I’ve always liked all-in-one PCs, having bought my first back in 2000 from Gateway. I’m considering getting a Dell XPS 27 with the touch screen so that I can try out Windows 8 (don’t worry, I am prepared for Windows 8 to suck! Frankly I haven’t found any new Microsoft features since Windows XP that I thought were useful). Dell seems to make a pretty good product for around $2000 (includes 8 GB of RAM and a 2 TB hard drive for video editing/storage). What I can’t figure out is why there is no SSD cache or accelerator available from Dell or indeed why this isn’t standard. I bought a $1000 17″ laptop from HP last summer and, due to its 32 GB SSD accelerator, it boots just about as fast as a fully SSD-based machine yet has a huge capacity for storing video and the accelerator was only about a $50 option (based on SSD accelerators on amazon.com
If everyone hates computers that are slow to boot, why hasn’t the SSD accelerator idea caught on as a standard feature?
[Anticipating that the Apple fan club would chime in with some derision… I priced a similar configuration over at Apple and found that $2549 is the price for a 27″ all-in-one with similar CPU, memory, and hard drive capacity. But the Apple product does not have a touch screen so really there is no direct comparison. Anyway, it would be good if people could confine comments to the question of why this $50 item is not in every personal computer rather than the question of how anyone could be stupid enough to buy a non-Apple product.]
Update 10/20/2012: Dell just added a $2500 “monster” config for the XPS 27. It has a 32 GB SSD accelerator (in front of a 2 TB conventional hard drive), 16 GB of RAM, and a Blu-ray drive. That still does leave the question of why don’t they offer this as an option on their $1000+ PCs. Almost every magazine review seems to indicate that the SSD accelerator improves system performance more than anything comparably priced.
An all in one with touch screen? Did somebody solve “gorilla arms”?
I was wondering about that as well since I’ve been using a SSD at home for almost three years now. Here is my explanation attempt.
70% of all PC buyers don’t have a clue about SSDs. The best they can do is compare prices, hard disk sizes and CPU clock speed before making a purchase.
The remaining 30% are technology savvy people.
I work at a high tech company and we are building high tech server solutions for large network operators. Most employees are engineers with a university degree. Still – most people don’t have a clue about SSDs and when I wanted to introduce SSDs in our solution the database group came with great concerns about limited write operations on SSDs (we’re talking enterprise level SLC disks here) with the result that our upcoming database configuration for next year is based on mechanical disks with several spindles to increase the number of IOPS (disk striping). Showing figures that a mechanical SAS hard drive delivers around 200 IOPS and a single SSD delivers 20.000 IOPS didn’t help. I’ve been beaten to death with Oracle documentation (“best practices”) made for mechanical disks.
When I got a new laptop at work it had an SSD and I was happy because I thought the new laptop would be faster than the old one. Did I feel a difference? Unfortunately not. The corporate software add-ons (security, mounting mandatory network drives, software inventory check, etc) add so much delay that there was simply no subjective “felt” difference.
So – when even computer science engineers from high tech companies never felt the benefits of an SSD then why should they be willing to pay for it next time they buy a private PC?
My guess is that large PC vendors aim for the mass market and if the “SSD accelerator appreciating group” is below 20% then they better save this $50 item and please the remaining 80% with a $50 cheaper offer.
Andy: That is sad! Have you seen the monster TPC-C benchmarks that are being made with DBMS servers using monster flash memory arrays (brand name “Violin Memory”)? Aren’t your colleagues impressed by those? Paying $500,000 for a 3U-high disk, mind you, must be kind of unpleasant, but the speeds are hard to argue with (see http://www.violin-memory.com/products/performance-benchmarks/ ).
I think its symptomatic of how most large organizations innovate (not very well). When an org gets large enough, focus shifts inwards. Agreeing with your managers+coworkers, avoiding risks, matching competitors, and spending exactly 100% of your annual budget all become more important than providing innovations that serve external customers.
Definitely sad, you’d think people who can market MMX, DDR3, AGP x4, etc, etc… would figure out a way to market those Momentum disks (or SSD OS disks). Perhaps the margin on those is so small that PC makers can’t get them at a big volume discount so it’s not worth it for them, but there’re always bragging rights…
Price, price and price. Unless Dell, et. al. spend an enormous amount of money on educating Joe Public how this makes a computer faster, people are just going to see “SSD accelerator” in the 5 line spec at Best Buy, won’t know what it is and buy the computer next to it that is $50 cheaper.
People spend hundreds extra to get a 2.6 instead of the 2.3 GHz CPU while spending the same on going full SSD makes an actual noticeable difference. (Whereas the CPU does not)
Never even knew about SSD accelerators until today. Didn’t even know a slow boot time was an issue for anyone. SSD accelerators sound like the RAM expansion boards & FPU coprocessors people bought in the 1980’s, really niche devices that hardly anyone used.
How reliable are these things? One reads reviews of most commonly available models as having a high rate of failure often within months of installation. I would think PC makers wouldn’t want to deal with the resulting warranty issues.
re: new Microsoft features since Windows XP that I thought were useful
I think the “Search programs and files” search box in Win7 is very useful.
demetri: You raise a good question. The weak point of SSDs supposedly is that you can’t do a crazy number of writes into them. If an SSD is small and used as a cache for the most frequently read/written info you’d think that the failure rate would go up. I couldn’t find anything on the Web about failures of these accelerators. If the thing did fail, given that it is only a cache, I wonder if you could just rip it out of the PC and throw it out and then have everything work fine again?
Mitch: I’m glad that you like this feature. I did not mean to imply that none of the new Windows features were useful to anyone, only that I personally use Windows 7 in the same way and to do the same things that I did with Windows XP.
If it fails and you rip it out, one would hope there would just be graceful performance degradation. That still leaves the PC makers with a potential warranty issue with the units that fail quickly (possibly a large number) and maybe even a class action suit if the numbers are high enough and juicy enough for the lawyers.
Demetri: I’m looking at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223-7.html and it talks about Seagate using a special type of “SLC NAND” in their hybrid drives instead of the “MLC-based NAND” flash memory in a standard SSD. The Corsair accelerator supposedly uses the lower reliability MLC NAND (see http://www.storagereview.com/corsair_accelerator_series_caching_ssd_review ).
I think enough of these have been sold that it would be easy to find failure reports using Google. Yet one cannot. I’m not planning to be buried with any of the laptops or desktop computers that I use now. If an accelerator can last for 3-4 years I will be happy.
@philg: If your key factor to buy an SSD is because “… computers that are slow to boot …”, then I really don’t understand your logic. I always put my laptop to sleep (2-4 sec.) and restart from sleep (again in 2-4 sec.) Heck, one of my all-in-one Dell PC’s (3 years old now) is configured to go into sleep on it’s own and will come out of sleep in less than 2 seconds by simply moving the mouse or touching a key on the keyboard!
one reason for lack of adoption is that its usually a pain or impossible to put a second drive in a laptop.
Dave: Hmm.. I thought that these things were very small, e.g., the size of a camera SD card. But on the Corsair site it says “Just mount the Accelerator Series cache drive in an unused drive bay”. So then I guess the question is why a 32 GB of flash cannot be pulled back onto an existing board within a laptop or all-in-one.
Apple just announced that they are offering hybrid drives as an option in the new iMac. I thus expect Dell, Lenovo, et al to follow suit in 3-12 months.
Apple seems headed in this direction. The new iMacs it announced can optionally have 128 GB of flash storage and a 1-3 TB HD, and there seems to be OS level support for caching on the flash storage.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/apple-fusion-drive-wait-what-how-does-this-work/
Thanks, Paul and Jon. It has been kind of strange to me that the Seagate hybrid drives are not more popular, since that requires zero engineering effort on the part of the PC vendors. I’m surprised that Apple is doing this in the operating system/file system. Certainly the hybrid drives don’t deal with the OS. Why wouldn’t Apple build it into the disk interface hardware? Is the advantage that OS-level software can be smart about never replacing key OS components in the SSD cache even if the user is editing a lot of video or doing something else that has bits flowing through?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
“Fusion Drive automatically and dynamically moves frequently used files to Flash storage for quicker access, while infrequently used items move to the hard disk.”
Y.S.: Thanks for the link. I don’t think that answers the question. The Seagate drive presumably does the same thing internally. This is a standard caching algorithm (e.g., to push out the least recently used items) and should not need to be at the operating system/file system level to function.