Western Digital Launches First SSD 163
Vigile writes "The solid state disk market keeps getting more crowded, but the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD marks the first offering from a player that currently dominates the market of traditional spindle-based hard drives. It was a year ago this month that WD purchased SiliconSystems for $65m, a small, enterprise-level SSD vendor that developed its own storage controller. Western Digital obviously made the move to prepare the company for the inevitable situation it finds itself in today: solid state has surpassed traditional media in performance and will likely soon become the mainstream storage choice for computers. PC Perspective has put the first consumer-level SSD option from one of the kings of HDDs through the wringer and found the drive to be a solid first offering, with performance on par with the some of the better solutions in the market while not quite fast enough to take away the top seatings from Intel and others. Western Digital has seen the writing on the wall; the only question is when the other players in the hard drive market will as well."
Hot Hardware ran their own series of tests, coming to a similar conclusion: "There is no question the SiliconEdge Blue doesn't light up the benchmarks like some of the more recent SSDs we've tested, but it's a solid product from a well-respected brand name storage company."
Gah (Score:2)
I really wish prices dropped on these things. I know they have come a long way since they were first released, but still... my Dell Mini 9 hungers for a storage upgrade, but the price per GB is still insane.
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I really want a SSD for my netbook - I worry about how much abuse the little thing takes in a day at school - but I can't really justify spending more on a hard drive than I spent on the entire computer!
*Sigh* Maybe for my next one.
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but I can't really justify spending more on a hard drive than I spent on the entire computer!
That too is a problem. A 32 gig SSD for my Mini 9 would run me right around $100 or so...considering I only paid $250 for it, that's an ass of a deal. I may end up going with a 16 gig, which can be had for around $50...the only problem is that I only want the bigger hard drive for gaming (the Mini 9 is AWESOME if you plan on playing anything pre-2002), but most of the games from a ways back are fairly small, especially the older ones like Wasteland (which is somewhere around 700k).
Meh, I don't know...all
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I paid $115 for a 64G for my netbook in January. But prices have gone up since then. SSDs have been fluctuation pretty wildly lately. the same model SSD is $189 now. Also the performance of the one I bought only get 150MB/s reads and 90MB/s writes, but that is good enough and plenty for my little Core2 netbook.
As for space. I have half of it dedicated to OpenSolaris and half for Linux. And I never actually run OpenSolaris so it is essentially going to waste. I'd have to say the amount of space I get is plen
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I must have gotten a deal. My mini 9 has a 32 GB SSD installed in it. It cost me $25 more to get it.
I keep on looking at the 64GB ones.
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SSDs are still way too expensive for how much space you get.
That's why you don't buy them for storage, you buy them for performance. Who cares about the access time of their movie collection, when the OS suddenly runs like it's supposed to in the 21st century?
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That's why you don't buy them for storage, you buy them for performance
I know. I have all of my archives sitting on a Western Digital Green drive (a WD15EADS to be exact) backed up on to two hard drives (1.25 TB total) sitting in a Kingwin DK-32U-S.
Who cares about the access time of their movie collection, when the OS suddenly runs like it's supposed to in the 21st century?
In this instance, I care because upgrading the mini PCIe SSD in my Dell Mini 9 is going to cost more than 1/3rd of what I paid for the laptop. Considering I only want to upgrade it so I can hold more games on there and it is used as a "while watching movies" laptop, I would rather not buy 33%+ of the whole laptop again.
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Blame Moore's Law, really. After all, SSDs grow in space in accordance with Moore's Law (since doubling transistors doubles storage capacity - SLC or MLC flash). Spinning disk technology however has been growing at a far faster rate. And controller technology is improving, but there's still room for impr
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Buy three. What are you afRAID of? (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently, on Newegg, their Intel SSDs (I singled out Intel as they reportedly make the best) come in a maximum of 160 GB. That is honestly a pathetic amount of storage. When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them.
Either you have a laptop, or you're afRAID to put more than one drive in a desktop PC. Maybe you need to RAID NewEgg and buy three SSDs. Or you can take a step back, realize that a half terabyte is a step toward some goal [catb.org], and describe this goal. What do you plan to put on this 500 GB drive?
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I need 500 GB drives because I currently run a 1 TB RAID 5 array. I don't need to get 500 GB total space (I have more crap than that anyway), it'd just be very impractical to build a 1 TB array using 160 GB drives. Granted, I probably wouldn't use RAID 5 because the drives aren't prone to random death like magnetic drives, but it would still be 6 drives to get the kind of capacity I want. That's a bit more than I'm willing to go along with.
As to goal... I tend to have a lot of software/game disc images, mov
Re:Buy three. What are you afRAID of? (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, I probably wouldn't use RAID 5 because the drives aren't prone to random death like magnetic drives
You must be pretty new to SSDs. My experience with old ones is they work great, until one random day they never work again, at all, with 100% data loss. Some people experience they "merely" fail to write but can still be read. It seems pretty random.
Hard drives at least some of the time fail gradually and sometimes making horrible noises or taking a long time to spin up.
SSDs, so far in my experience, pretty much define random death, although they're overall pretty reliable.
Re:Buy three. What are you afRAID of? (Score:4, Funny)
You know, you could have solved that problem.
Not the battery dying in the cold dark at 2 AM in the parking lot of the "gentleman's club". That battery is gonna die; there's no helping that.
But that awkward call to the missus... doesn't have to happen. Just make sure she works at the club. If she has her car, problem utterly solved. If not, at least you get to hang out with a stripper who is already predisposed to talk to you. Even if only to nag you about not having had that battery changed earlier. And the cat litter.
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IMO the way to go for desktops at the moment is to keep the bulk stuff on hard drive(s) and reserve the SSD for stuff which is relatively small but subject to frequent random access (primerally your OS and applications).
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You don't need high performance for that stuff.
Step down the performance requirement a notch and the price goes down rapidly.
You're doing it wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
Use your SSD for the stuff that needs lightning fast access: your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.
If you are keeping software/game disc images to mount and use, just copy the source for a few of the ones you use most often to your SSD and leave the rest on regular storage. If you are keeping them as an archive to burn another disk if your master gets screwed up, don't even think of putting it on an SSD. The price per GB is way to high to use it as a warehouse.
You really don't need to keep media on an SSD. Just how fast to you plan to watch that movie or television show, anyway? Traditional media WAY more than suffices to stash your terabytes of audio and/or video. You can put the media application (e.g. Windows Media Player, VLC, whatever) on your SSD so that it launches and responds quickly, but putting the media itself on your SSD is a colossal waste. (With one possible exception: if you are editing media files, it might be worth having a workspace on your SSD.)
My suggestion is to buy one SSD and install your OS and essential applications on it. The contents on this drive should remain relatively stable. Also install a pair of large traditional media drives in a redundant configuration (RAID 1) and store all of your data (including SSD backups!) on it. Whenever you upgrade your OS or install new software on the SSD, create an image of it using something like Acronis [acronis.com] or PING [windowsdream.com]. If you're paranoid, keep an extra SSD on-hand in case the one you installed fails, so that you can get back up and running quickly.
You get the best of all worlds. Speed, redundancy, and not spending as much as your car costs to have a terabyte of storage. A few hundred bucks should be plenty.
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your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.
Do people reboot that often or have so little RAM? I mean, personally I have enough RAM that most of the OS and any applications I use with any frequency will be cached anyway. I can see the use for portable and constrained devices, but is there a significant benefit compared to simply adding more memory?
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Many people have laptops, and they use energy even in suspension mode, so powering them off is useful.
I usually hibernate, but that uses the disk too, so it doesn't buy me much time.
I does buy me time is running apps that start from cold boot in less than a couple of seconds, excluding one or two (like Firefox or Eclipse).
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Your applications don't always benefit from extra RAM, while improved random access helps.
Remember that some Windows versions are eager to send to disk parts of an application, even if there is still free memory. As for adding more memory, you are limited (usually) at 8-12GB (more RAM is much more expensive in both high capacity DIMM prices and many DIMM slots mainboards).
And more memory doesn't accelerate the application's first start, and (especially) simultaneo
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Getting the best of both worlds would mean getting low latency access to bulk file metadata, as well. I don't even mean fancy stuff like tags or what have you; but it would be nice if file listings would appear instantly instead of just very quickly, ideally including the icon thumbnails for media data if you're browsing graphically, finding files (recursively) should be super fast, as well. None of this is easy to do without doing strange ninja stuff, though, if it's possible at all.
Personal media archive (Score:3, Informative)
I tend to have a lot of software/game disc images, movies, and TV shows sitting around on my PC (both "very legit" and actually legit), and while I don't strictly need to have them all on the disk at once, I'm in love with the convenience of being able to pull anything up at a moment's notice.
If you are keeping a personal archive of a terabyte of video and software installers, I'd recommend keeping the works that you're not currently using on an external RAID. Put your media on that and use an SSD for your operating system, installed applications, and frequently used documents. Just don't use RAID 5 if you aren't prepared to suffer the consequences of one drive failing and then another failing during recovery.
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For what it's worth, I could once restore my partition table using TestDisk [cgsecurity.org].
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ZFS + L2ARC & ZIL on SSD.
It really doesn't care how big your drives are. Just take all your drives, shove them into a RAIDZ1, (you will be limited by the smallest size hard drive).
Then put ZIL and L2ARC on the SSD cards. Fast AND big.
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test [sun.com]
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I bought an Intel SSD in March 09. Fast forward to February 2010 and WEI showed a 5.9 score--the same as a spindle drive. I did a secure erase using hdderase 3.3 and performance shot up to 7.4. HDTune also showed massive improvements (don't have the numbers for that handy, though).
TRIM makes a HUUUUGE difference.
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I'm afRAID to tell you that the TRIM command is unavailable in RAID sets
Why is this the case? Why can't the RAID controller split up a TRIM on the array into TRIMs on each drive?
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Why is this the case? Why can't the RAID controller split up a TRIM on the array into TRIMs on each drive?
The RAID controller can't split a TRIM command among the drives because that feature requires a great deal of development, testing, and validation. All of those things cost money that isn't going to be spent adding features to old products. Count on TRIM-aware RAID controllers being introduced over the next several years. And by introduced, I mean sold for a profit to replace existing hardware.
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You can get 500GB+ drives, but not from Intel.
On newegg, OCZ has a PCI-E SSD that has 500GB or (either 750GB or 1TB) of storage, and data transfer rates of 700MB/s +/- 100MB/s depending on read/write.
Of course, the $1k-$2k price tags might scare off most customers.
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Back when 1GB drives started becoming available at less than $1 per MB, it was a huge deal. Seriously, Computer Shopper and other magazines practically had orgasms, based on all the "NOW UNDER $1/MB" ads I saw. Yet, people still bought 1GB drives. My 60GB OCZ Vertex cost about $180, which puts it around $0.33 per GB. That alone is over three orders of magnitude cheaper than 1995 tech.
In a few years, 1TB SSDs will be as commonplace and cheap as 8GB USB sticks. Remember when those were over $100 for 64MB? Wha
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I hate replying to myself, but what I meant to say was $3/GB. But that's also two orders of magnitude and change. $3 per GB is nothing to sneeze at, when it used to be $1000/GB for a plain old magnetic disk.
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My problem with SSDs isn't even the price per GB (which is bad enough). It's the amount of space, period. (...) When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them.
Unlike mechanical drives which have a very clear sweet spot the SSD prices scale almost linearly with size. Actually I have no problems finding a 512GB SSD [prisguide.no] in stock here in Norway. The downside is that it costs 1800$ with or 1450$ without VAT, exactly double what the 256GB version costs.
Re:Gah (Score:4, Informative)
My problem with SSDs isn't even the price per GB (which is bad enough). It's the amount of space, period. Currently, on Newegg, their Intel SSDs (I singled out Intel as they reportedly make the best) come in a maximum of 160 GB. That is honestly a pathetic amount of storage. When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them. Not a moment before.
You're doing it wrong. You don't get an SSD for document storage. That's what spinning disks and RAID are for. No, you get an SSD for your root partition including /etc /bin /lib /usr and /var (or C:\windows and C:\program files). You don't really need /home to be fast (although velociraptor drives and RAID are nice), but putting your binaries, config files, and shared program files on SSD is the thing that will give you the biggest performance jump you've had in years (disk access being the bottleneck that it is). Most people can fit their root partition on a cheap 30GB SSD with plenty of room to spare; I'm personally at 13.22GB/29.35GB on an OCZ Vertex 30GB and loving the 10s boots and instant OpenOffice coldstarts. Of course it's better than just fast application launching--programs which load a lot of data (i.e. from /usr/share) are also much quicker.
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You don't really need /home to be fast (although velociraptor drives and RAID are nice)
Although there are a few usage scenarios where the 300GB Velociraptor [newegg.com] is still the clear winner, the 2TB Caviar Black [newegg.com] generally does better in most real-world situations.
When you factor in the $0.80/GB vs. $0.14/GB, the 2TB Caviar Black is the clear price/performance winner for rotating magnetic disks.
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The nice thing about an SSD is that it's small and can handle the brunt of the big jobs that need speed. So, I decided to replace my single 7200 RPM 3.5" drive with an SSD for the boot drive, and a 5400 RPM 2.5" drive for storage. I will never go back to hard drives for the boot system, no matter how much space I need. Mounted on a 3.5" adapter, both drives take up the same amount of space as a single 3.5" drive, and everything runs incredibly cool in near silence. With the speed of the SSD for my main
Any word about the write cycles limit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Any word about the write cycles limit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Any word about the write cycles limit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any word about the write cycles limit?
That's one thing everyone seems to be forgetting.
I don't think anybody is forgetting anything. With wear leveling and whatnot the MTBF is pretty comparable to that of a traditional HDD. Especially given how quickly capacities are growing and how often drives get upgraded or replaced.
The odds of you burning out an SSD by hitting the write cycle limit before you want to replace it anyway are fairly slim.
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People have forgotten because with wear leveling its a fixed issue with most SSDs. Its MTBF is on par with mechanical disks.
The new hotness is to make sure your OS and disk support TRIM so you dont have performance issues down the line. I bought a 60gig OCZ drive a month or two ago and run Win7 on it (both support TRIM). 200+/mbs reads with no latency. Its pretty nice for gaming load times. I still have 2 500gig drives for storage. Works great. When the 120gig model goes on sale I'll switch to it and p
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I've been running tests with the little Intel 40G MLCs. So far I am getting a durability run-rate of around 110TB (the drive is rated for ~40TB). That is, I'll be able to do at least 100TB worth of writes to this particular SSD before it wears out. That's actually quite a lot. Intel's specifications are very conservative.
MLC flash has approximately a 10,000 cycle endurance. It all comes down to two things: (1) How good the drive software is at combining dynamic and static wear leveling algorithms and
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That's one thing everyone seems to be forgetting.
How could it be forgotten when it gets brough up every single time SSDs are discussed ?
And, of course, every single time the same point is made that wear-levelling solved the problem years ago.
Re:Any word about the write cycles limit? (Score:5, Informative)
Wear leveling isn't some magical pixie dust that suddenly solves the write cycle limit. It just spreads the writes so that it takes longer wear it out.
But for some numbers they give (if I read it right) they say you can write 42.1GB each day on the largest (256GB) for 5 years. Which is about 76832GB before it goes 'poof'.
And some more info, the 256GB SSD contains 16x K9MDG08U5M-PCB00 chips. Which are 128Gbit each. Which comes to 256GB, which is odd, as you need spare space for wear leveling. But, specs save us again. 256GB SSD contains: 500118192 user sectors. Which is 238GB in flash. So that leaves 18GB for wear leveling.
(See: http://www.samsung.com/global/system/business/semiconductor/family/2010/1/1/Nand_Flash.pdf [samsung.com] for info about the chip size)
Uh, where was I going with this? 42.1GB each day, or a max of 76832TB writing. On 238GB, which is 322 full write cycles.
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*GB
Please don't let this get like LCD monitors (Score:4, Interesting)
They aren't good replacements for mechanical HDs. They require tons of background work to keep wear leveling working and I don't trust normal day to day use (rather than occasional like you have now with SSDs in netbooks and storage drives) won't wear the things down incredibly quick.
Plus every single one I've ever tried do not have significant overall performance increase. Burst speed seems good but sustained and general use seems to be on par or even worse than standard mechanical drives, and writes are horribly slow.
But of course, since it's new and exciting and tons of attention are being focused on them, they will become standard despite their huge limitations, much like LCDs with their horrible motion tearing, flimsy hardware (barely touch any LCD screen and it's fucked) and overdriven colors that just makes things look "shiny" to make people think they look better when they really don't.
But soon enough I won't be able to even buy a goddamn real HD, just like I can't buy a CRT now thanks to companies convincing people to buy inferior products.
I really wish I could leave off AC on this post, but I know idiot mods are going to treat it as a troll post and mod it down to oblivion. But I truly believe this and am just stunned to the point of near-frustration at the ignorance of the buying public lately who will buy any new pile of garbage as long as it's hyped to hell. I mean, you have something like the worst piece of hardware ever that is KNOWN to fail eventually regardless (the XBox 360) and people are still buying the damn thing. That's incredible consumer ignorance, and makes companies realize they can put any pile of garbage out and people will buy it as long as it's hyped to death, which is horribly wrong.
Get some sense, people.
Re:Please don't let this get like LCD monitors (Score:4, Insightful)
The LCD thing pisses me off too. While I have a CRT monitor that is quite good, people usually advise me to buy a LCD and their argument is usually that then I could have two monitors. Yes, I could. One behind the other. It wouldn't do me any good though.
Now it will be the same thing with hard drives. In a way, it already is. I don't need the drive to be super fast, no. 30-40MB/s of linear read speed would be enough for most of my drives, but I have to buy 7200RPM drives with a lot of cache that do 100MB/s. How about a huge 5.25" Full Height drive with >10 platters that does 40MB/s and has 50ms full seek. The drive would probably be cheaper or more reliable because of the lower data density or it would have much more capacity than the regular 3.5" drives.
I don't trust flash based storage devices. If the power supply fails and sends +30V where 5V should have been the flash memory will be destroyed with all its contents. If this happens to a hard drive, I could at least bring it to a data recovery company (if the data is very valuable) or try to recover the data myself (if the data is not that valuable). It would probably only need a circuit board replacement. Oh, and flash memory has a limited number of write cycles.
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Now it will be the same thing with hard drives. In a way, it already is. I don't need the drive to be super fast, no. 30-40MB/s of linear read speed would be enough for most of my drives, but I have to buy 7200RPM drives with a lot of cache that do 100MB/s. How about a huge 5.25" Full Height drive with >10 platters that does 40MB/s and has 50ms full seek. The drive would probably be cheaper or more reliable because of the lower data density or it would have much more capacity than the regular 3.5" drives.
There was a drive like that in the 90's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot_(hard_drive) [wikipedia.org]
Sucked ass performance wise, but good price per MB.
Where SSD score big is random IO, in real world use sequential IO performance is largely moot. Random IO dominates performance. SSD are orders of magnitude better performing on random IO, especially reads.
I don't trust flash based storage devices. If the power supply fails and sends +30V where 5V should have been the flash memory will be destroyed with all its contents. If this happens to a hard drive, I could at least bring it to a data recovery company (if the data is very valuable) or try to recover the data myself (if the data is not that valuable). It would probably only need a circuit board replacement. Oh, and flash memory has a limited number of write cycles.
That's what backups are for. You do make backups, right?
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There was a drive like that in the 90's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot_(hard_drive) [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]
Sucked ass performance wise, but good price per MB.
Where SSD score big is random IO, in real world use sequential IO performance is largely moot. Random IO dominates performance. SSD are orders of magnitude better performing on random IO, especially reads.
And I need a small, but fast drive for system files and programs/files that need high performance and a big but not necessarily fast drive for my movie collection. I said linear read because I would only need 40MB/s speed is if I was moving the files to another drive or writing them to tape. In which case I am reading/writing large files, so the drive does not need to have a lot of cache or RPMs. I also use one drive as external, connected via USB. USB2 can't do more than ~40MB/s anyway.
My small, but fast d
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I like this post. Too bad it *won't* get the credit it deserves in the mod system (haha, right now it's at -1: Troll), but I'll weigh in (as AC of course) and say that I do agree, by and large, that the quality of electronic consumer goods is definitely sucking lately.
Other examples include:
- PC keyboards (I still have 80s-era IBM keyboards that work flawlessly)
- Audio equipment (can anyone say "iPod earbuds?" or "bad mp3 bitrates")
- Overreliance on lame fly-by-wire technologies (Toyota, etc)
Not to sound l
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It's the nature of the beast. If a company produces goods which are too high in quality their sales volume goes down (because nobody is replacing the item after a few years) and they go out of business. Well, not quite true but close enough. Either the company goes out of business in the high-volume low-cost commodities market *OR* they jack up their prices and go for the low-volume high-quality market. If they do that, of course, the product will no longer be considered a consumer good.
All consumer goo
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I really wish I could leave off AC on this post, but I know idiot mods are going to treat it as a troll post and mod it down to oblivion.
Is your karma really that important to you?
I don't agree with you, but I do recognize that you have reasons for choosing the hardware you do. So does everyone.
The only reason I can see you get modded down is not your opinion on the hardware, its that you call everyone an idiot that doesn't agree with you.
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Hard to tell if you are the original AC from above or a different AC.
Its not that you called the mods idiots, you called EVERYONE an idiot who does not agree with you.
If it is everyone else then its not them, its you.
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The majority is not always right.
The lone voice in the wilderness is not always crazy.
FWIW, that's the fatal flaw of popular moderation systems like this. Lucky metamoderation can help, but usually doesn't it seems.
That said, I think the original commenter ranting about how SSDs will drive his beloved rotary magnetic media out of existence is right in that respect but SOL.
Horse-and-buggy required cute adorable fuzzy horses, but that didn't keep cars off the roads.
It's just karma (Score:2)
The majority is not always right.
Agreed.
The lone voice in the wilderness is not always crazy.
Also agreed.
I still don't see the point in hiding ones slashdot username just because you think you might get modded troll.
Hell its just karma, whats the worst that can happen?
Be known as the Luddite who hates LCD monitors and SSD hard drives? Oh No! NOT THAT!
I of course am not using you as in you specifically, but the general you of the strawman I'm creating from the AC posts above.
Now if someone was posting illegal or confidential information or had an actual fear of retaliation beyond the confin
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Althought I still think spinning metal discs will last. Only due to the total storage density of traditional HDD. It will take a long time for SSDs to fit 1.5TB into a drive bay, and not cost
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I don't have to worry about 1080 vs 720 native resolution problems. I can show 1080i just as nicely as 720p.
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Then I must be terribly lucky, as my 19" Samsung has been dropped on the floor twice and it's working flawlessly.
Price / Perfomance Question (Score:4, Informative)
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Along those lines, Anand suspected the PCB was similar to the new JMicron unit I reviewed recently. This prompted me to add another page to the article detailing the similarities between the drives:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=878&type=expert&pid=11 [pcper.com]
Regards,
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
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I just bought a drive from Newegg.com. They were selling the Dane-Elec repackaged Intel 80 GB drive (with a USB upgrade kit) for $150 -- under $2/GB.
It's a G1 Intel drive but it can do 35,000 read IOPS per second (only 3,300 write IOPS though). Still much better random performance than anything other than the G2 Intel.
The linear performance of the Intel drives isn't so great (movie ripping / etc) but if you know you're doing linear work, storing the
Flat panel monitors all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
Just when large CRT monitors became affordable albeit heavy, the companies rolled out smaller flat panels. Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.
Similarly right when magnetic drives are near-free, the companies roll out smaller, and in some cases slower SSD's which are less expensive to make, cheaper to ship and over the long run (probably) have lower field defect rates born of their no moving parts. So of course they will charge more for them.
Everything old is new again. Wait and see companies that offer Netbooks with NO storage as an 'option' and then charge up the wazoo for a crappy sized SSD touted as 'premium'.
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So are you trying to say that people are moving to SSDs for no reason?
Really? Are you sure about this statement? Or are you pulling numbers out of your ass? What makes you think they're cheaper? What if they actually are more expensive and not so big conspiracy?
Flat panel != LCD (Score:2)
Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.
Same with most anything else during the last twenty years. I once investigated a 2.50 increase in a 16.00 phone bill due to a 'tax'. It turned out the tax was 0.03 and that 2.47 was the maximum sum the phone company was allowed to charge for 'handling' the tax. They do that because t
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Just when large CRT monitors became affordable albeit heavy, the companies rolled out smaller flat panels. Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.
And people happily paid the premium for large displays that didn't crush their desks.
And after a few years the prices came down, and now it's virtually unheard-of to buy a big ol' CRT unless you're doing some fancy graphics work.
Similarly right when magnetic drives are near-free, the companies roll out smaller, and in some cases slower SSD's which are less expensive to make, cheaper to ship and over the long run (probably) have lower field defect rates born of their no moving parts. So of course they will charge more for them.
Similarly, people are happily paying the premium for faster drives that use less power and have fewer moving parts to break.
And after a few years the prices will come down and it'll be virtually unheard-of to buy a traditional HDD.
Re:Flat panel monitors all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
And in a few years, LCDs came down in price so quickly. In 2002, I bought a *cheap* but decent quality 17" LCD monitor for $400. In 2010 I can buy a comparble quality 24" monitor for around $225. You can now buy a 46" HDTV for well under $1000 today. You could NEVER buy a CRT of that size for so little. And it was a rarity to see a CRT TV larger than 37" anywhere but in the wealthiest homes.
Once manufacturers recoup their R&D costs and achieve economies of scale, the prices on SSD will come down too. Once are close enough in cost compared spinning magnetic media that their additional benefits outweight any cost advantage of spinning disks, HDDs will become obsolete, and the entire market will switch to SSD, and then they'll get even cheaper.
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The question is when will SSDs get cheap enough, or good enough, for most people. Honestly I have a bigger problem getting cheap (and large) enough backup storage. DVD-Rs are laughable and Bluray is still too expensive. Considering buying a backup HDD, but HDDs are not exactly small and portable
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That's probably true in the mid term. As soon as it does though some new marginally better and far more expensive technology will be touted as the next breakthrough. For LCD screens though there was really only one period of time where the prices dropped rapidly. It was about 2.5 years ago. Since then prices have been flat or nearly flat.
Have you ever considered why Netbooks are what they are? Why is it that 'regular' laptops of less than stellar performance can't cost $300 new? Because there's no point in
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Once manufacturers recoup their R&D costs and achieve economies of scale, the prices on SSD will come down too.
Yes, there are multiple factors. There's R&D costs, the costs of retooling the factories, and the costs of retraining personnel. I don't know about SSDs, but at least in the case of LCDs, there were also problems with defects in the factories. Even if it was cheaper to produce a panel, there was a greater failure rate and they had to account for the cost of producing failed units.
I mean, yes, these companies want to jack up the price as much as they can, but there is real competition in the market w
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LCDs generally have become a lot cheaper, but most of the cheap ones nowadays use crappy TN film panels, which means mediocre or average image quality.
I guess it depends how picky you are about these things. After seeing and using my first S-IPS based LCDs (Apple Cinema Display and EIZO L997), I haven't looked back. The difference is night and day,
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Why was it called a "floppy" drive? Or a Stanley "Steamer?"
Legacy technology is the province of technological historians. And old guys telling you young punks to take your electric cars and get off my driveway.
Besides, we'll always have Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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Disclaimer: I'm an SSD evangelist, I think they're great and probably the most important thing to happen to storage in at least the last decade.
I was also one of those people who held on to their CRT's for an age because, for me at the time, TFT's provided zero benefit to me. However, a few years later I've found some displays that didn't cost much more than their good quality CRT counterparts used to, as well as being much smaller, sharper and providing almost-as-good colour fidelity.
SSD's, on the other ha
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That's what we're seeing. I think of an SSD more like an extension of memory and less like a hard drive. For mass storage the hard drive is the most efficient solution, and for performance the SSD is the most efficient solution. If you can fit the working data-set extracted from the HD onto your SSD you are golden.
Most servers still only use a 1GigE network link, which is only 100MB/sec. The cheapest SSD can trivially do 100MB/sec, so if the data-set fits you now have a server capable of saturating the
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Indeedy - it's improved even more by products like FusionIO which can act like a colossal cache between your server and your SAN which get you your craptons of cheap storage plus lightning-fast IO for the bits that matter (assuming they're being used frequently enough).
We were lucky enough to get a good deal and our SAN fabric is all over 10Gb iSCSI, hopefully to be upgraded to FCoE-capable kit in a year or so, and it's pretty easy to saturate that even with plain old SAS/SATA drives (when we got it we play
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I find it unlikely because in the last decade or two it has become very important for programs to be able to know whether accessing a bit of memory is going to cause a long page fault / stall due to I/O, or not. Simply mmap()ing a file isn't good enough in a threaded environment (when running a threaded application) where the app might be holding locks through the memory access. At least not unless the application has very good locality of reference and can assume the memory in question will be well-cache
Price & Performance (Score:3, Insightful)
Not for sale yet. (Score:2)
Or, if it is, no one id talking about the cost, which is therefore presumably somewhat high.
It's a solid product (Score:4, Funny)
Pun not intended!
mainstream (Score:4, Insightful)
you'll know SSD has gone mainstream when they do 512 GB + 256 GB = 0.8 TB
Damnit! (Score:3, Funny)
You fool! Don't give them any ideas!
EMP Bomb (Score:2)
Innovator's Dilemma (Score:2)
I have recently been reading The Innovator's Dilemma which has quite a case study on the hard drive market and, in particular, disruptive innovations to the market. If anybody else has read the book, I am wondering - does SSD really representing a disruptive innovation to the market?
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Yes, absolutely. It takes away a significant chunk of the HD market for applications which do not require hundreds of gigabytes or terrabytes of storage, and also takes away a significant chunk of the HD market for high speed storage, and on top of that it also hits the DRAM market because SSD storage is significantly cheaper than DRAM for caching purposes (particularly when you also take into account the motherboard, footprint, and power resources required).
People who were buying big whopping servers with
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I agree with you. I work at a company which processes large datasets on a farm of servers. We are currently in discussions to buy a bunch of SSD drives exactly for the purposes you describe: to help cache data during the processing.
But for me and my laptop, I think it'll be a couple years before I will have an SSD HD.
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For great value for money on a SSD I'd recommend the 128GB version of these babies [kingston.com]. I have 2 and no problems so far.
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At £211.49 for 128GB ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-Technology-128GB-SSDNow-Desktop/dp/B002BH3UDY/ [amazon.co.uk] ), vs £34.32 for a 160GB HD ( http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/160GB-Seagate-ST9160314AS-Momentus-25-HDD-SATA-3Gb-s-5400rpm-8Mb-Cache [scan.co.uk] ), I don't think I'll quite be making the jump yet. Maybe when prices aren't almost an order of magnitude different...
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Right now if you are getting less than 10GB per USD (0.74 euro) then you arent even close to optimal on the cost per gigabyte metric. That 160GB drive you just priced.. yeah.. thats a horrible value.
That kingston SSD is probably a reasonable choice for many people. Thats 160GB drive you priced isnt a reasonable choice for anybody.
The question is, why do you think that the cost/gigabyte is the important metric such that you wont be
Re:Prices have to go down (Score:5, Informative)
Intel is going to release products based on their 25nm manufacturing process in 4Q. Toshiba just doubled their flash density as well and products will start shipping soon. Next few years expect to see a huge explosion in SSD. Just like the late 1990's for hard drives
Re:Prices have to go down (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like prices will go down much until Q4 when Intel get their next generation flash chips going. What is happening though is that many of the high-end controllers are massively increasing performance for a relatively small increase in price. For example my Vertex has about 10MB/s random 4k write on an unaligned partition, the Vertex LE is now doing 50MB/s. Random reads have gone from 35MB/s on my Vertex to almost 80MB/s on the latest Crucial C300s. So you may have to wait a bit longer, but the difference will be even more amazing when you switch.
always going to be 20x magnetic (Score:2)
What about memristors? (Score:2)
Wouldn't memristor storage ultimately be far denser and cheaper to manufacture? I know they're not ready for mass market yet and I don't really expect that they should be. But while an improvements on their mechanical counterparts, I find that SSDs so far are just another compromise. Mind you, there would probably be similar drawbacks with memristor storage if not wear or capacity.
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Anandtech has become the only source I trust on SSDs: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3757&p=5 [anandtech.com]
Decent performance, certainly better than hard drives, but nowhere near Intel and top shelf OCZ.
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Yah, but be careful. Write performance is virtually a non-issue in the SSD space. There's no point being able to write at a sustained 150-200MB/sec when the only real-world outcome of doing that is your SSD will wear out more quickly. Writes can be cached, so only long-sustained writes will actually impact system performance. If you are bursting a few hundred megabytes worth of writes your system ram can cache that trivially.
What matters the most is read performance.
-Matt
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well, WD knows a thing or two about micro-controllers, and since they do not actually produce the flash memory, it's Samsung's, the actual controller chip is probably JMicron's with WD firmware inside that was created by or for WD specifically. I expect WD to get their shit together and actually to apply some of that knowledge they are harboring of various controller optimization and massive storage techniques that they have learned over the years and come out with something that actually kicks ass in SSD
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Already exists. DragonFly + swapcache, with SSD configured swap (32G nominal on 32bit and 512G nominal on 64bit). It works very nicely with a 40G Intel MLC drive.
Of course, you'd have to run DragonFly :-). heheh. But that said I think most OSs have solutions. There's ZIL for ZFS (Solaris, FreeBSD), I'm sure Linux has something, and Windows 7 has something. The DragonFly solution is quite general purpose though and not tied to any particular filesystem. We use it primarily for meta-data caching for th
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Indeed. I have watched WD go from cheap brand to respected brand. To answer your rhetorical question with a real answer: it happened over the last, say, five or six years.
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Believe it or not, it wasn't actually rhetorical, so thanks for the answer.
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I think I may still have one of those laying around. Obviously no point in checking to see if it still works.