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  • ameatypie - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link

    i think in one years time, these are going to be the default laptop hard drives. The price of flash memory is going down so fast..... a year ago, a 4GB flash drive was &70 USD or more.... now you can get em for $5. If that sort of trend continues, we are going to have super-quick laptops in no time at all.....
  • Zak - Monday, May 19, 2008 - link

    I remember couple of years ago they were promising huge speed improvement and energy savings but when SSD finally hit the store shelves they're quite underwhelming considering the price. What's most disappointing is almost no improvement in battery life on laptops! At least that's the case with Air. Still, this is new tech so I hope things will get better in the next couple of years, so I'm not writing SSD off yet.

    Z.
  • FXi - Monday, May 19, 2008 - link

    Would have been helpful if just one fast laptop drive had been included in the mix to see for that segment of users what degree of speedup is gained.

    I figure you'll get to it in time. These kinds of reviews are far from over :)
  • MadBoris - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link

    This is solid state?
    I don't understand how people can look at this as anything but a good tech demo.

    Comparing actual physical RAM to a Hard drive is night and day and yet somehow a solid state drive can barely compete or even falls short of a hard drive at times.

    Isn't the point of solid state that we all desired for decades the huge performance gains???
    Their is something really wrong with this picture when it still can't compete with a hard drive yet costs 4 times as much.
    Give me a quality RAM Drive on an OS any day, address the volatility of the RAM or load the ram drive on startup of the computer, using the HD as a cache during startup and shutdown just like sleep does.

    Until solid state will improve performance over a hard drive by 2-3 times then it is just a tech demo. I would be happy to have something much smaller and yet much faster memory for installing some programs on, specifically an OS and some main applications, not data.

    The good thing is their is great opportunity for competition and advancement in this market. Wake me up when we get there.
    Nice article although I disagree it is award worthy as a technology regardless how much improvement took place, their is a galaxy of room left for improvement for it to be worthy of consideration above .01% of consumers.
  • Harkonnen - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link

    I would love to see Anandtech test out this SSD.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-memoright,...">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-memoright,...
  • codeThug - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    About as mainstream as Bigfoot Networks $249.99 Killer NIC M1

    http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N8...


  • TheriusDrake - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    I'd love to see the game load times on the fastest Core2 Duo on an Intel and Nivida Mobo to see if there are any major differences in those benchmarks.
  • shabby - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Who would spend that much money only to receive 1 year of warranty on the ocz ssd?
  • Arbie - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Do the vendors quote these? Are there any verifications / experience? Not one SSD review I've seen has even raised this issue.

    Of course any drive can fail at any time (random), and all mechanical drives will eventually wear out too. What I'm talking about is unexpectedly near-term, statistically-predictable wearout.

    Arbie
  • chizow - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Given the storage demands of the latest HD media and PC games, I just don't see how SSD will overcome standard HDD any time soon. I can see them surpassing HDD in speed, but not both speed with increased storage capacity. And that's before considering pricing. I have a hard time justifying even the $1/GB VelociRaptor nowadays given the price to performance of the larger drives, and that's coming from someone who owns two 150GB Raptors.

    I think SSD has a much better future serving the performance sector in that gap between DRAM and conventional HDD storage. I'd like to see them get closer to DRAM speed, keeping capacity lower, but perhaps implementing something like integrated RAID to speed things up. As more people move towards 64-bit OS and multimedia apps and games continue to grow, 8GB of RAM may not be enough in the not too distant future. Games are already spilling onto multiple DVDs with install folders easily surpassing 10GB for a single game after patches and expansions.

    This may pose a problem for board and dimm makers, as it seems increasing memory capacity is a limitation that can't easily be overcome. Current solutions are limited to 4GB per dimm I believe and server boards with additional dimm slots or daughter cards. Mainstream solutions would be reluctant to adopt these changes as they'd increase cost/size significantly. Introducing a fast, hybrid SSD solution could help bridge the gap between system RAM and HDD storage giving programs faster performance as needed.
  • Dobs - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link

    I like the sound of that.. a Hybrid with built in Raid (or equiv).

    So.... I'll have the Samsung F1 SSD3 500GB Hybrid thanks!
    That's the one that includes 1 308GB platter and 3 64GB SSD's (in Raid0 equiv)
  • mechBgon - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    "We waivered about presenting either drive an award."

    I think you meant "wavered."
  • Baked - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    I know you guys get all the freebies you want, do a RAID-5 w/ these drives now!
  • Juddog - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    The main advantage here IMHO is the power required, heat dissipation, noise level and MTBF. Perfect for notebooks. Working as a tech I see notebook drive failures all the time. I see plenty of executive level people with notebooks that would gladly pay a few hundred extra to get a much greater extended battery time from lower power usage, and greater data protection from the MTBF, not to mention the shock levels that these drives typically have is much greater than that of a hard drive.

    This is excellent for people who travel around a lot and carry expensive data on their laptops. Top it off with data encryption technologies that more companies are moving into, and the access time plays an even greater roll.
  • strikeback03 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    IIRC, the tests in the Macbook Air at least showed little to no advantage in battery life from the SSD. The durability though would be nice. I personally wouldn't consider one until we can get drives upwards of 100GB for under $500.
  • JarredWalton - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link

    MacBook Air SSD testing was actually http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3226&a...">quite good. I think you're probably remembering the more recent http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=328...">128GB SSD follow-up where the extra performance and size of the SSD made power requirements about equal to a standard HDD.
  • Ender17 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Any results on the snapiness with these drives as seen here?
    http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=328...">http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=328...
  • tshen83 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

    Too bad it is out of stock. I hope STT makes more of it. 299 for 30GB of 120MB/read speed.
  • JarredWalton - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    But only 40MB/s writes.
  • semisonic9 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    ...over it's competition? What's up with that? Would have expected 7200.11 drives, or 1tb drives, to be faster.

  • Ender17 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    I'm not surprised. The 334 MB platter drives are fast.
    Just look at this review of the Samsung F1
    http://www.storagereview.com/samsungs_spinpoint_f1...">http://www.storagereview.com/samsungs_spinpoint_f1...

    Beats the old ADFD Raptors across the board. And I don't know why anyone expects the Seagate drives to be fast, they're consistently at the bottom in performance.
  • Griswold - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Why? It has the same platter density.
  • Noya - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Yes, and I'm using my $59 WD 640gb just for games (the first 150gb of it anyway) and the load time is very quick compared to my old 250gb 7200.8 sata.
  • PlasmaBomb - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Thats probably because your old drive was nearly full and speed drops off towards the inside of the platter.
  • semo - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link

    aren't new data stored on the inside tracks of the platter and then move outwards?
  • Zefram0911 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Is anyone disappointed in the load times for games? Only beats my old raptors by 3-5 seconds.
  • Calin - Tuesday, May 20, 2008 - link

    Load time for game levels is mostly sequential - I suppose game developers take pains in having the load level as a big sequential read (in which case solid state drives have no advantage). I am surprised about the file compression tests (which have reads and writes from different areas of the disk)
  • retrospooty - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    "Is anyone disappointed in the load times for games? Only beats my old raptors by 3-5 seconds."

    Ya, I have to wonder what the various gaming tests like "Vantage HDD Gaming" are measuring. SSD's consistantly blow HDD's out of the water scoring 300 to 500% higher on those tests (Gary's article is consistent with others I have seen)... Then real world game load and level load times are only like 5% higher.

    What gives?
  • lemonadesoda - Wednesday, May 21, 2008 - link

    It's a very easy answer: file compression. The data files (e.g. maps and textures) on disk require a lot of CPU processing before they are "ready to play".

    A trick used in the days of Quake engines was to unzip the .pk3 files. Then delete the .pk3. This improved load times enormously.

    Perhaps game designers should have an install option to "full unzip game asset data on install". It would require a lot more HDD space. But load times would shrink.
  • JarredWalton - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    It's the nature of the benchmark: access a large amount of data in a fairly random fashion and don't do ANY processing of the data, and you end up with the theoretical performance of the hard drive. That's pretty much what IPEAK-based testing accomplishes.

    Games have been mostly bottlenecked by CPUs, GPUs, and RAM for a long time - load times with 2GB RAM are substantially faster than with 1GB of RAM, and even 4GB of RAM can show some speedup in certain newer games. The reason for the CPU bottleneck on level loads is that most games compress data in order to conserve space; decompressing all the textures and models and such takes a fair amount of CPU power, to the point where the hard drives probably only need to sustain around 15-25MB/s.
  • tim851 - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Seeing as all drives are quite close in load times I think it's safe to assume, that we've reach the apex and the load times are pretty much bottlenecked by CPU speed now.

    Most real world application performance numbers are pretty close these days, there aren't any dead slow hard disks anymore. Flash won't bring us more speed, but less power draw and noise.
  • FITCamaro - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    I got a pair of 74GB Raptors for $150. I'm quite happy with my load times. Even in the Age of Conan beta, my load times were pretty quick.
  • araczynski - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    nothing mainstream about a $1000 64gb drive.
  • piroroadkill - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    I agree, it's definitely good, but it's not $1000 good
  • JarredWalton - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    More "mainstream" than a $4000 64GB SSD. :)
  • dingetje - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    sorry, this is about as mainstream to the st0rage industry as brasilian fart p0rn is to the p0rn market.

    nice article by the way, thanks ;)
  • AssBall - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    Yes, but the key is that now you can store and access your fart Pr0n even faster!
  • retrospooty - Friday, May 16, 2008 - link

    dang... I didnt even know there was such a thing as brazillian fart porn. I need to get out more !

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