Vigile writes "When Intel's consumer line of solid state drives were first introduced late in 2008, they impressed reviewers with their performance and reliability. Intel gained a lot of community respect by addressing some performance degradation issues found at PC Perspective by quickly releasing an updated firmware that solved those problems and then some. Now Intel has its second generation of X25-M drives available, designated by a "G2" in the model name. The SSDs are technically very similar though they use 34nm flash rather than the 50nm flash used in the originals and reduced latency times. What is really going to set these new drives apart though, both from the previous Intel offerings and their competition, are the much lower prices allowed by the increased memory density. PC Perspective has posted a full review and breakdown of the new product line that should be available next week."
Fortunately I got it for only about ~$300 so I only "lost" $100 with the new ones coming out. That having been said, I don't regret the purchase at all, it is insanely faster than any other laptop drive out there, while being completely silent and power-friendly. As for TRIM support, I've heard that Intel is not going to add it for the older drives, but I'm not sure if that is just speculation or if it's been officially confirmed by Intel (Intel not expressly say the old drives are getting TRIM support is not the same as expressly denying the support). Fortunately, the drives with the newer firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
Oh and yes, it does run Linux (Arch 64-bit to be precise) just fine.
I can't wait for next year with the ONFI 2.1 FLASH chips (the new drives are not using the new ONFI standard yet) as well as 6Gbit SATA support. At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
Fortunately, the drives with the newer [non-TRIM] firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
I wonder how they managed that without the TRIM command, i.e. without the OS telling the HD which parts can be nulled because they are not needed anymore. Did they hide more pages from the OS which are then nulled regardless to hack together something like a buffer? But that would still show terrible write performance once that overflows. Did they implement deep-data-inspection for the most common filesystems so the HD now knows when something is deleted?
At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
I'm planning the same thing once the prices are righ
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I too bought a X25-M 80GB back in April (though I only payed $300, so I only overpaid by $75). That said: 1) I've enjoyed the increased performance over the last 4 months. I've done a lot of work where I've benefited from the increased performance, so I feel I've gotten at least a good portion of that $75 in the form of the value of increased productivity (I use this computer for work for my business). 2) I've had no performance complaints from the new drive. Compared to my old drive, there are nearly zero times that I'm waiting on disk I/O anymore, so if it might be a little slower (and look at the charts in the article...it's not 25% slower) I'm not really noticing where it could be improved. 3) Obsolete? I do not think that word means what you think it means. My G1 drive is neither "No longer in use" nor "Outmoded in design, style, or construction". It has been surpassed (very slightly) by a newer model, but if that translate to obsolete, then I guess anyone who isn't paying $1000 for a Core i7-975 CPU is also buying obsolete hardware. And of course, anyone who does buy a Core i7-975 for $1000 will promptly be mocked by you when the price drops to $900 or a new model 1/3 GHz faster comes out or something.
So I'm assuming you are typing your comment in from somebody else's computer, because following your impeccable logic nobody should ever buy any piece of computer technology ever because something else is going to come along and make it obsolete. I can also say that if you are not a hypocrite you'd wake up every single day and loudly thank everyone who does buy technology, because if nobody went out and paid for computers, they would not exist for you to act like a smarmy bitch on. I assure y
Getting the prices lower is definitely a move in the right direction. I'm looking forward to moving to SSD in the near future, and not having to worry about hard drive crashes anymore.
While hard drives will continue to live on for a good while yet where $/GB considerations are paramount (especially archival type applications), the performance advantages of flash drives will soon trump the decreasing cost advantage both for workstation (x25-m) and server (x25-e) environments. The case for flash in servers is even more compelling, where we measure drives in terms of IOPS and a single Intel flash drive performs 10 or 20 times better than the best hard drives on the market for a fraction of the power consumption. Understandably, many IT managers are cautious about adopting new technologies, especially when the failure characteristics are not completely known, but I suspect the advantages are so great that minds are going to start changing, quickly.
I'd love to see a RAID5 array of SSDs in a Dell PowerEdge 2950. I'm willing to bet a few of these drives alone would saturate the bandwidth on a PERC 6i controller.
I bet one drive could saturate the PERC 6i, I know it can saturate the HP P400 no problem. In fact I got about 2x the 4k random write IOPS when I used it in a workstation with Intel ICH as I did when it was connected to the P400.
I've tried an X25-M on a few servers with LSI SAS controllers (as used by PERC 6i, though I don't think I've used that exact chip) and been disappointed to encounter IO hangs and other drives disappearing randomly; even just having an X25-M plugged in is enough to seemingly make the controller rather unhappy. Doesn't appear to be a driver problem, unless it's one shared by FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris.
Hopefully Intel will do an SAS version at some point; they could compete against 15kRPM drives rather well, I
While SSD may be the new kid on the block and show signs of superiority. Hard drives retain a bit of advantage over their non-moving, solid state counter parts. Hard drives can take more write overs than SSD. Flushing the cache to the actual media is still faster on HDD than SSD. SSDs are still very susceptible to static discharge versus HDD due to more surface area having sensitive parts.
I do agree with the parent. SSD are a big thing and they have some important advantages. However, let's not go p
The x-25e is great, and I use it in a few situations, but at 8x the cost per GB of 15k FC I'm not moving to it wholesale. It's true that for $10K I could get as many IOPS as my $200K EVA, but it would only have the storage of a single drive in the array.
AnandTech [anandtech.com] has a nice writeup too. If the price curve drops like the first-gen X-25M [diskcompare.com] we should all be happy pretty soon.
..and it is fantastic. This was the largest performance increase i've seen on computers in over a decade. I was going to go with a Velociraptor because I knew how important drive access latency was but then Intel patched the fragmentation issue that was worrying me.
I got mounting rails to fit the drive into my desktop case so i'm using it as my primary desktop drive for OS, some applications (Adobe Design Premium Suite runs great on it! Photoshop CS4 loads in 3-4 seconds!), and my main games. I then have a 1.5 TB secondary drive to store my data and music collection etc. I paid around $430 for my 80GB Intel X25-M so being able to get the 160GB for that same price is a fantastic improvement. I will definitely only be going SSD in my machines from now on. Everything loads faster, I get consistently fast boot times even after months of usage.
It is amazing to see Windows XP load up and then all of the system tray apps pop up in a few seconds. You can immediately start loading things like e-mail and Firefox as soon as the desktop appears and there is no discernible lag on first load like you will get with SATA drives since they are still trying to load system tray applications.
How can reviewers be impressed by reliability when they've only had the units for, at most, a year? When these things hit the five-year mark running perfectly well with no data loss in the home/work environment, then I'll be interested.
Ok, they may have been stress tested in factories by the manufacturers, but reviewers don't do that sort of work.
If you can get a regular hard drive to the five year mark running perfectly well with no data loss, you can consider yourself moderately lucky. Rotating media is what RAID was invented for.
All you'd need to do to demonstrate to me the greater reliability of an SSD is drop it and a regular hard drive onto the table a couple of times while they're running and see which one keeps running. That would be enough to get me impressed by increased reliability. Regular hard drives are delicate beasts.
If you can get a regular hard drive to the five year mark running perfectly well with no data loss, you can consider yourself moderately lucky.
There's nothing lucky about it. Unless you are just straining the drive constantly or don't have any adequate ventilation in your box, an HDD lasting 5 years if not longer is a pretty mundane thing for quite some time.
Having recently come from a job supervising two rows of racks of servers, the hard disk failure rate seemed to match well with a 3 year expected lifetime.
Well drives in servers are also put through far more strain than a home desktop so their failure rate would be expected to be earlier than a 5 year mark for a consumer drive in a home PC.
Lucky enough that I would recommend regular backups rather than depend on your luck with the hard drive.
Wouldn't you?
Based entirely on my own experience and that of those around me? No, not really. For extremely critical information, sure, but I don't really bother backing anything up as it's pretty much all replaceable and I've never really had a hard drive fail before the 5 year mark. By the time I've ever had a drive fail it's been probably 8-10 years old and is storing nothing of extreme value anyway so anything that may get lost is easily replaced.
Considering this topic is about consumer SSDs I figured we were talking about home desktops. Of course in a business environment you would back things up because it is critical information and as I said in my post:
I've not always held on to a single hard drive for 5 years, but I've never had a desktop hard drive fail on me, ever. I've probably owned 20 different drives over the past 15 years.
I have had exactly one laptop drive fail, but that was almost certainly due to having the laptop fall off the passenger seat repeatedly while using it for GPS.
My personal X25-M (the one that started all of my reviews and Intel's subsequent patching of the fragmentation slowdown issue with the X25-M series), has had over 10 TB of data written to it. Most of those were sequential writes spanning the entire drive (HDTach RW passes). SMART attribute 5 on that drive is currently sitting at a whopping "2". That equates to only 8 bad flash blocks. It's actually been sitting ag 2 for a while now, so those blocks were likely early defects.
I suspect it will take most users *way* over a year to write greater than 10 TB to their 80 GB OS drive. Considering mine is still going strong after that much data written, I don't think there's anything to worry about.
AFAICT, sequential vs. random loses its meaning with SSDs. The access time to any arbitrary block is equal, regardless of whether it's right next to the current one or on a different chip on the other end of the board.
Not only that, but there's no way a standard defrag program would be able to tell where data is physically located with a SSD. Block addresses are mapped by the controller to actual locations because wear-leveling needs to be able to move data behind the scenes. This is transparent to the OS; the disk will still report back the same data for a given logical block address, but said data can be physically located anywhere.
Actually, surprisingly, you do need to run a kind of defragmentation.
Just not the usual one.
That's because writing in flash is in pages (4k?) but erase can be done only in blocks of 512k. So what happens is that controller have to do some insane job of joggling your writes and rewrites to spread or combine or whatever... on the fly...
As a result, after intensive use, the address space become fragmented, just like memory heap in regular software after lots of allocations/deletions.
Currently, the only way
Any kind of memory can be become fragmented after some time in use. Defragging in the traditional sense may not be as necessary (as before) as the memory addressing scheme is much faster than before and, therefore, read operations for address spaces far apart are not going to be a problem. I mean, what's the difference if the next segment of code/data is FFFFFFFF away from the last address? Nothing! There are no heads to move from location 'X' to location 'Y' therefore, the throughput is sustained. Traditio
These SSDs contain a RAM cache that's powered by the host PC IO bus. Why don't they have a battery in the SSD? The OS thinks that everything ACKed as sent to the storage unit is written, but a power failure kills the cache before it's flushed. A little battery charged off the host PC IO bus would make these drives even more reliable than spinning discs.
The OS thinks that everything ACKed as sent to the storage unit is written,
What does it matter what the OS "thinks"? When power is lost, all of its "thoughts" disappear. When you power it back on it reloads its "thoughts" from the DISK, thus there can be no confusion.
I thought the progression of feature size went: 90 nm, 65 nm, 45 nm, 34 nm.
But the graphics processors seem to be using 55, and these SSDs are being reduced from 50.
I thought they had to pour gazillions into standardizing fab construction, steppers, and all the equipment. So is some plant manager stumbling in with a hangover one morning and accidentally setting the big dial for 50 or 55 or something? What's the deal here?
The last page of the review [pcper.com] states that these should cost you roughly $3 per GB. Whether that's "laughably expensive" depends on what you want to do with the drive.
Last year when the x25-m first came out the 80 gig version cost $595, or just a little less than $7.50/gig. Now the same 1st gen drive costs $314 with a -10 dollar discount and free shipping on newegg, or about $3.92/gig.
The new 2nd generation drive 80 gig drive sells for $225, or $2.81/gig. If it follows the same price trend as the 1st gen model around this time next year it should cost ~125 dollars, or about $1.53/gig.
Here are the quick results of the xbench of my 5400rpm 160gig drive in my two year old macbook pro:
Sequential read on the SSD is over 6x faster, and sequential write is 2x faster, but for the performance where it matters the difference is much more noticeable. Random read on the SSD is nearly 140x faster, and random write is over 40x faster.
Couple that performance difference with the lower power consumption, lower noise, and higher threshold for damage, and its a no brainer as to what is the single most price-efficient possible upgrade you can make to a laptop to boost overall performance, responsiveness, and battery life.
I wish I could justify buying one now, but I can't. However, 12 to 18 months from now I will probably be shopping around for a new laptop, and when I do I won't be settling for anything but a SSD. The benefits are just to great to ignore.
I won't be settling for anything but a SSD. The benefits are just to great to ignore.
As long as they don't wear out in months, instead of years. I'm still leery of just how quickly you can start killing one of these when it's hosting the swap file. And I have yet to hear data on just how many R/W cycles 34nm cells are good for yet.
They have wear leveling algorithms. Enterprises wouldn't be buying these if they didn't work.
If you're really that worried about it just throw a velociraptor or something in your machine and put your swap file on that and use the SSD for everything else.
This has been covered many times. It's a good number. I can't recall the article, but basically if you write 20GB per day, you'll get more than 5 years out of it thanks to wear leveling and extra space (SSDs actually have more capacity than they make available to you). Now, you might scoff at that but: 1) 20GB/day is a lot for the typical user. 2) People who routinely do more than 20GB/day probably need a lot more storage than SSDs currently provide (you are talking about filling the drive in 4 days) so you probably won't be using an SSD for those purposes anyway 3) People who buy into SSDs at this point in time are typically more on the cutting edge, and are likely no have moved on before the drive wears out. 4) When the drive finally does start having problems, my understanding is that it won't just fail and you'll have lost data. The failure should happen on write, and if it fails to write that will be detectable. If it writes successfully, then it should be readable. If it does fail, I believe that part will just be marked inaccessible and the data will be written somewhere else. The drive should (again, as far as I know) provide details of the failure to SMART and other disk utilities, so the problem can be detected before it progresses to a critical stage. This is much better than magnetic media, where the typical failure is that you go to read data and it is suddenly inaccessible.
Of course, this is all just what I've read about previous generations. I have no data about the 34nm, but I have no reason to suspect it's any worse.
PS. If you want to know how much you currently write to disk and you run a linux system, check out/proc/diskstats. The 10th column should be number of sectors written. Each sector is 512 bytes, so take value*512/1024/1024/1024 and you'll get the number of GB each device has written since bootup.
Yes, I'm aware of what is in that document (that's how I figured out what the columns were to begin with). That document skips over the first 3 columns of the output for it's numbering (major device number, minor device number, and device name). It considers column 4 to be field 1. Not sure why they wrote the document that way, but PsychiKiller's command above uses awk to print out the 10th column, and that does indeed give you the number of bytes written.
Wear leveling does not extend the drive life in any way...It simply causes it to maintain capacity as long as possible
But that IS extending the life. Without wear leveling, if I've got an 80GB drive and I store 50GB of data on it which I frequently modify, then after X years that 50GB will be worn out and I'll be left with 30GB. That isn't enough for me to use, so essentially the drive is dead as far as I'm concerned. Now consider a drive with wear leveling. After X years, I will only have used up 5/8 of th
One assumes they are MLC which are still good for about 10,000 write cycles. SLCs for 100,000.
The controller does a very good job of cycling "sectors" used, so the whole disk gets good use, rather than the same areas being overwritten constantly. The MTBF for SSDs is much higher than for conventional drives as a result, although the figure is less relevant as it's much more down to usage than anything else.
Keep enough free space on the drive for the controller to do its cycling, don't use it for constant
Let's make some wild predictions based on recent price trends. (Trends found [mattscomputertrends.com] here [mattscomputertrends.com]). Over the last few years, flash memory has been increasing in GB/$ at a rate of 185% per year. Meanwhile, hard drives have slowed to only 42% improvement per year.
Based on these trends, here is the estimated cost of 10 TB using either technology:
July 2009: Platter = $750 [newegg.com], Flash = $28,125 [google.com]
July 2010: Platter = $528 [google.com], Flash = $9,868 [google.com]
July 2014: Platter= $130 [google.com], Flash = $150 [google.com]
July 2019: Platter= $23 [google.com], Flash = $0.80 [google.com]
July 2024: Platter= $4 [google.com], Flash = $0.004 [google.com]
In July 2024, a 10 PB flash drive would cost $42 [google.com]! Of course, we can't assume these trends will continue, but it seems a good bet that we won't be worrying about the size of our mp3 collections. The traditional hard drive may only have five years of competitive life remaining.
Let's make a few predictions based on recent trends:
July 2007: number of wives = 0 July 2009: number of wives = 1
July 2011: number of wives = 2 July 2013: number of wives = 3 July 2015: number of wives = 4 July 2017: number of wives = 5 July 2019: number of wives = 6 July 2021: number of wives = 7
Gosh, I'll need to implement wear levelling soon, too.
"boost overall performance, responsiveness, and battery life"
That's the crux: SSDs boost performance pretty much only when doing random reads. Not random writes, not sequential reads, and not anything not HD-related. Basically, you're boosting boot times, app launch, game level load... and anything else that has to do with disk access, exclusively.
$200-400 is a lot to pay for a boost, even sizeable, in those rare occasions. They don't help with anything CPU-, RAM- or I/O-intensive. And cost pretty much the
>Sequential read on the SSD is over 6x faster, and sequential write is 2x faster, >but for the performance where it matters the difference is much more noticeable. >Random read on the SSD is nearly 140x faster, and random write is over 40x faster.
So >Not random writes, not sequential reads, and not anything not HD-related. is wrong.
It also seems to me that you don't really need to say >[no performance increases on] anything not HD-related. or >They don't help with anything CPU-, RAM-...-intensive
I've got one of the G1 Drives (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortunately I got it for only about ~$300 so I only "lost" $100 with the new ones coming out. That having been said, I don't regret the purchase at all, it is insanely faster than any other laptop drive out there, while being completely silent and power-friendly. As for TRIM support, I've heard that Intel is not going to add it for the older drives, but I'm not sure if that is just speculation or if it's been officially confirmed by Intel (Intel not expressly say the old drives are getting TRIM support is not the same as expressly denying the support). Fortunately, the drives with the newer firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
Oh and yes, it does run Linux (Arch 64-bit to be precise) just fine.
I can't wait for next year with the ONFI 2.1 FLASH chips (the new drives are not using the new ONFI standard yet) as well as 6Gbit SATA support. At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
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Fortunately, the drives with the newer [non-TRIM] firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
I wonder how they managed that without the TRIM command, i.e. without the OS telling the HD which parts can be nulled because they are not needed anymore. Did they hide more pages from the OS which are then nulled regardless to hack together something like a buffer? But that would still show terrible write performance once that overflows. Did they implement deep-data-inspection for the most common filesystems so the HD now knows when something is deleted?
At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
I'm planning the same thing once the prices are righ
Re:I've got one of the G1 Drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I too bought a X25-M 80GB back in April (though I only payed $300, so I only overpaid by $75). That said:
1) I've enjoyed the increased performance over the last 4 months. I've done a lot of work where I've benefited from the increased performance, so I feel I've gotten at least a good portion of that $75 in the form of the value of increased productivity (I use this computer for work for my business).
2) I've had no performance complaints from the new drive. Compared to my old drive, there are nearly zero times that I'm waiting on disk I/O anymore, so if it might be a little slower (and look at the charts in the article...it's not 25% slower) I'm not really noticing where it could be improved.
3) Obsolete? I do not think that word means what you think it means. My G1 drive is neither "No longer in use" nor "Outmoded in design, style, or construction". It has been surpassed (very slightly) by a newer model, but if that translate to obsolete, then I guess anyone who isn't paying $1000 for a Core i7-975 CPU is also buying obsolete hardware. And of course, anyone who does buy a Core i7-975 for $1000 will promptly be mocked by you when the price drops to $900 or a new model 1/3 GHz faster comes out or something.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So I'm assuming you are typing your comment in from somebody else's computer, because following your impeccable logic nobody should ever buy any piece of computer technology ever because something else is going to come along and make it obsolete. I can also say that if you are not a hypocrite you'd wake up every single day and loudly thank everyone who does buy technology, because if nobody went out and paid for computers, they would not exist for you to act like a smarmy bitch on.
I assure y
Good move (Score:4, Funny)
Getting the prices lower is definitely a move in the right direction. I'm looking forward to moving to SSD in the near future, and not having to worry about hard drive crashes anymore.
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God, I hope you are never in the IS department at my company. Or any company for that matter.
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You mean it may be naive to expect zero failures with the new drives?
I wouldn't be surprised if the failure profile between moving-parts devices and solid state devices were radically different.
the era of the SSD is here (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'd love to see a RAID5 array of SSDs in a Dell PowerEdge 2950. I'm willing to bet a few of these drives alone would saturate the bandwidth on a PERC 6i controller.
Sweet.
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I've tried an X25-M on a few servers with LSI SAS controllers (as used by PERC 6i, though I don't think I've used that exact chip) and been disappointed to encounter IO hangs and other drives disappearing randomly; even just having an X25-M plugged in is enough to seemingly make the controller rather unhappy. Doesn't appear to be a driver problem, unless it's one shared by FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris.
Hopefully Intel will do an SAS version at some point; they could compete against 15kRPM drives rather well, I
the era of the SSD is not far away. (Score:2, Interesting)
I do agree with the parent. SSD are a big thing and they have some important advantages. However, let's not go p
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Faster, Cheaper, Better (Score:2)
AnandTech writeup (Score:5, Informative)
I have a G1 Intel X-25M (Score:5, Informative)
..and it is fantastic. This was the largest performance increase i've seen on computers in over a decade. I was going to go with a Velociraptor because I knew how important drive access latency was but then Intel patched the fragmentation issue that was worrying me.
I got mounting rails to fit the drive into my desktop case so i'm using it as my primary desktop drive for OS, some applications (Adobe Design Premium Suite runs great on it! Photoshop CS4 loads in 3-4 seconds!), and my main games. I then have a 1.5 TB secondary drive to store my data and music collection etc. I paid around $430 for my 80GB Intel X25-M so being able to get the 160GB for that same price is a fantastic improvement. I will definitely only be going SSD in my machines from now on. Everything loads faster, I get consistently fast boot times even after months of usage.
It is amazing to see Windows XP load up and then all of the system tray apps pop up in a few seconds. You can immediately start loading things like e-mail and Firefox as soon as the desktop appears and there is no discernible lag on first load like you will get with SATA drives since they are still trying to load system tray applications.
reliability? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, they may have been stress tested in factories by the manufacturers, but reviewers don't do that sort of work.
Compared to rotating media... (Score:2, Interesting)
All you'd need to do to demonstrate to me the greater reliability of an SSD is drop it and a regular hard drive onto the table a couple of times while they're running and see which one keeps running. That would be enough to get me impressed by increased reliability. Regular hard drives are delicate beasts.
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If you can get a regular hard drive to the five year mark running perfectly well with no data loss, you can consider yourself moderately lucky.
There's nothing lucky about it. Unless you are just straining the drive constantly or don't have any adequate ventilation in your box, an HDD lasting 5 years if not longer is a pretty mundane thing for quite some time.
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Well drives in servers are also put through far more strain than a home desktop so their failure rate would be expected to be earlier than a 5 year mark for a consumer drive in a home PC.
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Lucky enough that I would recommend regular backups rather than depend on your luck with the hard drive.
Wouldn't you?
Based entirely on my own experience and that of those around me? No, not really. For extremely critical information, sure, but I don't really bother backing anything up as it's pretty much all replaceable and I've never really had a hard drive fail before the 5 year mark. By the time I've ever had a drive fail it's been probably 8-10 years old and is storing nothing of extreme value anyway so anything that may get lost is easily replaced.
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Considering this topic is about consumer SSDs I figured we were talking about home desktops. Of course in a business environment you would back things up because it is critical information and as I said in my post:
For extremely critical information, sure,
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I've not always held on to a single hard drive for 5 years, but I've never had a desktop hard drive fail on me, ever. I've probably owned 20 different drives over the past 15 years.
I have had exactly one laptop drive fail, but that was almost certainly due to having the laptop fall off the passenger seat repeatedly while using it for GPS.
Re:reliability? (Score:5, Informative)
My personal X25-M (the one that started all of my reviews and Intel's subsequent patching of the fragmentation slowdown issue with the X25-M series), has had over 10 TB of data written to it. Most of those were sequential writes spanning the entire drive (HDTach RW passes). SMART attribute 5 on that drive is currently sitting at a whopping "2". That equates to only 8 bad flash blocks. It's actually been sitting ag 2 for a while now, so those blocks were likely early defects.
I suspect it will take most users *way* over a year to write greater than 10 TB to their 80 GB OS drive. Considering mine is still going strong after that much data written, I don't think there's anything to worry about.
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
Parent
Would You Run DeFrag on an SSD? (Score:2)
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Except that SSDs randomly relocate data and doing a software defragment doesn't make files any more contiguous.
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AFAICT, sequential vs. random loses its meaning with SSDs. The access time to any arbitrary block is equal, regardless of whether it's right next to the current one or on a different chip on the other end of the board.
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Just not the usual one.
That's because writing in flash is in pages (4k?) but erase can be done only in blocks of 512k. So what happens is that controller have to do some insane job of joggling your writes and rewrites to spread or combine or whatever... on the fly...
As a result, after intensive use, the address space become fragmented, just like memory heap in regular software after lots of allocations/deletions.
Currently, the only way
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Any kind of memory can be become fragmented after some time in use. Defragging in the traditional sense may not be as necessary (as before) as the memory addressing scheme is much faster than before and, therefore, read operations for address spaces far apart are not going to be a problem. I mean, what's the difference if the next segment of code/data is FFFFFFFF away from the last address? Nothing! There are no heads to move from location 'X' to location 'Y' therefore, the throughput is sustained. Traditio
No Battery? (Score:2)
These SSDs contain a RAM cache that's powered by the host PC IO bus. Why don't they have a battery in the SSD? The OS thinks that everything ACKed as sent to the storage unit is written, but a power failure kills the cache before it's flushed. A little battery charged off the host PC IO bus would make these drives even more reliable than spinning discs.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think the UPS will cover that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The OS thinks that everything ACKed as sent to the storage unit is written,
What does it matter what the OS "thinks"? When power is lost, all of its "thoughts" disappear. When you power it back on it reloads its "thoughts" from the DISK, thus there can be no confusion.
Was 50 nm. WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
(Yes, I know the new parts are 34 nm)
I thought the progression of feature size went: 90 nm, 65 nm, 45 nm, 34 nm.
But the graphics processors seem to be using 55, and these SSDs are being reduced from 50.
I thought they had to pour gazillions into standardizing fab construction, steppers, and all the equipment. So is some plant manager stumbling in with a hangover one morning and accidentally setting the big dial for 50 or 55 or something? What's the deal here?
$3 per GB (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Oooh. (Score:5, Informative)
Last year when the x25-m first came out the 80 gig version cost $595, or just a little less than $7.50/gig. Now the same 1st gen drive costs $314 with a -10 dollar discount and free shipping on newegg, or about $3.92/gig.
The new 2nd generation drive 80 gig drive sells for $225, or $2.81/gig. If it follows the same price trend as the 1st gen model around this time next year it should cost ~125 dollars, or about $1.53/gig.
Here are the quick results of the xbench of my 5400rpm 160gig drive in my two year old macbook pro:
Compare those to the results of the new drive here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3607&p=4 [anandtech.com]
Sequential read on the SSD is over 6x faster, and sequential write is 2x faster, but for the performance where it matters the difference is much more noticeable. Random read on the SSD is nearly 140x faster, and random write is over 40x faster.
Couple that performance difference with the lower power consumption, lower noise, and higher threshold for damage, and its a no brainer as to what is the single most price-efficient possible upgrade you can make to a laptop to boost overall performance, responsiveness, and battery life.
I wish I could justify buying one now, but I can't. However, 12 to 18 months from now I will probably be shopping around for a new laptop, and when I do I won't be settling for anything but a SSD. The benefits are just to great to ignore.
Parent
Re:Oooh. Questions Still Remain... (Score:2)
As long as they don't wear out in months, instead of years. I'm still leery of just how quickly you can start killing one of these when it's hosting the swap file. And I have yet to hear data on just how many R/W cycles 34nm cells are good for yet.
Re: (Score:2)
If you're really that worried about it just throw a velociraptor or something in your machine and put your swap file on that and use the SSD for everything else.
Re:Oooh. Questions Still Remain... (Score:5, Informative)
This has been covered many times. It's a good number. I can't recall the article, but basically if you write 20GB per day, you'll get more than 5 years out of it thanks to wear leveling and extra space (SSDs actually have more capacity than they make available to you). Now, you might scoff at that but:
1) 20GB/day is a lot for the typical user.
2) People who routinely do more than 20GB/day probably need a lot more storage than SSDs currently provide (you are talking about filling the drive in 4 days) so you probably won't be using an SSD for those purposes anyway
3) People who buy into SSDs at this point in time are typically more on the cutting edge, and are likely no have moved on before the drive wears out.
4) When the drive finally does start having problems, my understanding is that it won't just fail and you'll have lost data. The failure should happen on write, and if it fails to write that will be detectable. If it writes successfully, then it should be readable. If it does fail, I believe that part will just be marked inaccessible and the data will be written somewhere else. The drive should (again, as far as I know) provide details of the failure to SMART and other disk utilities, so the problem can be detected before it progresses to a critical stage. This is much better than magnetic media, where the typical failure is that you go to read data and it is suddenly inaccessible.
Of course, this is all just what I've read about previous generations. I have no data about the 34nm, but I have no reason to suspect it's any worse.
PS. If you want to know how much you currently write to disk and you run a linux system, check out /proc/diskstats. The 10th column should be number of sectors written. Each sector is 512 bytes, so take value*512/1024/1024/1024 and you'll get the number of GB each device has written since bootup.
Parent
Re:Oooh. Questions Still Remain... (Score:4, Informative)
Cool, thanks for the tip!
cat /proc/diskstats | grep "[sh]d[a-z] " | awk '{print $10 "*512/1024/1024/1024"}' | bc -l
Parent
Re:Oooh. Questions Still Remain... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I'm aware of what is in that document (that's how I figured out what the columns were to begin with). That document skips over the first 3 columns of the output for it's numbering (major device number, minor device number, and device name). It considers column 4 to be field 1. Not sure why they wrote the document that way, but PsychiKiller's command above uses awk to print out the 10th column, and that does indeed give you the number of bytes written.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But that IS extending the life. Without wear leveling, if I've got an 80GB drive and I store 50GB of data on it which I frequently modify, then after X years that 50GB will be worn out and I'll be left with 30GB. That isn't enough for me to use, so essentially the drive is dead as far as I'm concerned. Now consider a drive with wear leveling. After X years, I will only have used up 5/8 of th
Re: (Score:2)
Intel rated the first generation X25-M's at 100GB/day for 5 years, I'd be surprised if these were significantly worse.
Re: (Score:2)
One assumes they are MLC which are still good for about 10,000 write cycles. SLCs for 100,000.
The controller does a very good job of cycling "sectors" used, so the whole disk gets good use, rather than the same areas being overwritten constantly. The MTBF for SSDs is much higher than for conventional drives as a result, although the figure is less relevant as it's much more down to usage than anything else.
Keep enough free space on the drive for the controller to do its cycling, don't use it for constant
Re:Oooh. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's make some wild predictions based on recent price trends. (Trends found [mattscomputertrends.com] here [mattscomputertrends.com]). Over the last few years, flash memory has been increasing in GB/$ at a rate of 185% per year. Meanwhile, hard drives have slowed to only 42% improvement per year.
Based on these trends, here is the estimated cost of 10 TB using either technology:
July 2009: Platter = $750 [newegg.com], Flash = $28,125 [google.com]
July 2010: Platter = $528 [google.com], Flash = $9,868 [google.com]
July 2014: Platter= $130 [google.com], Flash = $150 [google.com]
July 2019: Platter= $23 [google.com], Flash = $0.80 [google.com]
July 2024: Platter= $4 [google.com], Flash = $0.004 [google.com]
In July 2024, a 10 PB flash drive would cost $42 [google.com]! Of course, we can't assume these trends will continue, but it seems a good bet that we won't be worrying about the size of our mp3 collections. The traditional hard drive may only have five years of competitive life remaining.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Let's make a few predictions based on recent trends:
July 2007: number of wives = 0
July 2009: number of wives = 1
July 2011: number of wives = 2
July 2013: number of wives = 3
July 2015: number of wives = 4
July 2017: number of wives = 5
July 2019: number of wives = 6
July 2021: number of wives = 7
Gosh, I'll need to implement wear levelling soon, too.
Extrapolation: almost as good as copulation.
Re: (Score:2)
"boost overall performance, responsiveness, and battery life"
That's the crux: SSDs boost performance pretty much only when doing random reads. Not random writes, not sequential reads, and not anything not HD-related. Basically, you're boosting boot times, app launch, game level load... and anything else that has to do with disk access, exclusively.
$200-400 is a lot to pay for a boost, even sizeable, in those rare occasions. They don't help with anything CPU-, RAM- or I/O-intensive. And cost pretty much the
Re: (Score:2)
So what the hell are you talking about? Did we catch you talking about something you havent research at all, again?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
>Sequential read on the SSD is over 6x faster, and sequential write is 2x faster,
>but for the performance where it matters the difference is much more noticeable.
>Random read on the SSD is nearly 140x faster, and random write is over 40x faster.
So
>Not random writes, not sequential reads, and not anything not HD-related.
is wrong.
It also seems to me that you don't really need to say
>[no performance increases on] anything not HD-related.
or
>They don't help with anything CPU-, RAM-...-intensive