Power-Loss-Protected SSDs Tested: Only Intel S3500 Passes 293
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the 95%-of-everything-is-crud dept.
from the 95%-of-everything-is-crud dept.
lkcl writes "After the reports on SSD reliability and after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs, a degree of paranoia set in where I work. I was asked to carry out SSD analysis with some very specific criteria: budget below £100, size greater than 16Gbytes and Power-loss protection mandatory. This was almost an impossible task: after months of searching the shortlist was very short indeed. There was only one drive that survived the torturing: the Intel S3500. After more than 6,500 power-cycles over several days of heavy sustained random writes, not a single byte of data was lost. Crucial M4: failed. Toshiba THNSNH060GCS: failed. Innodisk 3MP SATA Slim: failed. OCZ: failed hard. Only the end-of-lifed Intel 320 and its newer replacement, the S3500, survived unscathed. The conclusion: if you care about data even when power could be unreliable, only buy Intel SSDs."
Relatedly, don't expect SSDs to become cheaper than HDDs any time soon.
Stop Bragging! (Score:5, Funny)
"after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs"
Stop gloating about how you got the good batch of OCZ SSDs! Some of us weren't so lucky....
Re:Stop Bragging! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Stop Bragging! (Score:5, Insightful)
SSD's from certain companies were crap. Unfortunately you couldn't tell straight away (and I guess, they couldn't tell either, otherwise they wouldn't have shipped them).
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Re:Stop Bragging! (Score:5, Funny)
Companies are all about making money. I don't think they would have shipped such dodgy products, since it resulted in bankruptcy
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I hope you're referring to the fact that OCZ *did* go bankrupt in large part due to its dodgy products...
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Consumer SSDs (except OCZ) have the standard approximately 5%/year failure rate that consumer electronics makers aim for. If you want something significantly better, go for industrial electronics that is rated for better reliability. Note that industrial electronics can be even less reliable, as it expects you to read and understand the data-sheet.
So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you are good with electricity, and computer electrical needs are modest, one might be even better off by going with a solar panel setup, a couple sets of AGM solar batteries, a PSW inverter, and a MPPT charge controller. This wouldn't allow a 15 amp circuit to run at full throttle for long, but a computer that takes at most 200-400 watts (the new Mac Pro maxes at 480 watts), it would provide steady, clean power regardless of anything in the house.
Solar is cheap, so much that having a dedicated circuit i
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UPS works the same regardless if it's night, foggy, raining or snowing outside.
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:4, Insightful)
The "remote-deployed" may have something to do with it. These may be part of some kind of set-and-forget devices that are not maintained by IT types. Think industrial settings.
If the UPS units were desktop grade, they are a crapshoot for quality and would probably have to be rotated out every 2-3 years and are expensive to ship due to weight. Add in the hassle of recycling the lead-acid batteries.
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Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never found a UPS useful. I used to buy them, but this always happened:
* Power went out
* UPS didn't quite come up in time
* Computer reset
* UPS now was happy to provide power for my computer to boot
I've tried very expensive and very cheap - they just don't work for computers in my experience, and the batteries need replacing every couple of years, and are difficult to dispose of.
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Interesting)
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You probably tried to draw more power than the UPS is rated for. The UPS will cut power at this point to protect itself.
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Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never found a UPS useful. I used to buy them, but this always happened:
* Power went out
* UPS didn't quite come up in time
* Computer reset
* UPS now was happy to provide power for my computer to boot
I've tried very expensive and very cheap - they just don't work for computers in my experience, and the batteries need replacing every couple of years, and are difficult to dispose of.
"UPS didn't quite come up in time"? WTF? I've never had a UPS do that, and I"m on my third one in 12 years.
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wild guess: He's mixing a cheap off-line UPS with a horrible PC PSU that can't do the required hold-up time.
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Wild guess: He's mixing a cheap off-line UPS with a horrible PC PSU that can't do the required hold-up time.
Ah, good point. I haven't skimped on the PSU in 15 years. It's the dumbest piece of a machine to skimp on.
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The only problem with this methodology - and I'm all about repairing and not replacing - is that a poorly engineered inexpensive power supply can actually take out other more expensive parts (motherboard, SSD/HDD.. video card) if it fails spectacularly. Then your cost to repair just went up over the cost of a decent power supply. I've been a fan of Corsair power supplies in my last several builds. They're mild (500 watts) but I haven't had one fail on me yet.
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I've never had this problem. I run my computer, monitor, wifi, and cable modem into mine and it works like a champ every time. I've only had two UPSs but they both worked without fail each and every time. The only problem they have is that their power is reduced as they age.
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I have had that problem, though. I guess it depends on what hardware you have.
My guess is, shitty hardware. I've never seen this happen unless the batteries were bad. And I've been using UPS's since the mid 90's.
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Re: So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Funny)
"Your MacBook Air came with a UPS built-in, it's called the battery."
Yet another brilliant example of Apple design!
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Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Funny)
Have you considered the possibility that it's not the UPS?
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and get a UPS. Why blow more money on a slightly more reliable SSD when a UPS is so much cheaper?
That will give absolutely zero help when the machine blows a fuse and halts.
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That will give absolutely zero help when the machine blows a fuse and halts.
And what if the "fuse blown" is inside the SSD itself?
Onboard reliable power only helps in a very limited number of places that a UPS does not, and there are still plenty of obscure failure modes that onboard power doesn't protect you from.
At some point you have to accept that some things are beyond your control and maybe you should have a backup or two of your important data.
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I have backup of my important data. The problem is that it takes a couple of days to restore it all from tape so I really don't want to do that unless I really have to. As long as the price is not way too high I stick with what's most reliable.
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From the small sizes and absence of current larger drives, I deduce this is a very specific application, like an on-disk journal or a measurement recorder or the like. The UPS may be problematic for a number of reasons, in particular that it does not solve the problem, just gives the OS warning and some grace time. It is expensive though and has battery-lifetime issues.
Incidentally, you could also generate the 5V power for the SSD from 12V and give is a bit more endurance (say, 0.1-1sec) that 12V power and
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Two reasons:
1) Defense in depth. Sure, your UPSes should protect against power outages. But what if both mains and UPS fail? They may consider their data important enough that they need to prepare for that situation.
2) Niche hardware. From the sound of it, they aren't a typical server scenario. They required 16GB size as a minimum (incredibly small even for an SSD), and they tested a huge number of power loss cycles. This makes me suspect they aren't doing typical server or desktop stuff, but I haven't the
Re: So make the power reliable... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: So make the power reliable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, why test the (already discontinued) M4, which I don't remember ever being marketed as "power protected" instead of the current m500 models that actually are?
I started deploying the m500 drives as soon as l heard about that one improvement (though only one of the numerous M4s got corrupted (less than 0.1% data lost) apparently due to power loss. Admittedly none of our Intel drives have failed yet either, but the new 530s tendency to disappear after a warm boot made us wary of them up until last week when Intel finally released the firmware fix for that issue.
Re: So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Informative)
The power loss protection on the Crucial M500 worked fine in my initial tests. It can't be taken seriously as a reliable drive because it doesn't have any SMART data on longevity. There's no way to know when the drive is wearing out, so it's pretty much useless for serious work. The one I bought for testing is in my laptop, it's a fine drive there. See Tech Report [techreport.com] for a review complaining about the missing SMART data, I'm not the only one who noticed.
Intel's data on wear is very good, see my look at the 320 vs. 710 lifetime [2ndquadrant.com] for example. The replacement models, DCS3500 and DCS3700, are even better drives in every way.
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I tried to punt the details here toward the references provided, but you raise a good question: why not just use the lifetime percentage exposed at attributed 202/0xCA "Percent Lifetime Remaining". There's two problems with that data.
First off, that SMART attribute hasn't been consistent since the drive was released. See M500 960GB MU03 SMART Issue [crucial.com] as one observation about the biggest firmware change. I believe that happened after the Tech Report review. The fact that Crucial changed exposing wear data
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There's no need to bring firearms into the discussion.
Is it that hard to include a capacitor? (Score:5, Insightful)
These things are already expensive; surely spending a few more cents per unit on a capacitor to ensure power loss reliability isn't a big deal.
The cap only has to be big enough so the controller can do a controlled shutdown.
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I'm still trying to process the fact that there are new SSDs that DON'T have ultracaps. You'd think that what happened to OCZ might have taught the industry a lesson or something. Well, besides, "There's a sucker born every minute!"
Consumer grade vs. Enterprise Grade (Score:5, Insightful)
Slightly more seriously than my last post, the S3500 was the only enterprise-grade SSD tested in that batch. Frankly, I have little sympathy for you if you expected consumer-grade SSDs to perform like Enterprise-grade SSDs in a mission-critical application.
Consumer grade drives, even/especially the "high performance" ones that will often benchmark better than the "overpriced" enterprise drives, ain't designed to have perfect data retention. Of course, consumer or enterprise, any drive can fail and appropriate measures including RAID and backup* should always be in place no matter what type of drive you have.
* Yes, RAID != backup, I know, don't bother making that post.
Re:Consumer grade vs. Enterprise Grade (Score:5, Insightful)
If one company's enterprise grade drive is the same price as another company's consumer level drive, isn't it valid to compare them head to head?
Re:Consumer grade vs. Enterprise Grade (Score:4, Interesting)
A £100 budget was mentioned. I guess Intel was the only vendor that offered enterprise hardware below that.
The Intel 320 apparently delived good results as well, and that's not enterprise grade whatever that means anyway.
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Agreed.
I'd really like to see an sTec [stec-inc.com] enterprise grade drive tested. It will be over the price point, but probably not by all that much and I suspect will perform great.
am I missing something? (Score:2)
Probably... (Score:2, Informative)
That it is losing data outside of the data being written.
Some SSDs are notorious for the firmware's block tables getting corrupted if they're suddenly powered off. Unlike a hard disk, what this means is they could potentially be writing under the assumption that the set of blocks they're reading/writing are meant for an entirely different set of sectors than they actually contain. IE massive data corruption because you're not getting back the data you're assuming you will. Due to the write limits of Flash,
TFA isn't that clear about what they're testing. (Score:2)
If I were to pull the plug on a consumer grade mechanical hdd in the middle of a write, would it not lose data as well?
My only guess is that they're looking at it from the point of view of file system corruption with journaling filesystems, and whether or not stuff committed with sync() is actually safely stored on the drive at that point in time or not. However, the poor way in which the author describes this (assuming it's what he's attempting to describe at all) seriously makes me wonder why I should trust that he knows what the hell he's doing.
Some years ago while discussing design of a journaling filesystem with someo
Re:am I missing something? (Score:5, Informative)
Technically -yes-, but the issue can be catastrophic with an SSD where as with an HDD, you just loose maybe a file. Both the drive and a journaling filesystem should be able to recover from. With an SSD however, the LBAs are not mapped predominately to memory cells. They get reassigned based on whatever algorithm of wear leaving is employed. If this separate abstracted database to the drive's firmware itself becomes corrupted, you could lose the entire drive. And that's the problem, yet another abstraction that SSDs use that's completely vulnerable to uncommitted writes-backs from power failure. This is something where the OS and filesystem can't help you on an SSD. Unfortunately.
Power-loss protected? No Samsung? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, why was Samsung excluded? Their 800 series with RAID support has been tested in the past with long term writes with great results.
http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4178/10/hardwareinfo-tests-lifespan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-updated-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013 [hardware.info]
I do not mean to plug a particular brand, but the range of SSD's tested in the articles does not seem very expansive nor do they seem to fit into the criteria they specify.
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+1 for wondering why Samsung was not included.
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Also, why was Samsung excluded? Their 800 series with RAID support has been tested in the past with long term writes with great results.
Samsung's 800 series doesn't have power loss protection.
That's why it was excluded from a test where the main criteria was Power Loss Protection.
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"No official power loss protection label" is not the same as "losing data on power loss in real life".
SSD drives are fast, but they suck for reliability (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have important data don't store it on an SSD drive. I own decent size small company which ships lots of systems with the better drives (not Intel) with comparable user satisfaction ratings to Intels SSD drives and they certainly aren't that terribly reliable. They are much better than the junk SSD drives, but for real reliability stick with the 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM drives. Sadly the 7200 RPM drives are dead now. Nobody makes them for laptops. I guess the next best thing for speed + a little more reli
Re:SSD drives are fast, but they suck for reliabil (Score:4, Informative)
There's still one 720RPM laptop drive, I just bought a 1TB 7200RPM HGST drive recently...
That said one of the newer Seagate drives scored faster in a speed check. Not sure what to make of that.
Re:SSD drives are fast, but they suck for reliabil (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is all a great theory, until the "data" in question is something like copy protection hackery that someone's high-end software puts on your SSD boot disk without necessarily telling you anything about it.
The only time I had an SSD failure, the hardware guys were great and got a replacement to me the next day, while it took literally weeks (and, in the end, a recorded letter threatening legal action) to get Adobe to let me use the software I already f**king bought on the same f**king PC it was always in
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If your story includes "I use an Adobe product", you really have no one to blame but yourself for any and all disasters.
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That's cute, but approximately 100% of professionals working in graphic design would disagree with you. If someone else made products anywhere the level of Creative Suite and with better customer service than Adobe, plenty of us would use them.
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but for real reliability stick with the 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM drives. Sadly the 7200 RPM drives are dead now. Nobody makes them for laptops. I guess the next best thing for speed + a little more reliability is Intel SSD.
7200 RPM laptop drives are readily available from multiple vendors.
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If you have important data don't store it on an SSD drive.
Don't store it on any one drive.
Original research (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd trust every conclusion except the one that pretty blatantly advertises Intel. I guess that means Toshiba might be worth looking into.
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Repeat the experiment (Score:3)
An Odd Assortment of SSDs Tested (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure the reviewer tested what they had available, but I'm not sure I'd draw any conclusions from this list of drives. The drive that passes is the only current generation drive on the list. Everything else is last generation or older. In the case of the OCZ Vertex, much older. Most of the current popular drives seem to be omitted.
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UPS? (Score:3)
If you are worried about data loss during a power failure wouldn't the money be better spent ensuring there isn't a power loss?
UPS are cheap and reliable, and give you time to shut down.
Its interesting and good to know that the intel SSD survived thousands of powercycles while it was trying to work without losing a single byte of data. But my desktop SSD is on a UPS. And my laptop has a battery built into it. So a power failure affecting the SSD in the middle of an operation is pretty much unheard of.
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UPS are cheap and reliable, and give you time to shut down.
BWAHAHAHAHA! Cheap UPSs are not reliable. Seriously, just put in a new NAS this year for user backups, in a building (hospital) with extremely reliable power, but put it on a UPS just in case. And within a few months the UPS failed, abruptly cutting power to the NAS. That is just one story, but I have many others involving cheap UPSs.
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Cheap UPSes are horribly unreliable. What's more, they can be less reliable than grid power... APC's horrid SmartUPS devices had an awful tendency for a significant percentage to drop the load during a self-test, even when both battery and utility power were in perfect working order...
Even if you have dual power supplies, and connect to different UPSes, you're screwed. The SmartUPS all perform a self-test at exactly the same time, two weeks from
Did you test brownouts? (Score:2)
Hey lkcl, I don't know if this is a concern of yours, but I ended up having some fairly costly troubleshooting a few years ago with the original OCZ Vertex drives where the root cause was my laptop battery had degraded enough to where the OCZ wasn't getting the necessary voltage/current on boot-up or when the power was unplugged and it ran off of battery. The OCZ Vertex drive hardware wasn't well designed to handle not getting enough power (it was still receiving power) and totally and completely corrupted
Statistical significance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my skim through the article, it seems like he only used a single drive of each type. That makes it hard to demonstrate that the differences he saw were real, and not just random. I.e., it may be that all drives have a 75% chance of surviving the test, and that the Intel one just happened to be the lucky one. A more robust test would be to test N copies of each drive. N = 5 should give pretty good significance if this really is completely deterministic.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my skim through the article, it seems like he only used a single drive of each type. That makes it hard to demonstrate that the differences he saw were real, and not just random. I.e., it may be that all drives have a 75% chance of surviving the test, and that the Intel one just happened to be the lucky one. A more robust test would be to test N copies of each drive. N = 5 should give pretty good significance if this really is completely deterministic.
I had the same thought. And to make the sample really meaningful, the N drives from each vendor would ideally come from production different lots.
UPS (Score:2)
Yes, you could buy an Intel SSD for twice the cost of one without power loss protection. Or, you could buy a UPS for a mere $43 [amazon.com], and get protection not just for the SSD, but for all the other components, as well as non-disk related software. So why would I care about power loss protection in the hard drive again?
No fair (Score:2)
Intel needs to feed data from said drives to the NSA while you sleep.
(Side note: unplug the cat5).
Why not use a raid card with Cache Protection? (Score:2)
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That begs that you have enterprise level everything else, including dual psu's and or a UPS.
Those are all single points of failure.
You should have dual power supplies, and each power supply should be plugged into separate power busses.
Each of your power busses should be protected by a separate UPS, so that a single UPS component failure will not shut off power to both power supplies.
Each power circuit feeding the UPS supply side should be backed up by a separate standby generator on a separate
How many samples of each model? (Score:2)
Relatedly (Score:2)
I think one reason SSDs are not going to become cheaper than HD's anytime soon is because the price on hard drives is plummeting partly in response to the more slowly lowering price on SSDs - it's just the competitive nature of the industry, even if that means sometimes companies are competing with themselves. I can get a 1 terabyte 7,200 RPM hard drive for $50 bucks, or I can get a Sandisk Extreme 2 120GB SSD for $100. I was recently
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I think one reason SSDs are not going to become cheaper than HD's anytime soon is because...
...they're better.
what's the point of this? (Score:2)
As many others have posted, a UPS will protect the whole computer from data loss in the case of a power outage. what about the data stored in memory without a UPS? Are you going to test that? the idea that a capacitor can store enough temporary power for shutdown is neat but worthless. SSDs were made to replace harddrives. what happens when you unplug power from harddrives in the middle of a write? Why would you want SSDs to be better than harddrives in that function?
What does the failure rate of ocz ssd
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SSDs were made to replace harddrives. what happens when you unplug power from harddrives in the middle of a write?
Hard drives do not constantly re-arrange pages into newly-erased blocks, and so do not constantly have to update the mapping of logical blocks to physical location, so with power removed will most likely just drop whatever file data is in cache, instead of dropping the mapping update like an SSD which potentially results in massive corruption.
Re:what's the point of this? (Score:4, Informative)
HDDs, even the cheapest ones nowadays, allow the software to enforce the order in which pending data is written to safe permanent storage and software to known that pending data has indeed been safely committed to permanent storage.
The operative systems, file systems and applications build upon this to ensure that, in case of an unexpected crash, you don't end up with a corrupted file system or data. You may lose files created in the last 5 minutes, but you won't end up with a file system so corrupted that you need to re-install your computer.
Databases uses this to ensure that, once you've clicked "pay" in a e-commerce site, it will either record it properly or not at all, so you don't end up with half-way situations where you get charged and don't get the product you paid for or vice-versa.
According to reports like TFA and the article TFA was attempting to reproduce, a lot of cheap SSDs break this guarantees.
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Depends on the kind of documentation you're asking for.
The behavior is described in the HDD interface standards (ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS).
The interesting bits are the description of the desired behavior of
- write through caches
- write back caches and FLUSH CACHE EXT or SYNCHRHONIZE
- write back caches and FUA or DPO
If you want documentation on how many drives support and honor this behavior, then I can't give you much pointers.
I don't think there's a SATA HDD in the market which doesn't support and tries to honor
Test any STEC Mach2 SLC Ent NAND Flash SSDs? (Score:2)
It looks like all the SSDs the author was testing are low-end models, that obviously don't have Enterprise features such as high-end fault protection circuits / super capacitor in the design.
price was a criteria (Score:2)
Yes, of *course* he was mostly testing low-end models, one of the criteria was a price limitation!
Certainly if budget is increased then you can include more enterprise level drives which would be expected to have a capacitor for controlled shutdown. The whole point of the test is whether any of the low-budget drives behave well during power outages.
My Intel SSD sucks... (Score:3)
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My daughters WD 500 gig blue edition is damned near as fast loading levels in games.
Without testing a different HDD in place of your drive, it's silly blaming it on the SSD. It can be anything from your motherboard, SATA controller, bad memory, cable, heck you might even have some malware installed.
Really poor selection (Score:3)
I understand that the reviewer was restricted by the ultra-low price point set by his employer, but the result is that this is a really poor selection of SSDs, many of them obsolete, and is not particularly reflective of the market today. For instance, he reviewed the Crucial M4 (release date: early 2011), but not the newer Crucial M500, which according to reviews [tomshardware.com] has both RAID-style NAND redundancy and a bank of capacitors to protect against power failure. The M500 isn't even all that expensive on a per-GB basis, though it isn't available in the ultra-small sizes the reviewer apparently needed because of his very limited budget.
There are other, even more glaring, omissions. No mention of any Samsung drive? Nothing from SanDisk? These are two of the biggest SSD vendors, and both have a good reputation for reliability. Leaving out their products makes this roundup almost worthless.
The SSD market is advancing so fast that reviewing drives over 2 years old is going to give an extremely misleading impression of the current state-of-the-art.
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> Isn't this why god created UPS?
When my UPS battery starts going bad, the first sign is that it just cuts the power without warning. If you have a SSD, that could be the deathblow that sends your data bye-bye.
The bigger question, though, is WHY THE FUCK can't we either disable whole-drive encryption, or at least set it to a key WE control, with some means to read the bits from even a drive that's totally nonfunctional SATA-wise (JTAG, SPI, whatever) and reconstruct it offline? That's why I despise Sandf
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When my UPS battery starts going bad, the first sign is that it just cuts the power without warning. If you have a SSD, that could be the deathblow that sends your data bye-bye.
What is the first sign that the backup power on the SSD isn't going twitchy?
At least you could get redundant UPS and test them from time to time.
And at the end of the day you still need backups. On disk backup power still isn't going to help you if someone spills their coffee into your computer, or if the building burns down.
Re: UPS (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Jobs created UPS technology?
You're missing the point of this advertisement. Only an Enterprise class Intel drive will save your data. All other factors of the test are irrelevant, like the other drives being consumer grade or that all the other drives were beaten with a rubber mallet for 5 minutes before each test while the intel was handled with silk mittens attached to 7 grounding point. And you definitely don't need to pay attention to the fact the power loss with the Intel drive was carried out via software shutdown while the other drives were done by power surging the computer until the motherboards burst into flames.
Nope, pay no attention to that irrelevant information. Just remember that only official certified and authorized Intel drives can protect your data. Now please wait while the next advertisement queues up, which will explain how the Intel drives protext your data with a computer rendering of the drive tucking your data into bed at night before turning off the lights.
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I can, but you won't be able to decipher it without the magic seer stones of Itsajokelaughdamnit.
Those seer stones are also good for translating ancient gold tablets that detail how to create your own religion.
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Given that the 840 EVO only came out this summer, both those drives are still under warranty.
So why didn't you get them replaced?
Lots of people are using those drives without issue. It sucks that you got two bad ones, but it's hardly representative of the drives as a whole.
Or if you really don't want to deal with them, take them out of the 'garbage bin' and give 'em to someone who'll do the RMA themself for a free drive.
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Sure, of course. But all the UPSes in the world aren't going to help when a capacitor on that particular system's motherboard pops.