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Best SSDs For The Money: August 2011

118 points by nesbot 15y ago

saturn 15y ago
I recently grabbed a 512GB crucial m4 for $730 delivered, from here http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ (no affiliation) (price has risen slightly since). For some reason I'd been putting it off but seeing it there for less than $1.50 per gig, at the capacity I wanted for my macbook, suddenly seemed to be a no-brainer. Hell, I remember paying $100 per gig back in the '90s. Somehow my mental model of "reasonable prices to pay for storage" has just been totally biased by years and years of dirt cheap HDDs. Frankly it hasn't been the jaw-dropping entering-hyperdrive performance boost I had kind of hoped for (I'm a rails dev). While a definite improvement, it seems that for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU. But while it hasn't sped up all that much, it never slows down, which you don't notice at first but over time has a subtle confidence-building effect. Application launch speeds are much improved, for those who spend a good part of their day launching apps, which is not me. I tend to launch a few and then use them for the next two weeks before I restart. I also like how the drive does not make whining sounds when I move the computer before it's gone to sleep. Recommended, anyway, they're cheap enough now that it's not a luxury, even if like me you use most of it for your work music collection.
- earl 15y ago
  I felt the same way -- that I wasn't blown away by the performance -- until I got used to find . -iname "*java" | xargs grep ... or ctrl-h in eclipse blowing through millions of lines of source code in 10-20 seconds instead of 3-5 minutes. I tried going back briefly while helping a friend on his laptop and waiting for grep to finish was amazingly annoying.
- ranebo 15y ago
  Using someone else's sans-ssd computer will remove any doubt you have about the purchase. I occasionally have to do the usual family tech support and I find the slow response infuriating. I ended up getting a 128GB for the OS and apps and installed a macbook optical replacement HD caddy for a 500GB drive for media. If you can deal without an optical drive this config is highly recommended.
- Cymen 15y ago
  I brought the 128GB m4 and have had a similar experience. On a side note, there is a firmware upgrade that just came out that improves performance. http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx
- rawsyntax 15y ago
  From what I read at the time, (january 2011) sandforce based SSDs got much better performance on mac systems. I think this was to do with OSX's lack of support for TRIM. On the other hand, right after I upgraded my SSD, I went to ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3, which are much slower due in part to a bug that makes requiring files take forever.
  - r00fus 15y ago
    Not sure about others, but in my case (10 MBP 13" w/ Vertex2 in optibay), I had occasional stalls (anywhere from 2-30 sec) until the TRIM Enabler ( http://www.groths.org/?p=308 http://www.groths.org/?p=308 ) showed up and I installed it (OSX Lion supports TRIM on this drive natively, it seems). I think this is because, although sandforce drives have native garbage collection, it can sometimes happen at a very inopportune moment (like say, a 20s "pause" during critical moments of a SC2 game).
    - ugh 15y ago
      By the way, do not use that Trim Enabler. If you want to and are aware of the risks, use this one, especially if you plan on using it with Lion: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/ http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/ What this does is actually pretty simple, it replaces the string “Apple SSD” (used to identify for which drives trim is turned on) in a file in the relevant kernel extension with zeros. It also creates a backup copy of the original file. The Trim Enabler you linked to replaces a whole kernel extension (meaning you might end up with an older version of a kernel extension) which is obviously monumentally stupid.
- eupharis 15y ago
  "for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU." This is my experience as well. I have an older computer (2009) with a low-voltage processor (SU3700) that I am looking at upgrading, but it's not really justifiable yet. So I thought I'd grab an SSD for a nice performance pick-me-up now, then throw it in my new computer when I got it. However, while there is a performance increase, it isn't really all that noticeable. (I use another computer often with an HDD, and can hardly tell the difference.) The CPU is definitely the bottleneck on most tasks.
- dasil003 15y ago
  It's strange the way people have different reactions to the SSD performance factor. I'm a rails dev too, and for me the SSD was nothing short of life-changing. When I have to go back to a non-SSD machine I get cranky. I think the difference is because if you only do one thing at a time and you have sufficient RAM, than an SSD does almost nothing. Whereas if you have a lot of processes running and accessing files spread around the drive, and HDD will quickly send you to beach ball land. Parallels in particular will do you in in a hurry. I'm in the habit of running a IE7/8/9 in separate Parallels instances, Photoshop, Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Opera, MacVim, MySQL w/ 20GB of data in it, local rails server, local rails console, and iTunes or Spotify. With an SSD I basically just run whatever I want and things slow down only very slowly and linearly as I add processes. Without an SSD I feel like if I listen to music it's going to slow things down, it adds unnecessary mental overhead to my whole workflow. The mental factor is I think why people may overstate the absolute benefit of an SSD.
acangiano 15y ago
I recently bought a Crucial M4 256GB SSD, and I have been extremely satisfied. Blazingly fast and no issues whatsoever. Even better, on my late 2008 MacBook Pro model, I get SATA II speeds (3Gbps). Most other drives (e.g., OCZ Agility) will only be recognized as SATA I (1.5Gbps) on my Mac. This makes the Crucial drive literally twice as fast in best case scenarios. As an example of the effects it has had on my computer performance, building my upcoming book (which invokes rake and JRuby) used to take 1m 30s on a 7200 RPM drive. Now it takes 15 seconds. Also, productivity apps like Office open in a split second.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  Upgraded my Cr-48 to a 40 gb Intel drive over the weekend. An SSD with room is a marvelous thing. So, I have a late 2008 macbook (white), looks like a very similar processor (core duo 2.4 ghz), and 4 GB RAM, running Lion. I've been looking at the Crucial 256. That or the Intel 160. How long have you been running this drive, and are you running Lion? How did the upgrade go? Did you need anything besides Time Machine? Do you use macports, postgresql, or apache, and if so, any problems after the upgrade? Also, have you looked into 3g inside your macbook? Is there any way to make that work? A dual function wifi/3g mini PCIe?
  - acangiano 15y ago
    > How long have you been running this drive, About a month. > and are you running Lion? Yes. > How did the upgrade go? Did you need anything besides Time Machine? I did a clean install and then moved over my data. It was time for me to do a clean up anyway, so I took the opportunity to do so. > Do you use macports, postgresql, or apache, and if so, any problems after the upgrade? I use all the typical dev tools with no problems, but I have not installed macports after the switch to this new drive. (I use brew instead.) > Also, have you looked into 3g inside your macbook? I haven't.
    - niels_olson 15y ago
      thanks!
cowmixtoo 15y ago
I have a lot of personal success stories with SSDs but here's my current favorite. A few months ago I had to help one of our scientists (the company is called 5AM Solutions.. they the awesome) run a bioinformatic job written in Perl and R. As it turned out, for long stretches of the processing the job required around 20 GB of memory. The one server that had all the required dependencies installed had only 8 GB at the time. When I let the job run the first time, it started to page out memory to hard disk. The job ran for about four days, was only about 25% complete and during that time frame the server was un-useable for any other functions. Pretty much everything came to grinding halt. Between that first run and the time our new RAM would be installed, just for grins, I gave the system 30 GB of swap space on the locally attached SSD. With that configuration the job finished in 19 hours and during that time the server was still responsive of other tasks. When we finally added the appropriate amount of physical RAM the job took only 15 hours to complete. It is the first time I have ever seen virtual memory be useful.
- scott_s 15y ago
  "Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory Virtual memory is what lets us write programs pretending that we own the entire address space, and it is very useful. Swapping pages to disk, though, has been useful for a very long time. Yes, once your high-performance application starts swapping all the time, your performance is going to suffer by several orders of magnitude. But occasionally swapping pages in and out of disk is part of what makes modern operating systems useful. You left a large PowerPoint presentation open for several days, but never got around to working on it? Not a problem, since if the OS needs that memory, it will just swap out the pages. Without that ability, the OS would need to go around killing processes. (Which it will do if it has to, but it's a rare event because it can swap out pages.)
  - cowmixtoo 15y ago
    My point was that my application needed 166% more phyical memory than what I had at the time. Paging out to a normal "disk" was not even an option, the performance ranged incredibly horrible to completely unusable. Paging out to SSD was not only usable, it was only a percentage slower than 'real' RAM. I think that's amazing. Having the option to use SSD as memory in a pinch is a great 'win'.
sciurus 15y ago
We use the 600GB Intel 320's as second drives in Macbook Pros for running virtual machines. They're the highest capacity 2.5" SSDs available, and they aren't cheap. However, we can put multiple virtual machines with 100GB+ databases on them, travel to countries with poor internet connectivity, and teach workshops where the students run intensive queries. It's as if we've shrunk a $100,000 storage array and stuck it in our carry-on luggage.
- cowmixtoo 15y ago
  I don't understand why SSD are not deployed in EVERY RMDBS server right now. They benefits are truly out of this world.
  - riobard 15y ago
    'cause SSDs are not as reliable as they appeare to be to withstand the server-side workload. Enterprise-grade SSDs are significantly more expensive than consumer-grade ones. You are not looking at $1~2/GB price, but $10~20/GB. Given the capacity required for most use cases, SSDs are hardly good choice for critical servers as primary storage. In addition, most RMDBS are optimized for mechanical disks. Optimization for SSDs becomes interesting only recently when the price of SSD drops to be barely reasonable. However, SSDs absolutely rocks as big cache.
    - cowmixtoo 15y ago
      I have a lot of friends using 'consumer grade' SSD for their DB workloads and the difference is night and day. This might be a horrible example but my one friend had a installation of FileMaker Pro running on a completely tricked out XServer (RAID with 15K SAS drives). With 250 concurrent users he was completely max out on CPU and many queries took minutes to complete. When he moved to a 256GB SSD his CPU load now never goes above 20% and not one query takes more than five seconds, period. Also, please reference my old HN post from over a year ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998
    - masklinn 15y ago
nesbot 15y ago
If you use your computer for extended periods of time every day then their performance payoffs outweigh the $. They have come down quite a bit in price lately as well. As the article talks about there are many options available today from at least getting your OS onto a smaller speedy boot drive to housing everything on a larger one. I for one initially had picked up a 60 GB OCZ Vertex1 awhile ago and then about 10 months ago moved up to a 120 GB Vertex2. Will never look back.
angrycoder 15y ago
I am surprised to see the OCZ drives recommended so frequently in the article. So far I've owned 2 from crucial, 1 intel, and 1 from OCZ. The first SSD drive I purchased was a crucial, and it is still running like a champ 3 years later in a macbook pro. The OCZ drive failed within 90 days. This wouldn't be a big deal in and of itself, things break. However, their customer service is terrible. I got nothing but a 2 week long run around with them when I tried to RMA it.
- nesbot 15y ago
  I have had good success with 2 OCZ (Vertex1 and Vertex2) drives but had an Intel SSD that failed hard on me.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  OCZ's SSD offerings have carved out a very good chunk of the SSD industry. Their Vertex drives almost always receive favorable reviews & perform competitively, and their Agility drives are a popular budget SSD. Judging from the past few shootouts I've seen, they are one of the Drives to Beat, along with the intels.
  - Stratoscope 15y ago
    You seem to like OCD SSDs. I'd be interested to know which ones you've used, and how they've worked out for you. Thanks!
- dmn001 15y ago
  I have a Kingston and an OCZ Vertex 2 and the OCZ drive failed in a month. My experience with the RMA is similar, it took 3 weeks to get a replacement and very slow email support.
- zzuser 15y ago
  I am also very surprised to see OCZ drives recommended. I have 10 OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs in a single server. In the past two months, 6 of these 10 Vertex 3 drives have failed so far. OCZ is utter and bitter crap.
saturdaysaint 15y ago
I'm pretty happy with the 256 GB drive in my MacBook Air. I would have considered this limited until recently, but wireless networked storage is cheap and easy to implement(I basically just connected a cheap 3 terabyte drive to my router) and Thunderbolt or USB3 storage gives us a lot of options when more high-performance storage is necessary. Also, cloud services (Facebook/Flickr for photos, Rdio for music) have made me much less of a data packrat. So I increasingly consider the hard disk "working storage" for applications and the most crucial files.
deleted 15y ago
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sid0 15y ago
I've been using an Intel 320. It's a dream. No more hitches at all.
peteforde 15y ago
I'm surprised that I'm not seeing even a casual mention of the OWC SSDs in this review. From everything (else) I've ever read, they tend to be way ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and performance. Sure, things change quickly stats wise... but they aren't even on the chart. http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6... Subjectively, I would describe my OWC 120GB drive as "blisteringly fast". Previously I had a 100GB OWC with extra redundancy for server loads (overkill in my iMac 2010) and the first time it booted it was like being personally greeted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
- wmf 15y ago
  OWC = SandForce = OCZ http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/the-sandforce-roundup-corsair-patriot-ocz-owc-memoright-ssds-compared http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/the-sandforce-roundup-cor...
lawnchair_larry 15y ago
Just a warning, a lot of these SSDs "cheat" by using compression. I bought the best drive that I could find for my macbook pro - OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, and was rather disappointed to find out that the posted speeds are based on benchmarks with compressible data. The reason this is an issue is because if you use disk encryption like you should be doing, encrypted data is not compressible. As a result, my speeds are 1/3rd to 1/2 of that which is advertised, and it was not worth the extra money.
- 0x12 15y ago
  > if you use disk encryption like you should be doing I've never found that I had a really good reason to encrypt a drive yet, I'm kind of surprised to see a suggestion that this is the way things are done. Why should you be encrypting your disks?
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    I approach full disk encryption and how we "should be doing" it the same way I approach brushing my teeth 3x a day and flossing 1x a day. Yea, I should, but I brush my teeth 2.5x a day and floss 1x a week instead, and it's worked O.K. so far.
    - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
      Russian roulette is not a big deal. I've shot this revolver at my forehead 5 times now, and it's worked ok so far.
  - khafra 15y ago
    Perhaps he has data that he doesn't want people looking at if it's lost or stolen.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - colonelxc 15y ago
    The OP specifically mentioned a MPB, a laptop, which are pretty easy and high value targets for theft. If my laptop was stolen, I would be relieved to know that my personal data was safe. There are additional reasons for full disk encryption too, like ensuring that important system files have not been tampered with. Whether or not you want to go that far depends entirely on your level of paranoia. For a home desktop, the cost/benefit may be a bit different, because the computer is exposed to less places and people. As with many things in security, you would need to calculate what is an acceptable risk to you versus the cost of mitigating that risk.
pointyhat 15y ago
There's a lot of snake-oil in SSD's until you hit the $400 mark. I'm not going near them until the lies and half-arsed chipsets stop.
rektide 15y ago
Judging SSD's by their little performance bits is a kind of amusing endeavor: the latest SandForce already saturates a 6Gbps SATA III link, and others are catching up real fast. This pretty standard unit of measure is hitting the limits of the interface, not the drive. What other criteria are there? GB/$, performance/watt, watts at idle, IOps, and warranty or lifecycle costs. Personally, I find something "big enough", ignore power consumption and iops (neither is going to make a huge enough difference for me to concern myself), and then get whatever I can find that has the longest warranty.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  the latest SandForce already saturates a 6Gbps SATA III link Considering the dinosaur pace of new interfaces, and the fact that SATA III isn't even fully "rolled out" yet, I wonder if we are going to see a new wave of hackish custom solutions by manufacturers. Dual SATA ports on your drive, anyone?
  - bho 15y ago
    Or, direct plug-in to PCI-E like the revodrive.
  - wmf 15y ago
    They're already combining two SAS ports to get 1 GB/s; you can't really do that with SATA, though. http://www.smartm.com/products/productdetailssd.asp?SMARTPartNumber=Optimus http://www.smartm.com/products/productdetailssd.asp?SMARTPar... We may also see some migration from SATA to NVM Express.
mxavier 15y ago
I knew this would happen. I bought a Thinkpad T420s which has a non-standard (or new standard?) 7mm hard drive caddy instead of the much more common 9.5mm. I bought a 64GB Crucial M4 because it could be modded to 7mm and the price was right. I'm happy with the performance. It feels noticeably faster than a standard magnetic drive, but the 64GB is in tier 10 on this comparison. I guess as long as I'm happy with the performance it doesn't really matter. I wish this article was around 2 weeks ago.

118 points by nesbot 15y ago

I recently grabbed a 512GB crucial m4 for $730 delivered, from here http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ (no affiliation) (price has risen slightly since). For some reason I'd been putting it off but seeing it there for less than $1.50 per gig, at the capacity I wanted for my macbook, suddenly seemed to be a no-brainer. Hell, I remember paying $100 per gig back in the '90s. Somehow my mental model of "reasonable prices to pay for storage" has just been totally biased by years and years of dirt cheap HDDs. Frankly it hasn't been the jaw-dropping entering-hyperdrive performance boost I had kind of hoped for (I'm a rails dev). While a definite improvement, it seems that for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU. But while it hasn't sped up all that much, it never slows down, which you don't notice at first but over time has a subtle confidence-building effect. Application launch speeds are much improved, for those who spend a good part of their day launching apps, which is not me. I tend to launch a few and then use them for the next two weeks before I restart. I also like how the drive does not make whining sounds when I move the computer before it's gone to sleep. Recommended, anyway, they're cheap enough now that it's not a luxury, even if like me you use most of it for your work music collection.

earl 15y ago
I felt the same way -- that I wasn't blown away by the performance -- until I got used to find . -iname "*java" | xargs grep ... or ctrl-h in eclipse blowing through millions of lines of source code in 10-20 seconds instead of 3-5 minutes. I tried going back briefly while helping a friend on his laptop and waiting for grep to finish was amazingly annoying.
ranebo 15y ago
Using someone else's sans-ssd computer will remove any doubt you have about the purchase. I occasionally have to do the usual family tech support and I find the slow response infuriating. I ended up getting a 128GB for the OS and apps and installed a macbook optical replacement HD caddy for a 500GB drive for media. If you can deal without an optical drive this config is highly recommended.
Cymen 15y ago
I brought the 128GB m4 and have had a similar experience. On a side note, there is a firmware upgrade that just came out that improves performance. http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx
rawsyntax 15y ago
From what I read at the time, (january 2011) sandforce based SSDs got much better performance on mac systems. I think this was to do with OSX's lack of support for TRIM. On the other hand, right after I upgraded my SSD, I went to ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3, which are much slower due in part to a bug that makes requiring files take forever.
- r00fus 15y ago
  Not sure about others, but in my case (10 MBP 13" w/ Vertex2 in optibay), I had occasional stalls (anywhere from 2-30 sec) until the TRIM Enabler ( http://www.groths.org/?p=308 http://www.groths.org/?p=308 ) showed up and I installed it (OSX Lion supports TRIM on this drive natively, it seems). I think this is because, although sandforce drives have native garbage collection, it can sometimes happen at a very inopportune moment (like say, a 20s "pause" during critical moments of a SC2 game).
  - ugh 15y ago
    By the way, do not use that Trim Enabler. If you want to and are aware of the risks, use this one, especially if you plan on using it with Lion: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/ http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/ What this does is actually pretty simple, it replaces the string “Apple SSD” (used to identify for which drives trim is turned on) in a file in the relevant kernel extension with zeros. It also creates a backup copy of the original file. The Trim Enabler you linked to replaces a whole kernel extension (meaning you might end up with an older version of a kernel extension) which is obviously monumentally stupid.
eupharis 15y ago
"for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU." This is my experience as well. I have an older computer (2009) with a low-voltage processor (SU3700) that I am looking at upgrading, but it's not really justifiable yet. So I thought I'd grab an SSD for a nice performance pick-me-up now, then throw it in my new computer when I got it. However, while there is a performance increase, it isn't really all that noticeable. (I use another computer often with an HDD, and can hardly tell the difference.) The CPU is definitely the bottleneck on most tasks.
dasil003 15y ago
It's strange the way people have different reactions to the SSD performance factor. I'm a rails dev too, and for me the SSD was nothing short of life-changing. When I have to go back to a non-SSD machine I get cranky. I think the difference is because if you only do one thing at a time and you have sufficient RAM, than an SSD does almost nothing. Whereas if you have a lot of processes running and accessing files spread around the drive, and HDD will quickly send you to beach ball land. Parallels in particular will do you in in a hurry. I'm in the habit of running a IE7/8/9 in separate Parallels instances, Photoshop, Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Opera, MacVim, MySQL w/ 20GB of data in it, local rails server, local rails console, and iTunes or Spotify. With an SSD I basically just run whatever I want and things slow down only very slowly and linearly as I add processes. Without an SSD I feel like if I listen to music it's going to slow things down, it adds unnecessary mental overhead to my whole workflow. The mental factor is I think why people may overstate the absolute benefit of an SSD.

acangiano 15y ago

I recently bought a Crucial M4 256GB SSD, and I have been extremely satisfied. Blazingly fast and no issues whatsoever. Even better, on my late 2008 MacBook Pro model, I get SATA II speeds (3Gbps). Most other drives (e.g., OCZ Agility) will only be recognized as SATA I (1.5Gbps) on my Mac. This makes the Crucial drive literally twice as fast in best case scenarios. As an example of the effects it has had on my computer performance, building my upcoming book (which invokes rake and JRuby) used to take 1m 30s on a 7200 RPM drive. Now it takes 15 seconds. Also, productivity apps like Office open in a split second.

niels_olson 15y ago
Upgraded my Cr-48 to a 40 gb Intel drive over the weekend. An SSD with room is a marvelous thing. So, I have a late 2008 macbook (white), looks like a very similar processor (core duo 2.4 ghz), and 4 GB RAM, running Lion. I've been looking at the Crucial 256. That or the Intel 160. How long have you been running this drive, and are you running Lion? How did the upgrade go? Did you need anything besides Time Machine? Do you use macports, postgresql, or apache, and if so, any problems after the upgrade? Also, have you looked into 3g inside your macbook? Is there any way to make that work? A dual function wifi/3g mini PCIe?
- acangiano 15y ago
  > How long have you been running this drive, About a month. > and are you running Lion? Yes. > How did the upgrade go? Did you need anything besides Time Machine? I did a clean install and then moved over my data. It was time for me to do a clean up anyway, so I took the opportunity to do so. > Do you use macports, postgresql, or apache, and if so, any problems after the upgrade? I use all the typical dev tools with no problems, but I have not installed macports after the switch to this new drive. (I use brew instead.) > Also, have you looked into 3g inside your macbook? I haven't.
  - niels_olson 15y ago
    thanks!

cowmixtoo 15y ago

I have a lot of personal success stories with SSDs but here's my current favorite. A few months ago I had to help one of our scientists (the company is called 5AM Solutions.. they the awesome) run a bioinformatic job written in Perl and R. As it turned out, for long stretches of the processing the job required around 20 GB of memory. The one server that had all the required dependencies installed had only 8 GB at the time. When I let the job run the first time, it started to page out memory to hard disk. The job ran for about four days, was only about 25% complete and during that time frame the server was un-useable for any other functions. Pretty much everything came to grinding halt. Between that first run and the time our new RAM would be installed, just for grins, I gave the system 30 GB of swap space on the locally attached SSD. With that configuration the job finished in 19 hours and during that time the server was still responsive of other tasks. When we finally added the appropriate amount of physical RAM the job took only 15 hours to complete. It is the first time I have ever seen virtual memory be useful.

scott_s 15y ago
"Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory Virtual memory is what lets us write programs pretending that we own the entire address space, and it is very useful. Swapping pages to disk, though, has been useful for a very long time. Yes, once your high-performance application starts swapping all the time, your performance is going to suffer by several orders of magnitude. But occasionally swapping pages in and out of disk is part of what makes modern operating systems useful. You left a large PowerPoint presentation open for several days, but never got around to working on it? Not a problem, since if the OS needs that memory, it will just swap out the pages. Without that ability, the OS would need to go around killing processes. (Which it will do if it has to, but it's a rare event because it can swap out pages.)
- cowmixtoo 15y ago
  My point was that my application needed 166% more phyical memory than what I had at the time. Paging out to a normal "disk" was not even an option, the performance ranged incredibly horrible to completely unusable. Paging out to SSD was not only usable, it was only a percentage slower than 'real' RAM. I think that's amazing. Having the option to use SSD as memory in a pinch is a great 'win'.

sciurus 15y ago

We use the 600GB Intel 320's as second drives in Macbook Pros for running virtual machines. They're the highest capacity 2.5" SSDs available, and they aren't cheap. However, we can put multiple virtual machines with 100GB+ databases on them, travel to countries with poor internet connectivity, and teach workshops where the students run intensive queries. It's as if we've shrunk a $100,000 storage array and stuck it in our carry-on luggage.

cowmixtoo 15y ago
I don't understand why SSD are not deployed in EVERY RMDBS server right now. They benefits are truly out of this world.
- riobard 15y ago
  'cause SSDs are not as reliable as they appeare to be to withstand the server-side workload. Enterprise-grade SSDs are significantly more expensive than consumer-grade ones. You are not looking at $1~2/GB price, but $10~20/GB. Given the capacity required for most use cases, SSDs are hardly good choice for critical servers as primary storage. In addition, most RMDBS are optimized for mechanical disks. Optimization for SSDs becomes interesting only recently when the price of SSD drops to be barely reasonable. However, SSDs absolutely rocks as big cache.
  - cowmixtoo 15y ago
    I have a lot of friends using 'consumer grade' SSD for their DB workloads and the difference is night and day. This might be a horrible example but my one friend had a installation of FileMaker Pro running on a completely tricked out XServer (RAID with 15K SAS drives). With 250 concurrent users he was completely max out on CPU and many queries took minutes to complete. When he moved to a 256GB SSD his CPU load now never goes above 20% and not one query takes more than five seconds, period. Also, please reference my old HN post from over a year ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998
  - masklinn 15y ago

nesbot 15y ago

If you use your computer for extended periods of time every day then their performance payoffs outweigh the $. They have come down quite a bit in price lately as well. As the article talks about there are many options available today from at least getting your OS onto a smaller speedy boot drive to housing everything on a larger one. I for one initially had picked up a 60 GB OCZ Vertex1 awhile ago and then about 10 months ago moved up to a 120 GB Vertex2. Will never look back.

angrycoder 15y ago

I am surprised to see the OCZ drives recommended so frequently in the article. So far I've owned 2 from crucial, 1 intel, and 1 from OCZ. The first SSD drive I purchased was a crucial, and it is still running like a champ 3 years later in a macbook pro. The OCZ drive failed within 90 days. This wouldn't be a big deal in and of itself, things break. However, their customer service is terrible. I got nothing but a 2 week long run around with them when I tried to RMA it.

nesbot 15y ago
I have had good success with 2 OCZ (Vertex1 and Vertex2) drives but had an Intel SSD that failed hard on me.
sliverstorm 15y ago
OCZ's SSD offerings have carved out a very good chunk of the SSD industry. Their Vertex drives almost always receive favorable reviews & perform competitively, and their Agility drives are a popular budget SSD. Judging from the past few shootouts I've seen, they are one of the Drives to Beat, along with the intels.
- Stratoscope 15y ago
  You seem to like OCD SSDs. I'd be interested to know which ones you've used, and how they've worked out for you. Thanks!
dmn001 15y ago
I have a Kingston and an OCZ Vertex 2 and the OCZ drive failed in a month. My experience with the RMA is similar, it took 3 weeks to get a replacement and very slow email support.
zzuser 15y ago
I am also very surprised to see OCZ drives recommended. I have 10 OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs in a single server. In the past two months, 6 of these 10 Vertex 3 drives have failed so far. OCZ is utter and bitter crap.

saturdaysaint 15y ago

I'm pretty happy with the 256 GB drive in my MacBook Air. I would have considered this limited until recently, but wireless networked storage is cheap and easy to implement(I basically just connected a cheap 3 terabyte drive to my router) and Thunderbolt or USB3 storage gives us a lot of options when more high-performance storage is necessary. Also, cloud services (Facebook/Flickr for photos, Rdio for music) have made me much less of a data packrat. So I increasingly consider the hard disk "working storage" for applications and the most crucial files.

deleted 15y ago

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sid0 15y ago

I've been using an Intel 320. It's a dream. No more hitches at all.

peteforde 15y ago

I'm surprised that I'm not seeing even a casual mention of the OWC SSDs in this review. From everything (else) I've ever read, they tend to be way ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and performance. Sure, things change quickly stats wise... but they aren't even on the chart. http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6... Subjectively, I would describe my OWC 120GB drive as "blisteringly fast". Previously I had a 100GB OWC with extra redundancy for server loads (overkill in my iMac 2010) and the first time it booted it was like being personally greeted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

wmf 15y ago
OWC = SandForce = OCZ http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/the-sandforce-roundup-corsair-patriot-ocz-owc-memoright-ssds-compared http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/the-sandforce-roundup-cor...

lawnchair_larry 15y ago

Just a warning, a lot of these SSDs "cheat" by using compression. I bought the best drive that I could find for my macbook pro - OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, and was rather disappointed to find out that the posted speeds are based on benchmarks with compressible data. The reason this is an issue is because if you use disk encryption like you should be doing, encrypted data is not compressible. As a result, my speeds are 1/3rd to 1/2 of that which is advertised, and it was not worth the extra money.

0x12 15y ago
> if you use disk encryption like you should be doing I've never found that I had a really good reason to encrypt a drive yet, I'm kind of surprised to see a suggestion that this is the way things are done. Why should you be encrypting your disks?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I approach full disk encryption and how we "should be doing" it the same way I approach brushing my teeth 3x a day and flossing 1x a day. Yea, I should, but I brush my teeth 2.5x a day and floss 1x a week instead, and it's worked O.K. so far.
  - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
    Russian roulette is not a big deal. I've shot this revolver at my forehead 5 times now, and it's worked ok so far.
- khafra 15y ago
  Perhaps he has data that he doesn't want people looking at if it's lost or stolen.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- colonelxc 15y ago
  The OP specifically mentioned a MPB, a laptop, which are pretty easy and high value targets for theft. If my laptop was stolen, I would be relieved to know that my personal data was safe. There are additional reasons for full disk encryption too, like ensuring that important system files have not been tampered with. Whether or not you want to go that far depends entirely on your level of paranoia. For a home desktop, the cost/benefit may be a bit different, because the computer is exposed to less places and people. As with many things in security, you would need to calculate what is an acceptable risk to you versus the cost of mitigating that risk.

pointyhat 15y ago

There's a lot of snake-oil in SSD's until you hit the $400 mark. I'm not going near them until the lies and half-arsed chipsets stop.

rektide 15y ago

Judging SSD's by their little performance bits is a kind of amusing endeavor: the latest SandForce already saturates a 6Gbps SATA III link, and others are catching up real fast. This pretty standard unit of measure is hitting the limits of the interface, not the drive. What other criteria are there? GB/$, performance/watt, watts at idle, IOps, and warranty or lifecycle costs. Personally, I find something "big enough", ignore power consumption and iops (neither is going to make a huge enough difference for me to concern myself), and then get whatever I can find that has the longest warranty.

sliverstorm 15y ago
the latest SandForce already saturates a 6Gbps SATA III link Considering the dinosaur pace of new interfaces, and the fact that SATA III isn't even fully "rolled out" yet, I wonder if we are going to see a new wave of hackish custom solutions by manufacturers. Dual SATA ports on your drive, anyone?
- bho 15y ago
  Or, direct plug-in to PCI-E like the revodrive.
- wmf 15y ago
  They're already combining two SAS ports to get 1 GB/s; you can't really do that with SATA, though. http://www.smartm.com/products/productdetailssd.asp?SMARTPartNumber=Optimus http://www.smartm.com/products/productdetailssd.asp?SMARTPar... We may also see some migration from SATA to NVM Express.

mxavier 15y ago

I knew this would happen. I bought a Thinkpad T420s which has a non-standard (or new standard?) 7mm hard drive caddy instead of the much more common 9.5mm. I bought a 64GB Crucial M4 because it could be modded to 7mm and the price was right. I'm happy with the performance. It feels noticeably faster than a standard magnetic drive, but the 64GB is in tier 10 on this comparison. I guess as long as I'm happy with the performance it doesn't really matter. I wish this article was around 2 weeks ago.