Intel SSD
The Inquirer recently posted Intel’s 34nm NAND SSDs launch in two weeks, which to me was fantastic news. I now have three of the X-25Ms (one 160GB in my Macbook Pro and two mirror’d ZFS root 80GBs in my OpenSolaris file server) and I’m buying more, one for my Mac at home and another when Win7 comes out for my Windoze machine, when the capacity increases and price drops hit.
I happened to scroll down to the comments and noticed this, posted by : Tessy, 29 June 2009:
… So for me it’s $350 for 80 GB @ 250 MB/s or 4.5 TB @ 500 MB/s. I think the choice is obvious unless you’re on a laptop.
When SSDs are 500 GB for about $100 to $200 each I’ll bite. Till then it’s good for laughs watching people blow their hard earned money on really nothing more than marketing hype.
This is one of those comments that almost makes sound quantitative sense but is utterly stupefying from a qualitative standpoint.
Let’s start with the quantitative just to get it out of the way. I’m guessing the poster is conflating data transfer rates, which are around 100-150 for mechanical drives with er… something that’s 500… 500 MB/s would actually exceed the maximum 3 Gb/s speed of the SATA interface. In fact, the fastest mechanical drive I could find on Newegg only claims 179 MB/s. Now that we have our facts straight…
While the price per gigabyte comparison between mechanical hard drives and SSDs is staggering, as the poster rightly points out, the number is essentially meaningless in a comparison. SSDs are more expensive? Really? Hello, that’s not what SSDs are for right now. If you’re buying 4.5TBs then you’re storing video and unless you’re editing that video mechanical drives are perfectly okay.
Where SSDs rock is not for your data, it’s for your OS and applications. Or as another commenter put it, “It’s like saying ‘ferraris suck because a pickup is better at pulling my trailor!’” And I would almost argue that, aside from making sure you have enough space for your OS and applications (and let’s be honest, if you have more than 160GB of applications you are playing too many video games), most of the specifications in this space just seem to confuse things. There are drives with faster reported transfer rates that perform horribly. The Intel drives are by far the most well reviewed and my experience with them would agree.
A few months ago, my aging Macbook Pro (it’s a 2006 Core Duo, not even a Core 2) started to make that grinding noise that over the years I have come to recognize as the Your Hard Drive is Going to Die Soon noise. I was also nearly out of space, so the writing was on the wall. I shopped around a bit for regular old 2.5″ drives and for kicks I did some reading on SSDs. The enthusiasm of the reviews surprised me and I started to wonder how much of a speed increase I could get. My MBP was beach balling a painful percentage of time and the machine was already maxed on RAM. When I got to this page at AnandTech (which ironically is about OCZ) I decided I was sold. I was going to get one of those ridiculously expensive Intel SSDs. I went over to Newegg, plopped a 160GB X25-M into my shopping cart, winced at the price and hit checkout (note: I would link the Newegg product page, but it’s no longer listed, further evidence that new drives are coming).
As usual, the my Newegg package arrived absurdly fast (gotta love that Edison NYC tax-free-yet-so-close-stuff-arrives-tomorrow! warehouse). After googling around and making an absurd number of trips to multiple hardware stores to get the right kind of screw drivers (now I know what a TORX is) I managed to get the new drive into my MBP. I booted it up off a Leopard retail DVD and re-installed off of my latest Time Capsule backup (yes, I’m that much of an Apple whore these days, I still refuse to buy their over priced monitors tho). The machine came right back to life and I immediately started trying to push its performance. I started clicking on every app on my dock. All I can tell you is that I sat there giggling for several minutes. Forget beach balls, the damn thing was launching apps as fast as my Mac Pro. It’s jaw-droppingly fast. To this day, I basically leave all my apps open and only really get beach balls when something crashes (or when Entourage has to do a search, but that’s Entourage, a supercomputer couldn’t make it fast). I have probably close to 100 Firefox tabs open, dozens of Eclipse files and multiple Word and Powerpoint docs. Everything is super fast. In fact, my old beatup, heat-discolored MBP is behaving like a brand new computer.
I had been dreading a full laptop death and replacement, but I think this drive essentially extended the life of this machine by at least a year, if not two. It’s that much faster. And that’s why I’m slowly putting Intel SSDs into all my machines.