I am one of those wackos that likes being in the same room as my family. When I decide to write an article for a blog or surf the net, I have to isolate myself in my den. I finally decided to stop being cheap and buy myself a laptop.

I went to the Dell site and put together a laptop. This was going to be a desktop replacement so one of my my criteria was that the laptop should handle some of my games. I ended up putting together an Inspiron E1705. I upgraded the processor to the 2Ghz Intel dual core, the memory to the max of 2 Gigs of RAM and the video card to the 256 meg video card. I also made the unfortunate decision of putting Windows Vista on the laptop.

When the laptop arrived I was pretty excited about it’s speed, 2 GHZ with 2 Gigs of RAM, it should have be a pretty fast machine. Unfortunately it’s not. It’s actually quite a pig. Part of the problem is Vista which I already talked about here and here. Part of the problem was Symantec which I will discuss in another post.

At the root of all my problems was the hard drive. One of those oft overlooked items. They are big and cheap these days so usually I don’t think about them. I should have. Apparently, Dell decided that a 5200 RPM drive was a good idea for a laptop.

I can’t really blame Dell, I should have looked closer and upgraded the hard drive at the outset. I just assumed everyone was using 7200+ RPM drives these days. It turns out that was not the case, for heat and power reasons vendors tend to use slower drives in laptops. Heck of a $4,000 lesson for me.

Between Vista constantly chomping at the hard drive because it needs more ram and Symantec spinning around looking for viruses, this thing crawls. Boot up time for the laptop is around 4-5 minutes. It’s actually quite frustrating, I turn on the laptop and go get some coffee or something. Maybe when I get back Symantec will decide it’s my turn and let me use my machine.

So, needless to say I have been looking at upgrading my hard drive. I don’t care much about battery power, I always run plugged in. I just care about mobility and performance. Up on the Dell site, I ran across these… Amazing, 64GB SATA solid state hard drives (SSD). How did I miss these coming out?

A quick education here, current hard drives are lot like old vinyl albums, a platter spins around and a head comes down to read it. There are generally multiple platters in the hard drive with multiple heads. So if you want something off of platter 4 the drive has to spin up and place the head in the right place to read the data. The process is pretty slow, relatively speaking. RAM (your computer’s memory) on the other hand has no moving parts. If you want to read the data at position 1000 you go there and read it. No spinning platters and no heads going up and down.

I did some quick research and it looks like the Dell hard drive is made by Samsung. You can buy them retail for between $700-$1,900. The wide price range says a lot about the availability of these drives (very low).

The speed looks amazing but not incredible. It can transfer something around 100 Megabytes a second. By way of comparison, a 10,000 RPM Cheetah runs in the 78 Megabytes a second range and my lowly laptop drive has a sustained transfer of 44 megabytes per second. On top of the speed question, the power consumption and heat generation of these drives is much lower than traditional drives. Basically there are no moving parts so it takes considerably less power.

I was not sure why the SSD was not able maintain a 300 MBS transfer rate, it seems that it should be able to max the SATA transfer rate out and keep it that way. So I brought this drive up to my brother (he is an electrical engineer) over the weekend and told me about the dark side of solid state drives.

Under the cover, solid state drives use NAND Flash Memory. Seeing my blank stare, my brother explained it for me in simple terms. They wear out. Each bit on a NAND drive can only be rewritten between 1-5 million times, then it dies. While this may sound like a lot, it’s not. Watch your hard drive light some time. It runs a lot when your not looking. The windows page-file is constantly rewritten. He told me that there were people that tried to put their swap files onto small SSDs and wore the device out in under 24 hours. SSDs not really designed for that kind of work so they burn out in 250,000 - 1 million writes.

There is a technology that helps to mitigate this problem, it’s called wear leveling and it does help considerably, although opinions differ. According to some sites, write endurance is a non-issue, according to others it really limits what you should use these drives for. The real key is how much of the drive you are using. If you have a 2 gig drive filled to capacity and rewrite it many times then you hit failure very quickly. If you have a 32 gig drive with 2 gigs of data that you rewrite a lot you it will take much longer to hit failure.

In my final analysis, I would love to plug one of these into my laptop and test it out. I bet my waiting on the laptop days would be over. I don’t think that I would have a problem with write endurance. But at a grand apiece, I think I will wait a little longer before risking this. I have dreams of a database server running on an SSD array. Talk about lighting fast, that would be awesome.