A.M.D. vs Intel

[Cinema Face]

my opinion is that as long as you do not buy an SSD based on the first generation JMicron controller you are good. A SSD using a first generation indilinx or intel based controller is still able to put up very respectable numbers and give you 80%-90% the speed experience (by that I mean boot speed and performing common everyday tasks, not moving 100GB of data around) of current top of the line SSDs based on newer controllers.

I will be on the hunt on boxing day for a 80-120GB SSD. I am pimping a tiny 30 GB SSD on my laptop, makes my laptop go vroom vroom but need more boom boom space.

I'm shopping for a new laptop and I'm thinking about putting one of these bad boys into it. What do you think?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

I'm still in the research stage, but I think these hybrid SSD drives may be the way to go, especially for a laptop.

 

[WoodPeckr]

That Hybrid Drive looks interesting. Read the reviews there, you can get a lot of good info from them. All them drives and SSDs are not equal. Some are faster than others and many reviewers point this out along with some of the tweaking some of them require to get peak speeds out of them.

 

[Cassini]

I just can't see how the hybrid drive will take off. To be effective, caches need to be large, and the hybrid hard drive has relatively small amounts of flash memory. As such, using flash memory as a cache for the mechanical hard drive won't give much benefit. Additionally, if the drive manufacturers make the hybrid cache large, then the hybrid drive risks becoming a limited market product. In particular, you need to find a market willing to pay for both a mechanical and an SSD drive simultaneously, and unwilling to purchase each separately.

If you do find a market, then the hybrid drive is the worst combination of both worlds for reliability. I just can't imagine a situation where you would want to combine both flash and mechanical hard drives, where one was not backing up the other. Mechanical hard drives are prone to crashes. Solid state drives are prone to instant failure (already had it happen.) The combination works best when one backs up the other, because both drives need backups.

Myself, I recommend purchasing the 120 GB SSD as the main drive, and an external mechanical for backups.

 

[Capoeira]

Do SSDs consume less power (in laptops)? For battery life sake, would it be more beneficial to buy an SSD over a conventional HD?

 

[bishop]

I'm shopping for a new laptop and I'm thinking about putting one of these bad boys into it. What do you think?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

I'm still in the research stage, but I think these hybrid SSD drives may be the way to go, especially for a laptop.

You can get a normal 500 gb for about half the price. You can also get a 64gb SSD for the same price of the hybrid drive. I would get a 64gb SSD, it is large enough as a main drive, get a USB drive for the porn and you are good. Reviews on newegg are a mixed bag, it honestly does seem quit a bit faster than conventional HDD, but lots of people complaining about heat/noise/high power consumption, for a desktop drive that is not a big deal but for a laptop it is quite a deal breaker.

 

[bishop]

Do SSDs consume less power (in laptops)? For battery life sake, would it be more beneficial to buy an SSD over a conventional HD?

Yes they consume much less power, however unless the drive the SSD is replacing is a real big power hog you will probably only see maybe a 5-10% increase in battery run time, not a real big deal. The power saving aspect of SSD are a bit overplayed considering that modern conventional HDDs are really quite power efficient in the first place. But since with an SSD you can get more work done in less time, you can say that an SSD is much more power efficient (longer battery life + more work done while the battery is still alive). For surfing TERB and checking out porn, power savings are insignificant IMHO.

 

[Cassini]

Battery life with an SSD could be less than the battery life of a notebook with a hard drive (HD), even if the SSD consumes less power than the HD.

I just benchmarked the CPU+SSD combination and the CPU+HD combination for the same application. The CPU on the SSD ran 85% of the time. The CPU on the HD ran 60% of the time. The hard drive makes the CPU wait in a low power mode. The SSD is much faster, causing the CPU to run in a high power mode a significantly larger percentage of the time. Since CPU's consume more power than hard drives (on the order of 10 to 20 times), it is very easy to neutralize any power reductions from SSD use with corresponding increases in CPU use.

I would be very surprised if SSDs increase battery life in normal usage patterns, because the users likely respond to the increased speed by making the computer work harder.

 

[splooge]

Exactly what you say, Cassini. As power consumption would be greater in a system with a ssd while running CPU heavy programs, in particular, those which do heavy multithreading

 

[WoodPeckr]

Myself, I recommend purchasing the 120 GB SSD as the main drive, and an external mechanical for backups.

Was thinking the same.
Here's a pretty good Newegg deal for under $200 after rebate:
Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH120G2K5 2.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

It's a new Intel SSD and reviews point out power consumption is lower than earlier SSDs plus you have Intel reliability.

 

[Cinema Face]

Myself, I recommend purchasing the 120 GB SSD as the main drive, and an external mechanical for backups.

Sounds great for a desktop computer but for a laptop, with only one drive bay, a hybrid sounds like the best cost/speed compromise solution.

 

[Cassini]

Sounds great for a desktop computer but for a laptop, with only one drive bay, a hybrid sounds like the best cost/speed compromise solution.

If your data is worth anything at all, the cost of backups dominates. Also, if you are paying anyone to work on/fix your computer, it is cheaper to use the SSD than to pay the hourly rate.

 

[The Options Menu]

I had an AMD chip a few years back. What a mistake! That thing would overheat after 10 mins of watching any video.

That's a fan(s) or case issue, with a $15 to $100 fix. CPU / case fans cost as little as $15, and a new case kitted with fans and a PSU can be had for $100. Unless it's a shit laptop. Also check for dust on the CPU under the fan, in the case, and general airflow.

I've built systems with both, and worked on both. Since the Pentium 3 days I've always gone AMD for my home systems. Minus some aggressive Intel price cutting not too long ago, the price-performance for Intel has never been justifiable, IMHO. I've found the quality of the AMD chips to be fine. As with anything, a lot depends on the system the chip is in:

1. You want a motherboard that has a reputation for quality, even at the expense of some speed, with a fully updated BIOS.
2. You don't need very low latency or error correcting RAM, but decent lower latency ram goes a long way.
3. The CPU's stock fan / cooler is probably fine, but you might want to go for something higher quality / quieter.
4. You want case fan(s). Bigger fans push more air and spin slower which makes them quieter. You can go with one fan, but if you do make sure you check your temperature sensors regularly and get a second one if needed.
5. Make sure the case allows for airflow, and you put the case in a place that allows for air.
6. If you can, always make sure you have a one slot space between all hard drives, optical media drives, the PSU, and any high performance video cards. These things all generate heat and you want that to dissipate.
7. It doesn't hurt to blast the dust out of the thing every now and then.

For 1-6, it doesn't matter if you're AMD or Intel, if you build or buy a system that fails in any of those categories, your desktop or laptop will fail rapidly and give you nothing but trouble. It's fine if you can blow through cheap systems-- But on a beefy desktop that you buy / built yourself, you really want to make sure.

edit: As far as backing up goes-- Find a local way to do it, and just do it. I use a RAID (redundant mirrored drives for non-geeks) based linux box as my desktop system, and I back that up to an encrypted USB Disk, and every Christmas I put last years disk in my closet at my patent's house. (The drive for the USB, that later goes to the closet, is 'free' because I grow my RAID by 2 disks every year. That leaves me with +1 drive, unless a drive fails, and +1 more for the previous year's drive.)

 

[Cinema Face]

If your data is worth anything at all, the cost of backups dominates. Also, if you are paying anyone to work on/fix your computer, it is cheaper to use the SSD than to pay the hourly rate.

I don't see why a hybrid drive would be less reliable than a normal mechanical drive. If the SSD portion of the drive fails then the hybrid will behave like a normal drive.

If anything, I'd expect the mechanical part of the drive to be more reliable than a regular drive because it doesn't have to work as hard.

 

[splooge]

The OCZ Agility 2 OCZSSD2-2AGTE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) supports TRIM Sustained Write: up to 250MB/s 4k Random Write (Aligned): 10,000 IOPS Seek Time: 0.1 MS Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology ECC: 27 bytes of redundancy per 512 bytes data. Up to twelve 9-bit symbols correctable.

This zippy little SSD can replace your HDD and your startup files/desktop files cache-full Vista computer will boot up to ready to go in less than 30 seconds from the time you push the power button! Probably the best $130 you can spend on a PC right now.

 

[Cassini]

I don't see why a hybrid drive would be less reliable than a normal mechanical drive.

I think you will find that if either the solid state or mechanical portions of the hard drive fail, the file system will be corrupted and the drive useless. Additionally, the highest risk (failure rate) environment will be a laptop, which experiences the largest temperature swings.

Also, my point was that it really doesn't matter. The reliability of a computer is in the backups, not the hard drive. If you are paying someone to do your maintenance, its cheaper to just buy the SSD. For instance, if a restore to SSD takes 3 hours, and a restore to HD takes 10 hours, then the time saved pays for the difference in cost of the drive.

I don't bother reusing hard drives any more. If a computer is messed up, I swap the hard drive and install a clean system. Restore data files from backups. Do data recovery on the old hard drive when things are quiet. The process is so much quicker with a SSD, that it pays for the cost difference. Plus, the users walk away and say: "Look how fast my computer is! You fixed it!"

 

[WoodPeckr]

The OCZ Agility 2 OCZSSD2-2AGTE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

That was the one I was looking at till the new Intel 120GB SSD came out that was in post #30. Even though OCZ is 60GB it would be perfect running Linux which only requires ~5GB as opposed to W7 that needs over 30GB.

 

[antaeus]

Exactly what you say, Cassini. As power consumption would be greater in a system with a ssd while running CPU heavy programs, in particular, those which do heavy multithreading

it certainly sounds logical but my experience is different. I have new performance laptop with both SSD and HDD: surfing terb, porn, the usual, drains the battery in under 2 hours yet I get 5-7 hours CAD and illustration work. Indeed I thought it would be the opposite as the CAD uses the massive power hungry discreet video card. Of course, it's setup with all programs on SSD, work files on HDD. I don't know enough to explain it, but that's what happens, only cause I can think of is most websites are bright and dynamic thus requiring lots of screen power whereas CAD screens have lots of static, constant light level areas.

 

[bishop]

Battery life with an SSD could be less than the battery life of a notebook with a hard drive (HD), even if the SSD consumes less power than the HD.

I just benchmarked the CPU+SSD combination and the CPU+HD combination for the same application. The CPU on the SSD ran 85% of the time. The CPU on the HD ran 60% of the time. The hard drive makes the CPU wait in a low power mode. The SSD is much faster, causing the CPU to run in a high power mode a significantly larger percentage of the time. Since CPU's consume more power than hard drives (on the order of 10 to 20 times), it is very easy to neutralize any power reductions from SSD use with corresponding increases in CPU use.

I would be very surprised if SSDs increase battery life in normal usage patterns, because the users likely respond to the increased speed by making the computer work harder.

I really doubt this is the case, my experience is the SSDs have never had a negative impact on battery life. Suppose that it does have a negative impact on battery life, since you can do more work in less time your efficientcy goes up, even if the battery life was shorter you do more work with the shorter battery life than with a conventional drive and a longer battery life. If you do no work and just let the computer sit and idle, your battery life with an SSD will be greater, since SSD have much less than 1w power consumption during idle. If you were to same stuff at the same pace on a computer with SDD vs a HDD, the SSD would come out on top. Suppose on a computer with a HDD you typically watch 1 HD video, but on a machine with an SDD you find it possible to watch 2 HD videos without problems and you go ahead and watch 2 HD videos at the same time and you find the battery life is crap, the fault is the user and not the SSD.

 

[Cinema Face]

I have no experience working with SSD drives but I suspect that it would improve battery life. A mechanical drive has a motor, spinning the platter all the time even if you're not using it, unless you disable that in power management.

I remember back in my clone building days, that a hard drive typically consumes about 4 or 5 watts when running. During startup, it can consume as much as 20 or 30 for an instant while the platter starts to spin up.

These new drives probably consume more. I know that a 7,200 RPM drive gets a little warm and needs some airflow around it. I'm not sure what they do in a laptop. I hope they don't run too hot. That's not good for a drive.

Also, I wonder what the power consumption for a hybrid drive would be. I suspect it will be no worse than a normal drive but not much better.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=15_215_217&item_id=031555

This is the Seagate Momentus 500 Gig 7,200 RPM hybrid with a 4Gig SSD drive, for $105. I think for the combination of price, storage and speed it's a good solution.

 

[Cassini]

This is the Seagate Momentus 500 Gig 7,200 RPM hybrid with a 4Gig SSD drive, for $105. I think for the combination of price, storage and speed it's a good solution.

If you think it is a good solution for your needs, then you should purchase it.