Conclusion
These days, SSDs are becoming a norm in PC systems, especially in notebooks. Although it has find it’s place in portable devices, desktop users especially multimedia users especially movie downloaders still require high capacity reliable storage medium. SSDs are still being used as OS drives.
When capacity is concerned, SSDs are still behind traditional Hard Drives. So far, we have heard of an OCZ 1TB SSD on sale at USD 2500. 2TB SSD were also on display at trade shows. Seriously, you do no need to fork out USD 1000 for a 1TB drive. We last check on Amazon.com fo the price of WD4001FAEX , it is priced at USD 325.00. The VelociRaptor 1TB is priced at USD 219.00.
The VelociRaptor 1TB is only a fraction of the price of the SSD. In fact, SSDs are fast, but they are too costly. If we were to do a RAID 0 of the VeloriRaptor, we should be getting speeds that are close to a single SSD. Just a thought – even if you have 2 SSDs that can do 400MB/s, even in RAID, you will still be limited by the SATA 6Gbps bottleneck.
So, our conclusion is that high capacity HDDs are here to stay. Western Digital (WD) has delivered two high capacity and performance drives which you could maximise your desktop performance. Although SSD is a viable option, the price/performance ratio for capacity of 1TB and above isn’t reliastic right now. SSD should stay as the OS drive and leave the heavy duty read and write to the traditional and reliable Hard Drives.
Buy from Amazon.com
We give both drives our Editor’s Choice Award (WD Black 4TB) and Gold Award (WD VelociRaptor 1TB)
I recently upgraded my old poor PC with a 500G Western Digital WD5000AAKB drive (old PATA, 7200 RPM, 16MB cache) and it is quiet and fast, albeit secondhand drive. So looks like that for high capacity AND time reliability the classic HDDs are here to stay.
On the second hand, I did not managed to get my SSD working using PATA/SATA converter in another old lazy Dell PC (Dell OptiPlex GX110, 1GHz PIII, 512MB SDRAM, integrated Intel 810 graphic with 4MB own videoram). It works only in Windows, delaying the PC start by like 2-3min and refusing to boot from it.
So, SSD is not w/o a own set problems, and we did not need to get back to the reliability. The new SSD seems to be even less reliable (smaller size = less duration = useless to buy a expensive drive that die so soon…).
One of my friend who operates a datacentre
dare not even use SSD as they’re unreliable.
This is very poor for a technical article. While the premise that spinning hard drives give more capacity for your money is sound, the article is otherwise full of innacuracies and misunderstandings. For example, the comparison based on serial transfer rate is totally misguided. One of the biggest benefits of SSDs is their random access performance which completely decimates spinning disks and is why SSDs are just as appropriate for a desktop machine as a boot drive because the OS primarily does (a lot of) random reads and writes.
And starting the article with an anecdote about the author’s personal experience with a single SSD as evidence of a general problem. There are huge differences in quality between the brands and I can guess which brand they had since there’s one I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Clearly the author or burned by a bad SSD and that’s a good reason to steer clear of the cheaper brands unless you have a good backup solution…