Video smackdown: Solid State Disk vs. Magnetic Hard Drive
It’s not exactly Celebrity Deathmatch, but if you haven’t seen a head-to-head battle between SSD and traditional hard drive machines, pull up a ringside chair. Rob has a lengthy video of two OQO portables, one with flash-based storage and one with a standard hard drive. The only other difference is an ever-so-slightly faster CPU in the SSD unit: 1.6 GHz as opposed to 1.5 GHz. You’ll get a real-time view of Vista boot ups, sleep mode, hibernation, and waking up. Aside from the Vista bootup, that sounds like me on a typical day, with a little bit of RSS reading on the side.There are no surprises here: integrated flash-based storage pretty much kicks the pants off of today’s magnetic storage, which is great for mobile devices. As far as power consumption, Rob observes an extra 45 to 60 minutes of power, which sounds a tad high, but then again, I didn’t do the test. 60 minutes would be nearly a 50% boost in run-time; I figured we’d see 20% more time max, but as we always say, your mileage may vary. Now if we could just get SSD capacity up and prices down, we’d be in business!
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ooohhh i get it, so the 100mhz CPU difference in the OQO is just “ever so slightly”. but when comparing the 100mhz-200mhz difference between the original Q1 to the current Q1U it was an unbelievable, earth-shattering, months of bashing, world ending, performance difference. that’s some real consistency there Kev!
now about the HDD/SSD. i hardly think it’s fair to do a 1-sided comparison in a minority market of the worlds best (SSD) to the worlds worst (1.8″ 4200RPM). i say to consider also moving up a step to ultraportables & compare to the 2.5″ HDD’s (epecially since the laptop market is ruled by them). oh wait i already did that, to my 2.5″ 7200RPM! although the SSD was faster, got me about 20mins more juice, it wasnt even close to what i expected. it was also actually slower in some regards.
i can definitely see the SSD’s replacing 1.8″ HDD’s, in fact thats where i think manufactures are going (thats probably why some manufactures are pulling out of even producing 1.8″ HDD’s anymore). but when comparing to the 2.5″ HDD market, the SSD’s only slight speed/battery advantage probably cant outweigh the HDD’s HUGE capacity/price advantage.
wow, bootup on both of them sucked (even the SSD, judging by SSD standards).
the other differences weren’t that great either, not as they should be.
he also made a CRITICAL mistake, he let the SSD completely boot. but with the HDD almost right after the screen came up he put it into standby & didnt let it finish booting (takes the OQO a good 2-3 minutes for full boot). then after he resumed it from standby he said “it appears to still be loading things” (DUH!) then right after that he put it into hibernate! how he made such a stupid mistake i will never know. but this whole test is VOID, he needs to redo it & let the HDD fully boot like he did the SSD.
SHD, not a problem if you don’t like my choice of words “ever so slightly”. I don’t think I bashed the 800 MHz A110 for months, nor did I say it was world ending. I’ve even recently indicated that the A110 in the Vye S37 was “quite usable, but requires a little more patience than I’m used to so far”. The original Intel CPUs met my needs better and I value performance over battery life. It’s really that simple, I’ve stated it many times prior and that’s my opinion. I welcome yours of course, but let’s not be juvenile.
agreed, this whole test is tainted. right after he came out of hibernate, the HDD once again tryed to finish booting Vista but then he almost immediately decided to try opening Word.
so not only was the HDD clamoring to try & boot Vista it would also be running high CPU utilization, both of those things would *dramatically* slow down the Word launch.
everybody knows just because the desktop is present does not at all mean the boot process is complete. you have to wait for the HDD to stop thrashing & CPU to drop, it’s usually around the same time the last sytray icon loads. it takes my OQO about 1min to the desktop and about 2mins more for HDD/CPU/systray to finish. i dont know what he was thinking putting it into standby, hibernate, and loading Word all before it had completed. obviously the SSD had been finished already because it had a significantly faster boot (but still seemed slow for an SSD).
no one is denying the SSD is faster, but this guy did a really poor job at demonstrating it.
I have
a Q1Pentium, 1Ghz, 60GB HD, 1GB RAM, and
a Q1u A110, 800Mhz, 32GB SSD, 1GB RAM
both with XP Tablet
The Q1P is about 20 seconds slower to boot, about 10 seconds slower to resume from hibernation. The speed while running apps seems to be a wash – no perception of one being faster than the other.
But battery life is noticeably better with the Q1u. I can run about 4.5 hours real-world at 2/3 brightness with the regular battery and over 7 hours with the 6 cell. Comparing the Q1 times were 3.5 and 6 respectively. I love the 6 cell. I really can’t tell the difference when I am holding the PC and several times thought I had the 3 cell on when it was the extended battery.
Running Battery Eater 5 I get the following results:
3 cell – Max Performance full bright: 124 min.
3 cell – Max Performance 50% bright: 166 min.
6 cell – Max Performance full bright: 247 min.
6 cell – Max Performance 50% bright: 351 min.
Not as good as Kevin’s Vye numbers but better than his reports on the Q1, Q1P and Q1SSD.
I find the Q1u much better day to day than the Q1 in usability. The split keyboard is really usable for me for URLs, emails, passwords. So much so that DialKeys and TIP are distant memories. If I need to really write some text I use ritePen or the Sierra keyboard.
I also find the joystick mouse and the LR buttons pretty darn useful. I slowed the mouse response down a lot from factory and I do not overshoot as much. I added mouse trails for visibility.
The screen brightness is a signiciant leap of the Q1P so much so that I often run 50% bright. Something I never did with the original except in the dark.
The handling of the unit is much better as well. I find that it seems a lot lighter (I know its only a few ounces) And 1″ less height makes it seem tiny. The menu and volume soft touch buttons are mighty responsive (menu pops up noticeably faster than with the Q1Ps hardware button.)
I know that with Vista the thing’s a dog but lets not blame the PC, lets agree that the default setup of Vista is to blame.
Overall the Q1u SSD rocks, but not in the ways I expected. The boot times are not significantly better but the overall feel and battery life are. If you are in the market I think that its worth ignoring the naysayers and taking a serious look at a Q1u – either the SSD or the Q1uXP. If the processor speed really irks you then wait for the Q1u Premium or whatever its called to be release 1.3Ghz I think.
Regards,
Alan