All Solid State

a nameless entity · Post by **a nameless entity** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 11:46 pm

"All Solid State" -Remember when that was a big selling point for TV's and stereo's?

About 18 months ago I asked my brother to look on one of his favourite online PC sales sites for a computer for me that would cost about as much as I could afford to spend at the time. He gave me a link to one that was pretty nice. It had liquid cooling amoungst its many fine features, and the whole PC was less than half of what I spent on this old rig.

One of the features was an all solid state drive to go along with the RAID hard drive which was the main drive. It was fairly expensive. Of course these drives are now bigger and cheaper than ever. I foresee the day when there won't be any hard drives with moving parts in them any more. I don't think it's all that far away. I'm also willing to bet that RAM in its present configuration will be a thing of the past. Instead you'll get a set of slots that you can plug your USB sticks into. Need more RAM? No problem just plug in another USB stick, or swap over to one of the new bigger ones just out.

This naturally, is assuming that PC's are still going to be around, and not all be replaced by smart phones and pads.

Comments?

Post by **Hermskii** » Tue Jun 18, 2013 7:37 am

They will stay around and you are right. HDDs will be totally replaced and ram will too actually. I suspect you'll be able to add to the size of your computers memory whether it be ram or a HDD by adding sticks or jump drives to an array of some sort.

Pie · Post by **Pie** » Tue Jun 18, 2013 3:57 pm

I agree with both of you, and it's no surprise to me. I mean, it IS pretty amazing to see how far we've come from 10 or 20 years ago, but doesn't surprise me.

But for every thing we get used to, they come out with something newer and faster to replace it with that'll cost just as much as the SSDs once did.

Technology is an ever-evolving thing, and I LOVE it!

EvilGrins · Post by **EvilGrins** » Tue Jun 18, 2013 4:22 pm

PC = Personal Computer... or even Portable Computer.

They've adapted!

Hook · Post by **Hook** » Wed Jun 19, 2013 7:26 pm

I remember just how Special a "10 Transistor" radio was!!!

My sister had one.
A GE - General Electric
Most had only 6 or 7 transistors.

I also remember getting my 1st transistor radio (it had 6)
I won it in a dance contest.
It had a funny name "Panasonic" - never heard of it!
And a funny logo of 4 lightening bolts coming from a circle with the name in it.
I still have it, and it works great.
I use it when the power goes out.
It is about 50 years old or so.

Oh, and yes, it is All Solid State!

a nameless entity · Post by **a nameless entity** » Wed Jun 19, 2013 8:58 pm

Hook wrote:I remember just how Special a "10 Transistor" radio was!!!
My sister had one.
A GE - General Electric
Most had only 6 or 7 transistors.

I also remember getting my 1st transistor radio (it had 6)
I won it in a dance contest.
It had a funny name "Panasonic" - never heard of it!
And a funny logo of 4 lightening bolts coming from a circle with the name in it.
I still have it, and it works great.
I use it when the power goes out.
It is about 50 years old or so.

Oh, and yes, it is All Solid State!

Oh my Hook, you've dug up some really old memories for me.

When I was 13 transistor radios were the walkman / ipods of their day. And the more transistors your radio had, the "cooler" it was. 6 transistors was the bare minimum for coolness. You'd also have difficulty pulling in more than very local signals with less than 6 transistors. For my 13th birthday I got one with 8 transistors in it.

But the following summer some kid had one with 10.

Mine wasn't a Panasonic. Perhaps that's why it died after only a few years. It's long gone.

But I still have a Japanese made multiband table radio that my parents gave me for my 19th birthday. It's been outside in the "garden room" for the last 29 years. It's a bit wonky and takes coaxing to work properly sometimes, but considering that it has been baked and frozen, covered with snow that sometimes blows in during the winter, it does just fine. And the sound coming out of it is as good as ever.
I wish I could say that I've still got that Honda Civic I bought when I was 23!

a nameless entity · Post by **a nameless entity** » Fri Jun 28, 2013 4:59 pm

Getting back on topic here a bit, I should say that I am tempted to wait until I start seeing "All Solid State" type PC's for sale before I replace this old beast. I wonder how far off they are? The thought of never having to worry about when or if the hard drive might fail is rather awesome, if I say so myself.

Dr.Flay · Post by **Dr.Flay** » Mon Jul 08, 2013 10:31 pm

Bare in mind (especially if you want to add RAM via USB).

USB is not a great way to use permanent sustained data transfers.
USB is always slower than internal buses (and probably always will be).
USB has a tendency to reset all other USB devices if you add or remove a device, during heavy load (eg. ripping/converting a DVD).
This causes your drives to remount, which is a real pain if you were in the middle of writing a big file.

Even though serious speeds are possible with USB3, the quoted speeds are always in "bits" not "bytes" so it seems faster.
The test setups will be in "ideal conditions" doing just 1 task. Never in a "real-world" setup.
I have never managed any where near the theoretical 35MB per second over USB2.
Drive benchmarking was the closest I got.

The brand/quality of USB chip on the MoBo will also make a difference, so making sure the chipset drivers are not a bottleneck is important.

There are "High-power" and "low-power" versions, this will effect how much you can actually plug in (More of an issue on mini PCs and laptops).

USB3 = 4-5 Gbit/s
SATA 3.2 = 8-16 Gbit/s (including special support for micro SSD)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb#USB_3 ... r_Speed.29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_AT ... TA_Express

Formatting SSD drives with NTFS is not good, as the extra reading and writing can kill your drive quicker.
ExFAT is designed as an alternative for NTFS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

a nameless entity · Post by **a nameless entity** » Mon May 19, 2014 9:00 pm

Well you've got to think that it won't be much longer until IDE, SATA and all the rest of those moving part hard drives will be a quickly forgotten thing of the past, when even Best Buy carries solid state drives.

Look at the sizes you get for way less money than you paid for the old technology just a decade or so ago!

http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/category/so ... 30442.aspx

How do I get one of those into this 11.5 year old Dell 8200?

Dr.Flay · Post by **Dr.Flay** » Mon May 19, 2014 10:56 pm

Easy, just get a cheap PCI SATA card.

I have to say though, after using SSD since November, I will happily buy a mechanical drive again.
Hard drive speeds have never been the bottle-neck in Windows.
Windows is the weak-link, and it takes longer to open notepad on my 64bit 4-core Win7 PC with SSD, than on my single-core 32bit XP with normal HDs.

My new PC may look good in all the benchmarks and has a "Windows Experience Index" of 6.7, but when it comes to real world use, it doesn't mean much.

I now have a smaller drive than I would of, that will die earlier than the alternative.
Defragging traditional drives, extends their lives due to spreading the wear of the tracks.
This still holds true on SSDs, as I have examined the drive usage, and can see excessive use of areas of it, with some getting near to the end of their life expectancy.
Windows and NTFS is a curse for SSDs

exFAT may be better in the future, but until Windows can boot to it we can only use it for other partitions.

House of Hermskii {HOH}

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