Solid state drives deliver poor performance, super reliability
By Jonathan Schlaffer
It’s typically thought that any type of flash memory is faster than a hard drive. Turns out that it’s not so much, at least in the case of conventional hard drives versus flash memory.
Several laptop manufacturers offer SSDs as options in their laptops. The most storage that can be had with a SSD is 64GB though there are 128GB options, those are prohibitively expensive. A 64GB SSD is about a $1,000 premium.
That would be all well and good but there’s no speed or performance advantage to current SSD technology. Less power usage is about all you can expect.
Dvice tested the read and write speeds of a MacBook Air equipped with a 64GB SSD and one equipped with the “slow” 4200RPM 80GB conventional hard drive.
The model with the SSD was shown to have almost 50% slower read and write than its similarly identical cousin with the standard hard drive. It would be completely thrashed by 5400RPM and 7200RPM drives.
As for being expensive, yes, they’re expensive but not so expensive that the US military isn’t using them. In fact, the US military has been using solid state drives and memory in one form or another for the past 10 years, well, they can afford the $70,000 laptop with lots of SSD storage.
We have a way to go before SSDs offer a speed/performance advantage but they do offer low power usage and extreme durability.
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Stumble It!
February 17th, 2008
This article seems to be a bit biased and mis-informed. Despite what this article says, the benchmark showed the SSD was said to have slower WRITE times only; the READ times actually benchmarked higher.
You failed to mention the lack of compatibility between the operating system and the SSD, which was said to make SSDs “look enormously better than a hard disk drive.” You also failed to mention the brand of the SSD used in the benchmark, a detail that could clearly make a difference in tests. For example, Samsungs NAND offers speeds nearly 5 times greater than that of Intel’s NAND memory.
In addition to your list of “only” advantages to the SSD, you failed to mention that these drives emit significantly less noise, are not susceptible to humidity or temperature, and offer a much higher level of security, as the deletion of a file on an SSD will leave no residual data that can be recovered.