In a fit of flu-induced geekdom, I decided let myself read most of this mammoth 31-page AnandTech article, updating my quasi-nil knowledge about solid-state drives (SSD).
Take-aways
It was a damn long article so here are the key take-aways:
- SSDs are still maturing
- There are good and there are bad SSD drives.
- Flash memory in a standard SSD can be erased only about 10,000 times before it goes bad and stops storing data.
- With SSDs, consumers expect low latency (good for booting and loading applications) rather than high bandwidth (good for storing lots of media files), something that some small manufacturers are only now starting to understand and optimize accordingly for.
- As with hard-disk drives (HDD), write performance for SSDs degrades as the disk fills up, but for different reasons. Because of the inherent need to sometimes erase and re-write large portions of data, an SSD will slow down over time.
- You can « reset » most of the original performance of the SSD by doing what’s called a « secure erase » of the entire drive. Not very convenient.
- You can also avoid some of the long-term slow-down by partitioning your drive in such a way that it sacrifices some of the space.
- Windows 7 will eventually support a TRIM command that can prolong but not perpetuate the time for performance to degrade. However, this will require new SSD firmware, and thus potentially new SSD drives. You may want to hold on before purchasing.
- Intel SSDs are producing the best and most expensive consumer SSDs, and today OCZ may be ideal for the value consumer.
The power of online reviews
Along with a recap of SSD peculiarities and performance comparisons of SSD drives now on the market, the article recounts how the author effectively forced a manufacturer (OCZ) to update its firmware to improve its latency even at the expense of more marketable bandwidth numbers. This is a good example of how one trusted popular online reviewer can have the power to not only make or break a product but sometimes have more say than a company’s engineering, marketing, and executive staff before the product even hits the market.
