Notebook SSDs are dead
It’s all over but the shouting
The scoop: the gap between notebook SSD promise and performance has been growing steadily. Now a review in Tom’s Hardware puts the final nail in the coffin. The title says it all:
The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flash SSDs Don’t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime – they Reduce It
By as much as an hour. A winner with the stupid high-end notebook demographic. The Paris Hilton market.
Ouch. Oops. Who knew?
Or who should have known?
Details
There’s a longer piece with some detail at Storage Bits but here’s the summary:
- A Crucial SSD - costing $25/GB - used more power - 1.6 W at idle - than any 2.5″ notebook drive requires.
- A Memoright 32 GB drive used a full 2 W at idle
- An Mtron 32 GB flash drive reduced battery life by almost an hour.
- The slowest drive - a year old Sandisk SSD 5000 - almost equaled the Hitachi 7200 RPM Travelstar’s energy use. But the SSD offers fewer IOPS than the hard drive!
- They tested against a 200 GB Hitachi Travelstar 7k200, but other 2.5″ 7200 RPM drives have similar power envelopes.
And, of course, a 5400 RPM drive is more efficient. And a 160 GB 1.8″ drive is even more efficient, roomier and cheaper than any of the SSDs TH tested.
My guess on the not-easily-or-quickly-fixed culprit? The flash control logic - disk translation layer - needs cycles for wear leveling, garbage collection, buffer and cache management, flash mux/demux and the SATA interface - with frequent background operations even when the drive is idle.
And don’t forget the 20 volts required to write a cell.
Tom’s singles out Crucial for special mention:
Users who purchase this drive because of Crucial’s statements such as “low power consumption” and the product being ideal for “users who want longer battery life” will most likely be disappointed. While the total battery runtime certainly depends on the workload — we used Mobilemark 07 — the minimum and maximum power consumption measurements prove that Crucial’s statements of low power consumption are in fact wrong: 1.6 W idle power is more than any 2.5” notebook hard drive requires.
Did anyone even think to check the facts? At least one engineer had to know - and he told someone.
What’s the dynamic?
Some will say I’m premature, like when I said HD DVD was dead a year ago. But think about the market dynamic:
- Cool but costly new technology needs early adopters
- Based on the marketing, hip high-end adopter spring for costly status symbol with claimed road-warrior features
- But the supposed advantages don’t exist, so the early adopters feel like chumps
- Word of mouth stops. Who wants to admit they were suckered?
- Notebook SSDs slip into obscurity as enterprise and very low-end SSDs move into the spotlight
Making early investors/adopters look stupid is not a winning strategy.
The StorageMojo take
The notebook SSD vendors have dug themselves a very deep hole. How to fix?
- Stop digging. A month in detox would help. Some encounter group time with the HD DVD folks.
- Form a serious performance consortium and get real about performance, power and longevity.
- Do the hard work of getting notebook operating systems better optimized for flash. Use Linux and OS X to beat Microsoft into some semblance of cooperation. Do the engineering for Apple - they’re open source, right? If Apple does it, it’s cool - and you need cool.
What the SSD guys will do:
- Deny and obfuscate. “Not representative. Slanted. Unfair. Conspiracy.”
- Claim next gen will fix all problems.
- Performance, performance, performance. Which is a weak reed as well.
- Point to cost curves show that, without a doubt, flash overtakes disk in 5 years.
And then hope the smart, techy, affluent road warrior demographic has a short memory. Good luck with that.
Comments welcome, of course.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 12:26 am
Please take a look at the comments on the Tom’s hardware guide report before you rush to build your basic logic foundation on that.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 3:46 am
Robin - couldn’t agree more: laptop flash drives have truly been over-hyped in the “green” space. Their only hope is that they figure a way to deliver sufficient performance to make it in the server or array storage markets - which I doubt will happen.
Idle power is an interesting consideration. I”m not sure the culprit is exactly as you describe, but I’ll agree those things must at least be contributors.
Fortunately things are a little different in the enterprise flash drive space. At least, the drives typically do their housekeeping in parallel to normal I/O streams, since there really is no such thing as “idle time” for the overwhelming number of applications that are being deployed on the technology…and the “under load” power requirements are nominally lower than that of spinning rust (32% lower than the equivalent-sized 15K rpm disk for the STEC drives EMC is using, and that’s an all-in comparison including power conversion and A/C load). Still, in the near term you still won’t pay for and EFD on power savings alone
on July 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 am
You misread the article, Robin. If you look at the power-consumption results on page 14, you’ll see that the Hitachi drive drew more power *at idle* than the Sandisk SSD did *under load* - and that doesn’t even count the difference in cooling needs. The MemoRight SSD also used less power at idle than the Hitachi did, and idle is where most notebook drives are most of the time. Those results are starkly at odds with the traffic-generating headline, and until the inconsistency is resolved I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions. What problems do exist with SSD power consumption are also more easily solved than you let on. Some functions can be moved back to the host, others to dedicated silicon which can do them very efficiently. It’s not like hard drives don’t have processors in them drawing power too, y’know. When somebody does a head to head comparison where the drives are idle 90% of the time and only reading 90% of the remainder, and properly accounts for the fact that whole-system I/O performance might not scale perfectly with drive performance, then it’ll be worth paying attention to.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 6:19 am
Robin misread the article, Jeff? If anything he was more reserved in his judgement than Tom’s:
“results prove unmistakably that battery runtimes do not increase when using flash based SSDs… Battery runtime may improve if systems run idle, but most of the time they don’t, and this is where the good old hard drive shines brighter than before.”
And he clearly highlights the Crucial SSD’s idle power draw comparison, not the SanDisk (ref p.14). The point here is that flash is no panacea. Solid-state offers potential benefits, but shoving square peg technology into round hole problems as the industry is attempting with notebook SSD will only serve to delay and confuse the adoption of beneficial applications of flash storage.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 8:27 am
I think Tom’s is flat-out wrong about notebooks running idle, but at least they added the caveat. Some couldn’t even bring themselves to do that.
I’ve composed a more detailed response at http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=1359 so I’ll forego further comment here. I was going to post-date it until tomorrow (because I like to space out my posts a bit) but, since everyone has been so polite and all, I decided to push it out sooner.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 8:28 am
They may still have a niche with ultra-quiet PCs.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 10:34 am
The article had a systemic flaw in it’s analysis… That is that because the SSDs had higher performance, the benchmarks were likely doing more work with them than they were with the HDD. So, the CPU was working harder, the graphics card was working harder, etc. etc. Tom’s should really redo the experiments and publish the disk stats and compare bytes read/written before battery death rather than simply battery runtime. It’s a glaring flaw that was immediately apparent and needs to be addressed before any conclusions can be drawn.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 am
This is a corner case where the divide between marketing and engineering gets thrown into sharp relief. Yes, there are issues with Tom’s methodology. There are *always* issues with testing.
But the preponderance of ALL the testing is that notebook SSDs have either no or small power advantages over hard drives for most consumers. There have been a couple of tests that do show some advantage: Anandtech’s test that played music continuously - when most road warriors would use a player or a cell phone.
And there are good reasons for this: hard drives are pretty efficient and getting more so; and current displays, CPUs and graphics use a lot more power than the disks. There’s only so much juice you can squeeze out of this lemon.
In a consumer driven world the fine points get lost. Until a major notebook vendor can advertise something like “Get an extra 60 minutes battery life with our high-performance SSD” the notebook SSD market is toast.
The standard engineering take is: give us more time and money and we will make it better. And I’m sure they can and will make it better. The question is: better enough to matter?
Here’s the marketing take. When you charge more for less capacity and the only benefit is performance - and even that seems limited to startup and some file operations - you do not have a value proposition that consumers will buy.
And BUYING, my friends, is the name of the game.
Flash will still play an important role in data storage - just not in the notebook market.
on July 3rd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
From Micron Technology - why they can’t comment like everyone else . . . .
To be attributed to Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development for Micron:
“The controllers analyzed in the Tom’s Hardware review are early-generation, multi-chip and in some cases even use FPGA’s, which can be quite power hungry. As with many other first and second generation drives, these drives are not delivering on the full potential of the NAND and are not delivering properly on the performance promise.
There is another factor to be aware of. If the CPU spends 25 million clock cycles waiting for random HDD data, but only part of that waiting for SSD data, the actual increase in notebook power consumption may be in the CPU. A useful metric is how much processing gets done per watt. If you are willing to scale back performance to that of an HDD-based system, an SSD-based system should deliver significantly longer battery life.
Finally, consider that many of today’s applications and operating systems are not optimized for SSDs, but for rotating media. As an example, Vista has a background defrag utility that is not needed, and in fact is not desired for SSDs.”
on July 3rd, 2008 at 10:31 pm
[...] puts the final nail in the coffin. The title says it all: The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flahttp://storagemojo.com/2008/07/02/notebook-ssds-are-dead/PC superstore suffers breakdown over Linux notebook The RegisterAverage CPU Power ACP The Truth [...]
on July 7th, 2008 at 11:51 am
A different test with a different result:
http://blog.laptopmag.com/web-surfing-test-shows-ssds-better-for-battery-life
on July 7th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Seems odd that the company that was first to the market with MLC SSD’s and recently knocked Samsung out of a lucrative Apple contract should have been tested. I think Apple probably ran as many tests as TOM”S. STEC SSD’s are superior and it directly relates to their controller technology and testing procedures .
on July 7th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I think it might behoove the various readers of Robin’s article to go over to the Tom’s Hardware original story and read the comments in detail. It seems to me that we’re not readily able to discern much here quite yet.
Joe
on July 9th, 2008 at 7:19 am
I have a MacBook Air with the SSD option. It boots so fast I am considering getting a SSD as the boot drive for my next desktop.
on July 10th, 2008 at 11:47 am
[...] to keep you from updating your blog. But on the bright side, I didn’t have to link to the notebook SSDs are dead - no they’re not [...]
on July 14th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
hi, I find strange you say ssd is dead. Startup times when loading programs or documents can be very good => they can make you win time and the money you wasted if you work much at your pc/laptop. If they were cheaper they would be preferred absolutely over hdd by the regular users. Many who use the pc to work not in multimedia doesn’t care about the capacity. And even the capacity could be not a problem if ssd gets bigger. Everything is going smoothly, and prehistoric spinning hard drives are the ones who are dead. I don’t understand why are you hesitant about a new good technology. Most people seems to be excited. May be even samsung in its next offering will aready lower the prices fast, even more han ocz recently did. Am waiting for it. NAND prices keep going down and SSDs too.
on July 18th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Antonio: “NAND prices keep going down and SSDs too.”
Do you think HDD prices and performance are standing still. There just isn’t going to be parity in these competing products any time soon (next 5-8 years i.m.h.o.) So when either side claims a superiority, it seems fundamental to question and attempt to prove the claim. Flash (SSDs) will improve with maturity, without doubt. And inherent qualities in flash will bring improvements to users. But this whole debate has been attended by much hype and the usual caveats should be heeded.
on October 5th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Just a remarkable example, beyond extreme speed increase by booting and random IO, SSDs are more robust devices, I am working in hard enviroemnts and this is the 5th time in 2 years that I changed my 2.5 inch rotating notebook drive because of bad sector and malfunctioning because of vibration. With SSD no trouble even when working near a press brake vibrating at 20HZ
on December 15th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Hi there you are worng ssd are just now taking off sony and alien ware offer 256 gb ssd for $1,300 and sony apple and dell have 128 gb ssd for about $500 soo soner or later the hard core gamers advantaly put hard drive sells too zero i say in about 22 years from know no one will know what a hard drive is just like the floppy drive and dail up modems