Would you buy a $40 - $70 SSD?

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 9:24 am

I love to tinker, and noticed that there's some el Cheapo SSD's in 4 and 8GB available for $40 and $70 respectively from this place. They are MLC, which I understand is slower and slightly less reliable, but for a system that sees hardly any use, would you buy one of these inexpensive SSD's to play with? To me, it seems like at this price, it's worth trying it out, speaking as someone who's never set up a system with an SSD before.

NyteOwl · Post by **NyteOwl** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 3:26 pm

For me, no I wouldn't. For $70 I'd be looking at an HDD despite it being slower or a decent CF card and ATA adapter.

twoscoreandfour · Post by **twoscoreandfour** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 8:23 pm

I think $70 is fairly cheap to try out the technology. If anything you can just an idea of the performance and reliability issues before the tech becomes more mainstream.

lm · Post by lm » Sat Aug 30, 2008 12:10 pm

They will have so slow random write performance that it totally kills the system in some situations, and they are so small that you can't have pretty much anything on them... No I wouldn't.

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 3:50 pm

Well, for what it's worth - on Linux the slow random write performance isn't really an issue. By default the memory manager caches everything for at least 15 seconds anyway, and I have mine tuned to cache for 10 minutes. I've also got 4GB of RAM in this machine. That means, for most of the stuff I'm doing, it'll be at least 10 minutes before the data tries to flush from RAM to the SSD. By then, a lot of the random writes will have become ordered within the memory manager, so it will write more efficiently. And, the flushes all occur in a separate kernel thread, so the system never freezes.

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 6:58 pm

highlandsun wrote:Well, for what it's worth - on Linux the slow random write performance isn't really an issue. By default the memory manager caches everything for at least 15 seconds anyway, and I have mine tuned to cache for 10 minutes. I've also got 4GB of RAM in this machine. That means, for most of the stuff I'm doing, it'll be at least 10 minutes before the data tries to flush from RAM to the SSD. By then, a lot of the random writes will have become ordered within the memory manager, so it will write more efficiently. And, the flushes all occur in a separate kernel thread, so the system never freezes.

Just curious, what version of linux do you use for such performance? I recently reloaded my system from Fedora Core 4 (don't laugh) to Ubuntu 8.04.1.

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 8:15 pm

I installed Ubuntu 8.04, and then upgraded to the 8.10 alpha because I wanted to test some other features. I'm running self-compiled 2.6.27-rc4 kernel right now because I needed a wireless driver that wasn't in 2.6.26...

ist.martin · Post by **ist.martin** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 9:34 pm

I have been using one of these for 8 months now:

http://www.cappuccinopc.com/slimpro-sp635f.asp

Mine has an 8 GB SSD, an Intel Celeron M 1.6, 1GB RAM and runs XP Pro. I use it daily for 5-9 hours. I am a stock/fund/investment guy, and have it running ~ 8 windows all day long, feeding me various data.

I do not spend much time writing my own files/data to the drive, and I don't believe I've used any unusual OS settings. I would say my performance is excellent. The system is very responsive and snappy. It appears to me to run faster than other systems I've used with higher powered CPUs.

I have no idea what brand of SSD is in it, as the box is sealed tight. But I don't think it is too expensive. It makes me question the common wisdom that SSD's are not practical for day-to-day use due to slow random write speeds. I rarely have a HDD ever attached to my machine (external IDE over USB when I need more storage.)

Just my experience.

By thw way - I see that the 8GB 'Pro' model on the site you linked is an SLC drive. $100 seems like a great price for one of those, and is easily enough to run XP and all the day-to-day apps you need. I am not a Linux guy, but I have a feeling like 8GB is a ton of space for it?

Would you buy a $40 - $70 SSD?

Would you buy a $40 - $70 SSD?

A difference experience ...