Wow! These things are pricey, but I'd love to have a stack of them for my HTPC --> http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2013240636%201421541071&name=SATA%20II

They seem to perform well, also --> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_ssd_performance&num=1

Yes, I am so rich that I throw them into the fireplace to heat my 60,000 square foot home. Nothing makes me happier than burning transitional technology that is overly expensive and of marginal technical superiority!

I see zero reason to bother as of today (at home) since they seem to get better by the week. There's two different memory chip technologies in play for the mostpart but the actual interface and firmware seem to be the secret sauce. Now for sheer random transactional IO, these things rock. I'm having tons of fun at work with small IO...Right now I need better array controllers to handle the SSDs! The common high end enterprise array controllers are smart...well would be smart if it was still 1998 and just don't seem so smart no-more in this day of cheaptech.

On another note, for HTPC use, iops (regardless of one's actual definition of iops) isn't really an issue at all for HTPCs. Everything is sequential reads or writes. Sequential IO is easy. The silence side of things is good with SSDs but at the same time, there really are quiet platter based HDs. Other gains have been shown to be marginal in terms of boot time or level load in games and whatnot.

A year from now, I think these SSD drives will make sense in terms of price, capacity and performance for the home user. Until the OS, interface and firmware get wise to SSDs and is hashed out though, they have a limit to their real value outside of specialized IO profiles.

-Trouble

I agree that at this point, SSD's make zero sense for consumer use.

You're much better off using notebook SATA hard drives if you want low power/small size/low heat/no noise.

...we did serve caviar on top of SSD's during the holiday's, though ;)

...with old, worn $100 bills used for napkins :D

You guys crack me up! :D

I can see using a small one to boot/run the OS on a frontend (much better performance than a usb drive or sd card) if all of the good stuff is on the backend server; but, honestly, I'd set it up diskless if that were the case.

If you were setting up a standalone, however, and had more money than God, and silence was an issue, then this would certainly be the way to go. It would be possible to build a box whose only moving parts would be in the optical drive.

I have started using CF cards and some low cost SSD's for specific tasks where it already makes sense:

- I have a Popcorn Hour with a 4 GB Transcend Industrial (SLC) CF card to allow me to personalise the GUI of the PCH and install my own additional programs onto it without having to put an actual HDD into it (all actual media is on a Linux NFS server not on the PCH).

- I have a small passively cooled VIA C3 based Linux server used as home DSL gateway/firewall and other purposes running off a 8 GB Transcend Industrial (SLC) CF card.
It's in the living room so I wanted it completely silent and also as the PC is passively cooled a HDD in it would get quite hot and itself add further heat.

- I have a Empeg (Linux based car/living-room MP3 player) where I have put a 64GB IDE MLC Transcend SSD into it, to avoid noise/heat/vibration issues. I decided to take the plunge with this one as the 64GB Transcend SSD is more than big enough for all my MP3s and didn't cost much (approx. $150)

- My wife's HP 2130 netbook which came with a 120GB HDD is now using a 8GB Transcend SATA SLC SSD (running Mandriva Linux), which is more than enough space for the use she makes of it and has made it run cooler and more robust (no worries about head crashes anymore).

As you can see I currently favour Transcend, they seem to make good quality CF/SSDs at very competitive prices.

P.S: and I'm certainly not rich, that's why I use Transcend, not Intel SSDs! ;)

I don't see where an SSD or the more expensive high speed/industrial grade CF cards are any advantage over a recent vintage SATA/IDE 4200rpm or 5400rpm notebook hard disk. There is no heat or noise issue with recent vintage good quality 2.5" hard drives, they are low cost, and power probably isn't an issue in most cases.

There is no heat or noise issue with recent vintage good quality 2.5" hard drives, they are low cost, and power probably isn't an issue in most cases.

I guess it depends on your ear's sensitivity, I can clearly hear any 2.5" hdd spin up from at least 2 metres distance.
The Popcorn Hour is located less than 50cm from my head when I'm sitting on the sofa.

But in any case I mostly decided for SSD/CFs where I did, for heat and robustness issues (try running a 2.5" hdd in the dashboard of your car, in the heat of the summer, after the car has been parked for a few hours under the midday sun... it won't have a long life that's for sure!

Also the HP 2130 netbook cpu/chipset get's quite hot, the additional heat of the hdd is quite noticeable, while the SSD has reduced the average cpu temperature noticeably (and the side effect of faster application startup times is nice too!).

I don't see where an SSD or the more expensive high speed/industrial grade CF cards are any advantage over a recent vintage SATA/IDE 4200rpm or 5400rpm notebook hard disk. There is no heat or noise issue with recent vintage good quality 2.5" hard drives, they are low cost, and power probably isn't an issue in most cases.

No moving parts = no head crash. :)

Or frozen bearings.

My bedroom Myth frontend box boots from an 8GB USB stick and has all media come in over gigabit ethernet. Does that count? :)

So I have what amounts to a $20 SSD I suppose. Mythbuntu 8.10 installed on it without any trouble at all.

^^^Just out of curiosity, did you leave it as FAT32 or reformat it?

I put my laptop drive in a silencer (http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/harddrivesolutions/quietdrive). This was a much better cost option for me vs a SS drive.

I put my laptop drive in a silencer (http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/harddrivesolutions/quietdrive). This was a much better cost option for me vs a SS drive.

I've used a couple of similar products for a few of my hard drives. They work pretty well. I used to get some vibrational noise, but now they are pretty silent to me.

I can get 80GB Intel SSDs for $300 through my work. Been wanting to (try to) put one in my ps3, and possible my linux box.

I don't see where an SSD or the more expensive high speed/industrial grade CF cards are any advantage over a recent vintage SATA/IDE 4200rpm or 5400rpm notebook hard disk. There is no heat or noise issue with recent vintage good quality 2.5" hard drives, they are low cost, and power probably isn't an issue in most cases.

With cost being put aside for the moment, I was in the same camp as you until one of my guys brought in my office two identical Dell D630's, both freshly imaged. One with a 130ish 5400 SATA platter and the other with a 128 GB ssd.

the difference was truly shocking from post flash to login was maaaaybe 10 seconds, on the sata was you're typical 40+ seconds. Bring up Word was also insane, wasn't really worth counting on the SSD.

I'm currently researching what I can do to put SSD in my new HTPC / Media Server. I'm just getting into it but it looks promising

I am not rich, but my husband in the tech field...http://z09a0222gshv273.imageshacknow.info/img/3044************************

We have 3x256GB solid state drivers in a RAID5 on our HTPC in our bedroom.

All I can say is it really cut down on noise...but the speed difference is not really noticeable for what we are doing.

I think a fascinating thing to note is that this discussion began in january and here we are 2 or so months later and the advancements in SSDs has been amazing. Both in speed, size and price, thing have changed drastically in just that short time!

We've been working with FusioIO devices (not quite SSD's as we're talking here I guess, but same idea) and they're pretty amazing...Though insanely expensive. They have a new 1.28TB card coming out. Over 1GB/s reads and writes...I'd imagine you're looking at 30-50K$ for the big one. mmmm good stuff!

-Trouble

Our next generation of toughbooks are going to have 32G cards in them instead of the traditional hard drives. It makes sense as there are less moving parts in a diesal utility vehicle. Hopefully less work for me as they are a pain in the butt to image.

I find it interesting that most SSDs are using SATA. SATA will soon be too slow, and as SATA was optimized for rotating media, it is not a good match for solid state media.
Since there is no head seek time and no rotational latency, native command queuing is a waste of hardware, and is more likely to slow down a SSD than speed it up.

What does make sense is that some SSD manufacturers are making their storage devices (seem absurd to call them "drives" any more), as PCI Express cards. This gets rid of one bus translation (as the SATA is usually sitting on the PCI express bus anyway), and allows for much higher transfer speeds.

I've been using 8 GB CF cards (Transcend 300X SLC chips) in my notebooks at home. The faster one is a 1.5 Pentium M (Dell D600). I use a 2.5" PATA -> CF adapter (from EBay). I do get UDMA, but UDMA4 (not UDMA5) (my understanding is that the CF card gets UDMA5 only if the adapter steps down voltage to 3.3V).

Power on to (GNOME) login is approx 30 s. I've been using this for 8-9 months. The hard disk area gets warm, the wi-fi card area is now the hot-spot in the laptop. A huge difference from the 5400 rpm disk in there before. The notebook is silent, no annoying spin-up spin-down, worrying about the power management spinning the HDD up and down to death.

The other "mod" I did is to move Firefox's profile directory to memory (/dev/shm). In the GNOME login/out scripts, I copy that directory back to/from the home directory. Of course, when the machine is hibernating, the login/out scripts don't get called, but the directory is preserved in the hibernate image. Note that this moves the Cache directory to memory too. Also, of course, I have no swap, so I live in 1.5 GB memory. I did have 2 GB at one point, but it just made the memory card area hotter.

hey Nexus, sounds like you got it nailed - can you post more some more info on sending your transient data (Firefox etc)? It may not be so obvious to the majority ;)


-Trouble

hey Nexus, sounds like you got it nailed - can you post more some more info on sending your transient data (Firefox etc)? It may not be so obvious to the majority ;)
-Trouble

I did this many months ago, so some of this might need to be slightly different. (In the following, substitute your user name for <username>).

1. Create a new Firefox profile
firefox -ProfileManager
You can specify the path to the new profile in the wizard. I think you may have to create the path to it, that is, if you want it to be:
/dev/shm/<username>/FF_profile
you may have to
mkdir /dev/shm/<username>

In order to keep my bookmarks, IIRC, I simply copied my existing profile to this location, but my memory is hazy on this. So,
cp -a ~/.mozille/firefox/<profile_name> /dev/shm/<username>/FF_profile

<profile_name> is usually some random string, like ar4yn6yz.default.

After all this, the file ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini should contain the new profile's name and location, and /dev/shm/<username>/FF_profile should contain the databases for bookmarks, history, etc.

Now, the login/out files.
.gdmlogin
---------
mkdir -p /dev/shm/<username>
cp -af /home/<username>/FF_profile /dev/shm/<username>/.
chmod 700 /dev/shm/<username>/FF_profile

.gdmlogout
-----------
rm -rf /home/<username>/FF_profile
cp -af /dev/shm/<username>/FF_profile /home/<username>/.

Test it a few times.

I have a newly built HTPC with standard hard drive, but I'd like it to be less noisy. So what cheap SSD would you suggest that works well with linux?

Good thorough article on the current state of SSD's. This was covered in Slashdot yesterday also if anyone wants to do some further research. Long, but worth the read if this interests you in the least.

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531

Cool info, Nexus7, thanks.

-Trouble

I have a newly built HTPC with standard hard drive, but I'd like it to be less noisy. So what cheap SSD would you suggest that works well with linux?

the Transcend ones, are cheap and reliable (but not as fast as others, you get what you pay for), I have a few of those (see my post earlier in this thread), but whatever brand you get make sure it's a SLC (single layer cell) one, not a MLC (multi layer cell), if you are going to use it as OS disk!