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My problem with SSDs
Solid State Disks are things which have royally annoyed me. After testing many models from PCI-Express Models (which I can vouch for), to high end $4,000 - $5,000 models, I always asked myself "Why can't they just make a better RiGi?"
Yeah, I get it...hard drives are slow....
but you know what else is slow? Filling up a hard drive with all your junk and then running software from it. I guess I come from another generation. Yeah I know....I'm a pregeneralist idiot at times (according to some)...Of course Im also the one who ran up a hill and yelled out "flower power" while paintballing as a joke...
I just don't get the logic behind it all. SSDs are designed for speed and are limited to certain types of software due to the way their controllers work depending on their models. I understand their logic, but what is it with an industry that destroys balance for choice? All for lower power consumption and weight...
Ok, tell me if I make sense.
What I tend to do on Windows 7 when putting games is the following:
I know that Hard Drives and Solid State Drives are just placeholders. Your files get copied to system memory, but all this talk about Operating Systems....I love how Windows 7 reads Size: 15.9 GB (17.1GB) wow, so accurate, all hail Clusters! ^_^ But that is my point. Making OPERATING SYSTEMS and kernels larger isn't really the solution. On top of that turning off the INFERNAL Paging file makes some programs not run since they need the paging file. Running with 16GB of RAM, I have two Ramdisks. One RAMDISK is 4GB and runs my Windows Paging File. Who says I can't find a workaround for turning it off? Now I have it thrown in Memory. Then comes another 8GB Ramdisk, so I can have 4GB left for system memory....
Of course I have a hard drive as well...as I use Velociraptor HDDs...Of course I dual boot with Linux, but on Windows 7 side of things, I have my OS in there...and then I run External HDDs. I literally have a copy of a lot of games there (of course backed up to another HDD) and when I want to play something, my windows registry points to the Ramdisk for games under a certain filesize, and so I just toss the entire game there...and guess what...
The entire game is running from System Memory. Some games are too big and break some rules to memory, those games I copy to the hard drive and then copy around 3GB to the Ramdisk, (essentially the 80 - 90% of the files I will keep in use, kept in system memory)...
Of course, rebooting wipes a ramdisk clean, but using USB 3.0 to transfer a file in there....Its pretty quick. In many cases the time it takes me to transfer a game to Rdisk and start it up is FASTER than double-clicking on an EXE and waiting for it to all load in memory. I mean, I already loaded it into memory and it won't have to find files and thanks to my paging file also being in its own ramdisk...it can just search through memory and swap between system memory which really is just a remapping when you think about it.
So what exactly is the real point from a gaming point of a view for an SSD? newegg.com runs them at about $200 - $300 for 100GB and you get Sequencial Access Reads and Writes as the "Showoff" rating to try to sell those things..
Even if you do own one, one must still write to system memory so an SSD still takes a secondary role just like a HDD. Both take on the role of storage, the difference is that SSDs are faster, but not really that much faster. I've never seen a 20 - 30% framerate increase due to the speed of the drive...and thats because all gets WRITTEN TO SYSTEM MEMORY, so the speed is defeated... Even though you get those people saying your games RUN ALL THAT MUCH FASTER ON AN SSD...See the contradiction? They are faster, but not THAT MUCH FASTER!
Even if an SSD is memory and has less power draw, it still runs by the SATA cables (which are filled with as many technical holes as the HMS Titanic in its design.....)
Is it me or....why do I feel I was thrust into an Inevitable black hole of deception. Oh wow, we can't sell 80GB HDDs for $200 anymore, lets make some pure memory HDDs, call them SSDs and now we can return to 10 years ago where we can sell something that does nearly nothing at this point in time for tons of money. Seriously...even today SSDs nearly do nothing. We will have to wait at least another 2 - 4 years and even then it doesnt break the rule....
I still wish for a better RiGi......
Of course Im told "oh yeah, an OS...YAY, its so much faster...and Ive seen speed boosts...but is it really faster..specially when loading much larger Operating Systems? Of course!! If you are a laptop user running a 5400 3 - 4 year HDD, of course anything seems faster...
Kind of reminds me of the same deception going around with video cards...where back then anyone knew that "More Pipelines = Greater Performance" for the most part, and then when Stream Processors came into being that was a HIGHER NUMBER so it was sold on that....Of course pipelines are really TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and we are up to 128 Pipelines (580 GTX) and 96 pipelines (6870). yeah! It felt so good saying that~! PIPELINES! A pileline of what? hehe...
Of course I can be told a lot about Operating Systems....specially Windows XP, Linux, Windows 7...Win 7...all I got to say to that is "Oh Really?"
Windows XP was smaller than most of my games, but now the only game larger than my Windows 7 Ultimate Folder is Dragon Age Origins.....Of course Win 7 being 68.000 files...so yeah...I need a big, bad SSD for Windows 7!!!
Of course there is a difference between running a Windows 7 for just games with only drivers + games copied from a USB 3.0 HDD to a ramdisk or velociraptor and the only other programs running are fraps and a few other things, like this crappy web browser...
Any smart person who wants to play WoW or Guild Wars can with some nice knowledge can strip a copy of Windows XP home to nearly nothing, then make it Flashable, Boot an OS and run a 200MB Windows XP completely Ramdisked and after the flashing is done, start up in 8 seconds...
The proof that memory today is NOT faster than in 2001 due to memory timings...
Q6600 @ 3ghz, windows 7 Ramdisked, DDR-2 RAM (800mhz 5-5-5-18) (tested with a 2GB Module for 200MB OS Ramdisk Flash) = After loading completed, boot up time was 8.3 seconds
A64 2.4ghz Single Core processor, boot up time was 5.9 seconds under 2GB 2-2-2-5-1T DDR 400mhz.
Of course, DDR 2 and DDR 1 based speed was 200mhz, in the time the DDR2 clocked to access, the DDR 1 memory accessed twice, not only that.....running at 2-2-2-5 vs 5-5-5-18 is insanely much faster. The timings were tougher and latencies are smaller. my Single Core A64 comp STILL has the tighest response time from any computer I own and have assembled.
Please note: The optimization was fair because A64s still used a Dual-Pump and Intel Processors have used Quad Pumps. Still in Synchronization. (I remember the FAMOUS 1600mhz BUS AMD claimed, it was 2x4x200, and the 2000mhz bus was 2x5x200)...I remember it as much as when Apple claimed it had a full 1ghz native bus...when it was really 166x6 
My My My....How I love how memory substructure has gotten worse while processors have gotten better, all so that the DRAM Executives can make the most gains. but hey, even the worse memory structure gives you better performance than a SSD!
So it goes without saying, what about those SSDs?
Who cares about SSD speed when one can Ramdisk stuff and if you were SMART enough to play a game for 8 hours, you would at least put in the files you would repeatedly use over and over again in memory and keep them there....where the time comes after initial access you hardly would even need the SSD since its already in System Memory where it belongs...The same is true for the OS...Why NOT keep what the OS uses frequently in System Memory since today we have a LOT MORE memory and most systems now are coming with 4 - 12GB of Ram where most arent using half their memory.....If OSes were coded more efficiently, a few simple things (i've reprogramed some of Linux for this), you never would need an SSD.....
So what would it take me to Embrace SSDs? How about make sense..and gee I don't know not...STRIP the actual memory of bandwith...and then wonder why controllers have problems? What were you born yesterday? Lets strip the Queen of Hearts and Jack of Diamonds and hold we don't jokerdoom ourselves, jeez~ Russian Roulette has better odds than this at not messing up (depending which was you see it).
I just don't find the use of spending tons of money on SSDs in this point and time, specially after testing more than half the models which exist out there. My personal favorite models however do exist...Yes! there out of the many Non-Believers, there are some Believers...The ones that plug in directly to a PCI-EXPRESS SLOT where one doesnt have to deal with those blasted ANNOYING SATA cables...Remember HMS titanic? Pisses me off how PCI Express Slots were so damned limiting in what one could use them for, for a very long time......
HDDs are like owning vans and trailer homes. They are slow, but they are reliable and hold your stuff...
SSDs are like being told you can have a fast car, but can only drive 60mph on the road or can use it to show off. The majority of the time you wont be able to drive to full speed due to traffic or some restriction or cop in your way. Have fun Flashing the Controller Program to Oblivion. ^_^
Ramdisks are like having your very own SR-71
It just aggravates me, like i recently has over 30 packaged SSDs I tested...All between 200MB/s read/writes, to some that are 500 - 900MB/sec read/write speeds...and I shook my head and said to someone I love "a certain someone said when is a DD not a DD (disk drive)" and flustered....gave me a rather familiar Ungabunga look....the kind that says...."umm....Run" (Of course if someone does kill me, please make sure I am facing to the Northeast first. I wouldn't want to be hexed and cursed for all eternity after finding my carcass in a bear's mouth at the bottom of a cliff...but no pressure! ^_^
I was as impressed at the SSD performance as I am when some wacko from the street pulls out some red toy sword and tries to convince me that he's a dwarven sith lord.......you guys do know that sith is an anagram for "shit" right?
oh well....anymore thinking and I wont know whats better, a black hole or the space within my skull, oh yeah....
Like my display name says "Free Jihad for everyone! Happy Holidays and Merry Xmas"
God, im such a ham! ^_^
Comments
I haven't tried SSDs I almost bought one on boxing day until I realized it was a mail in rebate "sale".
I would agree that while transferring files from one drive to another or loading up something initially might be faster. . they are certainly not worth the price (unless you have cash to burn). We are not talking about C64 load times or anything where you have to run and get some food and call a friend while your game is loading up.
Once they come down in price a lot could see them taking the place of standard HDDs as a evolution. . they are certainly not a revolution though.
On a side note. . you seem to take these things pretty seriously. Maybe just play the games and be done with it eh?
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
Lol i read all that
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Same.
I think he pretty much lost most readers in the first paragraph by using "RiGI" instead of simply "HDD" or some other common term.
To answer the question of "Why can't they just make a better RiGi?"
- faster revolutions means less reliability and shorter life
- more heads means higher price (heads for most read/write devices are a significant amount of the material cost)
Solid state means less moving parts which means less wear, less chance of mechanical failure and often less heat. SSD is to HHD what the integrated circuit was to vacuum tubes.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
SSD do have other advantages than just speed. They don't generate any heat or sound and hey use very little power compared to a regular disk.
But they wont last long and probably never will be the standard disk. There is a new kind of disk that is fast as your ram and will change everything. So far is the only commercial ones Samsungs version for cellphones but they will be here and change everything.
You will soon be able to have a combined ram and harddrive.
The downside is probably that companies don't have to optimize their programs as much as they have to now.
I have 4 raided SSDs. They work fine.
Ramdisks aren't the answer they just timeshift the bottleneck.
Someones had a bit too much eggnog this xmas.
I use hibernate - the poor man's SSD!
There are so many things so wildly wrong with the original post. Perhaps I should pick it apart anyway, lest someone come along and think it's important or accurate and write off SSDs.
"I always asked myself "Why can't they just make a better RiGi?""
Because it's quicker to access and send data electronically than to physically move it to where you want it before you can do anything. Hard drives have to do the latter. It's kind of like asking, rather than using phones, why can't we just make faster airplanes to fly people to meet the other person?
"SSDs are designed for speed and are limited to certain types of software due to the way their controllers work depending on their models."
SSDs aren't really limited to what software they can run well. SSDs can run any software better than hard drives, if on an OS with proper support. Windows 7 and certain recent distributions of Linux are the only operating systems that support TRIM at the moment, but even without that, good SSDs can be made to work on older operating systems, even going back to Windows XP.
"All for lower power consumption and weight."
Reduced power consumption is nice, but speed is the main advantage. Being nearly indestrucible and being dead silent are nice, too.
"Ok, tell me if I make sense."
You don't. (Okay, so that was gratuitous.)
"Running with 16GB of RAM, I have two Ramdisks."
Congratulations, you just spent more than it would have cost for a good SSD. And in exchange for spending more, you got the added hassle of having to swap things in and out and wait a while when you want to switch from one program to another. You also have to completely reload everything whenever you reboot the computer. It would be quicker if you used a good SSD instead.
"and then I run External HDDs. I literally have a copy of a lot of games there (of course backed up to another HDD) and when I want to play something, my windows registry points to the Ramdisk for games under a certain filesize, and so I just toss the entire game there...and guess what..."
And your loading times to load the entire game onto the ramdrive from the external hard drive, even at perfect sequential reads and writes, will greatly exceed the time to load the game as normal from a good SSD for most games. That's even ignoring that, when loading a game off of an SSD, much of the loading time isn't waiting on storage access at all, but rather downloading something off of the Internet or processing things that you've loaded. Your ramdrive can't help with those at all, either.
"Some games are too big and break some rules to memory, those games I copy to the hard drive and then copy around 3GB to the Ramdisk, (essentially the 80 - 90% of the files I will keep in use, kept in system memory)..."
In addition to paying more for your computer to run slower, sometimes you manage to make it break entirely. Congratulations.
"but using USB 3.0 to transfer a file in there....Its pretty quick."
No matter what connection you're using to transfer data from the hard drive to system memory, it can't go faster than the hard drive. And that's going to make it go slower in most cases than a good SSD through a SATA 2 connection. Add to that that installing something to the SSD merely makes it run the way it intended, rather than having to copy a bunch of stuff before you can start loading the game. It might be quick as compared to a hard drive in some cases, but it's not going to keep pace with SSD loading times in any real game.
"So what exactly is the real point from a gaming point of a view for an SSD?"
SSDs aren't primarily about gaming. They're about your computer doing what you tell it when you tell it, rather than sometime later after it has finished messing with a hard drive. Or finished loading a bunch of junk onto a ramdrive.
"newegg.com runs them at about $200 - $300 for 100GB and you get Sequencial Access Reads and Writes as the "Showoff" rating to try to sell those things.."
Surely if you were half as familiar with SSDs as you try to pretend, you would know that 100 GB is the wrong size to buy for most purposes, excepting certain enterprise uses where large amounts of reserve space set aside is important. There aren't any SSDs on the market that have at least 100 GB of physical NAND flash without having at least 128 GB.
Furthermore, I'm not sure which newegg.com site you're looking at, but it must not be the one that my browser finds. New Egg does list sequential read and write speeds as one of the standard measurements, along with the connection type, form factor, and so forth. In the features section where the manufacturer could advertise whatever they want, most of the good ones had IOPS advertised, but few mentioned sequential transfer speeds.
"Even if you do own one, one must still write to system memory so an SSD still takes a secondary role just like a HDD."
If there are no advantages to having the larger, slower tiers of storage, then why don't we abolish system memory, too, and only use processor cache? After all, L1 cache is a lot faster than DDR3 SDRAM. (No, I'm not seriously proposing abolishing system memory.)
"Both take on the role of storage, the difference is that SSDs are faster, but not really that much faster."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
For convenience, your VelociRaptor is shown on those charts, too. That's "not really that much faster"? That's like saying that a Core i7 980X is "not really that much faster" than a Pentium III.
"I've never seen a 20 - 30% framerate increase due to the speed of the drive."
And a GeForce GTX 580 won't make Excel run 20 - 30% faster than Radeon HD 4250 integrated graphics. Therefore, discrete cards are worthless? You get faster storage for the situations where storage is your bottleneck, not for where the video card or processor is the bottleneck. There are some edge cases where an SSD can fix hitching problems, though.
"Even if an SSD is memory and has less power draw, it still runs by the SATA cables"
Adding a few tens of microseconds to latency doesn't make a very big difference.
"Oh wow, we can't sell 80GB HDDs for $200 anymore, lets make some pure memory HDDs, call them SSDs and now we can return to 10 years ago where we can sell something that does nearly nothing at this point in time for tons of money."
Which explains why OCZ, Mushkin, Intel, G.Skill, and Crucial are telling you not to buy their hard drives anymore. Or why Western Digital, Seagate, and Hitachi are aggressively pushing their new SSDs? Oh wait. Samsung does dabble in both markets, I guess, but isn't exactly a market leader in either.
"We will have to wait at least another 2 - 4 years and even then it doesnt break the rule."
And how are SSDs going to improve in the next 2-4 years? They'll get faster in ways that benchmarks can measure, but likely won't be noticeable for everyday use. They'll get cheaper in $/GB, and that's a big deal, but that doesn't allow them to do things that they can't do today.
"I still wish for a better RiGi."
And Star Trek-style teleporters, which are about as practical back here in the real world.
"If you are a laptop user running a 5400 3 - 4 year HDD, of course anything seems faster."
Comparing my parents' computer with a WD Caviar Black to my own computer with an OCZ Agility, mine is a lot faster. And a WD Caviar Black is pretty fast for a hard drive (trailing only VelociRaptors among consumer hard drives), while an OCZ Agility is about the slowest SSD that one might reasonably consider buying new--and even then only if it's at a deeply discounted price.
"Of course pipelines are really TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and we are up to 128 Pipelines (580 GTX) and 96 pipelines (6870)."
Hooray for random numbers? Back in the real world, a GeForce GTX 580 has 64 TMUs, while a Radeon HD 6870 has 56. Not that that is relevant to SSDs.
"Any smart person who wants to play WoW or Guild Wars can with some nice knowledge can strip a copy of Windows XP home to nearly nothing, then make it Flashable, Boot an OS and run a 200MB Windows XP completely Ramdisked and after the flashing is done, start up in 8 seconds."
Meanwhile, on a good SSD, Guild Wars takes virtually no time to load, and what time it does take is largely waiting on the Internet connection.
"The proof that memory today is NOT faster than in 2001 due to memory timings."
You do realize that memory timings are given in numbers of clock cycles, I hope. Actually, you've made this claim before, and I corrected it then, and you didn't catch it, so I guess you don't. But the latency for your 2-2-2-5 200 MHz DDR is the same as for a hypothetical 16-16-16-40 1600 MHz DDR3. Check what memory is actually for sale on New Egg somtime. It's a good deal faster than that in latency. And that's quite apart from bandwidth, where it's really a lot faster.
"So it goes without saying, what about those SSDs?"
SSDs give you far more GB per dollar, and aren't volatile, so you don't have to reload things every single time you reboot the computer. But I've already told you that.
"if you were SMART enough to play a game for 8 hours"
What about those of us who have a job and don't have time to play a game for 8 hours at a time?
"you would at least put in the files you would repeatedly use over and over again in memory and keep them there"
Ever heard of prefetching? Windows Vista or 7 will do that automatically for you. Except that with an SSD, it doesn't bother, because the SSD is fast enough for it to not matter.
"So what would it take me to Embrace SSDs?"
Maybe if you actually tried one the way it was intended to be used?
"STRIP the actual memory of bandwith...and then wonder why controllers have problems?"
Bandwidth and latency are two very different issues. Latency hasn't improved that quickly, but bandwidth has. It hasn't quite kept up with Moore's Law, but pretty close.
In the past, I did catch it along with your mistakes. I didn't respond to it because it would be far too much to argue with you about your mistakes over an internet forum since I am not being paid to argue with people in a gaming forum. Below are "basics" to memory.
DDR-1 = 200mhz (rising and falling edge of the clip) (Sold as 400mhz RAM)
DDR-2 = 200mhz (clocks twice meaning on the rising and falling edge of the clip) (Sold as 800mhz RAM)
DDR-3 = 200mhz (clocks four times on the rising edge and falling edge of the clip) (Sold as 1600mhz RAM)
200mhz has been the max base limit reached on all three models which are "official specification" with all values above 200mhz (400mhz, 800mhz and 1600mhz) are overclocked modules sold under the illusion that its the latest cutting edge technology.
Calculations of bandwith:
There are Eight Cells on memory. A Ninth Cell if you have Error Correction Code. Calculated as
Memory Speed * Clocks * 8
DDR 1 PC3200 = 200 * 2 * 8 = 3.2gb/sec bandwith
DDR 2 PC6400 = 200 * (2 * 2) * 8 = 6.4gb/sec bandwith
DDR 3 PC12800 = 200 * (2 * 4) x 8 = 12.8gb/sec bandwith
Manufacturing Costs: DDR3 < DDR2 < DDR
Dangers of Memory:
The JEDEC specification of memory is designed to set a standard in the industry for the technical design of memory. However, it is also used widely to publish the limits of memory. Memory became a lot more intensive in its oversight with DDR-2 and DDR-3 due to the United States Department of Justice pressing charges on the DRAM Executive Cartel and forcing them to break up, with an imposed fine of over 6 trillion dollars.
A buyer can protect himself by remembering the standard timing and voltage, representing Normal Operating Guidelines.
Using DDR-2 as an example. The JEDEC specification of DDR-2 had its operating timings at 5-5-5-18 @ 1.8v. If you went to newegg.com and found memory that was NOT in this specification, then it was not "specification" and it was overclocked memory sold as though it were a technological breakthrough. To this day all memory at 1066mhz DDR-2 has been overclocked memory.
If one chose to buy DDR-2 memory back then, one can easilly figure out if you were being sold a Genuine Memory Module or an "overclocked module" for a much higher price. The voltage Guidelines were:
+0.1v allowed a light overclock on the memory speed or allowed a user to run at 4-4-4-12 preserving integrity, +0.3v increase allowed for both overclocks or a heavier overclock on either end. Remember that Overclocking memory is either done by increasing memory speed or tightening the timings.
Of course, we could talk about DDR-3 Memory. All I have to say is that if the Voltage is above 1.5v (JEDEC) or its timings are worse than 9-9-9-24, then its an overclocked module you are buying. Go to newegg.com where you find the 2133mhz modules with +10% voltage increase from the standard (1.65v) and to prevent the memory from frying, they literally put a thicker heatspreader and they change the timings, You don't see 9-9-9-24. The closest I've seen is 9-10-9-24 (not bad but still). You can do the same thing for a lot less (I know, as its what I've done for years)....
I did the very same thing with DDR-2 800mhz. Changed timings and Voltage and got the very same 1066mhz with absolutely 0 errors in Memtest86 that was being sold on newegg.com and other sites for nearly twice as much.
You do know that Solid State Drives have their own Official Standardized Specification too right? I can count all the Models which exist BY NAME and MAKE which actually FOLLOW THE OFFICIAL SPECIFICATION with the fingers in both of my hands and amazingly enough they also have the lowest failure rate reported (gee, why am I not surprised?) as well as the most stable performance.
We went from having HDDs which had a standard in working to now having SSDs where manufacturers can play around with the actual memory itself, along with the controllers too....and take them out of specifications and that is what you are gambling on right? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Btw, the SSDs that I actually do own are the ones that are the Official Specification, all the others outside of the standard specifications I do not even throw in my computer. HDDs also have an official specification as well. Remember, Storage is not just about "pure speed" as much as its about stability and data integrity.
I'm sorry, Shinami, but you're simply wrong here. It is you who needs your mistake corrected, again.
Memory latency is measured by I/O bus clock cycles, which are shorter on, say, DDR3-1600 than on DDR2-800. DDR2/3-800 has an I/O bus clock of 400mhz, while DDR3-1333's is 667mhz, and DDR3-1600's is 800mhz. You can see that very easily, right here. Note that that very article notes, right above where I linked, that DDR3 timings are numerically higher than DDR2's for the same latency, for the reasons I've outlined.
I can show this empirically, as well. Examine the page, here. Do you note how DDR3-1333 has lower latency at 9-9-9 timings than DDR2-800 does at 6-6-6 timings? It's just about the difference we'd expect, too. At a bus clock of 667mhz, the DDR3-1333 ram is using a bus clock that's 1.6675 times faster than the DDR2-800's 400mhz bus, while the memory timings are 1.5 times as high (so 1.5 times "slower", numerically). Multiplying 63 by 1.6675, we get 105.0525ns, the expected latency we'd get with 9-9-9 timings at a 400mhz IO bus. Divide that by 1.5, the difference in timings, and we get 70.035 (really 70, I guess, with two significant figures). That's extremely close to their latency of 71-73, and those further tiny differences aren't hard to explain away with other design differences in DDR3. Doing math your way, and just assuming that all memory timings equate to equal latency for a given number, yields entirely erroneous results
The bottom line is that DDR2 memory does not have lower latency than DDR3 memory. DDR2-800 memory never had a standard to took it below 4-4-4 timings (and even overclocking usually didn't get it lower without some serious voltage). DDR3-1600, on the other hand, has a JEDEC standard for 8-8-8 timings. That's the same latency, at much higher bandwidth, ergo the DDR3-1660 RAM is faster. Furthermore, the quality of kits is such that 6-8-6 timings are now being seen on DDR3-1600 at fairly close to stock voltage (often no higher than 1.6v), while a mere 7% increase in voltage didn't usually get you to 3-4-3 timings on DDR2-800. In fact, there aren't even kits of DDR2 being sold at those latencies, at any voltage.
I hope you'll finally correct yourself on this one.
That's your biggest mistake. $6 trillion is a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if it exceeds the all time profits of the entire computer industry added together.
GDDR5 is the only type of memory in use that is quad data rate, that is, sends four bits of data per bit of bus width per clock cycle. I think Rambus has some sort of quad data rate memory, but it never caught on. All of the other common types of DDR memory are double data rate, that is, two bits of data per bit of bus with per clock cycle. This includes DDR, DDR2, and DDR3, among others.
Some memory manufacturers do try to bump the voltage upward so that they can clock their memory higher. Yes, it is overclocking of sorts. Thankfully, that seems to be less common with DDR3 than it was a year ago, if only because there aren't any processors that can make much use of anything above 1600 MHz DDR3.
You can set memory speed and timings for memory in your BIOS. If you try to run it faster than the chips can handle (higher clock speed or lower memory timings at a given clock speed), it will merely crash your system. Memory chips come back from the fabs with a wide variety of characteristics in how fast the chips can go. Companies that sell memory modules bin them pretty aggressively (so they might sell some modules at 1333 MHz CAS 8 and others at 1333 MHz CAS 9, for example) and the rated timings aren't what you have to run the memory at. Rather, it's what the company says that the memory can safely run at. If you buy memory rated at 1600 MHz with 7-7-7-20 timings, and you try to run it at 1333 MHz and 9-9-9-24 timings, it will work just fine. The higher ratings just mean you could have run it at a faster clock speed and lower latencies and it would still work.
"You do know that Solid State Drives have their own Official Standardized Specification too right?"
You do realize that SSD performance is determined almost entirely by the SSD controller chip (and firmware, I guess), right? A lot of different SSDs use exactly the same IMFT 34 nm MLC NAND flash right now, but have wildly different performance depending on the controller chip. In most cases, the controller chip is supposed to meet the SATA standard, but other than that, it can internally do whatever it wants. There is also a TRIM standard, I guess, but a lot of SSDs don't use that.
The SSD market isn't very standardized. Companies are trying all sorts of different things to improve performance. Intel had aggressive garbage collection and a controller optimized for random writes. Indilinx was the first to have firmware that supported TRIM; in the early days of SSDs, there weren't any operating systems that supported TRIM, so it didn't matter if the SSD controller did, as it couldn't be used anyway. Marvell was the first to make a SATA 3 controller, and a chip fast enough to take advantage of SATA 3 speeds (at least for sequential reads). SandForce was the first to compress the data before writing it, in order to reduce writes and keep more spare area. Marvell and SandForce introduced 4K aligned writes at about the same time.
Take away all of those innovations that weren't standardized (except for TRIM, I guess) and you'd be left with an SSD that is really, really awful.
"I can count all the Models which exist BY NAME and MAKE which actually FOLLOW THE OFFICIAL SPECIFICATION"
Fine then. I'll call your bluff. What models are those, and what is the official specification?
"they also have the lowest failure rate reported"
Becuase you have access to the internal failure rate data at Intel, Crucial, OCZ, G.Skill, Mushkin, Corsair, A-data, Super-Talent, Patriot, RunCore, Wintec, Western Digital, etc.? Uh huh. Sure.
What, fining an organization the equivalent of 1.5+ years of the worlds food supply doesn't sound plausible?
SSDs will become a lot more convenient and widespread when they cross the 500GB/$250 threshhold. When that happens people will be using them as their primary hard drive and while they might have another drive, it would be a pure data drive.
With the small 100GB drives what happens is you put only those things that you NEED On the drive and data elsewhere etc and you end up with the same kind of issues people had back in the days when a large hard drive used to have to be broken up.
Of course these days you do not end up with a J: like you could have with a large hard drive 15 years ago, the convenience that having everything on C: becomes lost.
Note 500/250 might happen as early as next christmas as fast as the drives are coming down in price // getting bigger.
I considered getting an SSD in my new system that I bought on cybermonday, but decided against it because anything I spent now, could be the drive above next year.
I was considering the sidegrade (I don't consider it up or down) to SSD recently, until I got given an HVD to test. They're a few years away from hitting the shelves, but whereas (what I lovingly refer to) my bio-psycho-dyno couldn't 'feel' the difference between HDD and SSD, it sure could with holographic storage technology.
Anyway, someone else can babble on about the merits, but I was surprised that the 'next' technology hadn't been mentioned.
(should probably suggest you guys keep in mind what Google is doing atm; cloud ftw)
500 GB for $250 isn't coming next year. Maybe in four years at typical Moore's Law scaling. Right now, we're around $2/GB. Prices per GB should fall by roughly half every two years.
Most people don't need 500 GB of space, though. Personally, I've got a 120 GB SSD and no hard drive (except for an external one that I use solely for backup and only plug in once a month or so to do said backup). My SSD isn't even half full.
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HVD is an optical disk format. That's going to be slow for the same reasons that hard drives are slow, plus additional reasons that optical drives are slow. That's not going to be a competitor for SSDs.
Cloud storage isn't going to be fast, either. Having to download files off of the Internet means you're limited by your Internet connection, so that even sequential speeds are very slow. Latencies will be horrible, too. Unless you've got an Internet connection that reliably offers 2 Gbps (yes, Gbps, not Mbps) throughput in each direction and <1 ms ping times to your ISP's servers, cloud storage isn't a viable competitor for SSDs.
Sorry, Quizzical, practical experience says otherwise. Check out cnet in a couple of weeks
My ISP offers 1000mbps which is 1gbps on fibre for the past year now, its going to roll out big time this year (hopefully) and there is talk about storage too
FTTH offers the right ping time too.
There are competition for the SSD coming out, maybe in 3 years or so. But yes, right now they are the fastest choice.
And I doubt we'll see 500 GB for 250 bucks next year either but you'll never know. The prices do have dropped since I bought my 4 Intel X-25.
Is that "up to" 1 Gbps but realistically rarely anywhere near that, or reliably actually 1 Gbps 24 hours per day even if all of the ISPs customers are using it at once? ISPs tend to offer the former type of speeds but not the latter (typically with lower numbers, but yes, I realize that FTTH is faster than most broadband). 100 Mbps (12.5 MB/s) in practical use is blazing fast for Internet downloads, but glacially slow for local storage.
<1 ms ping times are hard, too. Windows doesn't really optimize network traffic for latency, so often you won't even get 1 ms ping times to the modem in your own house. In order for cloud storage to have any chance at being a viable replacement for SSDs, it would have to be built into the ISP's network, not sent halfway across the country.
ISPs aren't going to want to do that, either. Even if they offer a 1 Gbps connection, they're not going to be happy if you max it out around the clock. You may easily go through hundreds of GB of reads from your local hard drive or SSD in a single day, and at least tens of GB of reads on most days. ISPs aren't going to provide that sort of Internet bandwidth for $50-$100/month in the near future, though.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not down on fiber to the home. It's just that a level of performance that is really great for an Internet connection can still be unusable for local storage. This is just like how performance that is vastly better than what you could get from an SSD (2 GB/s read/write speeds, 1 million IOPS, 1 µs access times) may still be so slow as to be unusable for system memory.
SSD's is the future of storage, but future is freaking expensive now lol. Therefore I choose HDD. I have computers with more than 8 year old with the HDD still kicking so by the time it passes another 8 years, SSD will be cheaper for sure. Think simple.
I don't know but this article seems interesting about SSDs on Dec 13, 2010.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/213442/solid_state_drives_no_better_than_others_survey_says.html?tk=mod_rel
i see no reason to waste my money at this point on SSDs. Their life span and current price tag dont really make me wanna jump out of my chair to buy them. I am sticking with good ole mechanical HDs for now.
In all SSD's are actually more reliable than mechanical hard drive even though you know it will be worn out after 5 years (of use), because a hard drive could last 6 months or a decade when you roll the dice (but averages to 5 years of use)
yeah umm...no.
edit: i am talking about read/write longevity. sorry for the confusion.
That's why SSD's have 20% or so reserve space. Worn out cells get flagged as unusable and remapped to reserve cells transparently without losing any data.But the same is true for an SSD. SSD's do last ~5 years, not much less and not much more.. of use. On average, about the same as a mechanical hard drive, but the spread is much smaller. An SSD's cells mostly get worn out when being written to so it can even be mitigated further by smart usage. But since this is 5 years of use, it could last 40 years if you never write anything new to it.
right, and i still have hds is use for pictures and storage which are running 7+ years. like anything, you treat your property as it should it will last. my job requires me to have a mini "server" running off my computer, and i do a lot of read/writing on my hd, not counting gaming and such. that 5 years could be drug down to 2 or 3 years, maybe less. And its easier to recover data from a bad hdd and nearly impossible to recover it from a bad SSD. Both sides have their quirks, but like i said, the price for longevity for me does not make sense. I didnt mean it as a generalized term.