Intel's New Desktop SSD Is an Overclocked Server Drive 111
crookedvulture writes "Most of Intel's recent desktop SSDs have followed a familiar formula. Combine off-the-shelf controller with next-gen NAND and firmware tweaks. Rinse. Repeat. The new 730 Series is different, though. It's based on Intel's latest datacenter SSD, which combines a proprietary controller with high-endurance NAND. In the 730 Series, these chips are clocked much higher than their usual speeds. The drive is fully validated to run at the boosted frequencies, and it's rated to endure at least 70GB of writes per day over five years. As one might expect, though, this hot-clocked server SSD is rather pricey for a desktop model. It's slated to sell for around $1/GB, which is close to double the cost of more affordable options. And the 730 Series isn't always faster than its cheaper competition. Although the drive boasts exceptional throughput with random I/O, its sequential transfer rates are nothing special."
Re:The caps are electrolytic (Score:5, Informative)
tl;dr: these are storage caps, which don't endure the ripple currents that kill filter caps.
Electrolyte decomposition is usually caused by high ripple current, which is why caps pop mostly (only?) when used as filters, as in motherboard DC-DC converters and gadgets powered by wall-wart adapters. In this particular application, the PSU impedance is quite low and the caps are handled by on-board regulators (V=Q/C and all that), so there's no load ripple and the caps just have to sit pretty and charged with insignificant heat losses until the computer is shut down or outage occurs. Maybe that's why Intel didn't even bother to use the solid (polymer) kind.
If these caps dry out due to age or bad quality they just won't hold as much charge for emergency sync'ing, which is still better than ordinary SSDs/HDDs with no caps.
Re:The caps are electrolytic (Score:5, Informative)
The caps only need to supply enough juice to sync the RAM buffers to flash to ensure consistency of its internal block-mapping metadata (the filesystem should handle the rest through journaling and whatnot). The caps are rated at 35v but let's assume that they're kept at 12v: E = (12 v)^2 * 47 uF / 2 = 3.4 mJoules. Even at full operating load that should last for half a millisecond counting losses, but when power goes out the drive is going to stop serving requests and all it has to do is write that 1 GB buffer to a few flash blocks. More than enough, methinks.
Re:The caps are electrolytic (Score:5, Informative)
Except those caps are Nippon Chemi-con. High end high quality capacitors made in Japan. And not the kind involved in the bad caps.
Bad cap syndrome happens to the cheap caps - stuff like CapXon (aka CrapXon) and such.
In fact, a lot of bad caps you're finding are the cheap crap ones by the crap manufacturers. You can easily buy them and they will fail.
That's why you'll find people inspecting caps - and seeing if it's Nippon Chemi-con, Rubycon, Panasonic/Matsushita or other Japanese brand. (You can almost generalize it to those whose brands contain "con" in their name are higher quality - from when they used to be called condensers. The cheap brands all tend to have "cap" in their name).
So no, I don't see the caps being the weak point because Intel went and spec'd top-quality caps.
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Informative)
The much bigger reason for lack of interest in PCI-E SSDs is inability of that interface to pass on TRIM commands in the current implementations. In home use that is of far greater importance to speed over drive's life time than theoretical read and write times.
New standard: SATA express (Score:3, Informative)
There is a new standard which will increase SATA speed ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org] )
Currently, Apple computers use PCIe SSD disks, which increases their performance:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/... [anandtech.com]
"I'm very pleased with Apple's PCIe SSD, at least based on Samsung's new PCIe controller. Sequential performance is up considerably over last year's 6Gbps SATA drive. Go back any further and the difference will be like night and day, especially if you were one of the unfortunate few with an older Toshiba drive. Internal transfers are quicker, but to actually use the new SSD to its potential you'll really need a very fast external Thunderbolt array - even USB 3.0 can't completely tax it. There's still a lot more investigating that I want to do on Samsung's new controller, but my early results look very promising. It's sort of crazy that Apple now ships a mainstream consumer notebook with a PCIe SSD capable of almost 800MB/s. Now that Apple is off SATA, scaling storage performance should be much easier to do going forward. "
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Informative)
Citation Please.
In truth current gen PCIe SSDs [sata-io.org] appear to the OS as a PCIe bus connected AHCI controller with a single disk that supports TRIM. There makes it completely transparent... it works exactly the same as a SATA SSD from a software perspective.
Pretty soon we will start seeing next gen PCIe SSDs that expose themselves as an NVMe controller [nvmexpress.org] instead of an AHCI controller. Those SSDs will be backwards incompatible with AHCI but the command protocol and DMA interface enables extreme parallism so we will see pretty incredible performance for those SSDs. From a software stack perspective they use a new NVMe host controller and a new command set (ATA commands are completely gone!) So you need new drivers for it. They have OSS Win7/8/8.1 drivers available for NVMe but due to kernel limitations only the Win8/8.1 version of the driver is capable of supporting TRIM (Maybe that is where you got confused.) Win8.1 also have a NVMe driver in-box from Microsoft.
Don't worry though, AHCI PCIe/SATA Express SSDs will be with use for a very long time esp. since Win7 is rapidly turning in to the next WinXP (the version that everyone likes and uses despite Microsoft's best efforts.)
Re:The caps are electrolytic (Score:4, Informative)
None used it to flush the cache because it is too risky - the platters are not maintaining a fixed speed (they're slowing down to generate electricity) so writes to platters become tricky as the timing is off which means you can overwrite more than you expect.
Far better to just dump the buffers.
In fact, the electricity generated by the spinning platters slowing down is used to park the heads - it's called an emergency head park because it basically dumps the electricity into the voice coil that flings the heads to the mechanical stops in the park area. It's fairly violent and most hard drives have much less emergency head park life than standard power down (where the drive moves the heads to the parking area in a controlled fashion) life - a drive may have 50,000+ head load/unload cycles, but under 10,000 emergency park cycles.
You can tell because a soft-park makes only the smallest of clicking sounds on a drive when it spins down. But emergency park it and it's a much louder clunk.