SSDs or Solid State Drives are faster and more expensive – is there room for one in your life?

Intel SSD

With story from ComputerWorld

People want quieter computers. Sitting next to 45 dBA of computer noise all day gets on one’s nerves. An office with 100’s of noisy printers and computers wears people down. Some people want quiet computers to run a video or home theatre system.

I want a quiet computer to use for music recording where every little noise in the room can ruin a good take. Hard drives are the enemy of a quiet life. They make noise and generate heat that force noisy fans to rotate.

Unlike the usual hard drive HDD in most computers, an SSD has no moving parts. It is just silicon memory that emulates how a hard drive works. They are faster and much more expensive and usually found in high end laptops.

Where they work best is when you need low power consumption, extremely fast drive read and write times, smaller size and quiet.

Reducing drive noise

It’s the speed and no noise that have me looking at them. I need an ultra quiet computer for the recording studio. Condenser microphones pick up the smallest sounds when the music stops for a second. HDD have all kinds of whirring and clicking noises as the rotors turn and the heads seek data. SilentPCReview has a good series of articles on the various hard drives and the funny noises they make.

Velociraptor idle in frame: Note multiple tonal peaks centered at 700Hz, 1.5~2.2kHz, and 7kHz. These are all plainly audible from a few feet away. click for larger size

Most HDD will generate 20 – 25 dBA of noise at idle. Ambient room noise is between 15 and 20 dBA which stands for A-weighted decibels.

Decibels are a logarithmic or non-linear measure of sound pressure. You know the warning – 115 dBA rock concerts will ruin your hearing. 1 dBA is the smallest measure of sound pressure difference our ears can hear. In a quiet setting, you should be able to tell the difference between 25 dBA and 26dBA.

SilentPCReview recommends, among others, the WD VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS which generates between 22 dBA and 28 dBA of noise. That’s pretty quiet but it will be picked up by a good microphone from 2 meters, especially if the microphones are placed near field to pick up ambient sound in the room. The noise also peaks at certain frequencies which can get accentuated in the recording process. The noise level can be reduced by ditching Western Digital’s ice pack and installing the drive in a rubber band suspension.

SSDs are noiseless so they beat any hard drive hands down.

Keeping the heat out

The HDD will also generate heat the turns on fans that make noise. Case fans generate 15 dBA to 40 dBA of noise.

SSDs generate less heat and takes up less space which are all pluses.

Some SSDs have suffered from bad software and early failure. The crème de la crème of SSDs is the Intel X-25. Faster and more reliable than any of the less expensive brands, it will set you back US $320 for 80 GB up to $500 Canadian. That’s expensive when 500 GB of HDD costs about $100.

SSDs Reviewed

ComputerWorld reviewed some of the lower priced SSDs and came away impressed.

ATTO's benchmarking software test results for the OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD. Test on a 500 GB Seagate Momentus drive never got above 100 MB per sec transfer rate. click for larger image

They tested a 120 GB OCZ Vertex Series SATA II 2.5″ SSD which retails $400 US or $520 Canadian.

Data transfer rates were between 160 MB and 250 MB per second, leaving the Seagate HDD in the dust at less than 100 MB per second.

Even more impressive were the random access times “The HDTach software also measures CPU utilization and random access times. OCZ’s drive had a random access time of .2 milliseconds; Seagate’s 16.9 milliseconds. ComputerWorld”

Of course, actual performance depends on many factors. What bus is the SSD sharing, USB, SATA or eSATA? Is the operating system optimized for SSDs? Is you major work large file transfers or small random file I/O.

I will have to serious consider trying an SSD for recording. Speed and noise levels are big issues. Whether or not it helps remains to be seen.

The ComputerWorld authors conclusions apply to most situations.

“While the SSD outperformed the HDD in most benchmarking tests, as well as handily beating out the competition for boot-ups, whether or not as a consumer you should choose an SSD over a HDD will depend on your needs. HDDs, especially those with 7,200-rpm spindle speeds or higher, offer respectable read/write rates and vastly higher capacity levels.”

“Typical notebook or desktop users probably won’t notice a big difference between an SSD drive and a traditional hard disk drive other than a faster boot-up and quicker application-launch times.”

“According to Jim Handy, who co-authored a report about digital storage in consumer electronics, SSD will continue to dominate in small handheld devices because the cost to produce flash memory-based drives is significantly cheaper than hard disk drives. So in some cases, SSDs make sense for products such as MP3 players that can store large numbers of compressed music files on drives with relatively small capacities.”

“You can buy a $50 HDD with 120GB of storage. A 120GB SSD will set you back around $250-plus. You can buy $30 worth of flash, though — as long as 16GB is enough for your needs,” said Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis Inc. “That way you can pocket the other $20.”

“But for laptops and desktops, where consumers will continue to seek as much capacity as money can buy, Handy said SSD adoption will likely suffer for years to come.”

“The final word: For most users, this a good time to consider buying a higher-end HDD that should deliver more-than-enough performance — and plenty of room to grow — while you wait for SSD prices to drop further.”