What are the benifits of Solid State Hard Drives? Do they file quicker because FAT32,NTFS and Mac's ZFS-?

Question

What are the benifits of Solid State Hard Drives? Do they file quicker because FAT32,NTFS and Mac's ZFS-?

Answer 1

actually no, the only real reason is cost and cheapness, and is more unstable than a hard drive i have yet to see the proclaimed said aforementioned solid state drive cope with the hostile operation theatre of the computer personally i think its a mistake to abandon disc type hard drives simply because the platter packs can happily spin around for years before any issues.



the cheap alternative is like MP3 or those horrid ipod that we hear so much about, the fact is like with CD if you go from cd to mp3 all your doing is swapping one type of secure and stable platform to an unstable platform and if the mp3 fails you loose the lot.



this is the same for the solid state its a pile of memory chips and that is all the fuss so nothing new then!



except there completely not repairable in any case and are more cheaper to make so the greed of electronics manufacturers happy to keep telling the public you need this the new standard is going to be this and so on are just doing what intel and amd keep trying to do, that is re-invent the wheel and when every one has dumped there old hard drives in the bin and got a solid state drive then those will have to be made obsolete as well.



wait and see.



a disc drive is mechanically simple, and no complex bits that can burn out with consistent loads wipe read write standing around talking to no one and so on.



ask yourself what happened to all the old tape readers? or old floppy drives? anyone remember the old 5.24 inch drive?

Answer 2

The answer above is correct but on the speed part it is only half right. access times are reduced but wright times are similiar.

Answer 3

They are indeed "theoretically" faster but it has nothing to do with the filing system but rather the mechanism. The no moving parts thing. But, theory isn't yet ready for prime time. Real life testing has shown that the operating system does limt them. The statement below came from a white paper I got a from Seagate.



Solid-state drives will get faster as soon as operating system software is optimized for them. Semiconductor analyst Jim Handy of market research firm Objective Analysis says Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista are designed to take advantage of spinning hard drives, not SSD. "A lot of it has to do with software," Handy says. "The operating system does tons and tons of little tiny writes. If they were able to consolidate those into less frequent writes that were larger, solid-state drives would all of a sudden look enormously better than a hard disk drive."

Answer 4

I think the 2 biggest benifits is:

1 Speed - i believe its MUCH faster then a regular hard drive

2 No moving parts - no moving parts = no noise, harder to break.... etc

Answer 5

Filesystem design has an important bearing on performance and if that is a consideration then you are well advised to avoid any FAT filesystem in particular: put simply it was designed for volumes much smaller than current disks and it is hopeless on even semi-large drives.



Device speeds are layered on top of this: the overall performance you get will be a combination of the two. My own evaluations of SSDs show them to be far from ready for prime time just yet. Read performance is good but not exceptional but for many tasks this is more than made up for by the improved random access speed. Sustained write performance is just about acceptable.



However the show-stopper for many tasks is random-access write performance - this included filesystem use as metadata needs constant updating. Small writes have a penalty because SSDs write data in large blocks - a small write needs the other data reading off and the complete new block writing back. However the big problems are with the more "advanced" drives with wear leveling built in which truly cripples performance. After a few random writes the disk will go unavailable for several seconds as the disk rearranges data. During this period the drive is unavailable for either reads or writes making them completely unsuitable for use as primary drives.