Battle of the Drives: Solid State Drives vs. Normal Hard Drives

Posted by on 03/30 at 12:56 PM Discuss in Forums • Permalink
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The hard disk drive has been with us for over 50 years now. From the first time it made its appearance in an IBM computer in 1956, it fought its way into our computers, to the point where it became the main location for users’ photos, documents, music files, and videos - in other words, it became the most treasured piece of equipment in the computer. A failing hard drive can easily mean losing that all important video of your daughter’s first steps or your son’s Little League All-Star game. But, now, there’s a new kid on the block: solid state hard drives. They promise a more reliable storage location and better performance. This article will detail the advantages and disadvantages of solid state drives compared to ‘normal’ hard disk drives.

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    Posted by Joe Davis  on  03/30  at  01:42 PM

  1. If small sd cards (4gig) have come down in price and up in performance in the last year, who’s to say the big one’s aren’t going to do the same. I think they will. watch, within a year all laps will have them , and be reasonable in price.

    2. Posted by BEN MICHALSKI  on  03/30  at  02:14 PM

  2. Regarding solid state drives vs: spinning disc drives;
    I don’t agree that solid state drives are to expensive at this time ( March,2008) to invest in over the standard moving parts drives. Ultimately it would depend on just how important the data is that is getting stored or backed up. As a professional photographer who relies on back up storage for wedding pictures of my clients in addition to stock images of my commercial clients. Having a dependable means of storing images not only for my clients but also for my archives is ...to use an old SciFi term...’The Prime Directive”.
    Loosing even one of my wedding image files could cost way more than the price of even the biggest available solid state drive.
    Data protection to me equals cash in the bank..in addition to the peace of mind of my clients get trusting me with their most important files.
    Anyone in the business of using data files to do business and not haveing the elacrity to invest in the latest cutting edge state of the art equipment and the ways amd means to implement the technology...is setting themselves up for eventual disaster.
    But to tell you the truth...I hope my competition ignors these methods..it makes it way easier for me to eliminate them.

    3. Posted by Brian  on  03/30  at  04:37 PM

  3. I do not know if these hard drives would go well for my customers. I feel my customers want speed but the good side is durability. I replace a lot of laptop drives and durability is important but I feel customers still want speed. On a desktop the cases are designed better now so there is a lot less noise so I feel where I am putting up to a terabyte drive in people are not going to go for smaller drives that are slower.

    4. Posted by thelastamerican  on  03/30  at  06:04 PM

  4. What about the limited R/W cycles of any flash based drives? Even with a software controlled “randomized” write process, a flash based drive does not last as long. Also, any flash memory mounted on the motherboard of the computer won’t be easily replaced.

    Richy T.

    5. Posted by Ryan  on  03/30  at  06:49 PM

  5. Thanks for the very informative article, as always. However, there are 2 major points you missed:

    1) The failure and return rates of solid state drives is disputed. Generally, people perceive them to be more reliable for the reasons you stated. However, a report by Avian Securities stated the failure rates are being far higher than typical notebook drives (see http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9895986-1.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Crave). Dell has posted a rebuttal, but it only speaks to their own data and not any other manufacturers. Performance is also perceived as being much slower for many common activities, especially for businesses, and is not viewed as acceptable for many people.

    2) The article lacks the note that all nonvolatile flash-based memory (i.e. SSDs) have destructive write cycles. While a typical hard drive can be written to the same spot nearly indefinitely, SSDs can only be written to a finite number of times. For ordinary data, that’s fine, but for things like the FAT or MFT of the file system,, which is overwritten very often, this poses a significant problem. I’ve seen this happen with USB flash drives where you can read data fine, but no changes or additions can be made without first erasing a file (despite only having around 5% of the drive capacity in use). Current SSDs have high write cycle limits, but I certainly wouldn’t trust them with something that is meant to be moderately used every day. I just thought that fact should have been noted somewhere.

    6. Posted by alphaa10  on  03/30  at  06:49 PM

  6. The solid state drive poses the same hazard of hardware failure as a keychain drive, increased (but not necessarily multiplied) by the memory chip assets required to provide its storage value.

    This finite lifespan of solid state drive memory under normal use is the most surprising aspect of the solid state drive. Spared conventional mechanical wear of the standard physical drive, the solid state drive ought happily to run (nearly) forever.

    In contrast, conventional SIMMs or DIMMs survive intensive usage for long periods, with spontaneous errors a relative rarity.

    7. Posted by james abell  on  03/30  at  07:46 PM

  7. if our everyday normal HDD are better at somethings and less at others and cost a lot less at least now would it be possible or even smart to say that you should get a solid state HDD and use it for backing up the data that would be lost if something bad did happen to your drive?

    8. Posted by RobertR.Crews  on  03/30  at  08:51 PM

  8. Hi to all who are interested in this subject.As I read this tech tip and it’s context,I was glad at one point,but sadden by the prices.I’m sure in time as all items do this it will come down into a more reasonable price range!But until it does I can’t see the reasons for changing to a SSH,when the the three disadvanages are more of a problem in dealing with this whole subject?I understand the fact that no moving parts play a big role,but the sizes available in terms of $50.00 per gb is just awee bit much in this day and age.Look most of the technology that we now use has been used by the arm forces first.Not to mention NASA’s programs.

    9. Posted by Merlin Underwood  on  03/30  at  09:11 PM

  9. Thanks for the Great Information.
    I had been wondering, about the differences for some time.
    It’s nice to get some info and be able to really understand it.

    Merlin Underwood

    10. Posted by Merl Priester  on  03/30  at  10:15 PM

  10. I don’t believe reliability at this point should have any thing to do with a persons decision as what drive format to use.

    You need to backup all drives no matter what.
    Backup means reliability.

    Reliable drives don’t count if your laptop is stolen.  A replacement standard hard drive is a lot cheaper than a solid state drive if a drive fails.

    Heat and power consumption are factors to weigh, but at a very dear price.

    11. Posted by Sanjio Islam  on  03/31  at  06:18 AM

  11. I am happy to see your article on the solid state drive.  I just purchased an Eee PC which has a 4GB solid state drive in it.  Do you think that drive can be updated?  Would it involve sodering?

    12. Posted by chris rogers  on  03/31  at  11:35 AM

  12. a couple very important “disadvantages” that MUST be looked upon for new technologies such as this!

    1
    Higher vulnerability to certain types of effects, including abrupt power loss (especially DRAM based SSDs), magnetic fields and electric/static charges compared to normal HDDs (which store the data inside a Faraday cage).

    2
    Limited write cycles – usually Flash storage will wear out after 300,000-500,000 write cycles, while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1–5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer). Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device (so-called wear levelling), rather than rewriting files in place.[5] An example for the life time of SSD is explained in detail here. SSDs based on DRAM, however, do not suffer from this problem

    this info was gathered from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

    13. Posted by BEN MICHALSKI  on  04/01  at  08:10 AM

  13. Not having the tech background I can’t comment on articles and postings addressing the R/W cycles and reliability of SSD’s...all I can say is from my experience. I accidentally washed a 4GB CF card in the laundry a few months back. Low and behold...the images where not affected. However I did transfer them to another drive immediately. I also found a small 1GB ( small 1GB...isn’t that saying something) I lost about a year ago and the images where still there and in full resolution..which is more than I can say for leaving images stored on a disc drive. I have had what is being referred to as “BIT ROT” on disc drives. About a 50% loss in resolution ..especially on Western Digital products...I have had no loss in res on the SSD’s.
    As to the above comment on 300,000 r/w cycles avg on an SSD...if I get 10,000 r/w cycles..I’ll be fine with that. I’ll even be fine with 5K r/w cycles as I throw away any SSD’s after one year. I figure at the cost of 10 bucks a gig...It’s not worth taking any chances.
    As to speed...sure I like fast r/w cycles...who doesn’t...but when I download 1000 images...I usually go get a cup of coffee instead of watching the loading bar go from beginning to end.
    I understand most folks will take a $30 4 gig card and use it till the cow’s come home...but from my experience most folks are quite ignorant and cheap when it comes to using and maintaining computer hardware.

    14. Posted by Ryan  on  04/03  at  07:07 PM

  14. @BEN MICHALSKI
    I understand what you are saying, but you’re comparing apples & oranges. When talking about SSD VS normal hard drives, we’re talking not talking about portable (i.e. SD, MMC, jump drives, etc.) drives. The technology is great for those types of devices.

    As for being happy only having 5K R/W cycles with having a SSD as your main OS drive (like those now being put into more expensive laptops), your computer probably wouldn’t last more than a few days to a week. Probably less. NTFS (and most other major file systems) store their main metadata in a particular section or sections of the drive. When a file system metadata change is needed, which is very often, it tries to reuse that space as much as possible to prevent fragmentation. For instance, the file allocation table (FAT) or Master File Table (MFT) are written to whenever a change in any file on the volume is made, or a file or directory is modified in any way. 5k writes would be used up very quickly in this environment.

    As for “bit rot”, that shouldn’t decrease the resolution of your images. The images are stored digitally, so a single (or a few) bits being off would either throw an error or show up as a few pixels being wrong (if a real lot are wrong, it’s possible that only part of the image would be rendered and the rest would show up as weird colored lines or black). Either way, the resolution shouldn’t change at all.

    15. Posted by Morgan  on  06/10  at  12:12 PM

  15. Great post.  I read another good post on these drives at http://photographytechnologies.blogspot.com/2008/06/solid-state-drives-ssd.html

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