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Four SSDs Compared — OCZ, Super Talent, Mtron
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Sep 05, 2008 09:44 AM
from the be-vewwy-vewwy-quiet dept.
from the be-vewwy-vewwy-quiet dept.
MojoKid writes "Solid State Drive technology is set to turn the storage industry on its ear — eventually. It's just a matter of time. When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical, it doesn't take a degree in physics to understand the obvious advantages. However, as with any new technology, things take time to mature and the current batch of SSDs on the market do have some caveats and shortcomings, especially when it comes to write performance. This full performance review and showcase of four different Solid State Disks, two MLC-based and two SLC-based, gives a good perspective of where SSDs currently are strong and where they're not. OCZ, Mtron and Super Talent drives are tested here but Intel's much anticipated offering hasn't arrived to market just yet."
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Along with SSDs an optimized OS? (Score:2)
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I had a 286 laptop with MS-DOS in ROM.
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I had a 286 laptop with MS-DOS in ROM.
I had a Sinclair ZX-81 with OS and BASIC language in ROM. It was the first in a series of machines I owned in which the OS and BASIC were either included in onboard ROM or came on a ROM cartridge that plugged in.
Man, I just realized how old I'm getting ...
Re:Along with SSDs an optimized OS? (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I just realized how old I'm getting ...
No you didn't. You realized that awhile back but forgot.
Parent
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You can set up your machine this way right now if you want. Just put /home on a traditional disk and have the kernel and maybe a couple more trees of system files on an SSD. This way your SSD doesn't wear out as fast and you have super-quick read access to the kernel and settings.
If you're running something other than linux I'm sure there's a less transparent way of doing this. Mac OS doesn't really let you set mountpoints with Disk Utility but it won't freak out if you put in your own (MacFUSE does this).
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Deconstructing solid state. (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, we keep talking about solid state as its better because there are no moving parts, and less wear, but chips and circuits have plenty of moving electrons and go through a lot of thermal stress. I know that for a lot of applications a circuit can seem to be more reliable, but do we really have a sufficient experience to make such a sweeping statement that in fact solid state is more -reliable- than a mechanical system? There are some steam trains out there that are running and are over 100 years o
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Re:Deconstructing solid state. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, let's see:
- Magnetic hard drive = solid state (ICs, buffers, etc) + magnetic platter + mechanical (rotating platter(s) + moving heads)
- SSD = solid state
As soon as the price per GB of SSDs is at parity with the magnetic drives, I'm switching. It probably puts out less heat and require less power, meaning quieter drives too.
Parent
Re:Deconstructing solid state. (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as the price per GB of SSDs is at parity with the magnetic drives, I'm switching.
Actual price parity will likely only occur once the older technology become a rarity, and I suspect that for the next decade, magnetic drives will continue to be the cheapest mass storage out there. That being said, for me, I'll buy a SSD when I can get a decently rated 120 gig drive for less than $150.
Parent
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You're going to use more power. Yes, SSDs use less power, that much is obvious. But what you're forgetting is that the CPU does a lot of idling because of waiting for harddrives to give it the data it needs to process... With an SSD, the data comes faster and the CPU spends less time idling and more time working, and in turn ends up using more power.
Seriously, go replace your laptop's HDD with an SSD and watch your battery life actually go down. It's because your CPU
Re:Deconstructing solid state. (Score:5, Funny)
There are some steam trains out there that are running and are over 100 years old... do we really think that a CPU or a RAM or a motherboard can live that long?
I agree completely. I, too, am dismayed at the lack of development in steam-powered computing.
Parent
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Yeah ever since we lost Babbage that tech seems to have stalled.
Re:Deconstructing solid state. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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Makes you wonder why they're permitted to claim 1,000,000+ h MTBF in their literature when they don't give any assurance. Seems kind of like the sort of scummy propaganda that ought to be illegal. Saturate the media with consistent but unsubstantiated claims, and you make bullshit into
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I noticed they claim 1,000,000+ h MTBF, but they only warranty for less than 10,000 h (or 20,000 in some cases). What makes you wonder why they have so little faith in their product (or in their own reliability estimate).
You need not wonder. The disks have a limited life time - like the brakes on your car, or the tyres, they will wear out eventually, and then you have to replace them. Nothing you can do about that. But that is not the same as "failures". A "failure" happens when your tyre blows after only 10,000 miles of normal use. Let's say a tyre is worn out after 800 hours of normal use. And one in thousand tyres has a failure before it is worn out, then you have 800,000 hours MTBF but only 800 hours life time.
Re:Deconstructing solid state. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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There are some steam trains out there that are running and are over 100 years old...
I hope you also realize how much continual maintenance the average train requires, or any large piece of machinery for that matter. I should know, I am a maintenance technician for a plastics factory. Even our most dependable and reliable machines require at least annual maintenance. Tear down and check for part wear, replace or weld up worn parts, change belts, fluids, etc.
If a hard disk could be maintained (replace worn motor, lubricate bearings, etc) then I would agree with you. But they are disposab
Re:Deconstructing solid state. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are those steam trains really running with 100 year old parts?
Or do you regularly go in and maintain the various components of you hard drives?
Parent
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But do you think that the steam trains are still working with all-original parts? Or do you think that those steam trains have been disasembled and replacement parts swapped in repeatedly over the course of that 100 years? If you were (able) to treat hard drives the same way, then you could expect longer lives out of them.
And we don't expect computer components to last that long (at least not in production use) much for the same reason none of those steam trains are in regular production use (novelty use is
Oh For God's Sake (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another SSD review by clueless PC dweebs.
The whole point of SSDs is that they have no moving parts, so they don't have the seek time and rotational latency of spinning disks. That translates into faster random access. As the review says:
So what do they measure? Sequential transfer rates.
Gah.
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The whole point of SSDs is that they have no moving parts, so they don't have the seek time and rotational latency of spinning disks.
Indeed, but it's nice to have some hard numbers to back that claim up. And it's nice to see HOW much faster they are versus a traditional drive.
So what do they measure? Sequential transfer rates.
Actually they measured the performances against each other. They show us that not all SSDs are created equally and they show tell us which SSDs they think are worth the money.
What they
Disagree (Score:2)
>> When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical
As far as I can see there really aren't any, at least for conventional desktop PC use. The most obvious one would be performance, except suprisingly when comapred with the fastest of todays mechanical drives there's not much if any performance advantage. In some cases SSDs are actually worse.
There's still a lot of other disadvanteges to SSDs, like a more limited number of write operations,
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone wake me up when there's a 1TB SSD for $250 that can do unlimited rewrite ops.
Um, even mechanical hard drives cannot promise unlimited rewrite ops. Maybe you want lower your sights jut a tad?
Parent
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And I want a pony. The point is that even spinning disc drives don't offer unlimited writes. Modern drives only don't crap out constantly because they "cheat" and automatically remap bad sectors (and have tens of thousands of spare sectors).
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At least here in the usa, his desire is already fulfilled, just the manufacturers haven't caught on yet wiht their box labeling. You see, here in the USA, the maximum device lifetime of any device is 7 years. No manufacturer is expected by law to make any device that lasts longer than that, and they are legally allowed to call any device that is expected to last 7 years of normal service "lifetime" and other BS keywords, that could easily encompass "infinite writes". Because you see, these SSD drives can
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone wake me up when there's a 1TB SSD for $250 that can do unlimited rewrite ops.
Let me guess, you want a car's drivetrain to promise "unlimited mileage" and your homes A/C refrigerant to promise "unlimited compression/decompression cycles".
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but words like "unlimited" are marketing words only. EVERYTHING is limited and finite. In this case, consumer protection laws state that 7 years of normal usage is long enough to be considered "lifetime" or "infinite" or "unlimited" and all sorts of other key words and tricky phrases.
Those mechanical drives you are comparing SSDs to? They don't offer "unlimited rewrites" except in the marketing sense. 7 years of normal usage. In that same sense, SSDs are already offering unlimited rewrites as they have enough rewrite cycles to last 7 years of normal usage. Just like the mechanical drives.
Parent
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It's an SSD, there is no platter!
Article without 60 pages of ads (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1211 [hothardware.com]
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Actually not too far off (Score:2)
I was actually surprised to see the capacities and prices. As someone who's never had a hard drive bigger than 80GB (and even then only used half of it), the capacities of SSDs are starting to look pretty decent. The prices are still an order of magnitude away from what they'd need to be to get me to switch, but hopefully that's only a year or two away?
The big thing for me is the durability to shock. I don't own a desktop; I'm a purely notebook guy. Just recently I toasted a (mechanical) hard drive by drop
I don't understand the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not an expert by any stretch but it seems to me that write speed issues, at least when it comes to relatively small amounts of writing, could easily be mitigated with a very long on-board RAM buffer controlled by the drive... and by very large, I mean like 1GB at least. And to keep it stable, a capacitor should be enough to keep it alive when power drops to commit any changes in buffer to the SSD storage. Maybe what I speak of is impossible or ridiculously expensive, but I don't think either is the case.
Re:I don't understand the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not the first person to think of such a thing. Problem is: it's pretty risky.
Most high end RAID controllers do this already, if you set to write-back. But they also have big batteries attached to them, and even then, you have something like 24 hours to power back on or total system corruption can occur. This means that mentioned systems must be affirmatively managed.
Can you imagine what a hassle this would be for the HD makers, particularly in the notebook use case? It would be a never ending chain of angry users blaming the HD maker for their data loss...
I think the right place to do this is way up in the OS, with a file system that is aware of the issues of small page commits to these devices, and therefore doing some kind of page-coalescence thing. Sun's ZFS can do this. Now we just need something over in consumer space.
C//
Parent
I just bought an OCZ drive... now I'm selling it (Score:5, Interesting)
I aimed to slash my build time for complex scenarios.
I thought the Compile -> Jar -> War -> Deploy -> Expand -> Launch would be greatly spead up as the files would be accessed quickly.
I hoped effectively for a much more targeted and capacious file cache/ RAM disk.
Unfortunately, the hype does not turn out to be true.
The enormous time cost of writing files smaller than 8MB (!) [see footnotes] completely counters any read speed increase. Building a proect is making thousands of 2KiB files : one of the most pathological cases for these drives.
So is it slow? No, it's just as quick as a sluggish 7K250, but then again I just coughed up £179 for the privelege of the same speed.
So I'm ebaying mine to someone who wants it for a light and quiet laptop, perfect.
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Some "Terrible small write performance" links I found during research:
* http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram_6.html [xbitlabs.com]
* http://www.alternativerecursion.info [alternativ...rsion.info]/?p=106
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Re:1+1+1 != 4 (Score:5, Funny)
RTFM? Shit... comments, articles, now I have to read a damn manual too. Jesus Slashdot is getting harder and harder these days.
Parent
1+1+1 = 4 if 1, 1, 1, and 4 are rounded numbers (Score:2)
I did RTFA; at least, the first several screens. Not a word about price. If you've read the whole thing, what do these suckers cost? I want to build fanless, nose-free a media center but I ain't Bill gates (good thing too because I'll base it on Linux).
Re:1+1+1 = 4 if 1, 1, 1, and 4 are rounded numbers (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:1+1+1 != 4 (Score:4, Informative)
I know, I RTA...
Parent
Re:1+1+1 != 4 (Score:5, Funny)
By what WITCHCRAFT would thou know the article contents?
Parent
10 writes per second for 18 years (Score:3, Informative)
For instance, MLC NAND memory has between 1,000 and 10,000 write cycles per cell, SLC memory about 100,000. Some applications will be more write intensive, so they'll wear out the memory faster.
That's why modern CF, SD, and SSD controllers spread writes to a single logical sector over multiple physical sectors [wikipedia.org]. They also dedicate 5 to 7 percent of their space to spare sectors in case one wears out; this accounts for the difference between a GB and a GiB. For example, a half-full 16 GB SSD with blocks of 128 KiB has over 60,000 free blocks. If your app makes 864,000 writes per day (10 writes per second 24/7), then the wear leveling circuitry would go through the entire free memory just under 15 tim
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Your math is a bit off. Wear leveling lets you use the entire drive. If it is done correctly (and most SSDs are at least very close), then you can guess how many total "random writes" you can do before the drive wears out.
The first thing to guess is the size of the erase block. With most current drives this is 1MB or 2MB. So a 16GB SLC drive has 16,000 / 2 * 100,000 = 800,000,000 total lifetime available writes. At 86,400 writes/day this is 9,259 days or about 25 years.
The same numbers for MLC are 1/10
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SSD's will reach $/GB equity for enterprise disks within 2 years. They already beat them on $/IOPS, and will soon on $/MB/s.
A reasonable projection for SATA is 6-7 years. However, if you know technology, that's like talking about what's going to happen in a thousand years. One just cannot know. The cross-industry pressure is definitely going to incentivize the spinning media makers to work on areal density.
In spite of that, I feel pretty sure that SSD's are going to wipe out Tier 1 entirely. Tier 1 is an IO
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Speaking of handicaps and stalls, isn't that exactly what's going to happen to many of these 1st- and 2nd-generation SSD drives when they reach their maximum # of write cycles and suddenly fail to be writable anymore?
Just like SATA and SCSI drives, it will just build up bad sectors as the system tries to write information, resulting in a "shrinking" drive.
It is actually much less likely this type of storage device will have a sudden, catastrophic failure, when it only takes one moving part to foul in a mechanical drive to destroy everything it contained.
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What I don't understand is why the big whoop over SSD. Sure in special cases like music players and laptops,stuff that gets slung around,yeah i can see it. But why would you want one in any other place? hell,I got rid of some 400Mb(yes with an Mb. We thought they were big back in the day) drives that still purred like kittens. I think in all my years of abusing my HDDs with video transcoding and editing I have killed a grand total of two,and one of those i was able to get back with the bosses copy of spinri
Latency, Power, Journaling (Score:3, Informative)
The big win with SSDs is low latency read access - you don't have to wait for rotation or seek time to start fetching your data. That's really useful for many kinds of data applications, speeding up transactions in databases, etc. If you RTFA, and look at some of the benchmarks like Windows Startup, they totally smoke rotating disks - and if you're trying to run servers in a datacenter, you've got less downtime if you ever have to reboot the things.
They also consume less power, which is good for some kind
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I don't find a benefit or obvious advantage in a device that requires wear-leveling to keep from wearing itself out. The fact that it degrades its storage capacity gracefully instead of all at once doesn't offset that swap files can really work over mass storage devices and the first bad sectors have been known to start showing up after only weeks of use in some cases.
Magnetic media does this too, just not as intelligently. Magnetic media waits until a sector is nearing failure, then reads the data (hopefully) and moves it to a new sector.
You can query your magnetic drive to get a list of bad sectors. The list grows over time.