Are SSDs worth the money?

I've been hearing a lot of hype about the SSDs recently. I'm planning to buy a new machine as soon as Win7 gets released. My question is are SSDs worth the money on a new Win7 Laptop?

From serverfault bendewey

• Here is my understanding of the issues. I have read various articles and listened to discussions on podcasts. If I get a chance I'll edit with references. In the meantime however this is just my personal opinion:

  • The read times on SSDs are great. The write times appear to be slower. Often slower than writing to a platter.
  • By their nature flash memory devices have a hard limit on the number of read/write cycles that they can go through. I have heard as low as 10,000 or as high as 100,000. How this works out to drive life in the real world is still up in the air as far as I know.

  With these two pieces of information I would say that the answer depends. For a drive where you are primarily doing reads and you either backup regularly or don't care about data loss then I would say an SSD is probably a valid option. You have to judge the importance of these issues for yourself. For the time being I think that I will probably hold off a bit longer to see what changes in the SSD technology come down the pipe.

  EBGreen : It had been a while since I read on this topic. It appears that the write cycle limitation is becoming less of a concern as the technology ages. I think (as has been mentioned in other answers) that you would still be wise to explicitly buy a higher end model if long term data safety is a concern.

  Jason Baker : This is totally second-hand knowledge, but my understanding is that while SSDs don't tend to last as long, they handle being moved around a lot better. So for a laptop, an SSD might be the more durable choice. But again: draw your own conclusions.

  EBGreen : That is true. No moving parts is certainly a benefit.

  geoffc : Some of the reason for the 'not lasting as long' has to do with how the memory devices are crafted. Each memory cell has a limited number of writes allowed. Thus as you can imagine, a defrag program might really degrade the disks lifetime, as was mentioned elsewhere. The software on the SSD is critical for limiting this. There is a great Ars technica article on the topic.

  Ryaner : The thing to remember with the failures is that unlike traditional drives that fail, these just give delayed write failures. This should in theory mean 0% data lose.
  From EBGreen

• Only the high end ones will give you better performance then a normal hard drive so it depends on how much your willing to spend on the laptop. If your already spending $2500 then it's probably worth it, if your just getting a $800 laptop for basic tasks like internet, word processing, and email it's probably not worth it.

  Leon Sodhi : Joel did a bit of research on this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/27.html
  From Jared

• SSD's are great, fast, low power. However, the cheap ones are terrible, you need to splash out on the top of the range ones for them to be any good. The cheap ones are actually slower than a normal hard drive. For a laptop, if you can afford it, I'd say go for it.

  Oskar Duveborn : +1 for cheap is terrible... you'd need atleast a $500 64-80GB SSD for anywhere near decent real-world performance (just a few writes tend to lock up the system completely on cheaper ones)
  From Adam Gibbins

• This is Joel opinion of it.

  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/27.html

  My guess is not worth the money, unless for some reason you need to be able to access a program in 2 seconds rather than 10 seconds. You must have a business case for it. Some cases the 8 seconds mean allot.

  I would wait until they become worth it. It might be worth it to get 2 10k RPM drives and RAID them to cut down on loading time. It would be far cheaper.

  From David Basarab

• Depends how important random-read is to you, they ARE faster for sequential read than magnetic disks but are often not much faster than if you RAID0/1/10 two or more magnetic disks, and of course they'd give you much more capacity for the £$€.

  If you care about random reads and have the budget then yes, they're well worth it.

  From Chopper3

• I recommend reading this article, which is a really comprehensive resource of the state of the art:

  The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ (march 18, 2009)

  On page 8 there is a section "Putting Theory to Practice: Understanding the SSD Performance Degradation Problem" which is particulary interesting and important in order to understand why SSDs get slower the more you use them.

  The conclusion of the author:

  While personally I'm not put off by the gradual slowdown of SSDs, I can understand the hesitation. In the benchmarks we've looked at today, for the most part these drives perform better than the fastest hard drives even when the SSDs are well worn. But with support for TRIM hopefully arriving close to the release of Windows 7, it may be very tempting to wait. Given that the technology is still very new, the next few revisions to drives and controllers should hold tremendous improvements.

  Drives will get better and although we're still looking at SSDs in their infancy, as a boot/application drive I still believe it's the single best upgrade you can do to your machine today. I've moved all of my testbeds to SSDs as well as my personal desktop. At least now we have two options to choose from: the X25-M and the Vertex.

  I personally use an 128 GB SSD in my MacBook Pro. The drive is very fast, booting seems almost like waking up and last, but not least: it's silent. Although it was expensive, I would not hesitate to use the same configuration again.

  Rob Bergin : I would think the slowdown is also because the technology is still really new - what's interesting is that this technology is proven is so many spaces - Flash Memory in camera or consumer device/applications but it just doesn't get read/write like an enterprise application.
  From splattne

• Stay very far away from any of the cheap SSDs. Under random write conditions, i.e. normal use, they write speed drops down to less than 1meg and the write latency can go as high as 2 seconds. Basically your machine will lock up and look unresponsive.

  The Intel drives have solved this problem though and are quite fast just overly expensive still.

  From Ryaner

• You really should take a look at this entry Where SSDs Don't Make Sense in Server Applications James Hamilton frequently covers SSD issues on his blog and I find his perspective well worth taking into consideration

  From trent

• We bought an Intel x25-m for one developer's laptop. Just like Joel's article mentioned above, the boot time was much faster, and the load time of apps was much faster. For us, the $389 was well worth the money on a few select machines. As soon as they come down in price, I see us getting more of these. They made a noticeable difference.

  Edit:

  Since posting this, we bought 3 more Intel SSD drives. I put one of them in my laptop and it has been wonderful. The boot time alone makes them worth the money. I can now boot my laptop in 30 seconds (not a huge difference) but I can then log in and start using Outlook in 15-30 seconds. In the past I would login, start Outlook and a couple apps and then go get a cup of coffee.

  I can't say enough good things about the SSD drives. The only issue we have is determining at what price point do they make sense to buy 200 more for everyone else in the company.

  Oskar Duveborn : Have you compared this X25-M with a pair of 10krpm drives in raid-0? (same price, more storage space, better sustained throughput)

  Aaron : It was for a laptop. Unless I'm missing something I don't think that would be feasible.

  Mike McClelland : Aaron - have you ever tried using the Sleep functionality built into Vista/7 or good old Hibernate on XP? From cold-to-working on my laptop is around 3-4s from touching the power button to working in Outlook (or wherever I left off). I actually 'restart/reboot' very infrequently - say around once per month...

  Aaron : I use sleep when at the same location, but when moving from home to work and back, I usually reboot. For me it just seems like the laptop works better rebooting when in a different place. The boot time for the SSD is the most noticeable spot, but overall everything about the laptop just feels more snappy for me. I'm very happy with it.
  From Aaron

• You should really look at this site as it explains the different types of SSD either SLC and MLC drives. Wikipedia also gives a good summarization of the technology and describes the difference between SLC and MLC in greater detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

  From mrTomahawk

• SSDs are very nice devices, as long as you get the right one.

  For general computing, your primary OS drive or anything that does random reads (web servers, file servers, development, etc):

  Look primarily at Random Write performance! You also need good Random Read performance!

  Most reviews and advertisements for SSDs are centered around SEQUENTIAL Read/Write performance (usually around 150-200MBps throughput), but they don't talk about their RANDOM Read/Write performance (cheap ones are like 0.01-0.02MBps - a spinning rust hard drive gets over 1MBps).

  I know some of the Intel X25's are good at Random, but they are also expensive. The OCZ Vertex series is probably the lowest I would go (and don't bother looking at a majority of their other SSDs as they have abysmal Random performance).

  From Redbeard 0x0A

• My $0.02 ... not yet.

  GOOD SSD can improve disk-bound application performance. The price/performance is such that you better really need the performance improvement! Mediocre SSD will likely drive you crazy. SSD storage is not ready for standard deployment, and it won't be until:

  • the overall quality level improves across the price spectrum,
  • the low price comes way down, and
  • we have info about longevity and reliability.

  As an aside .. A Senior VP at my company bought an SSD-equipped MacBook Air solely for giving presentations and playing videos and is satisfied, particularly with the quick boot.

  From tomjedrz

• My colleagues who do a lot of demos for clients using VMWare or the like virtulization solutions have found that getting an SSD just to hold the VM guest disk files has a been a huge performance boost, and has definitely been worthwhile for them!

  As always, depends on the use case, and your mileage may vary.

  From geoffc

• Provided you get a fast one (the Intel X-25 being the generally recommended one) then it can have a dramatic effect on certain operations that write to lots of small files. Compilation is a key task that fits this, and Linus Torvalds wrote about how his Intel SSD rocks.

  But personally I think I'll wait a bit longer ...

  From Hamish Downer

• Disadvantages of SDDs:

  • still 30-50 times more expensive then HDDs of same capacity;
  • have 10-20 times less capacity then current HDDs;
  • have limited number of writes;

  Relate article on THG: "SSDs Replacing HDDs Soon? Not A Chance"

  Moreover, even if the money is not an issue, you're asking about laptop. In most laptops you can only have one disk, so there is no way of having setup like fast SSD for apps, big HDD for data (unless you consider using external HDD as valid option).

  On the other hand, SSD has much more mechanical resistance. Not so long ago my laptop fell of the table, resulting in total HDD failure. Painful.

  From vartec

• Steve Gibson, author or SpinRite http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm (an assembly-based hard disk diagnostic and recovery tool) said recently on his Security Now podcast that (I'm paraphrasing):

  Everyone will move to SSD. Hard disks are fundamentally a bad idea in a portable machine because it has moving parts in a case that moves: things will eventually break.

  Personally, though, I'm not going to get one until the price drops. I'm careful with my stuff, and if my laptop falls, it will be when the drive head is parked anyway (like my briefcase tipping over).

  Equally, the silence afforded by an SSD is irrelevant to me; perhaps if modern hard disks were as loud as a Bernoulli drive I'd consider it, but really, the fan is the loudest thing in any of my computers.

  From msanford

• I just had a bad experience with a SSD from PQI.

  The official MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is listed as 1,500,000 hours, or 133 years.

  It died within 2 weeks.

  Towards the end, the write speed was 6MByte/second, down from the original 60MByte/second. I think thats because it was struggling with more and more bad sectors. Finally, it got to the point where it would try to read a sector during a chkdsk, and the system would hang.

  I switched back to my original hard drive, and everything worked flawlessly. I have a latel model laptop, so all I can assume is that my SSD is bad by fault or design.

  The full name of the SSD to avoid is "PQI DK9128GD6R000A03 128GB SATA 2.5" SSD New Hard Drive"

  From Gravitas