"Limited Edition" SSD Has Fastest Storage Speed 122
Vigile writes "The idea of having a 'Limited Edition' solid state drive might seem counter-intuitive, but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the 'Vertex 2 Pro' and included a super-capacitor for data integrity, the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspectives's performance tests, the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow-down effects, and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge."
Re:Dial M (Score:3, Insightful)
Because we're talking about the home/enthusiast market, which is completely different (including and especially in price point) from the enterprise storage market.
Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies. (Score:5, Insightful)
If "almost a halt" is 200MB/s read speeds as opposed to 260, I think I can live with it before I upgrade to my TRIM firmware, which negates the whole issue... whoops, I started using TRIM on my home drives months ago.
Seriously, the SSD market has exploded in the last 12 months. It's gone from being an expensive tool useful to enthusiasts to a not-quite-as-expensive-but-faster-than-any-number-of-hard-drives-can-provide utility that's worth five times it's price, especially for enterprise users.
* Proud owner of 1 intel SSD, 3 OCZ SSD's and administrator of about 3TB of SSD SAN and >8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough
Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Irish coffee's bring out the best in everyone ;)
Reason I started using them at home was due to video editing - not very useful for encoding when you can rarely outpace your CPU's capability to encode stuff, but for random seeking/non-linear stuff/extracting streams/muxing, SSD's are a boon. Depending on your workload you can even get away with using crappy SSD's that are shit at random workloads but awesome at sequential.
TBH though you'll get the most noticeable improvement with using it as your system drive; apps start almost instantly and there's never any thrashing as $bloaty_app loads. Heck, my linux machines boot in 5s with the comparatively cheap OCZ Agility drives; the difference is less noticeable in windows however. Try running a laptop off an SSD for a month and then go back to a mechanical drive - the apparent slowness will drive you crazy :)
The benefits for enterprise users are especially large because 20k of SSD can replace 100k of fibre channel whilst getting 10x the performance and greater reliability. Plus Picard totally loves SSD's as he can rest his tea, earl grey, hot, on them without risking Data loss.
Re:All things are a "Limited Edition" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point. The SATA form factor is going to have much higher demand than any PCI-e card, period, for the simple fact that PCI-e is not really expandable while SATA is. SATA has a massive amount of infrastructure and momentum behind it for deployments ranging the gauntlet, small to large. That means SATA-based SSD drives are going to be in very high volume production relative to PCI-e cards. It DOES NOT MATTER if the PCI-e card is actually cheaper to produce, it will still be priced at a premium verses the SATA form factor due to the lack of volume and PCI-e will never achieve the same volume due to its lack of flexibility.
The fact that the form factor has volume demand means that many manufacturers can get a piece of a large pie by selling devices in that form factor. A larger piece than they could get selling PCI-e cards.
In addition, the competition in the space creates innovation. This is why we are seeing such a fast ramp-up in SSD performance and features. The SATA form is driving the ramp-up.
Yes, SSDs are hitting the 3Gbit SATA II phy limit. And your point is what? 99.9% of the installations out there don't actually need more bandwidth, so hitting the limit is not going to magically create more demand for PCI-e and other non-SATA solutions. The SATA phy standards will progress along with everything else. We'll have 6Gbit/s soon enough, and the delay is not going to have any real effect on SATA being the dominant form factor standard for the technology. The single port limit isn't even that big of a hurdle today since most motherboards have several SATA/E-SATA ports.
PCI-e based solutions will track the same lines as all other bus-card solutions have tracked: Low volume, premium pricing, highly-specialized, and non-standard drivers. If you are hoping to see SATA based SSDs disappear in favor of a PCI-e card you are in for one hell of a disappointment.
-Matt
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point. The SATA form factor is going to have much higher demand than any PCI-e card, period, for the simple fact that PCI-e is not really expandable while SATA is.
I think you're missing *my* point. The PCI-e standard is for expansion slots. You know, for... expansion. There already are 1TB SSD PCI-E cards, and you can plug at least 4 into most motherboards, and 6-8 into most dual-socket server or workstation boards. Just how much expandability do you *need*?
Keep in mind that 99% of the point of SSD is the speed. It finally removes that hideous mechanical component that's been holding back computing performance for over a decade now. Nothing stops you from having a couple of 2TB spinning disk drives in there for holding your movies and photos and all that junk that doesn't need 100K IOPS.
The jump from 100 IOPS of mechanical drives to the 5K IOPS of a typical SSD is huge. The improvement from 5K to 100K is just as noticeable, especially for people doing real work on their machines. I've heard from owners of both the Intel and Indilinx controller based drives that the Intel is noticably "snappier", even though the performance difference there is at most 2x.
The fact that the form factor has volume demand means that many manufacturers can get a piece of a large pie by selling devices in that form factor. A larger piece than they could get selling PCI-e cards.
How do you know? The form factor is not the only consideration, performance counts also. If a PCI-e SSD at the same price as an equal capacity SATA drive provided literally 100 times the performance, would people ignore it because.. wait... it's a funny shape for a drive? Seriously? Do you expect to buy your 3D accelerators in little brick shaped metal boxes? No? Why not? Maybe it's because the performance is more important!
Speaking of 'expandability', people often buy multiple PCI-e 3D accelerators. Two is common [wikipedia.org], and some people go as high as 3 or 4 in a single system. Nobody talks about the "limited" market of PCI-e 3D cards because they are "insufficiently expandable".
PCI-e based solutions will track the same lines as all other bus-card solutions have tracked: Low volume, premium pricing, highly-specialized, and non-standard drivers. If you are hoping to see SATA based SSDs disappear in favor of a PCI-e card you are in for one hell of a disappointment.
Err.. what? Most PCI-e SSDs look like a generic SATA host bus adapter to the OS, or use some generic SCSI HBA interface. The SATA speed limit is in the cable, not the drivers or the protocol.
I'm saying that the reason the volumes are low is because the pricing is insane. There's no need to price PCI-e devices higher than the SATA form factor. It's the same electronics. There is basically no difference, except that the PCI-e devices can be much, much faster.
I'm betting that you'll be the one shocked to find that in 5-10 years, most entry-level motherboards, especially those designed for corporate desktops, will have something like a 64GB flash drive built right into them. Heck, we're half-way there already [wikipedia.org], just give it time.