# (When) Will solid-state harddrives soon be the norm? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 22, 2009, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-solid-state-harddrives-soon-be-the-norm/503915 "2009-07-22T22:09:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-solid-state-harddrives-soon-be-the-norm/503915/41 "2009-07-25T02:48:04Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > I haven’t looked deep into HD drivers recently, but years ago, in the microcomputer market, only Novell, not Microsoft, was doing that kind of real-time repair after the initial drive format. Are you sure that is built in to today’s Windows and/or Mac OPSYS? The hard drive controllers do it themselves, just like flash controllers. The OS is not involved. (The OS actually has its own list of bad blocks and a remapping scheme, but it doesn’t do ECC recovery when it finds a bad block. The whole thing is really an anachronism. If the OS ever becomes aware of a bad block, it means there were so many bad blocks that the controller became overwhelmed and the whole drive should be chucked.) The phenomenon differs from SSD decay in the details (it’s not dependent on writes and the rate is different), but otherwise is a direct analogy. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-solid-state-harddrives-soon-be-the-norm/503915/42 "2009-07-25T03:02:16Z")
> [@Rhythmdvl](#): > > Are we talking picoseconds, nanoseconds, milliseconds … a vastly noticeable boot time? > > Given the price of regular drive storage, partitioning off a few feet for emergency boot backup would cover failures (just change BIOS settings and remember to backup settings should do the trick). In a bit of time, maybe size will be cheap enough to have OS and programs on there, with magnetic as data storage. That’s easy. [http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/mobi/](http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/mobi/) [http://www.guru3d.com/article/gskill-falcon-128gb-ssd-review/11](http://www.guru3d.com/article/gskill-falcon-128gb-ssd-review/11) Applications and windows start up about 2.5x faster than on a Raptor. A Raptor is a 10,000 RPM drive and is about 1.5x faster than a normal 7,200 hard drive. 7,200 desktop hard drives are some factor again faster than the typical low-RPM drives used in laptops. So yeah, it’s a big difference, especially for laptops. Putting programs and OS on an SSD and downloads on an HD is definitely the way to go. You can do this affordable already, since a $100 64GB drive is all you really need for Windows. ---
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2009, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-solid-state-harddrives-soon-be-the-norm/503915/43 "2009-07-25T18:50:32Z")
> [@Rhythmdvl](#): > > Can someone comment on this? > > Are we talking picoseconds, nanoseconds, milliseconds … a vastly noticeable boot time? > > Given the price of regular drive storage, partitioning off a few feet for emergency boot backup would cover failures (just change BIOS settings and remember to backup settings should do the trick). In a bit of time, maybe size will be cheap enough to have OS and programs on there, with magnetic as data storage. We picked up a 32G SSD for my laptop to test it. My laptop went from booting and finishing all antivirus, TSR’s, etc. in 2:45 to 0:38. 38 seconds is a crapload faster. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-solid-state-harddrives-soon-be-the-norm/503915.md?page=2)