CompactFlash-based SSDs get tested

You know how much we love SSDs around here, but getting one the legit way currently involves poking a rather large hole in your wallet -- so we were pretty interested to see how a jury-rigged SSD built using that CompactFlash-to-SATA adapter we spotted a while back would hold up. While we probably would have sprung for something a little larger than the 4GB drives used in the test, the results are pretty encouraging: DIY SSD drives were overall faster than the 1.8-inch traditional drive found in the MacBook Air, and even a little faster than the VAIO TZ's 64GB SSD. The drives were bested by a 7200rpm 2.5-inch drive and a 128GB SATA SSD, as you'd expect, but what we weren't expecting was the negligible hit on power consumption -- it looks like SSDs really don't use less power, as the unchanged battery life of the SSD MacBook Air hinted. Still -- you know we want one. Check out all the results and a little howto action after the break.

[Vesh @ Feb 15th 2008 12:43AM]

Just so you know, Nilay is a guy. (Unless that's your thing, more power to you.)

[Charlie Calhoun @ Feb 15th 2008 12:45AM]

Perhaps Bob is a girl?

[iofthestorm @ Feb 15th 2008 12:48AM]

Yeah, I personally don't understand the whole buzz behind SSDs, they have slower sustained speeds and don't really improve power consumption much. Their seek times make them useful for caches to act like extra slow RAM, but other than that as main storage there isn't much going for them beyond the lack of moving parts (which might be big for some people, but not everyone). They'll always be behind capacity wise, anyway. That said, I'm going to be buying an EeePC soon, and of course it uses SSDs, but that's more of a case where their size helps them more than anything. For mainstream laptops, and probably all desktops for more or less all time, SSDs are probably not going to take over any time soon.

[w00t @ Feb 15th 2008 1:24AM]

There are already brands of SSD which saturate a SATA interface with sustained reads, and obviously also totally wipe the floor with regular HD's for random read/write... All this translates to superb real world performance.

The price and capacity will start improving exponentially once the technology becomes more mainstream, and even if you can't see it yet SSDs will surpass HDs and not in too much of a distant future either.

I personally can't wait until my hot, whining, clunky and unreliable hard drives are replaced with silent, fast, cool and reliable solid state technology!

[iofthestorm @ Feb 15th 2008 1:43AM]

"There are already brands of SSD which saturate a SATA interface with sustained reads, and obviously also totally wipe the floor with regular HD's for random read/write... All this translates to superb real world performance."
Source? Even the fastest one listed on that site is 37MB/s, whereas a cheap seagate 7200.10 drive easily hits 80MB/s sustained. And the faster ones I see on engadget when searching for SSD are in the research stages and would cost several grand to a consumer.

"The price and capacity will start improving exponentially once the technology becomes more mainstream, and even if you can't see it yet SSDs will surpass HDs and not in too much of a distant future either."
Well, currently for the price of a 32GB SSD you could get at least 1TB of hard drive storage and probably even 2TB. That's 32/64x the capacity for the same price (well, couldn't find a price on SSDs but I'm kind of estimating).

"I personally can't wait until my hot, whining, clunky and unreliable hard drives are replaced with silent, fast, cool and reliable solid state technology!"
Right, and when was the last time you had a hard drive fail? Also, when have you noticed how hot or noisy your hard drive is? (I'll admit, I don't have much experience with laptops but I have never noticed the hard drive in any of them besides ancient ones, the sound is almost always from the CPU fan). And if you're really worried about reliability, a RAID5 array would be much cheaper and more cost effective than an SSD.

[w00t @ Feb 15th 2008 2:08AM]

Here's some specs for a fast flash based SSD by Mitron:

Burst Read/Write:- 155MB/sec
Sustained Read:- 120 MB/sec
Sustained Write:- 90 MB/sec
Max. IOPS:- 76,000
Access Time:- less than 0.1 msec

Find me a hard drive that can do that!

My computer (Mac Pro) has no CPU fans, no video fan and no chipset fan. The case fans spin at a whisper quiet 500rpm...
I set my drives to sleep after a period of inactivity and trust me the difference is huge!

The last time I had a hard drive fail was last week, my Maxtor 200GB drive packed in and makes loud clunking noises instead of spinning up properly. The computer has not been moved for a long time and that drive was still fairly new!

I never suggested SSDs were a viable option yet, but the technologies both available now and in research are extremely promising and I expect to see some huge advances over the next few years, faster than the advances conventional drives will make over the same period.

[OddManOut @ Feb 15th 2008 9:53AM]

"when have you noticed how hot or noisy your hard drive is?"

I notice it all the time. I have a Fujitsu P1120 and a Fujitsu C-500 tablet. Both are totally fanless, so I can indeed easily hear the HDDs. I use the tablet as an always on e-mail and VOIP terminal. During the day (or evening if I'm actually there) I can't hear anything as there are any number of other full size desktops running in the same room, but at night as I'm drifting off to sleep I frequently hear the HDD spin down in the tablet. Kind of a high pitch whine.

Not that it's incredibly disturbing or obtrusive. But it is quite audible. Just sayin'...

As for heat...The P1120 gets plenty hot to the touch right around the HDD. Not quite too hot to hold, but close...

[chainofcommand02 @ Feb 15th 2008 12:49AM]

Ehh, so what? I've been using a 32GB compact flash card in my iPod 4th Gen for months now...

[Aguiluz @ Feb 15th 2008 1:00AM]

Yay! 100,000 read/write cycles before the sucker craps out!

[BigD145 @ Feb 15th 2008 1:02AM]

What's that in dog years?

[chainofcommand02 @ Feb 15th 2008 1:03AM]

And then you just pop a new CF card in! That's the beauty of it. And 100,000 read/write cycles is a lot of cycles.... It'd take a year or two in normal use. And by then, who knows how large CF cards will be?

[alan westbrook @ Feb 15th 2008 1:10AM]

Why go through a SATA converter?

It would be a lot more efficient to have a PATA converter. CF cards are electrically compatible to PATA. That means the converter would just be a physical conversion without the need for expensive electronics and would probably therefore be faster and take less power.

[chainofcommand02 @ Feb 15th 2008 1:14AM]

Agreed.

[A.C.E.R. @ Apr 23rd 2008 5:30AM]

Yup. And you can get a CF to IDE adapter for about 3 bucks.

[nizzy1115 @ Feb 15th 2008 1:13AM]

They need to make one that accepts 2 cards and automatically run them in raid. Then i would be interested.

[chainofcommand02 @ Feb 15th 2008 1:16AM]

This one on eBay takes two CF cards, dunno about RAID, though.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140206793671

[w00t @ Feb 15th 2008 1:30AM]

That is just a direct electrical connection so no RAID, but there's nothing to stop you from using one of these with software RAID which is dead simple to set up in Linux or OS X. Probably in Windows too, never tried.

Nothing stopping you using this with a hardware RAID controller either.
Does away with the energy, speed and price disadvantages of using the SATA to PATA converter mentioned in the article too...

Come to think of it, I'm seriously considering this!

[Adrian Williams @ Feb 15th 2008 1:21AM]

32 GB of this would be around 160-200 compared with 400-700 for a 32 GB SSD

[hemmy @ Feb 15th 2008 1:52AM]

I wouldn't bother with CF without wear leveling.

[jon @ Feb 15th 2008 2:41AM]

ultra II cards are slow, i would like to see the speed tests of an extreme IV card, they cost a bit more but 4Gb is less than 100 and 8 is approaching that...

[Ma2T @ Feb 15th 2008 9:42AM]

I agree, I have an Ultra III in my EOS400D, and now there is the Ultra IV, im sure it's a lot quicker than the Ultra II.

That would have been a better test, use the fastest cards...

[Ethan @ Feb 15th 2008 9:54AM]

Put a MicroDrive in and create a wonderous cycle of uselessness.

[RobDaGoth @ Feb 15th 2008 11:04AM]

100,000 isn't so many write cycles if it's your page file area - I've never had a straight answer from flash drive manufacturers about the success or otherwise of wear-levelling (I think it's just delaying the inevitable by a small amount).

Now high-cap high speed FRAM might work ... hmmm.

[Michael Price @ Feb 15th 2008 1:53PM]

WORKS WELL -- GOING STRONG NOW FOR OVER A YEAR ON TWO MACHINES. Did this to two of my laptops last year -- yes I read all the warnings about the memory fatigue issue with CF and SD compared to true SSDs but have experienced no problems whatsoever.

[Zach Weisman @ Feb 15th 2008 2:43PM]

How about a card that can fit 10 SD cards and treat them as one drive. Heres the economic incentive for this...

optical hard drive 30 per gig
multiSD reader

[Zach Weisman @ Feb 15th 2008 2:44PM]

How about a card that can fit 10 SD cards and treat them as one drive. Heres the economic incentive for this...

optical hard drive 30 per gig
multiSD reader

[Zach Weisman @ Feb 15th 2008 2:45PM]

optical HD $30 per gig
multiSD

[Zach Weisman @ Feb 15th 2008 2:46PM]

optical HD less than 50 cents per gig....SSD greater than $30 per gig.......MultiSD less than $5 per gig

[GingerDingo @ Feb 15th 2008 8:41PM]

Addonics has a PCI card that accepts 4x CF in RAID. Only review I could find: http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0802%2F09b02%2F09b02%2Easp&articleid=45065