Comments | inversereality: Tech Geek Question

inversereality

Tech Geek Question

Jun 25, 2009 13:55

I'm writing a short press release piece on SSDs (Solid State Drives). I seem to remember this as an idea that has been floating around for the last year or so, but don't know much more than that. Apparently it is now THE hot thing in the next revolution of drive performance and capacitySo, to my geeky tech and engineer friends out there: what are ( Read more... )

Comments 1

fry_kun June 28 2009, 05:59:01 UTC

In short, unless you want to pay premium for a small boost in speed, they're still not worth it.
There are many problems with SSDs which are still not resolved 100%:
* They wear out much faster than normal HDs. A few years, and you can't write to it any more. They say SSDs are on par with normal drives now, but I'm still not convinced
* They use same if not more power because they're still not optimized for it. Normal HD takes a bunch of power when it spins up and when it works hard, but almost nothing if it's idle. SSD takes up same amount all the time.
* If used for a while, SSDs can become slower because of fragmentation (one part of file is in once place, another elsewhere, etc.). It's not the same kind of fragmentation as normal drives, but the effect is similar.
The last one is the latest argument I've heard against SSDs, about a few weeks ago..

HTH