New report says SSDs are, in fact, more efficient
By Ryan Block 
posted July 6th 2008 3:10PM
posted July 6th 2008 3:10PM
So LAPTOP magazine published a report confirming what most people already believe to be true about SSDs (that is, before last week when SSDs supposedly hit the fan): they use less power than traditional drives. Apparently they got up to 20 minutes more battery life when testing an SSD against a platter-based drive in an Eee PC and Gateway T-6828 (which jibes with our own experiences using SSDs in laptops), but if you ask us, the discussion seems a little moot. SSDs perform way faster and are far better suited to portable computing where drives are moved, bumped, and jostled -- the power savings is great, but the speed and reliability are still our top two reasons for going SSD.
Wouldn't a solid gold fiddle weight hundreds of pounds and sound really crummy?
No, a solid gold fiddle would sound real nice when you drop it off a 5-story building...
THUMP!
Oh people, calm down.
The manufacturers already said that the first-generation SSDs hardly have ANY power-saving features, and new ones being produced are much better at conserving power. Remember, Harddrives have been perfected over thirty years! You've got to give the SSD guys a little bit of time to really dial-in the power efficiency of their drives.. give it 6 -12 months, then do a full survey with brand new SSDs coming off the line.. If they still use more power than HDDs, I would be VERY surprised!
The plane is not pressurized, so whatever altitude you are flying at is the cabin altitude (unlike airliners who can maintain an 8,000 ft. cabin altitude at 41,000 ft.).
I routinely fly near the mountains on the West coast and air traffic control cannot see you on radar or talk to you on the radios until you get up above 14,000 feet (depending on where you are).
The Motion LS800 tablet has an altitude limit of 10,000 feet, and that's very accurate. Fujitsu doesn't publish altitude limits but I've had head crashes above 12,000 feet.
In pressurized light planes the computers did OK although vibration and turbulence sometimes caused crashes. SSDs will solve that problem too.
So unless I settle for squinting at tiny little charts on an IPAQ, I'm going to swap the HDD in my P1610D with an SSD so I can use my electronic charts again.
I hate getting rid of an 80 GB HDD for a 16 GB SSD but I'll just mount the HDD in a USB-powered external enclosure and use it on the ground.
oooooh issac brings us a clever new twist on everyone's favorite dead horse
SSD aren't necessarily more reliable. Try defragging them a few times and, unlike SSDs, they become less reliable. For some reason, this inconvenient truth is never mentioned...
You mean less reliable than HD's I assume, and I think you got some SSD with a bad firmware then.
Incidentally, it's 100% pointless to defrag an SSD since it has an instantaneous accesstime and no moving heads, FYI
I thought that current SSDs were faster if defragged because there would be fewer latency penalties (while the signal amplifier relocates due to memory addresses data being in differents columns/rows). However, on reading-up, it seems some SSD controllers may pseudo-randomly spread cluster writes across the available space to minimise cell overwriting - and so those SSDs wouldn't benefit from defragging. I also read a related issue with most SSD controllers not reporting physical locations to the OS, so the OS can't perform the defrag logic; this logic would have to be pushed down to the SSD controller to perform. Yikes...
EVERYBODY
STOP TAGGING ON POINTLESS STATEMENTS ONTO YOUR "FIRST!!!!!" POSTS
SERIOUSLY, STOP PRETENDING FIRST POST WASN'T YOUR INITIAL INTENTION
IF YOU DON'T WANT TO LOOK STUPID STOP CLAIMING FIRST POST ALTOGETHER
holy caps lock, batman! lay off the caffeine...
I still remember when i paid $50 for 64mb of Compact Flash :(
Oh sweet Jesus! i remember doing the same.
Young and naive =@
SSD aren't necessarily more reliable. Try defragging them a few times and, unlike SSDs, they become less reliable. For some reason, this inconvenient truth is never mentioned...
WHY?, because: YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO OR NEED TO DEFRAG A SSD.
interesting
SDD is great, but 64Gb or little bit more is not enough right?
-------------------------------------------------------
忆忆： http://yiyi519.blog.sohu.com/
Well, I think it's been summed up nicely.
It's 10 minutes of additional use - but to get that, you pay an order of magnitude more. Worse, we're arguing better/worse based on an amazingly small sample.
As for durability - well, I've already addressed that. There's worst case and real world durability - and if laptop hard drives couldn't handle some shaking - people wouldn't be making games and utilities which rely on slapping and shaking your laptop.
Will an SSD survive being slammed against the edge of a desktop better? Probably. But your screen probably won't... And then there's SSD wear.
SSDs also don't seem to scale up well (yet, at least). HDs are growing faster (and becoming cheaper faster). So... maybe someday.. but not today.
My netbook will have an HD, thanks.
Incredible Ryan! TEN WHOLE MINUTES MORE!!
I love this SSD hype "more reliable"...
We'll see your lovely SSDs in 2-3 years.
I forgot to use virus protection, and my laptop got an SSD...
sorry to restate the obvious but...id sacrifice 20 min of battery for 200 more gigs or HD space. not to mention one can get regular HD for much less than a SSD lol 20 min just doesnt seem worth it YET...mayb for pmp or stuff like replace the hdd in an ipod for a ssd but for other applications like laptops...not cool =)
my 2 cents yo :-P
Indeed, an SSD should increase battery time and performance compared to a HDD. This statement, however, is only valid if the SSD used is of high quality and, thusly, very expensive.
Seeing as there are some netbooks (ASUS Eee and Acer Aspire One) who give the option of selecting between an 8 GB SSD or a 80 GB HDD. I managed to get some information about the SSD used in Acer's netbook. The performance was quite appalling; some 35 MB/s when reading and 7 MB/s when writing. It did, however, use very little power. I've been unable to get data about the HDD, but I assume it out-performs the SSD, while at the same time uses more power.
In the end, it would seem likely that, for low-quality SSDs, you would get better battery time while, at the same time, getting poorer performance. Hence, the amount of work performed before the computer dies is probably the same.
So do you really gain anything by opting for an SSD in a low-cost, low-storage netbook instead of a standard HDD with ten times to storage capacity?
Really, with only a slight gain in battery life, SSD's won't be really worth it till they come under $1 per GB, unless you're a vid editor, then you have to figure out if you want speed or storage space. But once I can get a 250 GB 2.5" for about $200, I am so there.