Are solid state hard drives faster?

Do bear in mind that flash based hard drives have a finite amount of read write cycles. If you are read/writing constantly 24/7 then you might want to look into this aspect of them. Of course normal hard drives also have finite life but you can get drives designed to do read/write day in day out.

How about a ramdrive? Super-fast, low power, no wear.

John

I tried an SSD in a machine which I use to compile embedded Linux. It makes absolutely no difference.

I think you'll find that SSD drives are much faster.

I've used the Intel SATA 2.5" SSD drives which average about twice the speed of rotating drives, and the above are even faster.

On a sunny day (Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:46:37 -0400) it happened JW wrote in :

It all depends. The main thing that slows down normal rotating drives is the 'seek' time. This apart from filesystem issues that can become very important, for example on a reiser fs with many huge files, the time to traverse the trees seems huge. Also external drives via USB can be dead slow in my experience. So it depends what sort of data you have and how it is stored. As an example, you could just put a video stream as sequential sectors to a drive with 'dd. d if=my_big_movie.ts >/dev/hdX1 then play it back in the same way. That speed is hard to beat, and only slowed down by internal drive bad sector handling if there are any. There are filesystems that can store large files in a non-fragmented way. SSDs wear out, it all depends on how many writes you intent to do. Some filesystems even do writes when you are not writing. At the current state of technology, where you can buy 1 TB for 50 Euro, a normal good harddisk is likely the best buy. Only in extreme circumstances where you have a lot of random access reads and or strong vibration or weight and climate issues, SSDs COULD be and advantage, although I am not sure about data loss at higher temperatures with SSDs versus normal disks. FLASH does not like very high temperatures.

Unless that data is a huge amount, you probably want a traditional fast machine with lots of good ol' RAM rather than solid state disks. The operating system choice depends on what software the machine is going to run. If you're writing it from scratch then probably this page is worth a look:

You will have to qualify more precisely what you actually want to do.

I know several places (including my own main PC) using them as extremely fast random access lookup tables for multi-GB datasets.

In crude terms writing has a sufficient penalty that you might be better off with a RAID array of ordinary disks. But if you have an application where it is write once read many and random locations then the seek time advantage of the SSD wins out. And you can RAID array them to gain additional bandwidth/redundancy. With some hackery you can even RAID array thumbnail drives too although it can be hairy.

There is a real advantage using SSD for chess 6 men tablebases for instance which are *very* large files requiring rapid and random access.

If there will be many clients reading the same dataset after conversion then the SSD will probably do what you want. Several places I know are using sacrifical SSD arrays for caching faster DNA database searches. They expect the SSDs to fail because of the way they are being (ab)used.

Basically there is probably no alternative but to try it out with the application that you want to run.

Regards, Martin Brown

Speed is a fuzzy thing.. the SSDs read much faster (less latency) and write pretty fast to begin with, but slow down as they are used due to garbage collection.

Booting off a modest SSD (or a cheap USB drive) and using a RAM drive might give you the best of both worlds.

If you only need a few gig of storage, I would go with the responses suggesting "RAM drives". RAM is solid state, faster than all other options, read-write-able billions of times, and consumes less power than hard disk drives.

I have some other suggestions:

Bus speed and clock speed - check into seeing if something slower than the max will keep up with the demand, especially in light of bottlenecks in other areas. Slower clock speeds mean less power consumption, and less of The Big Enemy - Heat.

OS - I would prefer a non-Microsoft one, especially some version of Unix or a Unix-variant (namely Linux), due to lower vulnerability to hackers.

And, I have a liking to using older versions that are capable of meeting your needs - for less OS storage space requirement and less of complications.

Processor - figure out what you need to keep up with demand through whatever other bottlenecks. Lower number of cores and lower clock multiplier are often less than proportionately slower, especially for non-graphics usage of processor capability. I find this especially true for smaller number of processor cores. Simpler is also more reliable... Go for simpler older-tech tried-and-true to the extent that is capable of handling your maximum foreseeable demand with some safety factor (maybe

As much as data storage retrieval speed can be a bottleneck, and communication speed can be a bottleneck, I have a dislike to bleeding-edge internal computer architecture with bus clock multiplier times number of cores getting to 32 or 40 or whatever big number that can be nowadays.

Keep things simple, and keep them cool-running.

Also, don't forget to blow any dust out of the processor heatsink and its fan every few months or whatever it takes to keep the air moving through and keeping things cool.

I think a sorta "ram drive" will magically happen if you have plenty of memory vista/win7 will try to preload what it think is most likely to be used when theres available memory

Don't really know if SSDs are much faster than HDD in raw transfer rate, but they have much faster seek times

-Lasse

Isn't it cheaper to put several GB of memory in a computer?

Faster than what? Hard drives are solid state too. They're hard. That's a solid.

The bigger question is: How the f*ck is it that you could spend so many years in this industry and not know if a chip is faster than a magnetic disc.

You are experiencing a latency of what three decades?

No. You asked about the HD. Between the two, there is NOTHING else that would change the answer you seek.

The SATA port is an SATA port. There is no "optimization", you dope.

Way faster than you grasp of electronics or basic common sense.

So, as each new technology is introduced, are you so tunnel visioned that you have to research each new thing to get a clue about how it runs?

When you took electronics, were you daydreaming during each lesson?

Why?

Your "accelerator" paradigm is also flawed.

You do not "make it available in several formats real time.

You take the data and do ALL the conversions up front, and STORE them, then they are already there and ready to go when the demand comes in.

Your email and your brain are similar...

Netzero...

Brainzero...

Your skull is hard, and thick. That's a solid. Not much space left for your brainzero to fit. No wonder you don't know a goddamned thing.

No shit. That is why we pros use 1.5" SAS drives that spool at 15k rpm.

One of my friends at work swears by them now.

He's a heavy duty user of the computer.

You must remember, no moving parts. That in itself is a speed increase.

Also, nothing to get old and sloppy. Let the virus scanners run all day now..:)

Seriously, most of them are faster. That are some older ones out there that are actually a little slower in read/write times over a HD how ever, the speed of getting to the sector makes up for a lot. Jamie.

Jamie > the speed of getting to the sector makes up for a lot.

Nymnonuts > =A0 No shit. =A0That is why we pros use Nymnonuts > 1.5" SAS drives that spool at 15k rpm.

"we pros"?? LOL The only thing you are professional at is BS'ing, you autistic psychopath.

lse

e.

Thanks for your suggestions, even the condescending ones.... Since you don't know what we're trying to do, I will ignore most of your reply.

Except the part about 3 decades of latency. Is it that you were NEVER sold a bill of goods that didn't live up to the hype? Humm, you must be a super-genius or something. I sure wish I were you.

For everyone else, One thing I hadn't considered is worn out bits on SSD. That could be a deal breaker, depending on how many read/writes they can actually handle, and what "failure" actually means. I don't really want to get into that discussion - I know it's a long one...

Is there a difference between a "RAM Drive" and an SSD drive? Or, are these just different names for the same thing? All the HD's I've ever used were the spinning disk types.

I can't get into the details, but the amount of data we're processing is astounding. Our fastest PC's still take 30 seconds to do it, and we have to scale that easily 500 times over. Thus, my question.

And it won't be easy to parallel-process (for security/space reasons), although that could certainly be a solution down the road. Before we get there, we will review every angle for optimization, and this SSD question was in the back of my mind.... With the right hardware, another approach might be to process certain data streams more often that others, based on a priority scheme that we can define. (uhh-um, "might" be able to define). Something like a predictive algorithm, that can avoid re-processing data whose results haven't changed.

The latest SSD's i've seen no longer have that limit problem.. UNless you are worried about 170 years later after constant writing you may have some data lost.. They are not like the flash sticks that first came out. They are now actually a usable device, just cost more at the moment.. Of course, there is that unexpected electronic failure that could happen. Jamie