Posts Tagged ‘OCZ Agility’

Unless you’ve been living in a cave the last couple years, you’d know that flash memory is in. For the less nerdy amongst us, flash memory is the stuff that you build camera memory cards and USB thumb drives with. Everything from videocams to iPods now use flash memory to store pictures, movies, and music on.

A few weeks back I took the plunge and picked up a solid state disk (SSD): a hard drive made entirely out of flash memory. Think of SSDs like 50 thumb drives glued together in a RAID configuration. SSDs have been on the market a couple years now, but they have really matured in the last year.

To really understand why SSDs are cool, you’ve got to understand why hard drives aren’t cool. Picture a little tiny record player (remember those) spinning around in your laptop. Every time you need a file, the needle on the record player has to get to the right groove on the disk and then let the record spin around long enough to read what you want. Spinning the “record” and moving the “needle” takes power and is really slow compared to the rest of your computer’s components. SSDs do away with all of that: if you need some data, the SSD’s controller chip reads it from flash memory and hands it to you. No mechanical motors to suck power, no variable lag depending on how far away data is on the disk. It’s magical (and expensive, but more on that later).

I’d been reading Anandtech‘s in-depth analysis of SSDs for awhile now and watching for the technology to mature. Lots of companies make SSDs, but the only ones worth buying use Intel or Indlinx controllers. Go read Anandtech’s SSD article series for the long version, but basically all other SSD controllers are garbage.

At PAX I won a Patriot Memory SSD which uses on a jMicron controller. It was notoriously bad so I sold it and picked up a 60 GB OCZ Agility SSD based on the Indlinx controller. It was on sale, but it was still significantly more expensive than a traditional hard drive. I plopped it into my gaming PC with Windows 7 as my primary boot and data drive.

My first questionx: does it make things faster? On paper, SSDs are so much faster than hard drives it’s not even funny. But what does that translate to in real world usage? In my case, everything just feels smooth. It’s hard to explain but here’s an example: when I click on the FireFox icon the window is instantly there. When I’m playing games, the loading screens flip by faster. Everything just feels snappier.

My next question: are SSDs worth the extra cost? In a nutshell, no. Prices have come down a lot in the last couple years and I got a rip-roaring deal, but it was still $200ish for a 60 GB drive. If you’re looking to speed up your gaming experience, go buy a faster video card instead. If you’re a developer the situation is completely reversed (I wish I had one on my work computer). But if current price trends continue, within the next couple years I’d guess almost every laptop will use an SSD and a couple years after that I’d expect them to be standard on desktops. For now they are still an early adopter product.

My next test is to switch back to using a regular HD for a couple weeks and see if I miss the SSD. If not, it’s going on eBay and I’ll take a look at SSDs again in a couple years.