Interesting report

Interesting but to me personally not a surprise.

I worked in a high tech equipment supplier to both SSD ( Memory chip) makers and HDD manufacturers. At heart the Read/write head and the micro engine that steers it into precise alignment with the HDD recording tracks use relativly few though very high resolution precise processes. Memory chips go through many more process stages just as precise so have a much higher fail rate before even getting to the end of the process line. Couple to this the fact that the manufacturers of SSD chips are constantly pushing process technology to more and more challenging levels which gives little chance for the process to mature.

There is a lot of SSD hype out there - particularly in audiophile circles. The short answer is wait - interesting tech - but do you want to be a unwitting part of a beta test programme? No ..thought not!

There are rumours that Apple will move some of their MBP line to SSD storage sooner rather than later. More realistic rumours put a refresh date in the first half of 2011 but specifics are as usual sketchy.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20101215PD223.html


It is also highly likely that Apple will get rid of optical media as soon as they can get away with it. The long slow death of CD may finally be upon us all.


Tog

I wonder how much of this is initial failure in the very early portion of ownership. Are they more reliable if the make it through burn in? As for waiting, why? If you prefer SSD, it's already showing equal reliability to the previous drive format and with significantly higher speeds, no vibration and less consuption. Hard to be sure at this point but lifespan should also be significantly better once the drive passes initial use. Of course, like all things, it will vary by model and maker.

Unmentioned so far is price per Gb of storage ratio. HDD's cost at least 10 times LESS per Gb.

This is not set to change since advances in technology apply to both approaches. Last time I talked with HDD engineers they said they had a clear path to 100TB /DISK drives.

SSD is all about stacking more and more memory chips to get capacity. The capacity of individual memory chips which is about 32 Gb now ( larger capacity SD cards use stacked chips) is going to take a while to get to even 120Gb per individual chip.

quote:

Hard to be sure at this point but lifespan should also be significantly better once the drive passes initial use.

Unfortunately I don't think this will happen anytime soon. The usefull life ( number of write /erase cycles ) of DDR memory is known to be worse than the average life time of HDDs and is a function of built up latency so difficult to improve rather than a straight reliability issue.

Geoff

I thought they've sorted most of the latency issues with the more recent SSDs. Price is definitely to be considered but fortunately transparent.

quote:

Originally posted by js:
I thought they've sorted most of the latency issues with the more recent SSDs. Price is definitely to be considered but fortunately transparent.

js..you may be right that improvements have been made but I think they still have a way to go. The gate dialectric in the DDR transistors is probably only about 2 or 3 molecules thick now and 'wears out' overtime ( relatively speaking a long time).

Not sure what you mean by price transparency at least across the counter as a consumer. Maybe in an expensive audio system but I suspect there will be a price hike or a reduced storage capacity effect in PCs. The benefit of having your operating system and programs in fast access SSD will be an attractive compensation though, I guess.

quote:

Originally posted by Geoff P:
The benefit of having your operating system and programs in fast access SSD will be an attractive compensation though, I guess.

It is on my MacBook Pro - well worth the (self-installed) cost for an MLC drive.

quote:

Originally posted by David Dever:

quote:

Originally posted by Geoff P:
The benefit of having your operating system and programs in fast access SSD will be an attractive compensation though, I guess.

It is on my MacBook Pro - well worth the (self-installed) cost for an MLC drive.

I just changed the HDD in my old MacBook to a newest generation OCZ Vertex 2 SSD with the Sandiforce driver and firmware. It has an extremely fast writing speed, 275 MB/s and a bit higher reading speed, 285 MB/s. With 4 GB RAM, the SSDd old MacBook feels faster and more responsive than my son's new standard 13 inch MacBook Pro in the all of the daily activities, which is quite surprising. And even more surprising that it sounds way better than it sounded earlier with 2 GB RAM and standard HDD through HIFace EVO and Naim DAC.

I always find it surprising that upgrades in a computing sense always equates to upgrades in an audio sense.

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
I always find it surprising that upgrades in a computing sense always equates to upgrades in an audio sense.

As do I. A modern computer can already do red-book and HD audio in its sleep. Why more read/write speed, higher bandwidth, lower latency or faster processing power make any difference at all is a mystery to me.

I can max out my Mac Mini doing video conversion and it makes no discernable difference to the quality of the music playback that is going on in the "background". Maybe its just me...