Hi all,
I wanted you all to see this.  This is great news.
No more hard drive crashes in our lifetimes!
Harry
Changes Are Coming For The Hard Drive

We wish to express our appreciation to PC Pitstop for granting permission to make their excellent article available here. You will find a URL for the source
article at the bottom of the page along with a link to their website.
We apologize for any discrepancies between this and the original article. These may have occurred due to our efforts to make it easier to read with a screen
reader.

Source PC Pitstop

The next big improvement for your computer is here. The always spinning, ever failing hard drive is becoming an artsy door stop, replaced by Solid State
Drives (SSD). They have a lot going for them but there are also some misconceptions about what they provide.

Untill now, cooling fans, optical drives, power supplies and hard drives, all had moving parts. Moving parts and wear go hand in hand, so it's no surprise
that hard drives are at the top of everyones failure list. Now, thanks to SSD technology, it's possible to put together a consumer computing system with
no spinning hard drive or optical drive. You could conceivably get by without even a cooling fan but why try. Using one low rpm fan would provide fresh
cool air with little to virtually no noise.

What Is The SSD Drive?

Lets take a real look at what SSD drives are, and what they can offer us in real life improvements.

PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION andSize.

Their small 2.5 in. x 4 in. size makes them perfect for use in desktops, laptops, and notebooks. In fact they use the same form factor as your current SATA
laptop drive. They are available in a 1.8 in. size in addition to the 2.5 in. size popular now. The technology on the 1.8 sized drive is actually faster,
but the 2.5 size is getting all the action due to manufacturing costs.

Data And Power Interface.

SSD drives use the exact same connections as existing SATA and SATA II drives. Some of the lower priced SSD drives even come with an IDE connection. If
your laptop uses a standard SATA interface you can just unplug that drive and replace it with the new SSD. The drive holder/heat sink and securing mechanism
are interchangeable.

ssd-conectors-trim

Weights of the SSD drives are significantly lighter than the standard spinning platter drives and also lighter than notebook drives. Note that the laptop
heat sink and the SSD drive case are configured to match for attachment and as noted, use the same form factor. This makes for a more secure installation
and easier removal.

Drive Weights
Laptop
SSD
WD Raptor
4.1 oz.
2.5 oz.
1 lb. 4.5 oz

FEATURES

Temperature is a strong point for SSDs. Compared to full size drives the difference is significant. What might not be so obvious is how small a reduction
there is when compared to current 5400 rpm laptop drives. The newer laptop hard drives use little power, and are relatively cool during operation. My digital
thermometer shows only a 3 to 5-degree difference between the two. Of course any diffrences in heat would be a driect result of the watts being used. The
specifications posted on most manufacturers sites bear this out. Without giving a page full of "watts used" for varying drive states, just be aware that
there's a big difference in watts used between SSD drives and larger 3.5 inch drives, and not much difference between SSD drives and 5400 rpm laptop drives
.

Drive Temps

Drive Type
Idle
Load
Std. 7200 rpm
85F
95 F
Laptop 5400 rpm
81F
86F
SSD Solid State
79F
79F
This reduction stayed constant with varying types of HD use. While the temps fluctuated depending on the task, the difference in temps between the two
drives stayed about the same.

The 7 degree difference between 5400 rpm laptop drives and SSD drives during load is nice, but the hard drive is not the component causing the majority
of heat coming from your laptop. Most of the heat is coming from the processor and memory. The switch to SSD made no measurable difference in the peak
temperatures coming from under the laptop. The expected result was obvious but I was still disappointed.

Price is where the proverbial SSD hits the fan. The 32-gigabyte OCZ SSD drives that I bought cost a whopping $499.99 each, plus shipping. Yes, drives can
be found cheaper, and yes there is a difference in cost from mfgr to mfgr, but the performance of these particular drives is excellent . They are at the
top of most performance comparisons. The fly in this ointment is that even considering performance the cost is extremely high. The only good news regarding
price is, according to all predictions, the price will drop significantly in the next year. Intel is on board and promising that their future involvement
brings a better/faster controller and the expectation of some significant price slashes.

Raid Arrays are configured the same as spinning platter drives. Raid options will depend on the motherboard and bios. I’ve tried it myself and the results
and scaling are excellent.

I raided 3 drives in raid 0 and there is a second system shown below that has four drives in raid 0. While I liked the results, the cost was just a little
rich for my pockets. You can check out my Pitstop score here
(Visit the article at the Source URL below for this information)
and the test using 4 drives in raid 0 are shown
here
(Visit the article at the Source URL below for this information)
Be sure to click "Rankings" once in the OverDrive test.

Maintenance is much changed when using SSDs. DO NOT DEFRAG , defragging degrades drive performance. This caution should be placed in clear view, on the
drive itself. New owners should be made aware before physically installing this hardware. Drive defragmentation has become such a standard procedure that
it’s likely many will defrag before knowing the consequences.

Drive Life of SSD drives is much extended over standard drives. Because of the extended time without failures and the rugged build of the drive having no
moving parts, the military was one of the first to adopt this technology. Drive life is expressed as MTBF or Mean Time Between Failures. For SSD drives
this can be as long as 2,000,000 hours and is years beyond what would be needed.
Note--if you take 8760 hours, which is how many hours are in a year, times 228 years, you'll get just under 2 million hours of hard drive use.


What drives you?

SSD AND NOTEBOOK BATTERY LIFE

It has only been a few months since we finished the article on extending laptop battery life. One of the things we did was play a movie from the hard drive
until the battery was completely discharged. For a comparison of how SSDs affect battery life, we used the same setup. I copied a movie, "Over The Hedge",
to the notebooks hard drive. The battery starts the test at a complete 100% charge and is run uninterrupted until the screen goes black. The time is recorded
in minutes.

I ran several tests using the settings for Performance, Balanced, and Power Saver. They scaled, as you would expect, so I’m including only the representative
results here. To be a valid comparison the settings for the hardware and Operating system on the two drives had to be identical. To guarantee that the
drives were exactly the same, I used Acronis True Image Home and cloned the OS setup to the drives. This removes any chance of settings variations affecting
the outcome. * Please note: the comparison being made is between drives on a given system and not between systems or settings

. 

Systems
Gateway
Gateway
Model
MX8730
MT6821
Stock Drive/Cost
Western Digital Scorpio 5400 RPM $79.00
Hitachi 5400 RPM $74.99
SSD Drive/Cost
OCZ (Samsung) SSD $449.99
OCZ SSD $449.99
Laptop Power Setting
High Performance Option
Power Saver Battery Option
Time In Minutes
SSD Time = 113
SSD Time = 207
Time In Minutes
WD Play time = 111
Hitc Play Time = 198
Total Time Difference
4 minutes
9 minutes
These results show that SSDs do not dramatically increase battery life. Certainly not enough when considering the costs.

PERFORMANCE COMPARISONS

For performance comparisons I used HD Tune in addition to our own OverDrive test. One of the first things to notice is the increased “Maximum MB/sec” transfer
rate. When compared to the 5400 rpm laptop drive, the SSD drive is 66% faster and is the clear performance winner.
7-20-2008-10-56-58-am1
7-20-2008-10-45-26-am1

Next notice the reduced access times. Without getting too far into the world of data transfer, this basically represents the speed of transfer over the
interface between the hard drive and the rest of the PC. With SSD drives this is much reduced, as there are no platters to transfer data to and from. Data
and file transfer, application access, and even better boot times, as were measured and shown below, are the result.
SSD Boot Time = 34 seconds
7200 Boot Time = 48 seconds
Another interesting result was that increased CPU usage spikes were seen on SSD systems. This increase does not seem to be consistent and is much higher
than the expected 2% increase noted by others. The spikes were seen under varying use conditions, on multiple SSD drives, on laptops and desktops, and
on multiple operating systems. The thumbnail above shows this spike. Instead of 16.6% CPU usage it would normally be 2% to 5%. I was unable to determine
what caused the big jumps. My best guess is that it's something to do with the SSD internal controllers.

CONCLUSION
Let's cut to the chase and say that there's no doubt SSDs are on their way to your system, but it will be a while untill they take over.

Conclusion
Capacity Needs to be larger
Price Needs to be lower
Temps/Watts Perfect
Physical Size Excellent with plans to improve
MTBF/Life Excellent
Performance Excellent with room to improve
Even if you're an overclocker, SSD advantages are small when compared to the current Western Digital VelociRaptors. Raptors have much more capacity and
are cheaper to boot. Pun intended.


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