November 28, 2010
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Know any nerds? I need some advice.
Yes, I myself am a nerd. Well, “geek” would be the proper term to use, given the information in the Venn diagram in my last post. Anyway, last Tuesday I ordered two Western Digital 640GB hard drives (HDD) and a Crucial 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD). SSD technology hasn’t been around very long, and I’ve read the blogs, comments, and feedback from some very disappointed SSD owners, as well as those of extremely happy owners, and it’s hard to say whether this was a good decision or not.
The most obvious reason people aren’t hoarding and praising SSD’s is the price per gigabyte. I paid $2.11 per gigabyte for the SSD I ordered, and $0.10 per gigabyte for the HDD’s. That may not look like much, but if you do the math a 128GB SSD will run you about $270 whereas a 128GB HDD will cost a mere $12.80 (at the listed price per gig).
Why do people pay a 200+ percent markup per GB? Speed. A typical hard drive reads at 67Mbps (by itself) and writes at about 35Mbps. What that means is that when you press the power button on your PC, your hard drive will bring up the operating system and all your startup programs (Windows Sidebar, AIM, antivirus software, etc) in, say, one minute. The SSD I ordered (used for the sake of nearly exacting numbers) reads at 355Mbps, and writes at 140Mbps. If you haven’t figured it out already, this means that when I press the power button on my PC, the SSD will bring up the operating system and all of my startup programs in one second. When I open a program, it’ll be open and ready to use instantly. Basically, SSD’s make “loading…” a thing of the past.
The big deal? This is a brand new technology, and as such it has it’s bugs. If it didn’t, I would’ve saved up the money and dropped $1000+ on one the day they came out! (Well, no. I probably wouldn’t have. Regardless of how awesome they may be, I wouldn’t spend that much on a single peripheral.) You see, there’s a few different ways you can run a hard drive. RAID mode, AHCI mode, and SATA and/or IDE mode. I’m not going to bother explaining all of them, but I will say that RAID mode is for multiple hard drives, AHCI mode is…..something…..and SATA/IDE mode is probably what you’re computer is running in. My point is, SSD’s don’t reach their full potential in one mode, run slowly in another mode, and run at full speed with risks in another. And then there’s TRIM support, which is a function of an SSD that preserves the longevity and speed of the drive by “cleaning it up” when it’s not in use, that apparently only runs when you’re logged off (and I don’t know too many people who log off their home computer). Anyway, I could go on forever about the hiccups and issues people are having with SSD’s, but that would take a lot of research and time (and copyright infringement), and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because only a select couple/few people will have even made it this far into this post. I digress.
Do you have, or know anyone who has, and SSD, and if so what’s to know before firing it up?
