I've spent more time reading about solid state drives than I ought to. I read another long review about how this engineer tests the various brands to get the numbers on their performance. He seemed really frustrated. I didn't have to guess that. He wrote it several times himself. The real problem for him, as he seemed to explain it, was the big difference the hardware controllers the contemporary SSDs use. The old default hardware controller that most of the cheaper SSDs use today is much slower, but that is the only real difference in any of the SSDs made by any manufacturer.
I didn't learn much today by reading that long, technical article that I didn't already know from reading other long, technical articles. The flash memory manufacturers who have been around for a while are starting to come out with their own consumer renditions of SSDs with speedy new controllers that really up the ante for the small foundries. Intel/Micron, San Disk, and Samsung, etal., have recently introduced consumer and enterprise level SSDs that have garnered rave reviews for their speed and low usage of power.
When Intel gets into some product line, it's my impression that they have worked out all the kinks, and already figured it's gonna dominate the market or they're not interested. The SSDs they have recently offered to the retail marketers like newegg.com appear to be the cream of the current crop. They want a bunch of money for their new gadget. That's gonna change. It already has. The cheapest Intel SSD they had for sell on newegg a month ago was $600. I just checked it again this morning, and the price was $400. That's a lot more reasonable. Since they use the same SATA cable arrangements as the traditional SATA hard drive, they can be moved to another computer simply.
San Disk just came out with new SSDs that are faster even than Intel's SSDs, and according to what I'm reading online, they're considerably cheaper. I haven't run into much more information on them, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled. The race is on to get a lead share of this new storage device established, and the price is coming down. Computing is gonna get a lot faster in the year to come.
The big deal about SSDs is speed and low power usage. Traditional hard drives magnetically put the information on spinning platters. Moving parts that wear out. Moving parts that use a considerable amount of electricity to keep rotating. Both the spinning and the electricity it uses produces heat inside the computer case. The SSDs do that too, but at maybe an order of magnitude less.
This is the biggest problem laptops and small computers like my Mac Mini have. Traditional hard drives drain the batteries of the laptops more than any other feature, and they are usually the first part of any computer to fail. The SSDs don't have any moving parts and use a minimal of electricity to do what they do, and last a lot longer.
What I wanna do is put an Intel SSD in my Mac Mini. True they last a long longer and they're more reliable in some ways, but the big deal for me would be speed. The cheapest Intel SSD (now $400) would operate in my Mac Mini faster than the fastest rotating hard drive at any price on the market, and I can't put a fast hard drive in my Mac Mini anyway. The power supply isn't powerful enough, and it would get too hot inside that small case.
The Mac Mini uses a laptop hard drive that's very slow. The biggest bottleneck on the computer except for the onboard Intel graphics system is the slow response time of the hard drive. Much of the graphics slowness is due to the slow hard drive. I'd be killing two birds with one stone.
Solid state electronics came along after I studied electronic in the Navy. I studied and learned about vacuum tube circuits. The arrival of solid state transistors had a huge impact on the technical world, and particularly me. I knew just enough about how the technical world was changing into digital components to share the excitement in some small way. The consumer world was bombarded with how reliable they were compared to tubes, and no better example of that that the Sony Walkman portable radios no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Those were some pretty amazing pre-iPod times.
The traditional 5400 rpm laptop hard drive is practically the only analog part on my little computer. It's the only part of any computer that wears out because of it's moving parts. I really believe if I replace the hard drive in my Mac Mini that it will last much longer than I do, and it will continue to be all the computer I need unless I get antsy. The entire electronic make-up of it would be solid state and practically indestructible with reasonable treatment.
I'm looking forward the the next Apple OS called Snow Leopard. It's gonna be totally 64-bit throughout, including all the system drivers. It'll probably be out before summer, and if I got any money by then I'll probably buy a new computer to go with the OS so there won't be any hardware conflicts. I'm definitely interested in waiting to buy another computer until USB3 is default outta the box. That's gonna change everything, including how SSDs are connected externally.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
