As you may or may not be aware, there's something of an evolutionary change going on in the computing world. As of late, there has been a drive to move away from all things mechanical... Check that... The 'move away from all things mechanical' has been going on for quite a long time, especially when you think about what actually constitutes a computer... And as you'll see, the modern computer is about to be left with just a few cooling fans and an optical drive as the only things that move.
For today's purposes, the last of things mechanical, to remain inside the modern computer, is the hard drive. It's that little box with the spinning, silver platters that stores all of your data. The data can be anything from music to movies to pictures to video games. The hard drive is where it all sits and stays safe.
The mechanical hard drive has served us well for some time. And it's likely that it'll continue to serve us well for some time to come. If you want the history of the mechanical hard drive, a brief trip to Wikipedia is in order.
Today's hard drives are relatively inexpensive, they store ridiculous amounts of data and, for the most part, they're pretty reliable. As of the date of this review, $100 at Newegg will buy you a 1TB (Terabyte) hard drive. One terabyte of data is A LOT of information. At the current rate the average person is generating data (taking pictures, writing college thesis papers and downloading the occasional movie off of Limewire-I-mean-iTunes), it still takes quite a while to use 1TB of storage space.
If there's been any problem with mechanical hard drives it's been that they're, well, mechanical. And in the world of the integrated circuit, which runs at lightning speeds, waiting for something mechanical is like waiting for a gnat to catch up with a bullet train.
To put things into perspective, the RAM inside your computer, which is also solid state, can read off its data in the realm of gigabytes per second -that's giga with a 'G'. That means that in your snazzy new machine with 4GB of memory, if you fill up all that memory with data, it can empty itself or rewrite itself in one, maybe two seconds. That's fast...
On the other hand, that common, 1TB hard drive reads data at a sustained rate of somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 megabytes per second -that's mega as in 'holy crap this is taking mega long'. So to read 4GB of data from a mechanical hard drive would take roughly 57 seconds! Ouch!
2 seconds for solid state RAM. Nearly a minute for the mechanical hard drive. Starting to see a difference??? In practice, the hard drive and RAM serve two different purposes. But in concept, they're both storage devices.
The irony in all of this is that CPU speed and the amount of RAM memory is largely perceived by the public to be what makes a computer 'fast' or 'slow'. They tend to base the speed on how quickly the computer responds, when they click on the Firefox or Microsoft Word icons. But that is actually a direct result of how fast the hard drive can read off that data -in effect, reading the Microsoft program into memory so that the computer can run it. It largely has nothing to do with CPU speed or the amount of RAM! So with the mechanical hard drive, it's no wonder that people complain about their computers being slow. They ARE slow!
Enter the Solid State Drive, or SSD. The Solid State Drive is essentially a faster version of a USB Thumb Drive that you'd take to work or a Compact Flash or Secure Digital card that you'd put inside a digital camera. It also assumes the form factor of a regular hard drive. So if you look at it, from the outside, it has the same mounting holes as what you're used to seeing in a regular hard drive and is the same-sized box. Inside, though, are flash memory chips, instead of spinning platters. And that's where the magic happens!
But back to mechanical drives...
What makes mechanical hard drives so slow are two-part. First there is the rotational speed. Essentially, the faster you spin the platters, the faster the data can be read off. Standard-fare desktop hard drives operate at 7,200 rpm. Enthusiast drives spin at 10,000 rpm. And enterprise-class drives usually operate at either 10,000 or 15,000 rpm, have slightly different communications protocols and generally last a bit longer. But the point is: the faster the better. And in this case, if we are talking about large, continuous files, 70MB/s isn't too bad. Of course, a 15,000 rpm Seagate Cheetah will double that speed, if not more. But a modern SSD reads continuous data at 3x that rate. And that is good. More than 200 MB/s will fully saturated a SATA port or even start to eat into a SATA II port. But it wasn't really the sustained transfer that was hurting us to begin with...
The second factor to take into consideration then, when thinking in terms of what makes mechanical hard drives so slow is called random access speed. And I guess the best way to think about this is like so: Imagine that in order to complete a task you have to walk from one side of your room to the other and then back again. To make that analogous to a mechanical hard drive, consider that you'd have to actually take those steps and travel from A to B and back to A. That takes a few seconds. Not too shabby. But now consider that if you were a Solid State Drive, you'd start at one end, teleport to the other end and teleport back. And it would be almost instant... That is what makes Solid State technology so quick. It can just 'be' in one place, then in another and then in another completely different place, almost instantly... A mechanical hard drive has something akin to the needle arm on an old record player. It has to flick around really fast to find files. And even though it's flicking faster than your eye can see, the time it takes to get from A to B is essentially an eternity to a computer. Remember the gnat trying to catch up with the bullet train?
Today we have the G.Skill Falcon series 128GB SSD. Installation into my Macbook Pro went just the same as any other drive. For grins, I created a restore copy of OS X Leopard onto a Sandisk Extreme 4 Compact Flash card. It got fed via the Firewire 800 port.
Mind you, this is not a review of benchmarks. You'll find tens of sites that have done all the laborious and diligent work that focuses on those things. This is more of an experiential review. Its purpose is to answer the question 'How does this product enhance or change or detract from my computing experience?'
Right off the bat, installing OS X (minus printer drivers and additional language fonts) took about five minutes till' first boot. And if that doesn't make a fellow nerd giddy, I don't know what will.
As one reviewer on Newegg put it, "It's like your computer came from the future."
I'll try putting it in slightly different words. Near instant random access and blistering sustained throughput makes the computing experience complete. And by that, I mean, the hard drive feels like it's finally reaching the point that it will operate with a certain amount of harmony with all the other parts. It's like everything else was waiting on this super slow dinosaur. But now they can all breathe and really stretch their legs.
To put it in more quantifiable terms, when I tell my computer to restart, from the time that I click the restart button to being back to my desktop is about 21.5 seconds. That's 21.5 seconds for a complete shutdown and reboot. You no longer have time to grab that cup of coffee!
In terms of general computing, nothing really changes that much -to be completely honest. Once you have your application loaded into memory and running (i.e. open), it's all the same. But it's that seemingly long time of waiting for applications to load that has been nearly eliminated. And God forbid you have to load a big application like Photoshop or World of Warcraft. Those wait times are now a fraction of what they used to be. Monster RAW images and entire Warcraft continents load 3-5x faster than they did before. It's an amazing experience. And it makes you say, "This is what my computer was always supposed to be like."
Another thing that I've noticed is that everything seems more fluid. Whereas desktop and CoverFlow animations once seemed edgy, like there was a pause as more data was being loaded, this time it flows. Possibly it's just way I'm looking at things. But it appears that when I drop a Widget into Dashboard, I'm seeing every frame of the animation. When I minimize a window (which uses the Genie Effect), it's instant and complete. It's hard to describe. It just feels like the CPU is getting exactly what it needs and when it needs it...
The catch, and there always is one, is that SSD's are pricey and limited in capacity. I paid $320 at Newegg for a 128GB drive (click the link a few paragraphs above). 128GB is fine for the OS, music, a few thousand pictures and your applications. But you won't be cutting video on this drive. And that's okay. That's not why we bought it.
Another gotcha is something slightly technical. It has to do with a device called a memory controller. It's a little memory chip that sits in the drive (both mechanical and solid state drives have them) that tells the data how to get in and get out. Earlier versions of SSD's had memory controllers that really sucked. They would hang people's machines up for seconds-to-even-minutes. Intel avoided this (by developing their own memory controller) and their drives are really good but way, waaaay expensive. And Samsung was on the ball with the memory controller but quite a bit slower in overall speed (the SSD that Apple put in the Macbook Air).
Recently, an awesome company called Indilinx came out with a memory controller that really kicked it up a notch. And two companies have sourced this memory controller for their SSD's... OCZ and G.Skill... The G.Skill is about $80 less expensive than the OCZ and the drives probably come from the same factory (they're even using the same firmware number!) Speaking of firmware, the other awesome thing about Indilinx is that every time they release a new firmware update, performance shoots up again and again. So basically Intel, Samsung and only certain OCZ and G.Skill lines (Falcon and Vertex) are the way to go. Anything else and you will not be happy. I promise.
Without going into technical reasons, let me say this again. As it currently stands, if you deviate from Intel, Samsung, OCZ (Vertex) or G.Skill (Falcon) SSD technology, you will experience short to severe hangs in your computer (Window's hourglass, OS X beachball). It won't be pleasant. You'll peel your skin off, pull your eyeballs out and the IRS will audit you and all your immediate family members.
So we're still sort of at the bleeding edge of this. And a lot of people are going to start hearing more about SSD's. Unfortunately, most will get sold either older or less sophisticated technology -thank you Best Buy! They'll get decent sustained read and write speeds. But when their computers hang up for 5 or 10 or 30 seconds, they're going to be like, "This sucks!" So it's up to us to educate them... Help people to make wise decisions on things they don't know a lot about.
Of course, this is all subject to change. And this is a review/minor comparison of things you can actually whip out your card and buy today. I'm not interested in something, until it gets in-stock or is on the shelf -and more importantly in my computer! Announced products and engineering samples mean nothing (well, engineering samples count as 'almost there' and usually offer a good indication). But consider that a little disclaimer, so that you know where I stand.
Thanks for reading!!! And please feel free to post your own experiences with SSD's :)
Mikey V.
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