At which price point will you switch to SSD as your primary desktop storage?

[randomrogue]

For storage I'd do it when you can get them for about 7-10 cents a Gigabyte. Why? I have plenty of storage now and I don't see a reason to upgrade until the price is less than what I paid for these drives. I've been doing it this way successfully for about 20 years and don't see a reason to change. To be perfectly honest I'd probably wait until they're in the 5 cent range since historically I have never upgraded until the prices halved or better.

For a boot drive I'd have to compare to the price of a Raptor but I'm way too lazy to do that right now.

 

[Fallengod]

Im still chugging along great with my Velociraptor for main boot drive. Have not yet switched to a SSD. I plan to get one but only when a 120gb gets into the $100 price point.

 

[Charlie98]

Im still chugging along great with my Velociraptor for main boot drive. Have not yet switched to a SSD. I plan to get one but only when a 120gb gets into the $100 price point.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820171545

 

[neilsabo]

^what the heck is up with all those reviews saying the drive dies after 4-5 months

 

[bunnyfubbles]

I've already transitioned to 100% SSD for all my OS/apps, although with only 2x256GB worth of space I have to be picky on what I install

although I'd wager at the $0.20-25 range I might be willing to go 100% SSD outside of video storage/archive/backup as that would give me 4-5TB of space (which is what I'm working with my current rig and 2x256GB SSD and 3x1.5TB 7200K HDD without breaking a grand.

but to not even consider using an HDD I would have to see prices in the $.05-10 range, otherwise they're simply too inexpensive not to use if only for backups/archives/etc

 

[exdeath]

Will never use a HDD again. Otherwise I'd have to go back to cassette tapes and CPUs built out of mechanical relays too.

No excuse why a machine capable of performing over a TRILLION operations per second like a modern PC should cause ME, a HUMAN operator, to wait for ANYTHING, EVER. A PC that hitches and lags and can't keep up with the rate I input commands despite 99.9% idle CPU fails miserably and belongs in the trash; or at least it's HDD does.

It's 2012. I stopped measuring data rates in kilobytes per second in 1980. Yes even your "150 MB/sec" Velociraptors and 7200 RPM "TB" drives will plummet to mere kilobytes per second speed when you do anything realistic on your PC that causes random access, oh say like, booting, installing software, transferring folders with lots of small files. I mean seriously does anybody have a single 10 GB MP3? No.

The only thing that doesn't have a SSD in my house is my XBox 360, and I'm greatly annoyed by load times even after installing the game internally.

 

[F1shF4t]

All the machines I use have only SSDs except the desktop which still has a couple HDDs for storage.

Obviously it will be a while before SSDs are affordable enough to put into my NAS boxes. To put it this way, I'd start changing over now if you could get 2TB TLC/MLC SSDs with say 1000 write cycles at double or less than what equivalent HDDs cost.

 

[Lonyo]

Will never use a HDD again. Otherwise I'd have to go back to cassette tapes and CPUs built out of mechanical relays too.

No excuse why a machine capable of performing over a TRILLION operations per second like a modern PC should cause ME, a HUMAN operator, to wait for ANYTHING, EVER. A PC that hitches and lags and can't keep up with the rate I input commands despite 99.9% idle CPU fails miserably and belongs in the trash; or at least it's HDD does.

It's 2012. I stopped measuring data rates in kilobytes per second in 1980. Yes even your "150 MB/sec" Velociraptors and 7200 RPM "TB" drives will plummet to mere kilobytes per second speed when you do anything realistic on your PC that causes random access, oh say like, booting, installing software, transferring folders with lots of small files. I mean seriously does anybody have a single 10 GB MP3? No.

The only thing that doesn't have a SSD in my house is my XBox 360, and I'm greatly annoyed by load times even after installing the game internally.

Considering my primary storage is more large files which benefit from sequential writes, I'm quite happy with mechanicals for primary storage.

BF3 is on my SSD, Windows is on my SSD, my mp3s and films etc, as well as most games, are on mechanical drives.

Would it be nice to have 50MB/s+ random read/write for everything? Maybe.
Is it enough to have >100MB/s typical sequential read/write when I mostly deal with large files and sequential transfers on those drives? Hell yes.

How often do you transfer folders with lots of small files? Maybe it's a minor annoyance on the very odd occasion, but until there's near price parity, it's not likely to be worth the extra cost of an SSD for 99% of people.

 

[BFG10K]

1. Read the article, this a firmware bug unique to that one controller that simply cannot occur on an OS drive nor will it reasonably occur naturally on a storage drive, rather it requires very specific situation (implausible for a normal user) where you fill the drive to 100% with incompressible data and then overwrite it with more incompressible data to fill the spare area, all done on as a secondary data drive to trigger the bug.

You said the degradation claim is overhyped BS because it only occurs on TRIM-less systems…

I showed you an example where it occurs on a system with TRIM. It doesn’t matter what causes it or why it happens. It happens and it’s repeatable, and TRIM won’t fix it.

2. You are comparing said bugged result to the speed of an empty raptor 1TB sequential speed... Why not a raptor that is also full to the brim with random incompressible data?

When I can get a 1TB SSD for $250 we can make that comparison. Until then SSDs need to be held to higher standards given they cost a lot more.

4. It did NOT occur on a TRIMMED drive... it occurred and then TRIM was unable to fix it.

Stop playing semantic games.

6. Before you go "SSDs have firmware bugs therefore they suck"... I have seen worse firmware bugs on HDDs. And for that matter worse firmware bugs than this one on other SSDs too.

It’s just as well a 3TB HDD only costs 6c/GB then. I’d feel a lot worse if I had a firmware bug after paying $1/GB. Oh wait…

1. On sequential only, it will still be much faster overall thanks to random.

That’s great and all, but that graph is a file copy test, and Caviar Black will copy faster than both Intel and the Force RAID in that situation.

2. This torture test is not how drives are used IRL.

The HDD can be tortured the same way but its before and after scores won’t change. At ten times more per GB I expect the SSD to be more robust, not more brittle.

3. Notice how the vast majority of SSDs are not adversely affected and have the same speed after said torture test.

That’s because the specific example was for RAID. Don’t jump into arguments if you don’t understand their context.

 

[BFG10K]

No excuse why a machine capable of performing over a TRILLION operations per second like a modern PC should cause ME, a HUMAN operator, to wait for ANYTHING, EVER. A PC that hitches and lags and can't keep up with the rate I input commands despite 99.9% idle CPU fails miserably and belongs in the trash; or at least it's HDD does.

Just curious, how do you download files off the internet at 10MB/sec (e.g. Steam, patches, service packs, OS updates)? Or even basic surfing like this forum?

A lot of internet situations can visibly slow down regardless of how fat your pipe is. You must be throwing out a lot of computers.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Already switched along time ago. Never looking back.

HDs are so insanely slow its almost unbelieveable.

 

[sandorski]

500gb for $100 would make me go exclusive SSD.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I put in $1/GB, keeping in mind that it's desktop storage, not server. I would never use a SSD for server as I need mass storage for cheaper that can have unlimited read/writes.

I recently built a new PC and went SSD for the main (and only) drive. Got a 120GB drive for a bit over $100 which was decent. It's strictly for the OS and apps, actual data is stored and worked on off the server.

 

[Vegemeister]

1. Read the article, this a firmware bug unique to that one controller that simply cannot occur on an OS drive nor will it reasonably occur naturally on a storage drive, rather it requires very specific situation (implausible for a normal user) where you fill the drive to 100% with incompressible data and then overwrite it with more incompressible data to fill the spare area, all done on as a secondary data drive to trigger the bug.

A common scenario for an encrypted disk.

 

[taltamir]

A common scenario for an encrypted disk.

Fair argument, you definitely have a point. So its not "impossible under normal operations" but rather "requires a specific niche (but not terribly rare) condition of being encrypted; which is using the drive as intended and as such is an actual problem" (which is a really annoying bug and pisses me off as I own the SSD model in question I was just considering encrypting it too)

However it is still overhyped BS. Note I didn't say "never ever happens" I said "overhyped BS".

First, it is overhyped because it only affects systems without TRIM OR a single controller with bugged firmware with TRIM under niche specific circumstances.

Second, it is overhyped because people are led to belief that it will degrade to nothing rather then a one time performance drop to a level that is still pretty damn fast.

Third, it is a BS argument. Remember that the argument I called a BS on was that the SSDs as a whole are not worth it due to 3 "drawbacks" compared to HDD. But this drawback is LESS SEVERE on an SSD then it is on a HDD, and even a worse case scenario SSD is still vastly superior to any HDD. Yes the

Sure, the 1TB platter velociraptor, when using the outermost rings (aka, empty; and not experiencing its own performance loss due to being full), might get slightly faster sequential speed. But the SSD in question still annihilates it on random IO and will give you a much faster system.

It’s just as well a 3TB HDD only costs 6c/GB then. I’d feel a lot worse if I had a firmware bug after paying $1/GB. Oh wait…

While cheaper, firmware bugs in HDD/SSD can lead to dataloss and that is the real problem not the cost of the drive.
Granted it does piss me off to find out my drive specifically has this bug, I just bought it a month ago for 350$ as an upgrade for the intel G2.

 

[Vegemeister]

@taltamir

I agree with you. I was just nitpicking. The common desktop use case is predominantly reads anyway.

 

[GarfieldtheCat]

Already using SSD for all desktop storage (of course, I only have 1-2 games and no real amount of music/pics/movies on my PC).

I do have 2 2tb spinning disks that I hook up to a docking station for backups.

 

[d3fu5i0n]

And in a RAID configuration you lose TRIM anyhow...

I thought that Intel released TRIM support for RAID 0 setups a while ago...
Perhaps I'm mistaken...?

 

[taltamir]

I thought that Intel released TRIM support for RAID 0 setups a while ago...
Perhaps I'm mistaken...?

You are, intel released a driver that allows you to have TRIM on non RAID drives if the mobo controller is in RAID mode.

So if you have a RAID1, 5, or 0 array of HDDs for storage and an SSD for OS, the SSD will have TRIM (originally it did not even though it was not part of the array)

Intel has been promising to release a driver that TRIMs SSDs in RAID0 arrays for a while now, its supposed to be released soon. it is supposed to be v11.5 of intel RST (rapid storage drivers)
http://www.station-drivers.com/telechargement/intel/sata/11.5.htm

As you can see on the release notes:

2. This release will not enable the TRIM on RAID0 feature, but it will be added in the next RST 11.5 release. Contact your RST AE representative with questions.

Eventually you will have TRIM with all forms of RAID, there is no reason for RAID1, 5, 6, 10 or whatever can't have TRIM, it just takes time to create such a feature and RAID0 is getting priority at the moment for reasons of sales and marketing (they believe it to be a more sellable feature)

 

[exdeath]

Just curious, how do you download files off the internet at 10MB/sec (e.g. Steam, patches, service packs, OS updates)? Or even basic surfing like this forum?

A lot of internet situations can visibly slow down regardless of how fat your pipe is. You must be throwing out a lot of computers.

Chrome + AdBlock +SSD = damn near instant loading of most web sites. It's amazing how fast the web is when a single page isn't opening up 100 connections to download 100 MB of Flash adds and freezing up the browser until it all inits.

Internet downloads don't bother me so much. Sure it takes a few minutes, but it's to be expected. Things on my local machine however need to respond instantly. I don't want to see an hourglass or flashlight in Windows Explorer, ever.

I *have* in fact downloaded things off the internet faster than I've had to endure copying small files off a HDD...

 

[bryanW1995]

When I can get a high quality 256GB for around $150 I'm in.

crucial m4 256gb was $199 fs at newegg the other day. Your day may be close at hand.

I answered that I'm already using ssd for OS and storage, which is true. Now that I'm at just under 500Gib I plan to fill them up until they're at around 80%. If I manage that then I'll probably offload some stuff to my 2tb wd20ears, but as of now I'm just using 2tb hdd for seti (which was already on that, anyway) and to hold my wife's backups for her pictures/etc. I literally just have one partition on the RAID array and put all of my games/data/itunes/etc etc into the C: drive.

I will be upgrading my measly 60GB SSD, soon, to a 256GB, that will be enough for everything except movies, which will be going to an HTPC soon. This includes iTunes, Steam, photos and such.

I think we are basically at the $1/GB point, for the most part, anyway, and it looks like the price on consumer SSDs is only going down.

When I originally started checking prices on replacing the 60GB, I figured I would be stuck at 128GB (they were going in the $150 range, on sale,) but now that the 256's are at $250 and less (+/-) I can afford to go up a size and put everything on it.

I just did it and got 2 x 256gb m4's to replace my 80gb x25m (which was $220 on BF 2009). For $400 or so for 2 x 256gb, it just got to be too hard to resist the temptation.

 

[bryanW1995]

I did not forget it, its a non issue. Its not degrading over time like you said, its a one time drop. And even after that one time drop (which only happens without TRIM) you still get a drive that is massively faster then HDDs.


None of what you listed are "downsides".

The degradation claim is overhyped BS because it only occurs on TRIM-less systems, does not occur as you described (its not continuous loss to nothingness, its a one time drop), and still results in a drive much faster than a HDD (60% the max speed of said SSD is still a lot faster when the SSD in question gets 100x the random speed and 5x the sequential speed of a spindle disk; being 60x faster in random and 3x faster in sequential is not a "downside"... its a "not as awesome but still awesome upside")

The "no matter how full" claim is BS because there is over provisioning which nearly eliminates the performance drop when the drive is full and furthermore HDD have it far far worse. The more full a HDD is, the slower it is by a far greater margin then SSD slowdowns. Because it is forced to write closer to the center, dropping to 30% of speed of an empty drive is normal... and if actually nearly full it gets catastrophically worse then that as massive fragmentation occurs which results in all random access which destroys the drive's performance. Unlike SSDs, an HDD cannot be over provisioned and as such has no defense against being filled to the brim and having catastrophic performance.

The lifespan claim is BS because every component in the computer has a measurable lifespan and your average SSD currently has a lifespan longer then all other PC components COMBINED. Except for when running high activity server databases (where you just use an eMLC or SLC and get far superior lifespan to HDDs, again).

This point is extremely important in my mind. People talk about ssd's losing performance when they are "full". Well, a quality ssd has enough over-provisioning that it can never really get all that full, anyway. And I've experienced the "your hdd is full so it's slow as a turtle" issue, it's real and it really really sucks. My 36 gb raptor in my mom's computer was full for a while, and even she noticed how badly it performed.

 

[piasabird]

What is an SSD?

I can still purchase a hard drive for < $100.
For watching movies online and office software that works fine.

It is more than price there is also a dependability factor.

People are still trying to build computers for $200. Just because a person can buy something that does not mean a person will go out and buy it.

They sell 60" HDTV's but I will probably not buy one of those either.

 

[bryanW1995]

Actually that isn't true at all: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/...cherryville-brings-reliability-to-sandforce/7

It clearly happens on a TRIM drive, and TRIM was unable to recover the performance.

Furthermore, their 162.5 MB/s sequential write is slower than several HDDs (e.g. Raptor and 1TB/platter 7200 drives) on their outer platters.

Why are you so against ssd's?


Here's the last 2 sentences from the page you linked:


Performance in this worst case scenario isn't terrible but the fact that it's irrecoverable even after a TRIM is what's most troubling. Again, I don't see most end users backing themselves into this corner but it's worth pointing out.

Anand has been talking about this corner case for years. I've been following ssd's closely since I started researching the x25m in late 2009. I'm not saying that nobody has ever accidentally done this to his/her drive, but I've never personally heard of it happening in a real life situation.

 

[lehtv]

I'll switch to SSD for main storage when HDD's aren't really sold in stores anymore. The speed offered by HDDs is fast enough to handle any data I need to store