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Topic: Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives (Read 27855 times) previous topic - next topic
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Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #25 –
Random access times is the main reason to use SSD.
Regarding sequential time, it's improved at each generation of hdd, usually by increasing the density on each platter. If sequential write / read matters for you, it can be improved by doing raids.
However you can't improve random access  time with raids, and the main motivation for getting a velociraptor is actually the small random access time.
Off course, you can do raids of ssd too.

 

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #26 –
Quote from: Rescator on
. While SSDs have gotten big enough/cheap enough that you can get almost 6 times the performance for 6 times the price, that still leaves the fact that it's 6 times the price.


Capacity of SSD  doesn't matter too much, if you just install the OS  on it  (I  mean above 100 Go is fine) ,  and then get a regular hdd for storage. This is the "expected use".

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #27 –
Quote from: Rescator on
Quote from: skamp on
Quote from: Rescator on
SSD CONS
Not so fast on sequential data
Slower than HDD on writes especially large sequential.

Where the hell did you get that idea? *snipetisnip* Even cheap SSDs write large files at 200 MB/s and up, a far cry from the fastest most HDDs.

Um.. *points*

Quote from: Rescator on
Now this is based on some research I did some time ago and it's from my vague memory of stuff.
SSD keep improving and especially in the writing speed and also on large sequential data handling.
So it really is down to cost.


A simple "Oh, I haven't looked at this and was just assuming" would probably have been a more tactful way of admitting that you were wrong. 

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #28 –
Quote from: extrabigmehdi on
Capacity of SSD  doesn't matter too much, if you just install the OS  on it  (I  mean above 100 Go is fine) ,  and then get a regular hdd for storage. This is the "expected use".

Which is a shame. I'd love to see a (cheap obviously and) huge and very fast 2TB+ SSD, audio work or video processing would be awesome on that.
Can't recall noticing any SSDs bumping into the 6gbit/s SATA3 limit yet (there was maybe one or two models?) either so room for speed improvements yet. I wonder if physical "RAM disks" may also make a comeback again (ages ago they where used in servers).

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #29 –
Quote from: Rescator on
Can't recall noticing any SSDs bumping into the 6gbit/s SATA3 limit yet (there was maybe one or two models?)


Actually, pretty much all modern performance oriented SSDs run into the SATA limit.  Its a huge problem and why the next gen interface is based on PCI-E over a flexible cable rather than SATA. 

Anyway, this isn't really on topic.  If you want to know more about storage, take a look at StorageReview.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #30 –
Quote from: saratoga on
A simple "Oh, I haven't looked at this and was just assuming" would probably have been a more tactful way of admitting that you were wrong.


I'm not prescient. I can not admit I'm wrong ahead of time. Those lines was written to indicate that  my statements may not all ring true any longer.

And even if I could edit my post I would not, only ties I edit a post is to either fix typos or hurriedly add something that really need to be part of the post.
Otherwise one wind up with thread rot where things make very little sense and stuff is quoted that is no longer in the original post etc.

Not sure what you mean by more tactful here! Do you mean that I did not act in a tactful way? Or that I acted tactless towards the original poster?

The original question of the original poster is "I was wondering what other people thought of the two recording mediums for storing music on",
I know that HA has very strict rules on things but I believe I did respond appropriately in my comment.
What is not appropriate is this small ember that you and me are tossing back and forth, and if there is an issue it should be taken to PMs or to a moderator instead if that does not help.

I have had presented anything as facts in my comment then I would also have cited the references to my sources. And if you look at my comment you can clearly see I do not do that, I'd rather not have to put a disclaimer on every single post/comment that stuff is not fact checked. It is far more practical to do it the other way around, and explicitly point out when things have actually been fact checked.

I gave my thoughts as requested and nothing else, and I clearly stated that my thoughts was probably outdated, I am assuming that the reader is smart enough to see that, when I actually mention that in writing. But I was perhaps not obvious enough. But I thought a huge disclaimer would be just tactless.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #31 –
Quote from: Rescator on
Quote from: saratoga on
A simple "Oh, I haven't looked at this and was just assuming" would probably have been a more tactful way of admitting that you were wrong.


I'm not prescient. I can not admit I'm wrong ahead of time.


Nonetheless, you can try to understand what you're talking about in the present.

Quote from: Rescator on
Not sure what you mean by more tactful here!


Avoiding sarcastic, wall of text replies to people who are correcting you would be tactful in this instance.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #32 –
You have some serious misconceptions about SSD's compared to traditional spinning platter drives.

My System 76 laptop with an SSD boots Ubuntu to the login screen in less than 2 seconds, and from login to desktop in less than 1 second. It can launch applications that take upwards of 10-30 seconds on a spinning drive, virtually instantly, less than a second.

That being said, I would not spend the money on SSD's simply to store music or video. Producing/mixing audio and video, yes. Storing finished lossless or lossy encodes? No way.

I can saturate my 1Gb network with spinning 5400 rpm HDD's running a ZFS mirror. The sequential read performance of even the slowest and cheapest modern HDD is orders of magnitude more than is required to stream audio or video. Spend the savings of using network attached HDD's to purchase multiple drives for redundant protection against failures and for extra drives/services for backup purposes.

As for reliability, in a purely storage scenario the write limits of flash storage isn't much of an issue. The most common failure mode of an SSD is controller failure. That being said, you would be unwise to trust your data to any kind of drives without implementing redundancy, error correction, and backups.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #33 –
Save up for a belt drive.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #34 –
SSDs are better in everything except price per GB. If that is no concern, by all means get an SSD. Especially since (local) IO has been one of the weak links in personal computing for a long time, SSDs are pure bliss.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #35 –
I would like to thank everyone for their input to my question. I guess the answer was always going to be ( six of one and half a dozen of the other )type of answer. I will try and respond to all those that made suggestions. Regarding NAS and backup solutions, the music will be backed up to separate HDDs or even to blueray discs or even another SSD eventually, regardless of what type of storage I decide to use, and  how far do you take back up precautions to ?. I mean if you are unfortunate to have a house fire or have them stolen you may lose all of your data anyway. Even using a RAID system of what ever flavour has its own risks. You do not hear much about vinyl users worrying to much about losing all of their copies of records do you!. Remember that this is  a music only system ( CDs) and are ripped from CDs (FLAC using dbpoweramp ) so I still have a hard copy available as a back up. Price wise, SSDs may be a lot more than HDDs but my collection is not vast so I dont need huge amounts of storage, so a smaller capacity SSD would  suffice, ( lower cost ) and if you compare SSD storage on an ipod/ipad type of player, recording a lossy format, then the price does not seen to extravagant, and I would have the added advantage of cooler running ( within the computer ) and near silent operation also, having only one case fan for cooling purposes and that fan is pretty quiet. I suppose it comes down to evaluating what you need and what your own requirements are, mine are probably different to alot of other peoples requirements. I will probably change the fan on my external hard drive anyway and use that unit for storing other data on. I too have to look after the pennies, as I had to retire due to ill health, but computer music is now my hobby and passion, I just have to be patient at times  and save up. I would like to thank again all who answered my question and hope that my response is helpful to someone else. A BIG CHEERS TO EVERYONE.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #36 –
I remember reading somewhere, and I can't remember the source at all, that when SSD storage fails, it tends to be the writing of data that goes, rather than the reading. If that is actually true, at least if a SSD goes funny on you, you can still make a backup from it.

Anyone had experience of this? I'm currently using HDD and am wondering if SSD is a more secure way to go next time.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #37 –
You might want to check out the Great TechReport SSD endurance experiment Jabba, the most recent article is to be found HERE.

In short, how gracefully (and with how much notice) an SSD fails depends upon the manufacturer. That being said, TechReport only managed to induce failures in modern SSDs by writing nearly a Petabyte of data to them. None of these drives are new enough to be using the absolute most current NAND process (19nm I believe), but nonetheless, this amount of writing is utterly astounding.

Since writes are what "kill" SSDs (well, maybe gamma rays or magma baths), storing your digital music collection on an SSD is likely one of the safest places you could possibly store it. Far, far safer than traditional spinning platter drives or optical media.

My SSDs are not yet large enough to store my entire collection, but with the availability of the good and cheap Crucial MX100 512GB drives, this may change soon.

Early SSDs got a bad name in large part to one dodgy manufacturer (OCZ) and immature firmware for one of the main controller manufacturers (Sandforce). Intel quotes early failure/return rates for their SSDs of between 0.1 to 0.4%, and a part of that is probably due to motherboard firmware issues. This is stunningly low for consumer electronics.

As most current SSDs of any size run up against the 6GBps maximum of the SATA spec, PCIe lanes are being coopted for storage IO in the most recent (SATA Express, M2, etc.) systems. I believe all of the Apple portable computers use PCIe based storage, as well they should given their cost.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #38 –
Thanks for the info and the link. I'm currently using a pair of 2 terabyte HDDs (one storage, one for backup), so I'll keep an eye on how the prices come down for SSD in the near future.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #39 –
Quote from: Audible! on
I believe all of the Apple portable computers use PCIe based storage, as well they should given their cost.


You may be thinking of Thunderbolt, which is a connector/interface that runs through PCIe, and is included on most of the new Apples. I've not used it personally, but I have seen external storage that hooks up to it, and the speeds are a lot better than SATA.

My computer actually still has spinning drives in it (running over IDE), but the next one within a few years is getting an SSD for sure.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #40 –
Quote from: slks on
Quote from: Audible! on
I believe all of the Apple portable computers use PCIe based storage, as well they should given their cost.


You may be thinking of Thunderbolt, which is a connector/interface that runs through PCIe, and is included on most of the new Apples. I've not used it personally, but I have seen external storage that hooks up to it, and the speeds are a lot better than SATA.

My computer actually still has spinning drives in it (running over IDE), but the next one within a few years is getting an SSD for sure.


Actually no. Thunderbolt is effectively an external extension of PCIe, but I was talking about the internal drive. Apple is using solid state drives hanging directly off the PCIe bus (PCIe 2 x2 or better, so effectively double the bandwidth of SATA3, at the least), and as of last year I believe that's standard on most of their lineup.

You can check out an early look by anandtech on the 2013 Air right here. There is a current standard for doing this called "M.2", but Apple, predictably, is using a proprietary connector in order to better gouge their customer base. Still, 128GB of space for apps/files/OS is quite doable, and the responsiveness of an SSD is marvelous.

Given my video hoarding and redundancy tendencies, I've got 10TB of spinning platters in my workstation. There is no way I'll go back to booting or running most applications off of them however. Indeed, I removed the 320GB 7200rpm drive in my refurbished dell laptop as soon as I acquired it, and swapped in my old 64GB Crucial M4 SSD. It does seem...disproportionate to be running a system with 16GB of RAM and 64GB of hard drive, but it's a far more responsive machine than with 2GB and a spinning platter.

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #41 –
Not to unduly belabor the thread here, but there is a new article up on PCIe SSD solutions from Samsung and OCZ on anandtech; the sequential read performance of some of the Samsung, OCZ and Intel PCIe SSD solutions show why anyone would care about such a solution.

As you can see HERE, it's possible to see sequential transfers from PCIe mass storage solutions on the order of 1-2GBytes per second, and write performance approaching half that. This is really amazing, and it's encouraging to see the one great Achilles heel of data storage making such incredible strides so quickly.

Unfortunately, these M2 drives are not the commodity items that traditional SATA SSDs are, so the price premium is pretty significant.

It does make me hanker for a 128GB PCIe boot SSD with a 512-1024GB SATA SSD for files and programs

Mechanical hard drives versus solid state drives

Reply #42 –
My apologies for yet again resurrecting an outmoded thread!

For anyone who's interested, in the US at least (check for Canada), the Intel 730 series SSDs are on sale as of November 21st, 2014 at Newegg for less than half of their original offering price.  The 480GB model is $200, which is a superb deal.

These are not the fastest or most up to date SSDs, as they were introduced in March of 2014 or so. They are not slow, however!

This particular model uses extremely high grade Intel/Micron MLC NAND, and the Intel data center (DC series) controller.
In essence, these are Intel data center SSDs marketed to power users.

As such they carry a 5 year warranty are are warranted for 40GB of writes per day, for five years.

If reliability is your chief concern in looking for an SSD, this is among best drives currently available.