Is a Solid State Drive in your future?

Posted 07/25/2007 at 5:21pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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There’s also some concern about the drive wearing out. You may not know it but flash memory has a limited amount of times that you can write to it. With my old Omnibook 300, I had to occasionally run wear leveling software to ensure that there weren’t premature dead cells occurring. Those dead cells would stop responding to write commands. While you could read from them forever, the cells would essentially turn into read only memory. That still occurs on flash memory today but the algorithms to minimize it and the cycles has increased so much that it really isn’t a factor. In the MTron’s case, the company claims a write endurance of greater than 140 years with you writing or erasing 50GB per day. If true, that means the notebook will long be in the scrap pile before you ever wear out any cells.
Still, at 16GB, the MTron has pretty limited applications. If you are particularly rugged on your notebook the MTron certainly is the go to drive. If you also have a special needs application that sings on low latency or drive access, the MTron is also particularly attractive. However, I’d have a hard time swapping the 5,400rpm 160GB Seagate drive in my notebook today to squeeze into 16GB. I just can’t put myself on that kind of data diet even for the incredible performance.

The Western Digital impressed me as WD is a fairly new player in notebook hard drives. For it to leap ahead of Seagate (largest drive is 160GB), Fujitsu (largest shipping drive is 200GB) and Toshiba (largest drive is 200GB) is surprising. The Scorpio does very good in the benchmarks considering its 5,400 spindle speed but that’s due to the areal density of the unit. It packs 250GB on two platters with four heads. That’s 125GB per platter. The Seagate also uses two platters but only hits 160GB or 80GB per platter. That makes the Scorpio attractive for those willing to give up performance for capacity.

That still leaves the Seagate 160GB as the reigning performance champ of notebook hard drives though (note we said hard drives not SSD’s). In the synthetic tests, the Scorpio lags by just 5 to 7 percent but in PC Mark 2005’s test, the numbers get a bit uglier. The Barracuda comes up with numbers generally 30 percent faster than the Scorpio when traces of real programs are applied to the platters. Our Photoshop CS 2 test, however found a very slight difference between the two and boot and hibernate times were similar.

If forced to choose between the 7,200rpm Barracuda or the 250GB Scorpio, I’d almost go with the Scorpio for the storage. One thing does give the new Barracuda an advantage over the Scorpio though. It features an internal G-force sensor – an accelerometer – that can sense a drop and parks the head to hopefully reduce the chance of data loss. Even there the MTron has the final word. For one test, we ran HD Tach while we repeatedly dropped the drive on the table from a height of three inches and rattled it on a hard surface from different angles. At worst, that’s a death sentence for any hard drive, and at the least, it’s a major performance lag as the internal accelerometer would halt read/writes during the impact. The Mtron, of course, just shrugged it off. I think even a paint shaker wouldn’t phase the unit.

Bold denotes winner.

* We could not physically install the WD Raptor in our notebook PC so we did not run these benchmarks.