SSDs Replacing HDDs Soon? Not A Chance

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
The average desktop PC actually utilizes less than 200GB of frequently-accessed data, and stores less than 500GB. I am a PC gamer playing the latest games and having several of the latest apps .. my 500GB hard drive currently has 350GB free.

So thats great, buy a 1TB drive, and have most of it sitting un-utilized, this is what will happen to 80% of users. And when they hit 5TB capacities, nobody will need that much space, not for several years. Meanwhile, because you want to have the space that you wont use anyways, you miss out on the enourmous SPEED benefits of having even a small SDD for your frequently-accessed data.

If you do have 1TB of data on your desktop PC right now, you are risking a catastrophic loss. Your home PC is not meant to serve as an enterprise-class storage solution. You'd better have redundancy, and off-site backup if you really have 1TB of data that is actually important.

And even if you do have "data", meaning you bothered to fill the drive with something, there is no way that you as an average user, frequently access 1TB of data. Most of it sits for months, in the form of unwatched movies and un-viewed photos.. in these cases this data does not even need to be on your machine.

The trick here is that as hard drives start to approach capacities which are far ahead of what the average user needs, we should take an example from corporate storage solutions and "categorize" our data, to reap benefits from both the HDD and upcoming SSD technologies.

Therefore, for any of your data it is either "frequent access" data, such as your OS (Windows for example), and the other category is "archive" data, such as your 100GB of family photos that you may never look at again, and should be burned to backup disc and taken off your machine anyways. For the frequent access data, it makes so much sense to, even today, place it on an SSD, even if it is only 128GB, because the Seek Time is basically instantaneous - the speed of your computer in many cases will appear to triple, i kid you not. Then for your 1TB of movies, photos, and other data that does not benefit from super-fast seek times (a HDD can stream a movie easily), by all means buy a cheap 1TB and throw those family photos on there.

But dont make the mistake of thinking that the existance of one SSD on every single PC and notebook can not already bring enourmous benefit, just because you cant put 10TB of photos (that you never look at) on it. The ideally-configured PCs and notebooks going forward will realize that one SSD for frequently accessed data (your OS and Applications), and one large HDD (for photos, movies, infrequently accessed data) is the ideal configuration, yielding both storage and extremely fast Access for the machine. Note that I did not give a sweet chocolate rats butt about the transfer speed, Access time is what your PC currently waits on, thats over 60% of the time you sit waiting for your machine - access/seek time. SSD's eliminate this waiting, by at least 90%, an amazing thing. Dont waste this opportunity because you cant store 10TB of useless data.







 
Of course SSDs aren't going to replace HDDs on desktops. Any idiot who knows how to do division can see that. The sky is blue and birds go tweet. SSDs are best for making laptops lighter and more durable. They can also be more power efficient and faster depending on the model.

In many notebooks, even today the SSD is well worth the extra money. As prices drop over the next 2 years, it won't even be a question which to choose. Most users just don't need that much storage in their laptops, and for those few, there will still be HDDs.

And it's cool how you always cherry pick the expensive hardware to compare.
 
Blah... this article really wasted my time.

Obviously, older slower technologies are cheaper. Obviously it takes time to adopt new tech. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

 
[citation][nom]mackayde[/nom]Currently, OS's and hardware interfaces are designed to accomodate the slow Hard drive. Until such a time that interfaces are redesigned ( a new Bus), and this is followed by OS's being designed to take advantage of the SSD's, the SSD's will not reach their full potential in near future and hence uptake will be slow.It must be said that for the SSD to perform so well on an inferior bus which is designed for inferior equipment is great news and I am sure that very clever people are sitting around a table somewhere to create a bus which will be Native to SSD only and only then will we see the potential of this drive being maximised. Followed closely by a massive take over of the market.Let's hope that HD Manufacturers do not sit on the board of standards.[/citation]

Even on the current aging bus if you look around on google, Toshiba and Intel's SSD drives 100% obliterated the Raptor drives in performance on booting OS, loading application, write and read speed. So even using the normal SATA bus they still have benefits. I admit these were only on the Intel and Toshiba SSD's though and not the others.
 
[citation][nom]BigBag[/nom]Of course SSDs aren't going to replace HDDs on desktops. Any idiot who knows how to do division can see that. The sky is blue and birds go tweet. SSDs are best for making laptops lighter and more durable. They can also be more power efficient and faster depending on the model.In many notebooks, even today the SSD is well worth the extra money. As prices drop over the next 2 years, it won't even be a question which to choose. Most users just don't need that much storage in their laptops, and for those few, there will still be HDDs.And it's cool how you always cherry pick the expensive hardware to compare.[/citation]

As soon as the smaller capacity SSD's come down in price after the 512gb models appear I plan on imaging my current Main drive and using a SSD as my main system drive. Only the off brand cheaply made SSD's perform slower than physical magnetic hard drives. It will be a huge boost in performance to the system. Will still use my large physical drive as my data drive as well as the drive I put the majority of my applications on.
 
[citation][nom]hituntang - 01/02/2009 6:48 AM[/nom]He is talking about when will SSD take over the HDD market, like LCD has taken over the monitor market, or DVD has taken over VCR, etc. You are not going to put a LCD monitor next to a CRT monitor for sure (I tried, and you would not wanted to do so.), and I bet you will not store a CRT just in case.[/citation]

Uh, why not?
I have one at work right in between 2 LCDs.
You obviously don't know the value of a good CRT.
And BTW, CRTs are't totally gone, and neither are VCRs, so your statement doesn't support his either. They are just rarer, which is what HDDs will become. You can be pretty sure HDDs will totally dissapear before either VCRs or CRTs do, because there is no legacy issues favouring platter HDDs over SDDs once prices come down.

[citation][nom]hituntang[/nom]I am not asking people those use computer more than 5hours a day, owning a computer costs more than 1,000USD, or owning more than 1 computer. I am asking those who spending 500 to 700USD on a computer,[/citation]

What site do you think you're on? BestBuy's forums?
Most people who seek out sites like THG, [H], Xbit, Anand, etc. do spend more than $1,000 on their PCs overall and spend 5+ hours a day on PCs. The other people you mention visit Cnet, and the pablum pushing sites.

[citation][nom]hituntang[/nom]And when SDD's price comes down, so will the normal hdd.[/citation]

Nowhere near at the same rates as the SSDs, and once arial densities catch up to them they will no longer make sense to build, that's when they will be gone. That's not anything immediate, but it is the future. Spinning magnetic platters is NOT the future.

[citation][nom]hituntang[/nom]Most of the responses saying "I disagree" are people that spend more than 1000 dollars on 1 computer. "Oh, I would put a SDD in my computer because I have external hdds" You guys are not average computer users.[/citation]

And as I said before, this site is not meant for the average computer user, and if it decides to go there it will lose the following it has and drown in a sea of PCs for dummies sites. Also I'm sure the THG staff realize it's the people who buy premium hardware that the advertisers want not those who want to race to the bottom for price.

[citation][nom]hituntang[/nom]I am done trying to reasoning. The question from the author to the rest: When will SDD truly replace the normal hdd we are using today. NOT putting SDD as system drive and normal HDDs as storage, But putting SDD as system drive and storage drives, too.[/citation]

Now you're redefining the authors original article intent. First you talk about how people don't get primary and secondary drives because they don't spend alot of money, now you talk about them getting primary and secondary drives. Netbooks tend to use SSD primary and an SSD secondary as well, and they're the growth market now. Do you really think HDD are their primary issue, and that those people have issues with saving to DVD?

Simple fact, SSDs are replacing HDDs, the rate at which that happens has alot to do with intel, Samsung and Toshiba's plans, not whether or not the definition of dead is when HDDs are stopped being made or simply stop being the largest # of shipping HDDs.
 
If people do think SSD's will put the nail in the coffin for HDD's then these people shouldn't be writing for publications which actually has standards.

Now come on, which idiots out there have said SSD's will kill HDD's? Are these the same idiots who predict Electric Cars will kill Petrol/Diesel run vehicles?

Everyone knows, NEW technology WILL take over eventually (if its good) just like someone commented about CRT's then TFT's.

I saw my first Plasma TV back in 1995 and NOW they are main stream...

TBS
 
While it's true that SSD will not replace totally HDD in the next years, I'm pretty sure the SDD market share is going to expand very quickly.
This article is too negative about SSD ; the autor seems biased and he got several facts wrongs - like the current pricing of SSD, or the absence of SSD in current low cost config-.

A lot of netbook come equipped with SSD today. They may be very slow and and very small, but they are enough for a lot of people.

The SSD that you can buy today on Internet are marketed towards enthousiats. While they cost much more than HDD, they have performances that the OEM like Dell or HP will not deem necessary for a mainstream computer.
The SSD will go mainstream when will see Dell or HP implementing cheap, average speed SSD in their basic notebook lines.

I think that we will see it happening very quickly, as soon as the low ends SSD start to cost about the same as the low end 2.5" HDD, probably as soon as the end of 2009. Don't forget that the majority of the computer sold today in the world still have storage capacity of 160Go or less.
 
[citation][nom]Anonymous[/nom]CRTs are you kidding me[/citation]
CRTs are still used many places. They do have their disadvantages such as size and power requirement at powerup, but they still provide a much better picture than almost all affordable flatpanel displays. So if you're a marketing engineer and need colors to be true, you need a crt monitor for said purpose.

[citation][nom]Anonymous[/nom]Tuan Nguyen is clueless. SDD drives as OS drive beats any HDD today already in a test. Tuan Nguyen do some test before babling like and idiot.[/citation]
Tuan don't listen to kids like that one. Keep on doing a fine job.

IMO the only place ssd's are worth their asking price would be in business workstations where you'd have a 64 or 128gb drive for os and your autodesk/adobe software, and a spinpoint or wd black for storage.
 
I am waiting for the next generation of non-volatile memory, like Nano-RAM,which will avoid failure due to repeated writes and will be much faster than flash.
 
I don't have a problem with the article per se - I don't believe SSD's will completely obliterate HDD's within the next few years either, although their uptake will be constant and ongoing - but I do have a major problem with some of the logic Tuan uses in his arguments. Ie:

"To watch the movie you want, you may have to scour through your stack of DVDs to look for the ones you want. This takes time and gets factored in to overall "access time." With the 1.5 TB drive, everything is at your finger tips for access, movies or otherwise."

Other posters have commented on this so I won't belabor it, except to say that this is one of the most inane pieces of logic I have ever seen. It is absolutely on par with the kind of comparisons Tuan made in his "Mac pricing myth" article of a few months ago. He was roasted for making those kinds of dubious assertions and then seemed to disappear from providing Talkback.

Tuan, I'm sure you're a nice guy, but you seem to be out of your depth and have no business writing articles for websites which cater to readers with advanced technical knowledge.
 
HDD still better for collecting movies for sure. Yet SSD starting to look more interesting as system drives with increasing performance. 64/128GB would be more than enough for Windows 7. If performance will be faster than HDD, SSD would looks more preferable.
 
Why is it that almost exclusively everyone who has a beef with Tuan are people who create a new account just to complain? I just don't get it. I mean, sure I wasn't too happy about some of the points he made in his mac article, but I was very happy seeing him read all the comments from us, and acting on it. And in any event, when people read this article they shouldn't think back to the couple mac ones and aim at finding errors. They should read the article for what it is - a simple article on SSD drives.
We can agree with the predictions, or not. But we cannot just assume Tuans views, merely ask him to explain them.


On another note - I'm actually glad to have read it, cause I was kinda worried best of media had sacked him just because of a few less lucky articles.
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]Why is it that almost exclusively everyone who has a beef with Tuan are people who create a new account just to complain? I just don't get it. I mean, sure I wasn't too happy about some of the points he made in his mac article, but I was very happy seeing him read all the comments from us, and acting on it. And in any event, when people read this article they shouldn't think back to the couple mac ones and aim at finding errors. They should read the article for what it is - a simple article on SSD drives. We can agree with the predictions, or not. But we cannot just assume Tuans views, merely ask him to explain them.On another note - I'm actually glad to have read it, cause I was kinda worried best of media had sacked him just because of a few less lucky articles.[/citation]

I guess many readers just found the content of this site made sense until they read some of his pieces and just couldn't stand it... so they unlurked to try and make it stop. I hope Best of media's strategy is interest by provocation otherwise, they should give this guy the sack.

(and justlookin, thank you. "inane" was juste the word I was looking for)
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]but they still provide a much better picture than almost all affordable flatpanel displays. So if you're a marketing engineer and need colors to be true, you need a crt monitor for said purpose.

IMO the only place ssd's are worth their asking price would be in business workstations where you'd have a 64 or 128gb drive for os and your autodesk/adobe software, and a spinpoint or wd black for storage.[/citation]
The first part hasn't been true for about two years, new midrange LCDs have better colour and contrast than almost any high end CRT ever built. This is totally a Myth.

And the second part about SSDs only making sens in workstations, well tell that to the gamers who want peak performance and laptop users who want shock resistance and faster boot-ups! Laptops are the place where SSDs will take their market share at first because of the smaller size of mobile drives and Laptops are the biggest share of The PC market... do the math.
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]Why is it that almost exclusively everyone who has a beef with Tuan are people who create a new account just to complain? I just don't get it. I mean, sure I wasn't too happy about some of the points he made in his mac article, but I was very happy seeing him read all the comments from us, and acting on it. And in any event, when people read this article they shouldn't think back to the couple mac ones and aim at finding errors. They should read the article for what it is - a simple article on SSD drives. We can agree with the predictions, or not. But we cannot just assume Tuans views, merely ask him to explain them.On another note - I'm actually glad to have read it, cause I was kinda worried best of media had sacked him just because of a few less lucky articles.[/citation]
I greatly appreciate Tom's charts and benchmarks. I didn't bother checking the by lines for Tom's articles until Tuan's first mac article. Why would it matter when people register for the site? He writes bad articles, there's no two ways about it.
 
@ snotling : I don't agree with you about Tuan, but doesn't matter. Neither you nor I are in charge of best of media anyway.
As for the other part. We're still using samsung CRT monitors for our guys using Inventor and Architectual. Those were very good monitors when they were new, but even now where they're admittedly old (8 years or so) they deliver a significantly better image than those 22" lcd's I've seen, so we haven't even considered replacing them yet. Not sure what an lcd @ 500€ and up can do though, as we don't have any of those.
And SSD's - They will NOT be used in laptops, cause they're just too energy inefficient. We've got people doing Autodesk stuff on laptops, and these people prefer a fast 7200 drive. They're not really throwing their computers about though, so I don't think they even consider robustnes as a quality.

@ Bigbag : I find it important if people speak their mind negatively about someone using 'their own' profile or one made for said purpose. IMO only people like you and me who dare insult, or in other ways confront, people with their opinions are worth listening to. Anybody can find something to dislike about someone, but only those who regularily use the site should be entitled to complain about a member of the site's staff.
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]@ snotling : I don't agree with you about Tuan, but doesn't matter. Neither you nor I are in charge of best of media anyway.As for the other part. We're still using samsung CRT monitors for our guys using Inventor and Architectual. Those were very good monitors when they were new, but even now where they're admittedly old (8 years or so) they deliver a significantly better image than those 22" lcd's I've seen, so we haven't even considered replacing them yet. Not sure what an lcd @ 500€ and up can do though, as we don't have any of those. And SSD's - They will NOT be used in laptops, cause they're just too energy inefficient. We've got people doing Autodesk stuff on laptops, and these people prefer a fast 7200 drive. They're not really throwing their computers about though, so I don't think they even consider robustnes as a quality. @ Bigbag : I find it important if people speak their mind negatively about someone using 'their own' profile or one made for said purpose. IMO only people like you and me who dare insult, or in other ways confront, people with their opinions are worth listening to. Anybody can find something to dislike about someone, but only those who regularily use the site should be entitled to complain about a member of the site's staff.[/citation]
I've read 4 of Tuan's articles. All of them were terrible. His follow up remarks in the commentary when people challenge him usually aren't much better. And I do regularly use this site. Like I said, I find their benchmarks and charts very useful. The fact that you're attacking mine and others complaints based on how old their accounts are rather than on the merits of the articles and their responses is pretty telling.
 
@ Bigbag : I'm not attacking people. I'm merely defending a site I happen to visit pretty much every day, and like as it is. Even with crashman who is a moron in the comments (but writes well), and tuan who publishes articles of varying quality, but at least believes in what he writes.
My beef isn't with people like you. You may've been disappointed by his articles, and have your right to say so. But people that just create a profile to complain aren't worth listening to. These people are like those who claim in the pub about the political situation, but can't be bothered to go vote once in a while. Their opinions just don't matter if they don't dare stand up for em.

disclaimer : I don't know much about politics, but I don't complain much about it either.
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom] We've got people doing Autodesk stuff on laptops, and these people prefer a fast 7200 drive. They're not really throwing their computers about though, so I don't think they even consider robustnes as a quality. [/citation]
Architects and photographs are not the typical business user but I agree, the user doesn't care about robustness he just doesn't care at all which is why techies like us must... the user just carries it around, throws it up in the overhead compartment, the trunk of his car or on the floor by the door, sometimes with the hardrive spinning because of the laptop comming out of sleep mode... the user just didn't care enough to shut it down... probably because it takes it's precious time for booting(another reason to get an SSD)

On the energy saving question, I have to agree, SSDs are still on par with HDs AT BEST (mostly, they're worst!). but it is new and improving technology and by the end of 2009, the new units will (for the most part) be as energy efficient as HDs operating systems (win7 will work differently with SSDs than with HDs, so I heard) and how HDs are traditionnally used for virtual memory are part of the problem. Stop swapping all the time and your SSD will stop sucking energy all the time and "light up" only when actual data is accessed.
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom] But people that just create a profile to complain aren't worth listening to.[/citation]
And what I'm trying to explain to you is that you shouldn't care why or when people create their profiles, you should worry about the quality of the articles written and the validity of the responses.
 
i think its quite a good outcome for tom's that people create profiles to voice out their concerns.

the huge problem with the article is the narrow view which beats who.
its much like making an article about processors,
quads will never beat dual cores, they're more expensive, use more power for the same performance, and etc.
they're not going to replace duals and single cores any soon, yet each have their own market and use.
 


Not even close. No midrange, even NOW, has anywhere near the gradient separation, blacks and contrast of a Trinitron or DiamondTron. Sure their extremes may cover further into the Adobe RGB spectrum, but that's not all there is to colour, and LCD's fake bazillion to one contrast ratios are as fake as their refresh and response time figures.
The only LCDs that have been able to finally surpass the top CRTs are the RGBLEB lit and HDR desktop models which are superb and support the palette throughout, not just the ends.
The original LEDlit models had some very nice features, but still had a lot of shortcomings like gradient separation and tinges to the LEDs; and NO midrange LCD to this day comes close, the only people who think that, never sat in front of a good CRT let alone a good calibrated one. Nor would appreciate the idea of letting a CRT warm-up for 10-15mins before calibrating it to ensure accuracy. LCDs have been easier use and build for a while now, but only recently have they rivaled let alone surpassed CRTs which has been the most recent generation. We are finally going to replace our fantastic Sony FW900s because only now CAN they truly be replaced. Until you've seen something like one of those in action, you haven't seen the best CRTs.

The biggest problem with CRTs now is that none of the good ones are made anymore as of 2 years ago when the last Diamontron rolled off the assembly line. The Trinitrons and Diamondtrons are gone, and the only thing left is mediocre cheap things (and usually small things) for more cheap generic use.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom