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- Half a Terabyte On Your Notebook
- The SSD Power Consumption Hoax
- Energy-Saving Hard Drives
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- WD's New Raptor Drive Is a Bird of Prey!
- Install A Solid State Drive In Your Notebook
- WD and Toshiba Join the 320 GB 2.5" HDD Club
- 2.5" HDD Galore: Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba
- Samsung, Ridata SSD Offerings Tested
- Momentus 5400 FDE.2: Data Encryption On-a-Drive
- Need better performance for single threaded apps
- Dual now, Quad later?
- How many PC's do you have?
- My New Build Please Rate It
- looking for a gaming case w/ window
- What is Bottleneck?
- WD RAPTOR 150GB (NOT A GOOD VALUE)
- Interesting way to cheat at 4GB RAM barrier...
- Building a Photoshop Computer: Need Guidance
- any way to make a ramdisk?
Flash SSD Update: More Results, Answers : An Apology First – And One New SSD To Prove Us Right
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: ssd, hard, drive
Syndication:
An Apology First – And One New SSD To Prove Us Right
First of all, we want to take this opportunity and apologize to our readers, for we made a procedural mistake when we compared battery runtime of various Flash SSDs, which we used to replace a 7,200 RPM hard drive on a business notebook in an effort to compare battery life of SSDs versus a conventional hard drive. As it was commented by our readers (see comments of that article) and other sources (thanks, George), part of the test procedure was inaccurate because of varying workload. This may cause other system components such as the CPU to be used more intensively, hence contributing to draining the battery earlier than on a slower drive.
The conclusion, however, that Flash SSDs are often misleadingly presented as energy savers to increase your battery mileage on notebooks, is not invalidated. The truth is that more and more Flash SSDs will be increasingly efficient. But many conventional hard drives can also be more efficient than today’s Flash SSDs in the scenarios some of you were demanding: when providing data under a defined workload such as video playback or in idle until the notebook battery runs empty.
We looked into all of that to find answers to the questions. You will see that there is indeed one Flash SSD that beats the living daylights out of any hard drive now, and you will see that answers can only be found for specific applications.
We’ll talk about this drive later, but this is exactly what our initial article meant to say: many Flash SSDs simply aren’t there yet.
There is no Simple Conclusion
The truth is that no general conclusion, such as “Flash SSDs are more efficient,” can be drawn at this point for the majority of the Flash SSDs on the market. Performance, efficiency and performance per watt typically depend on the specific workload, and some hard drives are surprisingly efficient in certain disciplines.
Some Flash SSDs were designed to be performers and they deliver on that promise regardless of power consumption (although performance per watt is typically great). Many others, especially first-generation drives, simply do not serve up the same solid results.
Additional Products Tested
For the additional tests we decided to take battery runtime tests out of the equation, mainly because they take a lot of time and we wanted to focus on a representative variety of drives when we provided this update.
We had to return the MemoRight Flash SSD, but we still have the Mtron Flash SSD, SanDisk’s SSD5000 and the Crucial SSD. We also received additional Flash SSDs by Super Talent (Master Drive MX) and the OCZ SATA II Flash SSD, which is the real surprise, proving us right when we say that many Flash SSDs are a hoax, while also proving many other people right who say that Flash SSDs do much better than magnetic hard drives. Much better.
Finally, we added more hard drives to our lineup. There is the Hitachi Deskstar 7K200, which we used for the initial article, Samsung’s HM320JI, a brand new Seagate Momentus 5400.5 — both 5,400 RPM drives — and Western Digital’s WD3200BEKT, which runs at 7,200 RPM like the Hitachi drive.
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Flash SSDs do not inherently contribute to increasing battery life and better efficiency comes with the appropriate Flash SSD used for a specific application. "Flash SSD" is not a qualifier for efficiency or performance.
This is much better than the first article now. Specially the DVD playback is interesting.
The 64GB OCZ seems to be an amazingly exceptional drive.
Hahaha. Once again contradicting yourself as Xeus pointed out.
Kudos to Tom's for having the decency to admit their mistakes and revise the article. The results, while not extraordinarily different than the previous article (discounting newcomers) provided a much more complete picture of the advantages and disadvantages of SSDs.
Articles like this one are a necessary step to regaining some of the lost credibility from previous articles like in this scenario. (Though it would be better if the articles didn't need revision) In short, it is encouraging to see that Tom's is listening to the readers. IMHO the real enthusiasts are more concerned with well thought out procedures, and accuracy/completeness/comprehensiveness of results than reading the "We posted first" articles that are all to easy to find on the internet.
iLOL
I like when people talk about the power inefficiency of hard-drives,yet don't blame things like CPU's,or discrete GPU's in their laptops.
However,I would like to see this as a high power part in desktops sooner or later,but with of course more power and(hopefully) stellar reliability.
And I mean for under 300 dollars.
Dragunover - no one is refuting the fact that the CPU/GPU will be power hungry... that's not what is under discussion here. i'm interested by the fact you seem to be asking for SSDs that consume more power...?
Ziria, Wattage (P) is calculated by multiplying Voltage (V) by Amps (A).
Hence, the only important number is Wattage.
This article demonstrates that too often people generalize from specific test data.
Whether SDD or HDD, how you use your electronics device will influence how it much power it consumes. To conclude that one drive uses less power because a specific test does is an inaccurate conclusion - the testor can only state that it uses less power under those given circumstances and that is most likely will hold true under similar circumstances. (For example: this test is for random read/write operations, so the results most likely will be true for most applications that follow that pattern of disk usage.)
My point? Many times reviewers do not have the time to evaluate a product in depth, and thus they should not make broad generalizations or exaggerated claims.
Hopefully Tom's will keep up with in-depth reviews for a variety of users - road warriors (office apps/web/email), multimedia entertainment (DVD/video streaming apps/music playing), gamers, and "typical home users" - and creating good summary tables of their findings.
Myself, I find the IOs/Watt information especially valuable. I'll use that to find the IOs/Watt/$ when evaluating my future purchases. I'm kinda curious how the SSDs stack up against each other in that category (and I'm sure the HDDs are still waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy ahead of the SSDs right now).
to me teh argument isnt so much a "efficency" issue , to mee flash SSd's represent a future in computing where we don't have to replace , storage devices every 5-6 years (this is assuming you are getting agood high quality hard drive ) old mechanical hard drives (the current standard) fail after about 5-6 years to date the longest livinf hard drive i have is at 6 and i'll be amazed it it last half another year./ Also note you can cut this hard drive life expectancy in half if you smoke around your computer or you ahve a dusty home like many peopel in more rural areas. This hard drive death is soemthign that can't be stoped as the metal paltes require mechanical parts to spin them , and like any motor the parts will wear outa nd eventually stop working all together. Now fast forward to when they have SDD's that range in a better size (like at elast 250 gb) i can see these drive replacing even desk top hard drives , simpply for teh reason ... They HAVE NO MECHANICAL PARTS THAT WEAR OUT ! what this means is essientially many of use computer geeks taht are hard put to lose a comp jsut because it is old , will not have to replace these parts , recently i gave my mom my old alienware (that is now 6 years old) and i know before the year is out i will be replacing her hard drive on it , but with an SSD's i wouldnt ahve to , the only issue with SSD's is their extremely High price for drives thet come remotely close to desk top hard drive sizes (last time i looked a good 128 gb one , goes for around 4,000-5,000 dollars) the alienware has a 200 gig , to just fill that capacity you are looking at any where from 8,000 to 10,000 dollars. yes i think these drives are the future of long term storage devices in ALL computers , but for the time that future is expensive at the moment. i say give it 10-15 years before you see SSD's at the same cost as old magnetic HD's
| demonhorde665 : to me teh argument isnt so much a "efficency" issue , to mee flash SSd's represent a future in computing where we don't have to replace , storage devices every 5-6 years (this is assuming you are getting agood high quality hard drive ) old mechanical hard drives (the current standard) fail after about 5-6 years to date the longest livinf hard drive i have is at 6 and i'll be amazed it it last half another year./ Also note you can cut this hard drive life expectancy in half if you smoke around your computer or you ahve a dusty home like many peopel in more rural areas. This hard drive death is soemthign that can't be stoped as the metal paltes require mechanical parts to spin them , and like any motor the parts will wear outa nd eventually stop working all together. Now fast forward to when they have SDD's that range in a better size (like at elast 250 gb) i can see these drive replacing even desk top hard drives , simpply for teh reason ... They HAVE NO MECHANICAL PARTS THAT WEAR OUT ! |
Not true. Flash SSD's suffer the same flaw as your typical Flash "thumb drive"... The recording medium fails after X number of writes. They've added technology in the controllers to extend the drive's life by spreading the writes around the drive's landscape, but the drive WILL fail eventually... even if you treat it with kid gloves.
Wow. Pretty rare these days to see a big publication go out and admit a mistake and even make a big public apology. kudos to you guys.
hard disks have been here for ages.. give ssds some more time and only then we can actually evaluatethe differences..
Wow, I have to admit, I did not expect Tom's to admit their errors in the last article. I am glad they did though, and this one looks to be much more along the lines of what we would expect to see. Props for having the gut to admit your mistake Patrick and Aaron.
All that really matters to me in regards to these articles, is that i'm not going to notice any difference in battery life while using my lapop. I could however expect to enjoy the speed if i got a good SSD.
Nice job Tom's. I thoroughly enjoyed this article a lot more than the previous one. It seems like the last one way maybe rushed. Either way, thanks for keeping things legit and up to (at least my idea of) Tom's quality standards. Thanks again!
so where are the benchmarks for OCZ Core Raid-0?
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LOL