-system with wear-leveling to avoid premature failure like JFFS or JFFS2.

SSD's, I'll be staying away from them as long as the prices are too high and the storage capacity is too small, as compared to their mechanical counter-parts. I think that the prices are being kept artificially high. I don't believe that it's that much more difficult to manufacture one of those SSD's than to manufacture any other type of solid state memory device.

I totally agree with your comment "I think that the prices are being kept artificially high", as soon as a dodgy company starts mass producing these and selling them at a more reasonable price I think all SSD manufactures will lower their prices dramatically.

I purchased a 60Gb SSD from eBay about 18 months ago for approx £60 - bargain !!

I fitted it in my laptop which now dual boots with XP and Ubuntu 10.10 - the whole experience has been good. It's very fast [boot times reduced] and quiet - would recommend to anyone.

How did this effect battery life? I've read that SSD drives use less energy on average than their mechanical cousins but I was hoping to hear a real users experience rather than "lab tests". There's also the added security of better shock resistance.

I can see a market for both types of drives. For example, I require a large capacity in my home server for my shares, I have 4 x 1.5TB drives in a Raid 5 array, it would cost a small fortune to get that capacity on SSD. I have several home computers that I've built using SSD drives as I've found they are faster:
to boot,
to run programs,
to wake from sleep mode and
to shut down.

I've considered adding a SSD drive to my server for the boot drive and my virtual machines:

Email server
Web server
Proxy server

to reduce wait times.

Cheers,

Griffo

[oz]

My own experiences with SSDs have been pretty good for the most part, but I did run into a snag when trying to restore a system image made on an SSD system over to a mechanical hard disk drive system. The restore process delivered a failed error immediately and that was the end of that, even on multiple attempts with different hard drives. I've had plenty of success, however, installing HHD system images over to SSDs, then tweaking those systems with SSD-oriented configs.

[cong06]

It's very fast [boot times reduced] and quiet - would recommend to anyone.

Same. I noticed the SSD performance increase in my EeePC710SD, and so when I bought a "real" laptop, I bought a 128GB SSD. Granted it was $300, so a bit expensive...

How did this effect battery life? I've read that SSD drives use less energy on average than their mechanical cousins but I was hoping to hear a real users experience rather than "lab tests". There's also the added security of better shock resistance.

This doesn't mean anything, but I think I've noticed it? Question mark because I guess I have nothing to compare it to...

I'd also be interested in numbers.