Comparing SSD Performance to Mechanical HDD Performance in a Dell Laptop

[queshy]

wow, nice. im pretty jealous

it's so expensive though, hopefully soon they'll become mainstream.

[Mackan]

Very interesting to read, but as others pointed out, it would have much more interesting if you used the same laptop to perform the tests on. Now it is hard to draw any conclusions, other than that SSDs of course looks very promising.

[reelbadspellur]

Great review, flamenko! Can't wait to get my hands on mine.

Does anyone know if it would be possible to switch a mechanical hard disk with an SSD in the m1330?

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, PM me!

[mujtaba]

Thanks for the effort Flamenko !
But sadly, the battery life results are not much valid. Because Santa Rosa itself saves a lot of power, plus the LED screen (though as Andrew said, the larger screen might make up for the difference).
Apart from that, the review is very useful

[wobble987]

does the SSD flash drive still suffer from that degradation effect? i'm talking about after its been written for a million times that it began losing its reliability/memmory holding capability?

and yes, i think if they cover that and any other reliability issue (if any), they are the way of the future. thumb drive nowdays are pretty much bullet proof, and i would presume that the LED backlighting are also a lot more durable than the fluorecent light that is standard on today's laptop. so in the not-so-long future we might very well have a very rugged laptop

[mujtaba]

In some cases, somewhat longer lifetime - Flash storage typically has a data lifetime on the order of 10 years before degradation. If data is periodically refreshed, it can store data indefinitely. Flash drives have limited endurance (typically, 100,000-300,000 write cycles), which, if a single block is written once per second, leads to failure in a few days at most. However, all flash drives employ a technique known as wear levelling, where writes are smoothly distibuted over all blocks. This means that if one write occurs per second, and n is the number of writes before failure and m is the number of blocks on the disk, failure no longer occurs in n seconds, but in (n*m) seconds. Given that blocks are typically on the order of 1kb and an 8 GB disk will have 8,192 blocks, this gives about 9,500 days before failure; remember also this is with one write per second for that entire time [1]. In consumer level devices you can expect the drive's data storage component to last roughly 10 years in normal use

This is what I found from Wikipedia in the SSD article.

[wobble987]

hmmm... 10 years.... thats allright... i guess. but i don't like the bit where they say that the data needs to be periodically refreshed. whats that mean i wonder... do they mean something like accessing the data or scan disk or something else?

coz if i remeber correctly the HDD has very similar limitation/flaw like this don't they?

[Jason]

I find your 100gb 7200rpm results a bit odd, The Seagate 7200.2 2.5" 100gb drive has a max internal transfer speed of 59mb/s alot more than the 45 your quoteing, My 5400rpm 160gb seagate in my V1S beats your 7200rpm drive.

If you take platter density into account, your 160GB 5400RPM drive will be faster in some tests. The platter on your 160GB drive is 37.5% more dense than his 100GB 7200RPM HD. 7200RPM's however spins ~33% faster than 5400RPM's. The 100GB 7200RPM HD will have faster seek times, but in large file transfers the 160GB drive should top the 100GB drive. I'm not sure exactly how HD tune tests your HD speed but it runs for quite a while, so transfer speeds on the 160 drive should be a little better...

[peted76]

That's all I was waiting for.. someone to say just how awesome SSD is.. now to go and count my penny jar!

[smagdy]

it is now at a point where Vista startup takes only 27 SECONDS!

Do u get 27 sec without Vista SP1 ? Cuz i remember i read another member saying after SP1 he booted vista in 40 sec VS 70 sec b4 SP1

Also it would be interesting to see how fast you can boot win XP maybe 15-18 sec