Hundred Hand

I’ve been reading up on Flash Harddrives (aka SSD’s, aka Solid State Disks) the last couple days and I’m getting pretty darned excited about them (good thing my boxer briefs have a lot of “support”). They hold a lot of advantages over standard magnetic platter based drives. SSD’s have no moving parts so once the technology is mature they should have low failure rates, especially in laptops that often get jarred around. They consume far less power than traditional drives and make no noise. They also produce much less heat, because electricity is always indirectly converted to heat when consumed. Of course these are great things for laptops, but the most important part which makes it just as attractive to desktops are the performance benefits. SSD’s are able to access any part of the disk equally quickly with no “spin-up” time. For the most part disk fragmentation doesn’t affect performance in the least, and on a highly fragmented disk, an SSD will be about 70x faster than a top of the line traditional drive.

For a rough estimate, I’d say that the average SSD will be about 2x-15x faster in practice than what you’re using now. People have reported boot times as low as 7 seconds from power button to surfing the web and most programs opening almost as quickly as if they had just been minimized. With all the little random reads and writes computers have to perform it makes a big difference. People in the know are saying switching from traditional to SSD is easily the biggest thing the average nerd can do to increase the overall performance of their computer.

Of course, there are downsides to it. First is size; the sizes of the SSD’s that are available are about the same as traditional drives were when I first began college 8 years ago. The average consumer will only end up buying between a 40g and 160g SSD due to budgetary reasons. Which brings me to the second downside; these things cost a bunch right now. A high quality 160 gig SSD costs about $500. At best, companies are charging about $2.34 per gig. It doesn’t seem ridiculous, but when you consider traditional drives are down to about 9c per gig, you only get 4% of the space per dollar. One company is making a 1TB SSD, but it’s actually just 4 250gb drives stuck together, and costs over $2000; expensive enough that the average consumer will never use it till prices drop significantly.

And so I’m sitting around hoping prices will drop. Except, right now is one of the few times with technology that prices are actually going up. The demand is so high compared to supply right now that many stores are sold out of all decent SSD’s, and those that are selling them are charging 30% more than they did this summer. I’m about 6 months away from building a new system; they’d better get their act together before that time.

Anyway, the solution to this size problem (besides pills and creams) is to just get a reasonable sized SSD to hold your OS and a few of the programs you use all the time, and placing the rest of your data on your dirt cheap and massive traditional drive. It’s the same thing we’ve been doing with high-end performance drives in the past, and while it was looking like things were getting cheap enough for that to become obsolete, it’s come back in a big way; much like houndstooth and thick rimmed glasses.