Solid State Disks, DemystifiedSolid State Disks, Demystified

Now that all of the hoopla has basically died down, perhaps we can have an honest discussion about the state of solid state disks (SSDs).

In theory, you should already be aware that SSDs are not the next best thing to sliced bread. (Peanut butter is, except if you're allergic.) However, they do provide interesting -- and worthwhile -- transitional points for our current crop of netbooks and notebooks. Let's dive in and examine the genre, and bust a couple of myths while we're at it.

Myth 1: A solid state disk will boot faster than a mechanical hard drive. This is true, but it's partially smoke and mirrors as well. When SSDs first appeared, they were rather pathetic 8-GB and 16-GB devices. Not much fits in that size. Even at 32 GB, you'll still be somewhat cramped if you have hardware drivers and applications.

In fact, that's where SSDs got their initial reputation for fast boots. With no drivers or background software to load, most of what you had to wait through was your portable's BIOS, which probably took about 20 seconds, and then maybe another 35 seconds or so for the operating system.

But when you get to 64 GB or 80 GB or 128 GB -- and you have some room to feel confident about carrying the additional software you need around with you --you start to add time to the boot process. Depending on just how much you're loading, you'll probably be waiting at least an extra 15 seconds. To be fair, a similarly stocked mechanical drive can carry on for an additional 20 to 30 seconds, and that's what you're paying to avoid with an SSD.

Myth 2: A solid state disk will extend your battery life. This has to be a no-brainer. There's no way that an electronic device would use as much power as a mechanical device. Just starting a mechanical hard drive up from a dead stop draws power on the ampere level rather than the more modest milliamp power draw that just idling the drive requires. And because you're moving physical read/write heads back and forth across the mechanical drive's platters, sending data through an electronic trace to a memory cell on an SSD is the all-around winner in overall low-power draw.

Here's the but: Many pundits treat a hard drive as the only component that uses electrical power. Au contraire! It is, in fact, a minor component, overshadowed by the power draw of your screen, CPU, memory, and GPU. The brighter your screen, the more intense your calculations or your display rendering, the more acutely do those four components suck your battery dry. And if you have an optical drive, let's not forget all the spinning it does while you're watching Twilight.

So while it might be a no-brainer, don't overestimate the impact simply having an SSD will have on your power lifestyle. You just don't use a hard drive that much in most applications. And if it is longer run-time without the need to plug in that you desire, be prepared to cut back in other areas as well -- like screen brightness -- and use the toughest power-saving options you can set through the control panel.

Myth 3: Solid state disks are wicked fast. Again, we're faced with an incontrovertible truth. SSDs are fast. In fact, some are faster than others. Among the consumer-level SSDs, Intel's X25-M is among the fastest. Enterprise versions of SSDs, such as Intel's X25-e, meant for servers, are even faster. The speed and consequent power savings of one SSD times 100 or 1,000 drives used in an enterprise deployment are significant.

That may change at some point during the next year, as several manufacturers of consumer versions are promising speed-ups for their SSD products. SanDisk is among the boldest with a claim that it will crank up performance by 100x. Most of the emerging schemes rely on disk management firmware to increase an SSD's overall operational efficiency as well as adding an extra cell to each memory location so there's more information available at each cycle.

How fast are SSDs now? Well, we took SimpliSoftware's HDTach and ran it on one of Intel's 80GB X25-M drives and then on Western Digital's 300-GB Velociraptor. (With a SATA 3.0-GB interface and a 10,000-rpm spindle speed, the Velociraptor defines speed among mechanical drives in its genre.) The verdict? The X25-M's burst speed was 256.7 MBps and its average read towed the mark at 230.2 MBps. In contrast, the Velociraptor showed a 250.3 MBps burst speed and 105.6 MBps average read. That's conclusive proof SSDs are faster, right? Maybe not.

Let's journey outside of the typical commercial test and look at a simple file transfer operation. We took 4,661 directories and files in an 8.05-GB group and transferred them to and from the two drives, using a third drive as the source and destination as needed. It took 264 seconds to write the data to the Velociraptor and just, um, 264 seconds to write the same data to the X25-M. That's not faster.

Reading the data from each drive saw the Velociraptor needing 242 seconds to complete the task while the X25-M required 221 seconds. All right, reading is faster with an SSD but it's not really that much faster, just about 9% in our testing. More important, look at the difference between the read and write times for just the X25-M -- 43 seconds, nearly three-quarters of a minute! As with all current SSDs, it's heavily biased toward reading. (That's one of the reasons boot speeds look so good.) Manufacturers are promising to reduce that disparity (by decreasing the write times, we hope) during 2009.

Buy, Buy Portables
So you're determined to grab onto a portable computer with an SSD! Generally speaking, you should really be waiting until mid-2009 before you book the big bucks on any SSD-based notebook. However, if you need something right now there are a few options we can point to as examples of the breed in general.

It's difficult not to latch onto Apple's MacBook Air first. It gets the most publicity of almost anything. It also, however, gets the sticker shock award. Tilting the scales at $2,500 for a portable with just a 13.3-inch LCD display, you're paying dearly for its technology. Granted, you get an LED backlight LCD panel, a 128-GB SSD, and museum-quality design.

Not to be outdone, there's also Sony's Vaio VGN-TT190. Available in Crimson Red, Champagne Gold, Satin Black, and Carbon Fiber Black, the base model is an awesome $2,675! For that you get a 1.4-GHz processor, a 64-GB SSD, a 250-GB mechanical hard drive, a Blu-ray optical drive, and an 11.1-inch LCD. The Blu-ray drive and the portable's HDMI output make up for the somewhat pathetic processor, but that's still a good chunk of change.

Lenovo takes you downstream, but just a bit, with the ThinkPad X200s. It's available with a 64-GB SSD drive for a mere $2,129 or with 128 GB for an extra $250. However, by the time you upgrade the CPU to a 1.86-GHz Intel processor ($75), the operating system to Vista Home Premium ($49), and the memory to 2 GB instead of 1 GB ($40), you're starting to creep into MacBook Air territory --and you don't get an internal optical of any kind at that price.

Getting into an SSD-based portable could also mean something as toss-away (yes, you read that correctly) as HP's Mini 1000 XP series. It's not a powerhouse nor is it a media mogul, nor any other superlative that might come to mind. But with a $440 entry price, you get an Intel Atom processor, 1 GB of memory, a 16-GB SSD, and a 10.2-inch screen to view the world. It's definitely minimalist, but you could buy and trash at least five of them before you even touched the starting prices of the others. And if all you're doing is the basic Internet tasks generally defined by the netbook genre, the small capacity of this SSD would be more than adequate. You could even buy one of these for the rugged road and one of those for the home or office. SSDs are versatile like that.

Hello, Upgrades
Then there's the other side of the coin, where you've already bought that $1,300 notebook chocked full of take-along goodness. You don't really have a hankering or a need for a minimalist netbook, but you'd really like to make your friends swoon by mentioning you have an SSD in your laptop without having to go broke getting one in there. All right, that means you want to slide an SSD into your current portable.

The interface could be an issue. Most current portables will probably use a serial ATA (SATA) connection while older ones will be parallel ATA (PATA). Although there are PATA SSDs, the more common configuration is SATA, so you may have to dig a bit for the former. Also, the most common size for a hard drive in a portable computer is a 2.5 inches, but there are laptops that bypass that size and use smaller (1.8-inch) mechanical hard drives. Most SSD are 2.5-inch, so determine what you have before you shell out your money.

Once you've cleared away the small details, you're going to need to clone your current mechanical hard drive onto your new SSD before you install it. If you have 300 GB of a 320-GB drive filled, it's not going to make it onto a 128-GB SSD. It won't even fit on a 256-GB Samsung Flash SSD. Pare down your data to the capacity of your SSD if needed, and then select something like Apricorn's DriveWire Universal Hard Drive Adapter (you can always eBay it when you're done) to do the cloning.

Which SSD should you consider? There are many. We've already mentioned Samsung's zippy 256-GB Samsung Flash SSD announced in November (pricing not available), and Intel's X25-M. The Intel disk is fast but it will set you back north of $500 for the 80-GB version. On the bright side, there is a 1.8-inch version available, the X18-M.

As an alternative, there's Patriot's 128-GB Warp SSD. Despite the bump in capacity from 80 GB to 128 GB, the Warp costs at least 10% less than the X25-M, more than that (possibly) depending on where you look.

Down the road a little way is Ridata's Ultra-S Plus SSD drive. It's a slower than the aforementioned SSDs from Samsung, Intel, and Patriot, but at around $300 for a 128-GB SSD, it's not a bad deal for the bragging rights of it all.

These three SSDs are not, by any means, the sum total of all your choices. As we already mentioned, there are many others -- and there will be more by the middle of 2009. These are, however, reasonable examples of what's available right now just as the portables are. We're not entirely sold on SSDs just yet, either as a pre-installed component or as a user upgrade, but early adopters have plenty of choices.