Top Solid State Disks and TB Drives Reviewed

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld has reviewed six of the latest hard disk drives, including 32GB and 64GB solid state disks, a low-energy consumption 'green' drive and several terabyte-size drives. With the exception of capacity, the solid state disk drives appear to beat spinning disk in every category, from CPU utilization, energy consumption and read/writes. The Samsung SSD drive was the most impressive, with a read speed of 100MB/sec and write speed of 80 MB/sec, compared to an average 59MB/sec and 60MB/sec read/write speed for a traditional hard drive."

Is it just me?

[crymeph0]

Or does the linked article say nothing about TB sized drives, only the flash drive?

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[Anonymous Coward]

And on modern flash devices, writes are automatically distributed over the entire filesystem so that particular areas don't get hammered and worn out. With a large flash device with a reasonable amount of free space, the time taken to reach 100,000 writes to a particular bit will be pretty long (as long or longer than a conventional hard drive's MTBF according to various sources I've read (unfortunately, I don't have the links to hand).

The article (or the manufacturer?) is misleading though - figures of 100MB/s read and 80MB/s write are quoted, but the drive is benchmarked at about 25ish...

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[goofy183]

Will this ever die? The write cycle counts in modern flash is in the millions now. Doing the math you very easily get 20+ years before write cycle wear is a concern: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html [storagesearch.com]

How many heavily used spinning drives do you know that last even 10+ years?

Re:Number of writes?

[Planesdragon]

Why is the ultimate number of writes never taken into account in these comparison reviews? Why are solid state drives tested so that their weaknesses are not probed?

Because it's a measure best reflected by Baysean Data, and they don't have enough time to test them.

If you want, buy an HDD and a Flash-Drive of the same cost, hook them up to a program that runs each at equal data-transfer rates, and see how much data you can read and write to each before they fail. Report back to us in the six months it'll take you.

Oh, and you need to do the trial over a wide sample, so get, oh, at least ten of each.

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[baywulf]

Actually the endurance on NAND has been going lower over the years as they switched to smaller cell geometry, larger capacity and MLC technology. Some are as low as 5000 cycle endurance. These MLC(multi-level cell) NAND tend also to be much slower than SLC(single-level cell) NAND. Most SLC NAND have around 50K or 100K endurance.

Re:Not the jump I was hoping for

[TimothyJones]

That's because those are not really performance SSD drives. Random Access time is much improved but the transfer rate is way below a good HD. MTron has some high performance drives that pulverize everything else but they do cost an arm, leg and probably one of your kidneys. The only real benefits of those Samsung SSD's are much lower power consumption, no heat or noise. On a laptop this is still very good news.

Re:Where can I buy one?

[baywulf]

Try newegg.com

Re:MTBF/Write Cycles

[NMerriam]

You obviously wouldn't be overwriting any data already stored on the drive

No, but the wear-leveling routines in the drive will happily move around your existing data so that rarely written sectors are available for heavy writing operations.

Seriously, this "issue" comes up in every discussion about SSDs, and it seems like people are just unwilling or unable to accept that what was once a huge problem with the technology is now not even remotely an issue. Any SSD you buy today should outlive a spinning disk, regardless of the operating conditions or use pattern. It is no longer 1989, engineers have solved these problems.

Re:Where can I buy one?

[Alt_Cognito]

For Samsung [samsungssd.com], it's easy enough, but the rest of the SSD's look geared toward that enterprise market.

The REAL article link

[hack slash]

Review: Six top hard disk drives for speed and capacity [computerworld.com]

Re:Where can I buy one?

[ricky-road-flats]

Near me, this place [scan.co.uk] has a handful of different ones.

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[theoverlay]

With 3-bit and even quadbit MLC NAND around the corner we should see faster controllers that will make these drives more attractive and larger. There are even some hybrid controllers that allow multiple nand types(mlc and slc) and even nor in the same application. One of these is Samsung's flex-OneNAND. A good site for more information is http://infiniteadmin.com/ [infiniteadmin.com]

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[vertinox]

Do traditional drives fail if the same sector is written to over and over again as well?

No, but they'll fail either reading or writing over time regardless if you are writing or just reading just because the drive is moving. Even if you cool your standard drive, eventually it could just fail because it was left on for 10 years (since an active drive is constantly spinning).

Now its not guaranteed to fail, but the chances of a standard HDD failing that you only read from and don't write it is far greater than a SSD that you put files on it one time and don't write further.

I think SSD shine in archival types of things that you don't plan on trashing and rewriting that often such as image collections, movies, and MP3s. That said, swap disks, scratch disk, and cache file directories would logically still have better performance on your spinning platter drives and if that drive goes belly up you haven't lost much.

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[psydeshow]

Just remember to mount these drives noatime [faqs.org] to avoid a write every time you read a file.

For that matter, noatime is a sensible default for any desktop OS. When was the last time you actually searched for files you hadn't accessed in six months?

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I am embedded systems engineer with 10+ years engineering experience with flash devices, fpgas and PALs (and gals) in various projects.
I personally have seen a lot of "failed" flash devices. One of the first Intel PQFP designs I had "ringed with gold" and turned into a necklace because it was so much fun de-soldering SMT components!

Even with the new flash tech, I wouldn't buy a SSD based on flash tech and especially with what is lurking around the corner.

I am *eagerly* awaiting Hitachi's ferromagnetic SPRAM memory tech. It's fast in all respects and does not have the flash write limitations.
Watch and see, this stuff is the death of the IO bound spinning platters folks! Good riddance!
I am just hoping that Hitachi realizes their spinning platters business which has been losing money since day one may be saved by innovation and may be more valuable for it's namesake than it's non-solid state design tech. They need to start building SPRAM based SSD's.
http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/070213.html [hitachi.com]

I purchased a 100MEGABYTE Conner Peripherals IDE harddrive for $850.00 back in the day (I have probably burned more than $200k on junk that I wish I could convert back into cash again). I am tired of being an early adopter and paying exorbitant prices for new toys. These flash SSD's are the new "Conner 100MEG Hard Drive" for me. No thanks...

been there, done that, the answer is NOT YET

[mauri]

I decided to test SSD drives on couple of laptop users some months ago.
Today we have none of them left, all went bad in a matter of weeks.
Tried SanDisk 5000 series, both 2.5" [sandisk.com] and 1,5" [sandisk.com]. No luck.
1,8 died completely, 2.5 just got more and more bad blocks.
Will try with Mitron 7000 [mtron.net] as well, when the damn thing ships.

But whatever they say, my suggestion is to keep out of this SSD business until there is more reliable NV memory than flash...

p.s. Writing is sloooowwww, I have commented it earlier here [breakitdownblog.com]