What's the advantage of SSD?

[Whiterabbit]

So, I've loved the idea of SSD for long periods of time. I've never been a dataminer, so even small drives are just fine for me. I liked the idea of them because they are supposed to have superior:

power consumption
access speed
noise production

So, I was evaluating an upgrade the other day. I was thinking a cheap and great way to add the functionality was to use a PCMCIA adapter with a CF flash card. But the more I think about it:

-Tested power consumption of specific SSD's approaches only 10% improvement.
-Access speed may be limited by the interface. Even superior access speed may not affect boot times and other critical moments when other devices may contribute more to the bottleneck.
-The noise bottleneck in my T42 is the system fan, not the hard drive. HD seems rather quiet, actually.

My idea was to put a couple 16 gig CF cards in the PCMCIA slots as a HD expension. Maybe even do the same for the main HD and run windows from flash as well (this was really my dream. two flash drives, one for the page file the other for the OS)

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But it just doesn't seem like I'd gain anything other than an extra 16 or 32 gig.

So in short, with a laptop that can fit a 2.5" hard drive, what is the benefit to flash or SSD? is there anything?

[rkawakami]

Mechanical robustness. You can't damage the data on an SSD by subjecting the system to physical shocks (up to a point obviously). Even with the Active Protection System (APS) monitoring a hard drive, there's still some chance that a fall or bump could lead to a head crash. Flash card adapters and SSDs don't have any moving parts.

[mgo]

So, I've loved the idea of SSD for long periods of time. So in short, with a laptop that can fit a 2.5" hard drive, what is the benefit to flash or SSD? is there anything?

My very own personal hands on experience with solid state drives is:
30% to 60% faster across the board.
cooler running
silent running (althought most mechanical drives are very quiet)

The combination of Windows 7 (Yes! it IS faster than XP or Vista!) and a solid state drive is addictive.

A smaller (say, 80 gig SSD) is more than sufficient in size. Big multimedia files can be run from the Ultra Bay, and that is still going to be very fast.

For a desktop, just plug in the drive and suspend it on big rubber bands in the 3 1/2 drive bay, and run multimedia files on a regular, second drive.

An unusual approach, but why not, eh?

[Whiterabbit]

80 holy crap man, my t42 is running on 20. fancypants high capacity!

Would you still estimate a speed benefit running something like compact flash in place of the hard drive? CF is ultra cheap and converts to IDE. a couple 16 gig chips, one to replace the HD the other sitting in one pcmcia slot would increase my capacity 50%

But I can't confirm there would really be any benefit. Any website set up for testing is testing expensive fancy SSD's, not experimenting with the idea of replacing a hard disk with standard flash.

Anyone try speed tests on CF through IDE?

[danny_isr]

need to keep in mind one thing about SSDs. the erase process is VERY slow.
so your drive will be fast at start. each time you write to it. it will use a different empty location. So no issues ....till it's getting full with "garbage". then every new write will have to wait for erase ......
UNLESS you have some utility software that cleans garbage during idle time.
just something to keep in mind.

[danny_isr]

works great !
still didnt install all the IBM stuff. but after few auto updates . the WiFi and Video are good to go.
i'm still using only 1G but its not slow by any means. ordering 2G ..
very cool !

thanks

[ThinkRob]

need to keep in mind one thing about SSDs. the erase process is VERY slow.
so your drive will be fast at start. each time you write to it. it will use a different empty location. So no issues ....till it's getting full with "garbage". then every new write will have to wait for erase ......
UNLESS you have some utility software that cleans garbage during idle time.
just something to keep in mind.

Also something to keep in mind: not all SSDs suffer from this. Good SLC drives don't have this issue, and Intels X-25M (although it does technically exhibit reduced performance) only takes about a 3% performance hit IIRC.