Poll: Are you using SSDs? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Are you using SSDs?

88 pointsjacquesm149 comments

How is it going with the Solid State Disk revolution? Are you already using SSDs? If you are what is your experience so far? Happy with the performance? Happy with the price/performance?

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I'm not using one in a production web environment, but my Macbook Pro has one in it now and it's phenomenal. Photoshop boots up in quite literally 3 seconds or less (cold startup) and every other action imaginable is noticeably quicker. I used to feel like browsing files in the Finder was slower than it was for me on my old Windows XP machines but eventually I got used to it. I use keyboard navigation as well, so it felt even slower. (For anyone interested, arrow keys, and command+downarrow to open a folder, command+uparrow to go to the parent folder).

Now that I've got an SSD as a boot drive, navigating the Finder is significantly faster. It feels so quick. Folders open instantly. When I got my development environment up and running (nginx, uwsgi, django, mysql, etc...) I noticed that code compiles wayyy quicker too.

Love it! For the record... I've got the Intel X-25M, second generation. It's only 80GB (they're pricey!) so I also picked up an MCE Optibay which is basically a hollowed out superdrive that lets you mount an additional HD where your DVD drive sits. It also includes an external enclosure so that you can put your otherwise useless SATA DVD drive to use via USB. So now my MBP has two drives in it, an 80gb ssd to boot off of and a 320gb regular drive for bulk storage (media, photos, etc..)

Gotta give credit where credit is due... Paul Stamatiou's blog came in handy a few times with aiming me in the right direction with this. Here is a nifty article from his blog, which describes most of what I did other than the RAID part (which I did not do). http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...

Very interesting. Do you notice any slow down over time? I think I'm right in saying that OSX doesn't implement the trim command or something like that?

This is correct (no support for TRIM), but the performance degradation is not very significant. I'm certain I've used all blocks on my SSD and it's still way faster than HD for random access. Sequential write is noticably slower, but that doesn't happen often -- copying a large backup, etc, but then I can do something else or get a drink while waiting. Random = interactive = fast.

Intel's SSDs don't perform worse if you don't use TRIM. They pre-erase and move blocks of data around in background so that when you go to write there is always some space to do so.

The downside is that sequential writes are bandwidth-limited compared to other SSDs, but this doesn't matter in practice with small random writes completing very quickly.

My SSD RAID 0 setup is still chugging along like a beast! Now I'm just curious how much faster it would be if I swapped the X25-M's out for dual Crucial C300's...

As I noted in that article though - SSD RAID 0 on a Mac is a danger zone because there's no TRIM. My first single, non-raid SSD (X25-M G1) died after 9 months of typical development usage. So I backup like a banshee. The speed boost is worth the risk though.

I got one when I bought my new laptop, and between SSDs and Windows Seven it has been the greatest productivity boost I've ever gotten out of a hardware upgrade in literally a decade. My machine now screams -- going from a cold boot I can get Chrome open before wireless handshakes are complete.

I would like to think of a clever follow up, but 'ditto'. I keep my 1TB hard drive as a long-term storage solution but otherwise all productivity has been moved to the SSD and boot times are in seconds.

It's a cool drive. But if you were really using one in production etc, it's not like you'd need a Mac! Everyone thinks that every where I go and it's like a disease actually. Macbook is absolutely worthless in terms of raw computing power. You pay double and get a computer 1/2 the speed, but most people think you get a computer double the speed. Simple example: I got an i7 based pc at 4ghz that will out render any typical $1600 imac, or the $2000, or $2500 pro. It cost $730. I also work with video and audio in a studio etc. I think the thing that irks me is every last macbook pro user tends to buy ssd first because they spend tons of cash easily. But then they are always determined to say "I use it on MY Macbook pro". To me this is not a sign of professionalism, but lack of understanding. It's not like most will run final cut pro. But most use adobe software anyway, which runs on windows 7 just fine. And there are other alternatives about as good as fcp for windows 7. Some of which are used to create very pro looking videos that have gotten famous on youtube. Search cows cows cows. There are thousands of others. But every last SSD review has some mac guy explaining how good the ssd works in a mac, lol. But I will agree on part of this. Mac's are typically slower, and their hard drives usually are terrible. So, it makes sense I suppose. And I know there are POS pc's. But with a little shopping around and looking, you can buy stuff better than a mac for 1/2 th ecost.

by the way. I realize there are a couple of macs $3000 and higher that have more cores. For that I'd just upgrade my board to dual cpu version and the computer would cost me $1200 and still be faster than the fastest mac on the market. In fact I could just hackintosh it and have a mac faster than what apple sells, and some do that. But I prefer windows 7.

I would absolutely recommend SSDs. It's one of the few times you can swap out a component in your computer and notice a performance boost. They are getting better very quickly though, so one big decision is when to pull the trigger. Every few months a new generation of SSDs with better firmware seems to come out. I've switched my laptop and home computer to SSDs.

Which SSDs can you recommend for your laptop and home computer?

My MBP has had a 160 GB Intel X25-M for almost a year and couldn't be happier.

Me either. This is the single best improvement I've made in the last 4 to 5 years. My MBP is awesome with this X25-M. I have adapted myself to use this little 160gb space very confortably using some external storage at home. This is great! I sure do recommend this to anyone!

I have an 80 gb intel x-25m in my 13 inch MBP but I also took out the superdrive and installed a 500gb live in an enclosure in the optical bay.

How does that affect heat and battery life? Does the second disk switch off when not in use?

Yep, it is off when it isn't and use. It does affect battery a little bit but I have found it be negligible.

Anandtech has the best reviews on SSDs I've seen. This is the latest article to benchmark current drives. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3812/the-ssd-diaries-crucials-...

They're just another product on the Moore's Law trajectory. Treat them the same as you do computers and phones -- plan to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and plan on only having the latest and greatest for about 12 minutes after you get it.

Wrong. HD speed improvements have been pretty flat, and has been far outpaced by HD capacity which is closer to Moore's Law. SSD offers a nice boost in speed. Don't just throw around Moore's Law as if you know something.

I think you might have misread kbob’s comment. I think he was talking about upgrading from one SSD to another newer SSD — not from HDD to SSD.

It would be stunning for SSDs to take off with exponential speed improvements. Sure, I expect them to get faster and faster, but I have no doubt that there's no Moore's Law at work in this case. I stand by my original comment.

It has nothing to do with speed, it has to do with transistor counts, which should increase disk size or lower cost.

I totally agree. Moore's Law is completely inapplicable when it comes to disk performance.

Which is a strawman of your own invention that you are being an arse about, kbob didn't mention SSD performance.

kbob was replying to a post about a "performance boost" and then claimed without qualification that HDs were "on the Moore's Law trajectory"... I didn't invent anything here.

Moore's law is about transistor counts, not speed, and is directly applicable to SSDs.

It really depends. Taking a hard black&white stance on other side is just silly.

Say you have an SSD that consists of 8x16GB chips. Internally it's implemented in something like a RAID0 array, which is why they're so fast. If the capacity doubles / size shrinks by a factor of 2 and someone decides to stick 16x16GB chips in the next gen SSD then you will see a speed increase. On the other hand if they go for 8x32GB you won't.

Moore's Law, as originally stated, is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. Flash memory is definitely on that trajectory, and SSD controllers look like they can make good use of increased transistor counts for a few generations.

My comment was directed to Matt_Cutts' complaint that he didn't know when to buy an SSD. I don't think it matters exactly when you buy one. (Though I personally am waiting to see how Intel's 25nm SSDs compare to those based on the SandForce SF-2000 controller around Jan/Feb 2011. Maybe I should practice what I preach.)

I switched over to a SSD (from a 5400 rpm drive) in my new laptop and didn't notice much difference at all. Everything was instant before, and it's still instant now.

This may be because I have a lot of ram, because I mostly work with small files, or because I'm using Linux which seems to be more resistant to bad disk IO speeds.

However I do like the gain in battery life.

you never load a large program like gimp? The speed difference is huge when loading up gimp on a rpm drive vs ssd. It's also pretty big when doing something like a "select count(*)" over a huge un-indexed table.

Where I work we presently have between 5-10 TB (actual, not raw, not counting replicants) across several MySQL shards. $/iop they just slay magnetic solutions.

The most interesting insight I can offer is that because there is no seek time penalty and SSD throughput increases as the I/O scatters, our tests with RAID 5 are essentially as fast as RAID 10, which makes $/gb much better than it looks at first blush.

TRIM through hardware RAID is still an unsolved problem for us, as is getting wear life SMART data (Intel X25M G2) through the RAID controller. My gut feeling is that the final solution is probably a JBOD controller and Linux software RAID.

We ended up with the JBOD solutions on a standard ahci controller with soft raid. We've tried a few different controllers and so far the performance with them has been been kinda sad, they just aren't made for the amount of iops the ssds provide.

I saved the results from tiobench from some of my initial testing with 6 intel x-25m here: http://gist.github.com/348417

Not bad for $2400 worth of ssds.

You may want to consider testing the LSI 9211-8i for a very fast JBOD controller or the 9260-8i for an equally fast RAID5/6 card. I've been very happy with these controllers and they are typically much cheaper than the equivalents from ARECA. Just make sure to use the latest drivers and firmware as LSI has been improving SSD performance by leaps and bounds in the last year.

On thing I noticed with the X-25M G2s is that if you are in a write intensive environment they will degrade in performance dramatically. The SandForce SF1200/1500 drives seems to handle garbage collection much better and run with lower write amplification levels. I've found that the SandForce drives do a much better job at maintaining acceptable random write performance after months of being beat on. That all being said a beat to hell X25-M is still 10 times better than a spinning disk.

If you want I can run an iometer batch or figure out tiobench if you'd like some runs on the 9211 or 9260 to compare with your ICH and Adaptec runs. Ping me at gomeler at gmail if you are interested.

We have one database server with SSD (we need more speed than room) and are pretty happy with them.

On a more personal note I use a Seagate Momentus XT in my Macbook Pro and this is the single best investment I made in years! This thing cost a third of a "real" SSD of the same capacity and for what an SSD is shining (boot time, application launch, ...) it's on par. The 4GB SSD cache is really improving the experience (they should offer an 8GB version though).

I can't recommend this enough if an SSD is too expensive or not capacious enough.

Which brand/model did you go with for your db server?

We have 2 Intel X25-M 80G in RAID 1

Just checked out anandtech's review comparing hybrid to SSD and its quite impressive - http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-revi...

I can second this. I bought the 500 GB version (currently $115 on Amazon). Boot times and launch times for common applications are much faster compared to a standard drive, but you also have the capacity of a standard drive.

If you have a laptop as your primary machine and need to store music and photos, SSDs with sufficient capacity are prohibitively expensive, which is where hybrid drives are ideal.

Seagate Momentus XT hybrid is very cool. But people not in a hurry perhaps should wait for Seagate to do write caching in SSD too. It will probably happen in the next few months.

I was hoping there would be observations here about this line.

The one thing that's given me hesitation with regard to it, is the reliability problems Seagate was running into a while back, e.g. the "click of death" (very) premature failures on some of their 1 GB drives.

If anyone has appropriate experience/observations, has their reliability trended back towards its old, high levels?

Been using an SSD in my Macbook Pro for the last year ... easily the best computer upgrade I've made in my lifetime (no kidding) ... Photoshop and Netbeans open up in 5-9 seconds, booting into OS X takes less than 30-40 seconds and applications generally fire up in the blink of an eye.

One word of caution though, when the SSD runs out of free blocks and has to re-use blocks marked as deleted, the performance hit can be pretty painful ... sudden application freezes that take many seconds to resolve are not uncommon (This is from Windows XP ... I spend a lot of time in it on my Apple machine)

There is a TRIM command that is supposed to help with this problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM, but only Windows 7 and Linux support it at present.

If you have an SSD based on Intel firmware, you can use Intel's TRIM utility on Windows XP as well. This is what I'm using on my gaming PC which hasn't been upgraded in ages, except for the addition of the SSD I installed.

Yes, SSD is great. It works even better in high end PC's which are FAR faster than Macbook Pro's. I have one in an i7 based pc at 4ghz on pretty high end motherboard. I can load Photoshop in about 1 to 2 seconds. So I'm not sure why your mac takes 5-9 seconds other than maybe they typically use cheap chips for the bus I/O etc. Macs tend to be slower at drive operations, even when an SSD is in place. I keep hearing about these mac users that would take a minute to boot their machines, and have it cut in 1/2 to 30 secs. What? why? My machine boots in 9 seconds on an SSD, and 17 with a regular HD.

As for "sudden application freezes" on XP. That's not true unless it's true for all people running XP. My systems NEVER freeze on HD, or SSD. But WAIT. I see what you are doing. You run in IN your Apple machine which proves my point that Apple Mac's are cheap hardware, and also the drive is not formatted in regular NTFS which also helps to slow it down. Don't sit there on a slow mac thinking how slow XP is. Get a high end PC for under $1000, and watch it out do your mac. Also notice how mac doesn't support TRIM.

But again. I see one of you Macbook Pro users about every 2 hours. Please don't tell me you bought it because it was faster and better. It's not. Only in terms of the fact that it's so obscure that you are less likely to get malware. But it's not a big enough difference to matter really. Other than this one point, there is NOTHING better about mac. Unless in a stylistic way, you like the shiny colors etc. The OS's are far too similar and both work just fine.

I'm sorry but I get fed up of seeing posts like this. I could tell you hundreds of little details in mac hardware and software that make the hundreds of hours a month I have to spend on a computer more tolerable.

If your laptop is your profession then you care about the tools you use, you're right it's not down to speed, it's down to the thought that goes into every element of both the hardware design and user interface that means my computer thinks along the same lines as me.

The cost extra is minimal when you offset it across 2-3 years of earning but the difference it makes in small increments to your daily working life is more than worth it.

Don't feed the troll.

I use a SSD in my laptop, but our servers haven't made the move yet. So, this is an important thing to remember. Once, I needed to write a program to deal with large DNA sequencing files (10-100 GB per sample). On my laptop, the program worked great, but on the server it sucked due to the disk IO. I ended up needing a completely different algorithm, but this wasn't at all clear when using my SSD. If only we could afford a few terabytes of SSD...

I'm using ZFS with SSDs as L2ARC and intent log devices, and standard SAS drives as the main spindles, all sitting in a JBOD enclosure.

It won't make purely random reads fast, but it makes my workloads scream.

I have a SSD on my Macbook Pro. Totally worth it. Definitely snappier in booting up, starting up apps, and any disk i/o-intensive operations. It's certainly noticeable.

Also, you don't need to sweat the higher price per byte, because more and more of my files (and I would assume yours?) are on the cloud every day anyways, so 256GB or even 128GB is fine for me these days.

I did the same thing... and it was great. I added a 128GB SSD, but unfortunately, I needed more space for media and work files (large datasets). So, I ended up removing the DVD drive and replaced it with the old hard drive. I never need the DVD drive outside of the house, so this ended up working great for me.

I'm planning on doing the same thing with my Macbook when the new Intel 24nm SSD's come out in Q4 '10 or Q1 '11. The new drives will bring down prices on the 128GB drive to <$200.

Very interesting hack.

For me, media files were a killer too, so I simply put my media collection on an external HDD, "cached" my favorite 20GB or so of content on my SSD (the stuff I put on my iPhone, essentially), and started relying more on streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Hulu, etc.

I did this in July and I haven't used the external drive even once...

There are several comments about people putting them in MBPs, but I guess I'll ask you... since OS X doesn't support TRIM have you seen any degradation in performance? I've been on the fence for a while due to the cost and OS X being behind the times.

I haven't seen any after a year of using my MBP with the stock Apple 128GB SSD.

I also haven't had any problems (though only after 3 months). I am both aware and a little nervous about the issue, though, so I've run a few benchmarks, and so far, so good. I'll be sure to tell HN if this changes.

We are using 4x 512GB SSDs (boy, these were expensive!) in a 16-core i7 computer, running in production using PostgreSQL 9.0.0, Glassfish 3.1 and ActiveMQ.

Works great, and we do heavy queries at lightning speed. We currently run Ubuntu Linux on it but would switch to FreeBSD 8.x if the Java support was better.

Which brand and model were the ones you put in the postgres server?

MMDOE56G, that's a Samsung 256GB SSD. [Sorry, I know I wrote 512GB and honestly I don't know why I didn't catch it before now.]

are they raided?

Yes, RAID-1 on each pair.

Does trim work over raid-1? I was under the impression that trim isn't supported in raid at all yet.

If you run SSDs on a Mac, I highly recommend OWC's Mercury Pro series: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extr...

Since OS X lacks TRIM support (arggh!), normal SSDs tend to degrade in performance over time. The OWC's are designed with a microcontroller to do the equivalent of TRIM behind the scenes, and they also happen to be fast as hell. I upgraded from a year-old 64g Kingston to a 120g OWC, and the speed boost was just as noticable as the original move from a spinny drive to SSD. (Down to a 22 second boot time on 3yo hardware!)

I don't understand how you can do the equivalent of TRIM without filesystem support.

Doesn't TRIM necessarily rely on knowing which blocks contain live data and which contain deleted data? I.e., something the hardware can't know?

An SSD can read the filesystem allocation bitmap, but that's a "rampant layering violation".

Most people confuse trim with garbage collection, which proactively cleans out invalid data (creating more pre-erased blocks to speed future writes) and potentially defragments data (to speed future sequential reads).

I'm curious why PC makers don't seem to be trying to take them mainstream at all yet (as in: last I checked they're not even available as an option in HP/Dell's desktop configurators) They definitely seem like the low-hanging fruit for noticeable performance improvements at this point, what with CPU clock speed having hit a wall and more cores requiring fundamental programming model (and application domain?) changes to take advantage of (and both being good enough for existing applications anyway). Is it just that consumers have been trained to treat CPU clock speed/cores, RAM size and storage capacity as the only important metrics?

You left out an option: using SSDs on development systems but not in production. That is my situation. I have an SSD on my work machine (a 13-inch MBP) but not on any of my servers. I absolutely love it. Not only is it faster than blazes, but it is, of course, dead-silent and it runs cooler too so my fans don't come on as often.

I've got an SSD in my dev machine. It's an earlier intel drive and I'm using WinXP. It has really fast read performance, making otherwise slow svn operations on my working copy effectively instant. The write performance is atrocious. When doing any significant writing, it tends to hang my whole system for 30 seconds out of every 90. I can't even move the mouse when it happens. Compiling does it, so I tend to do builds on a normal HDD. I suspect if I had trim support and plenty of empty space it wouldn't be a big deal.

WinXP has a poor I/O implementation that can hang the mouse if the I/O takes too much CPU. Vista and later have that fixed, as well as OSX and Linux.

Best. Upgrade. Ever.

I switched to a 120GB OWC Mercury Pro SSD in my MacBook Pro.

The upgrade is impressive enough that I understand why some people end up ditching the optical drive entirely in their MacBook Pros.

I honestly would not be surprised if we don't see the MacBook Pros lose the optical drive entirely in the next year or two. Steve is notorious for dumping dead technologies when the time is right and the CD/DVD is one of those. I haven't put a CD in my laptop since I bought it and the only time I ever use a DVD is to boot into the startup disk or watch a movie.

The best decision that Apple could make at this point is to offer a MacBook Pro with either two SSDs, possibly in a RAID 1 configuration. Speed and security of data is now more valuable to the average consumer than the convenience of being able to read DVDs and CDs.

The alternative would be to sell MacPros with one 60-120GB SSD drive to boot off and run applications from and a conventional HDD with 320GB+ to store stuff like photos, video and music on.

If you are debating an upgrade to SSD, don't. Just buy one already.

I just replaced the 5400rpm drive in my Macbook Pro with an OCZ Vertex2 SSD. The performance improvements for many things are dramatic. I did some very unscientific before-and-after measurements..

* Cold boot (Power button to login screen): 79s HDD, 76s SSD (didn't improve much, surprisingly)

* Login (Login -> Desktop menu bars loaded): 16s HDD, 6s SSD

* Firefox start: 11s HDD, 3s SSD

* OpenOffice start: 11s HDD, 3s SSD

* Metasploit msfconsole start (i.e. loading lots of ruby code): 22s HDD, 12s real

A lot of other things are noticeably faster. Searching for things in Spotlight is almost instantaneous. Previously, there could be a few seconds delay between typing a filename and seeing it appear in the results. Running find over large directories is noticeably faster as well. Time Machine backups are way faster, since it takes much less time to determine what has changed since the last backup.

I was a little hesitant to get an SSD knowing that OSX doesn't have TRIM. We'll see how it goes. I'm hoping Apple adds support soon. If not, I might be doing a secure erase and re-install periodically.

I took the plunge and bought one recently (Kingston V+ 128GB), and it's the most impressive upgrade I think I've ever bought.

For me, multi-tasking is the killer feature: being able to load up Visual Studio, Fireworks and anything else I fancy at the same time without having any noticeable impact on system performance has made me really fall in love with my SSD.

I actually meant 'server side', but if you make your living using a laptop/desktop then I guess that counts as production too.

An SSD in my Macbook pro is without question the most noticeable hardware upgrade I've had in years. Absolutely wonderful.

Same here. The performance boost is very noticeable. A great upgrade and easy to do on the recent Macbook Pro lineup.

Thought about buying one for some time, but after reading of the OCZ HSDL ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/30/ocz_hdsl/ ) i'll wait for the next generation hoping in bigger/faster disks, atm the size/price ratio is not yet good enough.

From what I gather HSDL is proprietary to OCZ, and unlikely to come to laptops.

Like many I've come to accept that SSD's will be roughly $2-3/GB for a while to come. I'd hate to spend all that time waiting while my spinny drive churns away valuable seconds of my workday.

I think this is an area where legacy support is really holding us back. I'd love to see us get to the point where we can just have a simple NAND controller attached to the PCIe bus. But doing that requires a flash-aware filesystem like UBIFS, and if you want to boot from it, bootloaders/BIOS that know how to read it.

We're currently stuck with PCIe->SATA controller->SATA attached NAND controller devices that implement their own wear leveling and bad-block management with degree of effectiveness widely varying among manufacturer's implementations. We have to use post-hoc benchmark results to attempt to reverse-engineer the the performance/price/longevity tradeoffs that were baked into the device.

I suspect that no mass-market ASIC company will be willing to get this on the market until Microsoft ships an OS with a native NAND controller driver and flash-aware filesystem and a system OEM contracts with their BIOS vendor to allow booting from the thing.

Don't wait. There's always something better coming, but the benefit from going from HD -> SSD is so much more massive than going from 2010 SSD -> 2011 SSD. (2008 SSD is a different story).

I've got an SSD in my macbook, and would recommend it to anyone who wants a faster machine. While expensive, SSDs are still worth it in my opinion - in many cases, putting an SSD in an existing machine makes a bigger difference than replacing the machine, and is cheaper.

What I'm interested in is the effect of SSDs on compile time, which is the biggest bottleneck to my productivity. In my case, the build time for Java projects in Eclipse. I've read conflicting stories of how SSD affects this. Over here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499889/ssd-and-programmin...

its mentioned that CPU is by and large the bottleneck but over here:

http://javamoods.blogspot.com/2010/04/hdd-ssd-battle.html

the author mentions that the SSD gives big speedups to compile time.

Anyone has any data to share in regards to this?

It depends on the size and type of project.

When you compile, does your computer's hard drive thrash, or is the CPU pegged at 100%?

We halved build times going from velociraptors to x25-e for a fairly big flash build. Made more of a difference than core2duo to i7 extreme

I'm a bit confused by this poll's "in production" wording. I have a SSD in my laptop, but I read "in production" as "in use in the server room" (maybe that's just my background in web hosting coming out.)

I'll answer "in production" with the caveat that important data should never be stored on ANY single disk or in any single location. (You'd think that would be obvious, but unfortunately, it's not, or else hard drive recovery services wouldn't do such a great business.)

I'm quite happy with the SSD in my laptop. I don't get any better battery life, but it does make the laptop "feel" faster.

We're using Fusion-io SSDs in a lot of our database (MySQL) servers. It makes a massive difference.

What host are you using and how much does this cost you?

We're self hosted (craigslist.org) and the cost is pretty much what you see if your price out the Fusion-io gear (I'd have to go dig that up).

My desktop and my netbook both run on Intel 40GB SSDs. Of course, the desktop also has two 1TB normal HDDs (Samsung F3s) for storage. / and /home are on the SSD.

My netbook is the System76 Starling netbook, and my desktop is custom built. The netbook takes about 15 seconds from Off the the Web. The desktop takes about 10 seconds from Off to the Web.

Launching Eclipse takes about 3 seconds (on the deskop; never tried on the netbook). Everything is incredibly fast.

Same experience here, got a 80MB Intel SSD for my desktop, and being able to start apps in windows the second login is completed is awesome. With a regular disk, you know you're waiting for all the background services and startup apps to launch before the app you actually wanted gets its slot in the I/O queue.

I did some tests on having my local repository on the SSD, but it wasn't substantially faster than my regular HDD, probably because working with it is sequential and heavily cached.

It will be nice when SSDs are price competitive enough to be the only storage in a desktop computer, if only for getting rid of the heat and the noise.

Which model of SSD specifically? How much did you pay?

For both machines I use the X25-V, which cost around $110 each time. Here it is on newegg.ca: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168201670...

I run nothing but SSDs now. High-speed, latest gen bad boys from Corsair and Crucial. I can now never go back to platter drives. I'm corrupted.

Really, it's the single best upgrade anyone can make to their machine. At work, I've got two in a Mac Mini and it smokes any other machine at tasks not tied to CPU - building projects, rendering to disk, everything. At home I've got two in a 13" MacBook Pro and it's like being in the future.

I've had one in my MBP for a year and it is the best "bang for buck" I have ever spent on a computer component.

My wife used my computer the other day, and she was shocked at the performance, enough to comment about it. She doesn't normally talk about computers or relative performance in things. Her computer is a 2008 MBP with a 7200RPM drive and lots of RAM - not far from my machine, except for the SSD.

A question to those who use SSDs: Did you notice any bugs in software you are using(or developing), which was previously hidden due to slow I/O?

I think it's the other way around. I had a classifier in python hitting a sqlite db for every new training instance and it was taking forever, with the SSD it was done in 20% of the time. So developers these days are in danger of presuming that the deployment platform i/o is as fast as their development machines and shipping slow apps to users (or to their servers that are still on mech drives).

It's noticable in all sorts of things beyond startup times when you swap over to a SSD drive. Even something simple like browsers; browsers speed up because whatever they are using to store history and the currently open tabs for crash recovery doesn't have an i/o lag and so the interface becomes much more snappy and pleasant to use with a solid state drive. Should your app write such small things immediately, and slow down the UI for a fraction of a second, or cache the writes in memory a little longer for not-so-critical data and write at an opportune moment? Depends on the app, but people should be wary.

That said, I will echo everyone else who uses them and say it's the single best investment you can make in your machine. Especially with 40 gig drives around $100, even if that requires a bit of juggling when you fill it up and have to move some of your data from your OS drive to your legacy drives/backup solution.

We are using MLC SSD's in production for our Cassandra clusters. It is very important to consider your workload when implementing SSD's in a production application.

There are MLC SSD's and SLC SSD's. The former being reasonably priced (think <1000$), and the latter costing in the neighborhood of 5-10k per drive.

MLC SSD's have a fixed write lifetime and will die or degrade after a certain number of writes. SLC SSD's have no such limits.

Cassandra for example has a very predictable write workload given our application, but other datastores (like an active write heavy mysql OLTP DB) would kill an MLC SSD very quickly.

We are using Cassandra to drive an API that must service thousands of requests a second but also with sub 100ms response times. Not a typical web use of Cassandra. Response times from hard disk just were not fast enough for our needs.

A new type of MLC is hitting the shelves now too. Enterprise MLC... supposed to be more resilient to the issues MLC ssd's have faced.

We are using OCZ Vertex.

I don't know about OCZ Vertex, but I remember that Intel bragged that its MLC drives can last for about 5 years even if you write a couple of GBs every day.

We are writing quite a lot more than 10GB per SSD per day on ours, and we have run into lifecycle issues. Of course, we are running a lot of these SSD's and striping across them with OS level raid, so we are doing a lot of write IO.

> SLC SSD's have no such limits.

[citation needed]

While yes, I do use one in my laptop, I think jacquesm is talking about production use, which is quite different.

Correct, that was my intention, but it's nice to have the data either way. I thought 2010 would be the 'year of the solid state revolution', and even though there seems to have been a shift it's nowhere near as dramatic as I expected it to be.

I will be making the plunge in a production server environment soon, but I will be starting with my read only, or read intensive applications.

I have an elevation service, which has 600gb of binary files which are queried randomly. Since I have users from all over the world using the service at any one time, the heads on the drives must be flying all over the place. Perfect application for SSD's, even if they are poor at wear leveling, because it's a read-only application.

As far as database is concerned, I'll be holding off until I am sure I won't be screwed by the wear leveling. My database is currently sitting at 91% reads, but as we grow I can imagine that 9% writes can add up way quicker on the server than any amount of writes do on a persons desktop.

SSDs took my DAW (digital audio workstation) from being able to mix 32 tracks of 96/24 audio with effects to easily over 100 tracks. It wasn't so much achieved by the change in the steady flow of data, but in data transfer spikes. Occasionally there is a disk load spike. When your disks are running 80% capacity, that spike takes them over 100% and causes a dropout in the audio. With the SSDs the disks run at about 4% normally, and the occasional spike just bumps it to the 10 - 20% mark, and it keeps on chugging!

I am a total convert to SSDs as a result. Still using HDD for the OS and other things like mass storage. When the price point is better I'll move all the disks across.

Now it's CPU that's the bottle neck :P

While awesome for a lot of tasks, I've still found that a file system and OS tweaked for a particular task can have remarkable results. On a system with a few hundred thousand RRD files, I've found that ZFS with a 16k block size reduced my load by 75%. Obviously, the average RRD workload goes is vastly improved by SSD -- the move to SSD has me forgetting about IO forever in this case.

But, it's just a hack to begin with and SSD is the patch. I don't have the time/option to find and hack out a better storage mechanism for that particular task. RRD makes little sense in this day and age, but it's what I'm stuck with due to time constraints.

I'm still waiting for OS X to add support for TRIM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)#Operating_sy...

I've got an Intel 80M in my dev machine (ubuntu 10.04), running a pile of KVM virtual machines. I've got it split, 40gig to / and 40 gig to flashcache for (a large partition on( the 1TB drive that I'm using for bulk storage. It screams. It can start 6 vms in a couple of seconds, with 250+ meg random read speeds while all 6 are starting up. I've tested with flashcache off, and It's a good 4x slower.

I'm starting to cycle these SSDs into production, got a couple coming Real Soon Now as vm containers. DBs are next, I just need to decide if I'm going to use flashcache or buy enough to go raid.

Lots of people here have mac laptops (like me) - any concerns about lack of TRIM support in OSX?

Some blogs says that the "easy fix" for lack of TRIM is to just backup/reformat/restore your SSD every X months. Eeech

I guess the general setiment is that even after a while of using it the ssd will still be orders of magnitude faster than your spinning disk. Doing an Xbench report on my ssd and my 7200 500gb seagate is laughable. One thing you should worry about is the damn thing being too fast and saturating the sata channel. I have a late-2009 15" mbp and it has a poorly implemented sata. If you do the fw upgrade to 3Gbps your drive will most likely not work unless you either get lucky and have a newer revved logic board or downgrade the fw to 1.6. I had to go this route. Email me if you need the link to the fw.

TRIM's primary value is preservation of performance as the disk fills. If your environment doesn't support it yet, you can stop-gap it by leaving a few percent of your disk space unallocated, giving the internal block allocators breathing room.

It's not perfect, but it is easy to configure and can make some difference without the reformatting hassle.

I've got an SSD that I use as a boot drive (40 gig). I bought it on one of Newegg's previous shell shockers for under 100 dollars.

My recommendation: if you're going to use SSDs, jump in with both feet first. Budget SSDs are ok, mine nets a 7.0 on the Windows Experience Index. It's actually the only technical bottleneck in my system that has an i7, 8 gigs of RAM, GTX 480, etc..

If I were to build my PC all over again I would have invested in a real SSD instead of dilly dallying with a budget SSD boot drive.

We use them in a healthcare environment for our production system and some database systems. The nightly processing for data extraction and reports showed significant improvement. Things that used to take over 10 hours are down to about 45 minutes. I don't know what the old drive speeds were for comparison, but they weren't more than a year or two old.

Our Server team is selective with the drives due to cost and making sure the problem area would really benefit from that type of drive.

I use a Patriot Torx 128GB in my dev machine. It died completely after two weeks. The seller told me that they are very reliable and that it was just bad luck and replaced it with a new one.

It is so fast and silent that I decided to give it another try and I have been using it for three months now.

I didn't try to recover the data but I think that in case of failure or damage it is more difficult to recover the info than from traditional disks.

It would be much easier to read the NAND IC's than it is to read a magnetic disk out of a hard drive, but you'd need to figure out the block format the drive used in order to reconstruct your files.

I started with an Intel G2 SSD in my MacBook Pro, then I added an OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E SSD to my desktop PC. My work laptop has an Intel SSD, and I'm considering picking a few more up for my servers at home and my media center PC as prices plummet. I can definitely say that they make a noticeable difference in perceived computing speed, and I'd never go back to regular hard drives if given the choice.

I would like to make the switch but am currently broke. I can get 2x2TB for the price of a 128GB SSD and RAID them. The price still doesn't justify the "snappiness" in my opinion since RAID'd drives provide a pretty good performance increase as well as a size benefit. Keep in mind that size is important to me right now as I use my PC as a media server to my house and also a development machine.

I did this, and boy do I wish I would have added a second raid, or even single drive, for my OS. My computer becomes unusable when I thrash on the drives by unraring a large archive or something. I am going to toss in a mid-level SSD for the OS so I can avoid this hit.

Yeah I actually have 3x750gb right now for media storage and a 500gb drive for OS. I get a performance boost from the RAID, and don't have it impact my OS. Ideally I would toss in another 500gb and RAID for performance on my main drive, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. SSD would be nice, but 500gb HD for $60 is hard to beat.

Three SSDs in my Mac Pro - two SATA (Boot & Apps) and one PCIe (Work). SATA are SandForce OEM (Digicube) and PCIe is OCZ Revodrive.

I put these into the machine as soon as I got it so I can't really comment on how much of a difference it would have made if I had left the stock HDD in there instead. That said, disk bound operations (like computing audio waveforms) happen in the blink of an eye.

I have a 64Gb SSD external drive which have been using about 6 months. I use it mainly due to the instantaneous seek time. Matlab 2010a loads in under 2 seconds, and large games load very fast, it's like having 64Gb of non-volatile RAM. Although, I just got a 2TB drive for the same price and they are still quite expensive. It depends on what you need more, speed or storage space.

I've bought a Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB for my new 15" MBP i7 (2010). It worked fine but broke after <5 weeks — all data lost (TimeMachine+Dropbox saved my back). The drive wasn't recognized anymore :-(

I've bought another one until my dealer does RMA in the hope that it's not a "generic" problem.

TL;DR

SSD break out of the sudden and usually everything is lost. Don't use a SSD without having backups on a daily basis!

> Don't use a SSD without having backups on a daily basis!

That goes for hard disks just the same.

15 years of my IT career I've never lost any hard disc out of the sudden (~100). A HDD usually does make sounds, throws smart errors or shows signs (starting file system corruption).

SSD die just out of the sudden without any warning.

I've had it happen twice, once in a laptop (the famous click-of-death, just like that, no warning at all), the other time in a server that was in a rack where the audible beep from the raid array wasn't heard and the monitoring utility was mis-configured so it was sending out its warnings to nobody at all.

The second one was pretty nasty because of course we only found out about that one when enough drives had failed that we couldn't recover any more, and as long as it worked it seemed to work perfect.

Of course there is no way to know how long that second one had been giving off warning signs, by the simple fact that several drives had failed it must have been dead a long time before we found out about it.

Lesson learned: after configuring a raid system test if your 'drive dead' signal actually reaches an operator.

I have 8GB RAM + an Intel SSD in my MacBookPro. There are very few physical reads - most of the data I require fits in filesystem cache.

When there are physical reads, the response time is awesomely fast. An IO is less than 1ms. For the drive included with my machine an IO was ~10ms.

It's response time (not throughput - as seen in many benchmarks) that makes you want an SSD on your desktop.

My main desktop (Win7) is running a 64G Kingston SSD. I love the performance it offers and the silent operation. I'll never go back to a moving disk for my main machine. However, all of my servers will remain as traditional disks because their noise doesn't effect me, they're cost effective, and performance isn't an issue on a 100mb home network.

I have a 4 year-old MacBook Pro (model identifier MacBookPro2,2). I bought a 48gb expresscard SSD and now use it as a boot drive, with my user folder living on my old internal. Time from start to having a usable system (logged in with all of my menubar apps running) went from 3-5 minutes to 45 seconds!

I put one in my Lenovo x200. Greatest decision I ever made. I use the machine at school and for travel, so I am much more comfortable biking and or running with it now that it doesn't have any moving parts. Also, < 10 second boot times are great.

I've been using the Intel X-25m G2 on my macbook pro and it's the best hardware investment I've made in years. The computer feels zippy all the time, and you feel like you actually use more of that CPU horsepower because your CPU isn't waiting on IO.

I am not yet. I don't want the hassle of running a small SSD and a big spindle disk, the cost of a big SSD, the cost of moving all my machines to SSD when I see how good it is, or the jarring switching between SSD / nonSSD machines.

I'm using SSDs in a handful of QA and staging VM servers. As a consequence, VMs are SCREAMING FAST running on SSD. As a further consequence, I have had 4/6 SSD drives fail. Use RAID. Don't buy A-DATA SSDs. (using ext4, Linux 2.6.35)

I will probably swap out my two 1TB HDDs when there are reasonably priced SSD equivalents. Right now, there's still way too high of a pricing premium and way too few choices for terabyte SSDs

Several of our company laptops have been migrated to SSDs and for the most part, people have been pleased with the switch. Also, some file-servers in our datacenter are using SSDs + Disk in a hybrid setup.

2x Kingston E-series, 1x Intel X-25E.

The difference is similar to dialup --> cable.

Intel's self-serve support's organized better than Kingston's, but neither offers a subscription to notify of firmware updates like Dell does.

My netbook contains SSD.. so far no complaints, a bit faster in startup.

My biggest reason for installing an SSD in my MBP is to remove the risk of drive failure from an accidental drop. Knowing there are no spinning platters inside give some peace of mind.

I use OCZ 60GB drives for my netbook and desktop. They're good enough for the price, and from what I remember, cheaper than Intel. Makes Ubuntu boot for ~8 seconds on my netbook.

Anyone who can afford it and knows about it has an SSD for their boot disk nowadays, including me. I just wish I could get a VPS with SSD storage, then my life would be complete.

If you can find a VPS provider with undersold hardware, then usually any extra RAM is used as disk cache, which should definitely speed things up.

I've set up some blazingly fast SSD based servers, the first one in 2007, using 16GB MTron SSDs. SSDs are a game changer for databases.

I would for both servers and my machine, but the cost for personal machines and use of AWS means "not using SSDs" for now.

Waiting for memristors! ;)

Would like to use them in servers, but Linux currently is not supporting TRIM through RAID.

Also VPSes with SSDs would be nice for database servers.

I ordered my hp-envy13 with SSD and will never go back.

Win7 boots in 10 sek. Firefox-4 is up and responding in a fraction of a second.

Where's the option of "No, but plan to".

This is a VERY unscientific poll. Simply because anyone who knows what one is will click the SSD Poll link to check it out. Most people who have no clue will pass it by. According to this 43% of people are using SSD while 57% are not. In reality, less than 5% of people use SSD. The poll is pointless and doesn't indicate anything.

Not using them, can't convince my employer to open his wallet in this recession.

Oops, I accidentally clicked on all vote options.

I love SSDs so much. Silent. Fast.

is this thing on?

I use them in production storage arrays for both read and write caching.

only buy notebooks with SSD, since my eeepc 1000.

will never go back on that.

But for servers and any other kind of storage I will not get near it because of price.

No, my time isn't that valuable.

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