Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive 148
MojoKid writes "Although they haven't been big hits with enthusiasts, Samsung's solid state drives have been successful due to strong relationships with a number of OEMs, including Apple. With the release of their new SSD 830 Series Solid State Drives, however, Samsung appears ready to make inroads with enthusiasts as well. The SSD 830 tested here is 256GB model, with eight 32GB Samsung NAND flash memory chips, 256MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory, and a new Samsung SSD Controller. The Samsung controller features a 3-ARM core design with support for SATA III 6Gb/s interface speeds. Performance-wise, the Samsung SSD 830 Series drive offered the best Read performance of the group that was tested, even versus the latest SandForce-based SSDs, though the SSD 830 couldn't quite catch SandForce in writes."
why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusiasts" (Score:1)
I assume if anywhere there are "enthusiasts" here on Slashdot, so per the summary, why haven't Samsung's solid state drives "been big hits with enthusaists"? Whose drives have?
I'm thinking of sprucing up an old laptop with an SSD - any recommendations?
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias (Score:5, Informative)
OEMs love 'em because, while mediocre, they have been comparatively reliable(no equivalents of the Jmicron controller debacle, firmware that makes them show up as only 8MB in size, assorted bleeding-edge weirdness and general "No, we really do have to offer these things under a 3-year warranty to get business customers"-stopping issues.)
The enthusiast-darling crown has changed hands a number of times. Intel was the one to have a little while ago, I think that they've been eclipsed by some of the newer Sandforce gear of late. There are rather more brands than there are chipsets, so brand enthusiasm tends to swing wildly based on cost and who is releasing the new hotness chipset this month.
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias (Score:5, Interesting)
Avoid SuperTalent like the plague they are.
Avoid anything used or refurbished.
Avoid any hybrid solution as they drain more battery.
If you don't need a lot space and need extreme reliability look at intel 311 series (those drives kick ass) or any SLC based SSD for that matter.
If you don't need extreme reliability, but don't want to play a game of Russian roulette with 3 bullets instead of one (like in the case of a SuperTalent drive), look and anything sand-force based.
Since you have an aging laptop, you do not need something that can saturate sata 6Gb/s so try to find something like an OCZ Vertex 2 1 drive or a Corsair Force 1 as in real life they are quite similar (you do not need the third edition (both drives have a V3) in an aging laptop).
Also bench the writing speed only one or two time as the more you bench the slower your drive get, you can usually bring some of it back by emptying the drive by formating it to ntfs in windows 7 and the use a force trim utility, wait about 15 minutes. After that you can reformat your drive to your file system of choice and the performance should be OK
1- In synthetic benchmark they differs a little bit but it is imperceptible in real life, unless your main workload is approximated correctly by the synthetic benchmark you were looking at.
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died a month after the updated to support trim and the replacement drive died on me to, at that point a gave up and bought something else....
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Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias (Score:5, Funny)
yay, the sup html tag is to hot for Slashdot a site for supposed nerd.....
And apparently, you are too sexy for preview...
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Hell, yeah, with my tone biceps and defined abs and my "I work on my backyard, with my torso naked, each weekend" tan , I am definitively to hot for that ;)
But, on a more serious note, I gave up on the preview system yesterday because I corrected every nonsensical phrases*1 in my post about Scala only to notice that the message slash posted was the one before all the corrections. It might not be a slah bug, it might be a Firefox 9 bug (it is a nightly build after all) but it made me gave up on it nonetheles
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Hell, yeah, with my tone biceps and defined abs and my "I work on my backyard, with my torso naked, each weekend" tan , I am definitively to hot for that ;)
Indeed, sounds hot. Any chest hair with that? Photo?
Firefox 9 bug
Oops, here I go off the internet for just five minutes, and when I come back, Firefox has jumped 3 major versions...
I do not know why but when I turned 30 some years ago, coffee started to hit me more than any hard stimulant that I ever tried in college; now when I drink coffee, I write like a methhead
Lucky you. For me, coffee seems to have less and less effect the older I get. Fortunately, there's Red Bull, which still seems to keep some of its power...
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Any chest hair with that?
Hell, Yeah, just the right amount and I wear an hybrid between the Disney villain mustache and the smug bastard two month later mustache as depicted on that page : http://www.fearlessrp.net/showthread.php?tid=120 [fearlessrp.net] .
Photo?
Hell no, my wife would kill me, in conjugal life, you have to choose your battles wisely!
What will happen when they die? (Score:3)
When SSDs were newer, I argued here on
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Interesting)
That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early. And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.
Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do. And if your typical IO pattern is one that will break an SSD, then you should plan for it and determine if the speedup is worth the cost.
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And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.
Mirroring an SSD to another SSD which is likely to fail at almost the same time doesn't seem a great plan to me :).
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SSDs aren't exactly inexpensive, are they?
Perhaps I wasn't clear: you'd keep copies on a RAID made of regular disks.
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SSDs aren't exactly inexpensive, are they?
Byte-by-byte they're about the same price as the 15k SAS drives we use in the RAID on the servers I maintain; and a lot cheaper than those drives were when first installed a few years ago.
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Depends on your perspective then, I suppose. Inexpensive for a server isn't exactly inexpensive for the average home user.
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Ive seen hard drives installed that failed after 27 years in service. Can that be said or even assumed for SSDs?
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If that's the case, what about power costs and gained IO performance?
I'm curious from someone who works with them in servers.
I would definitely like to replace the SAS drives with SSDs because it would significantly increase database performance. But we'd then have to buy SLC drives to handle the increased write cycles, which were about 4x more expensive last I looked.
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Mirroring an SSD to another SSD which is likely to fail at almost the same time doesn't seem a great plan to me :).
Assuming SSDs are likely to fail after a certain number of writes (as opposed to after a certain number of hours of uptime), a Time-Machine style backup system would work fine (since the number of writes to the backup drive would be much less than the number of writes to the primary). RAID-0 probably would be a bad idea, for the reason you mentioned.
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SSDs fail on write, not on read, which makes your whole argument rather meaningless.
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"That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early."
I am aware of how they are constructed and how they work, thank you very much. None of that changes the essential point: they can and do wear out, and probably cannot be expected to last as long as a modern hard drive, depending of course on usage.
The amount of I/O required to break an SSD (if one is doing it deliberately) is nowhere near as much as you seem to think. One only has to do it intelligently.
I can envision a simple virus that could break SSDs willy-nilly, although its operation would be tr
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Running a busy USENET server (I think I hovered at ~#10 in the stats for while) used to wear out normal hard drives too, back in the day; SSDs aren't especially novel in that regard IMHO. It's really only a matter of how frequent and comprehensive your backups are.
And as my USENET data didn't last longer than about a week then I think I regarded backups as largely pointless except for some very low-traffic local groups and just threw away a drive when it died and let the new one fill up again!
BTW, I've bee
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"BTW, I've been running a server entirely on a mixture of SD cards and USB Flash for a couple of years so far, so good."
Unless you have some kind of RAID-style paralleling arrangement, that has to be slow as molasses.
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It's entirely fast enough for my purposes: I have front-end mirrors and CDN to serve data quickly to end users. It also handles my mail (including many thousands of SPAMs per day), and SVN and so on.
And it does mean that I've been able to run the entire system off-grid, on a few solar panels propped up against a wall! B^>
Rgds
Damon
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It works for me. Maybe it wouldn't do for you, I can't tell.
But as I actually enjoy the challenge of working with resource-constrained 'embedded' systems (my first job was designing and implementing a robotic OS and hardware 25+ years ago), this part of the fun.
Rgds
Damon
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Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do.
For me it took all of 18 months, I must say I didn't optimize my system to minimize writes and I used and abused it heavily - my OS was on it, it was running a freenet node and downloading incoming torrents, keeping it almost full so it had to work really hard to wear it levelly and so on. And it wasn't a premature failure either, the chips were rated to 10k writes and when it failed I had an average of 8.7k writes with the worst cells having almost 15k writes. If I'd taken the easy steps to reduce writes i
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still a kludge. I'll be waiting for a technology that doesn't wear out at all - or at least not within a human lifetime. Flash memory is still half-baked IMHO.
So what exactly are you doing for data storage right now? Surely not a regular hard drive, because that doesn't meet your criteria either. Are you carving things into brass plates?
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is about upgrading; why upgrade to a crappy technology just because it's faster?
I see you haven't spent much time in the computer industry. Enjoy your Windows 95 and ham radio license.
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There will never be one.
Hard drives and SSDs both push the limits of what can be manufactured at the time, both operate on fairly narrow margins. It'd be possible to make a modern 100GB drive using the modern tech intended for 2TB and have a drive that's really, really reliable.
But who'd buy it? It would lose badly on performance and capacity paramete
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I'm sure it still wears out in some manner or other. Probably by electromigration, maybe by some other mechanism as well (don't know since I'm not familiar with this tech)
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately the Intel SSDs come with a 'wear indicator' showing how much life is left. Mine are all showing 99-100% life left, so unless I hit the Intel 320 8MB bug that randomly trashes the drive I don't see failure being a problem before I replace them.
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Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html [codinghorror.com]
These rates are probably for "normal users" (as in normal users who buy SSDs ;) ):
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html [behardware.com]
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html [behardware.com]
Note the common failure modes are not very graceful, they're usually brutal and/or weird:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue [dslreports.com]
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help [ocztechnologyforum.com]
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html [techspot.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs [wikipedia.org]
In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.
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It is worth noting that most of these failures do not seem to be wear related. There must be some severe quality issues where they build these things.
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>>It is worth noting that most of these failures do not seem to be wear related. There must be some severe quality issues where they build these things.
Exactly. Before buying my SSD, I read thousands of comments on Newegg, looking both at the highest average ratings and also filtering down to the "1 egg" rating to see what the reasons were for the low scores. If a pattern emerged ("Drive suddenly died" or "Firmware update destroyed data on the drive, and drive dies without firmware update") then I'd s
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Would have been quite useful to tell us how long you have had the drive, 99% after 1 month or after 2 years.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.
SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
Everybody should have a backup plan, regardless of storage tech.
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So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.
HDDs usually fail gracefully starting with a few bad blocks, giving you time to get the data off. SSDs have a marked tendency to fail catastrophically and lose everything.
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I don't think you've been doing it right and having enough fun! I've experienced plenty of catastrophic HDD failures with little warning or possible recovery, including my last MacBook's internal HDD killed pretty abruptly by static AFAIK. (I managed to recover my SSH key, but that was about it.)
Rgds
Damon
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HDD's usually fail by not spinning up, or just stop answering commands properly, in my experience. Which is from 100 to *Crash* before you know what's happening.
On my fileserver I've had two disks stop working, with notices like :
[1995429.300714] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdi] Unhandled error code
[1995429.300718] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdi] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[1995429.300723] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdi] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
[1995429.300738] end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 0
Because of RAID, I didn't lose any data, but the funny part was that even after it stopped working properly, SMART still reported it as fully functional.
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HDD's usually fail by not spinning up, or just stop answering commands properly, in my experience.
Whereas I've never had any of those happen. Every hard drive failure I've seen has been easily predicted by looking at the SMART data for reallocated blocks.
In fact, no drive has ever actually stopped working, probably because I get them replaced within a few days of the bad sectors appearing. Even my old laptop drive that had been sitting around in a box for a decade still worked when I plugged it in, though it had developed a bunch of bad sectors over that time.
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Google did a study awhile back and came to the conclusion that when you start seeing SMART errors that the disks are 10x or so more likely to fail than ones without. But, when it comes to HDD, or really any storage medium, when you stop having complete faith in the unit, it's time to get a new one.
I have a few HDD that probably will work for some time, but since I don't trust them and I can't prove them to be reliable, they're going to be recycled.
It kind of sucks, but the disks are a lot less expensive to
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Speaking of not answering commands properly, one of the reasons I switched from using my hardware RAID controller in my home server as an actual RAID controller to just having it pretend to be a bunch of SATA ports was actually one disk which managed to confuse the controller to the point where it would freeze up on its own or get the kernel to hang (FreeBSD btw).
That one disk worked fine for about a year and a half, then it started to show write errors, but only when it was more than 80% or so full. And th
Usually? (Score:2)
HDDs usually fail gracefully starting with a few bad blocks
I have never had a hard drive fail in this way. I have never seen a SMART status go bad before I had a very sudden loss.
I have had several drives that simply would not spin up one day (even after a trip to Mr Freezer). I have had large swaths of data oct in catastrophic storms, barley able to recover half my data after multiple passes with recovery tools.
I've been fortunate in that I've lost almost no data, primarily because I was able to recover
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I have never had a hard drive fail in this way. I have never seen a SMART status go bad before I had a very sudden loss.
What do you use to monitor SMART on your drives?
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smartmontools [sourceforge.net]
You can run it daily via cron if you like, I have to admit my approach is more manual.
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If you stick to a manual approach you might end up not checking often or regularly enough. That might explain why you never see a SMART status go bad before a sudden loss.
Yes there can be sudden complete losses, but from my experience, the first time you get a sector, CRC or other problem, you usually have a few hours or even a few days before the drive fails completely.
SM
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I had a laptop drive right in the middle of booting into Linux once. That was cool. Typed in my password, boomheadcrash.
"What was that noise? Why is it taking so long to load?"
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SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
My boot drive failed by destroying half the Linux partition. I was able to copy off /etc, kernel config and a bunch of useful scripts and things, but most of it was just a bunch of unreadable sectors. Shortly afterwards the drive failed completely and was no longer recognised as a disk. It was just under a year old - I used the noatime option, swap was on an HDD and it was only about 3/4 full.
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Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
That's been my experience exactly. Every PC I've owned has "died" from a HDD crash, usually sudden. The last SSD I had hit its erase limit in about two years (small SSD and I'm prone to reinstalling various OSes monthly). The lovely thing was that I could run a maintenance tool and see exactly how many erases were left on each cell (BTW the wear leveling was only 1% from mathematically perfect). This allowed a simple extrapolation down to the day some cells would start hitting their advertised capacity,
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Predictable in theory but not necessarily in practice. When your metadata goes RO on you I think that's why some responses are in the area of a corrupt file system or a drive that is not recognized at all. The ones about partitions being corrupted is a much bigger issue. You would think one wouldn't normally mess with partition metadata.
Probably the file systems and low level utilities need to be updated to take into account SSD-type failures.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:4, Informative)
Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable. If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles and so when your SSD reaches the end of its lifespan, your data will become read only. Even if not, you can still tell very easily if you're approaching end of lifespan using SMART status. I suspect that SSD death is much more predictable than HD death...
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"If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles"
You would have to be very lucky, since such a creature does not exist.
Maintaining a count of how many times any given cell has been written would take a lot more memory (not to mention processing power) than these devices contain.
Instead, what they do is over-provision, so that a detected bad block is replaced with a spare. (Most hard drives do much the same thing.) However, there are only so many spares.
As someone else mentioned: with any real luck your firmware might report what percentage of tho
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
SSDs erase in extremely large blocks, like 256K. Having a counter per block is not a problem. It works out to 16K of memory per GB for a 32 bit counter per block.
It probably doesn't even take an extra space, since a block probably already contains metadata and ECC, so a simple counter probably fits in there nicely, It won't even cause any extra wear because the only time you want to change the counter is when the block is being rewritten anyway.
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On the other hand, large block sizes detract enormously from both the write efficiency and the lifetime of the unit. The smaller the block size, the faster the write time (in general), and also longer life. But the smaller the block size, the greater the overhead of keeping track of the health of any block.
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Predictable? (Score:3)
SSD failure is predictable.
That's bullshit. You call the following predictable?
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue [dslreports.com]
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help [ocztechnologyforum.com]
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html [techspot.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs [wikipedia.org]
I might buy a Samsung SSD. The rest (except for Intel) don't have such a great
Re:Predictable? (Score:4, Insightful)
Different kind of failure. You're linking to firmware bugs. HDDs have those as well [mswhs.com]
In this thread we're discussing wear induced failure.
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a) If they are then the "wear levelling" stuff sure isn't working well enough.
b) If they aren't then isn't it ridiculous to talk about wear induced failures being predictable when the bulk of the failures are due the bugs and other faults? And judging from google and feedback many of those don't seem as predictable.
One might try to claim the RMAs are mainly due to PEBKAC but note tha
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But I'm not arguing about that. SSDs are new, bugs are expected until issues are hammered out. However, both SSDs and HDDs share a considerable amount of failure modes (circuitry, firmware, sensibility to power problems in the computer), so on those parameters neither is intrinsically better than the other.
Now, the one thing that is different is how the actual storage is done. SSDs can manage the underlying flash in a way that provides for somewhat elegant failure modes.
Hard disks on the other hand, can't d
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I find it ridiculous that there are people here posting that SSDs fail predictably and when they start to wear out, they're go read only, when the real-world evidence (which I've linked to) says otherwise.
Maybe the old-fashioned ones did go read-only. But the newer ones are going poof in crazy and stupid ways.
The RMA rates show that with the exception of Intel, they are not significantly safer.
My guess i
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>>Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable.
Write failures are predictable and reportable.
Unfortunately, the more common SSD failure mode is turning it on one day and it doesn't work. As I mentioned elsewhere, I read through thousands of comments on Newegg looking both at the overall score and the 1-egg ratings, to see if failure patterns emerged. One I remembered was a drive that would arbitrarily corrupt its data without a firmware update, but the firmware update also would wipe the drive...
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This might be of interest to you :
SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm [xtremesystems.org]
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
The mechanicals sometimes last a decade if you get lucky, or die within days of install if you don't. Moral of the story: If you store anything on a hard drive, you don't love that something very much. You'd better have backups.
The shape of the failure probability/time graph is likely a bit different for SSDs; but the "You'd better have backups" message, and the available means of taking those backups are pretty much exactly the same.
Again, because of the somewhat higher cost, burning your way through SSDs is a little more painful than burning your way through HDDs; but anybody whose plans involve just trusting a hard drive has always been doomed.
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What exactly happens when an SSD dies. Are the cells just read-only then or complete garbage?
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I've been a bit tepid in doing the upgrade to the homebrew nas solution,
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As someone who has FINALLY gotten his FreeNAS to a point where I'm satisfied with its performance, I'd like to share a few pointers that may help you out...
1.) get a good SATA/SAS controller. I don't care how many SATA ports your motherboard has. Ignore that entirely and get a good PCI-Express SATA controller. the one that was recommended to me - and that ultimately solved my problem - was an IBM BR10i that was force-flashed the LSI IT firmware, along with a pair of SAS-SATA breakout cables. There are some
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"Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? "
Same plan as ever. If it matters, burn it to DVD at slow speed. If it's large and matters, copy to different computers and external hard drives.
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I have bad news for you about your magnetic media, which also has a limited number of writes.
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Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die?
Don't you mean "Does anybody have a backup plan for when their storage devices die?" Even if SSDs fail more quickly than hard drives (which isn't necessarily true any more), no storage device will last forever. Everyone should backup whatever he doesn't want to lose regardless of what type of device he uses. I do.
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We use SSDs in our CentOS Postgresql database servers, the OCZ Vertex 3. The difference has been jaw-dropping. The SSD drives, used as the partition the DB servers mount on, so thoroughly stomp 15K SCSI drives that the performance ratio is something like 10:1. Server loads drop from 3 to 0.3, and everybody notices the speed.
I put them into production over the summer, just for safety's sake I'll replace them over Christmas and keep the original set handy for emergencies.
Oh, and we back up all our databases e
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Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die?
Fud, fud? Fud fud fud fud fud? Fud fud, fud.
Does anybody have a backup plan for when their HDDs die? After all, unlike SSDs, stepper motor bearings get ground out of round eventually. AFAIK, none of the disks made in the last decade are going to be spinning much longer, so they are bound to fail at some point.
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[U]nlike SSDs, stepper motor bearings get ground out of round eventually.
Voice coils replaced stepper motors for HDD head actuation a couple decades ago. Also, don't forget about fluid-dynamic bearings or ramped head parking/unloading, the latter of which reduces the occurrence of sticktion (and head crashes).
I'm not disputing that the laws of physics guarantee that all mechanisms will fail; I'm merely pointing out some friction-reducing technologies present in modern HDDs.
PS: Mad props for not forcing apostrophes into pluralized initialisms.
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The SSD (x25m 80Gb in my case) has been running happily for over a year - that's a pretty good run for something that makes me safe against basic power failures and is blindingly fast.
I believe that 'basic power failures' were the primary cause of the Intel 320 8MB bug; from what I've read it seemed that when the power went out it didn't update the mapping table properly so the drive was toast when you rebooted.
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Really? Yikes. That's just poor design. Even my $25 DVD player has a backup firmware zone so that there is always one known good copy of the data. I would have assumed that a solid state drive would keep at least one previous copy of something as critical as its page mapping tables....
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I wouldn't assume that: SSDs are sold for speed, not capacity and sometimes not even reliability.
If keeping two copies of anything hurts benchmark performance significantly, there's a good chance that it just won't bother doing it at all -- as a design decision.
A DVD player (and most other consumer electronics which have upgradeable firmware) has a totally different set of design goals, with "speed of writes" not being among them at all.
That all said: I'd like to see it be a user-selectable option. There
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Personally, that's fine by me, since I don't consider SSDs to be cost effective for a desktop, the ones I get always go in laptops for that reason.
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Big questions (Score:5, Informative)
1) How does this Samsung chipset compare vs latest Sandforce2 in terms of compressed read/writes?
2) TRIM support?
3) OSX friendliness?
4) Cost?
5) Size max?
So far I've identified 2 use cases that have very nice sweet-spot answers - a) For a desktop with PCI-e, the OCZ Revodrive3 X2 just gives amazing performance, completely bypassing SATA and delivering unbeatable performance/cost ratio. b) For a laptop solution, I'm more interested in max storage/price/performance, and the 512GB Crucial m4 seems unparalleled in delivering this (expensive at $700, but can completely replace an laptop HDD).
It will be interesting to see if Samsung is ready to challenge this market.
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AnandTech has a review [anandtech.com] up. For your questions, the drive has TRIM support, Samsung has been the SSD manufacturer of choice for Apple so I'd say OSX support is a given, costs will be in line with the SSD 470 which is within the range of the OCZ Vertex 3, Crucial m4 and Intel SSD 510 and it goes up to 512gb, which is the sample that has been reviewed.
Notably, they say that this is the first really exciting release by Samsung. Apparently, garbage collection is delayed to moments with low IO activity, making to
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Putting the OS and applications on the SSD gives a massive performance boost. Putting media on a HDD is more than adequate because you never read it beyond playback bandwidth requirements
Are video games "applications" or "media"?
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No. Next question please.
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mmm, games are a tricky one. On the one hand some games (particularly those with excruciating load times like RCT3) benefit big time from being on a SSD. On the other hand modern games are pretty big.
Still unless you are someone who hops madly between games a 120GB SSD (not that big by todays standards) should be enough to keep all the games you play frequently on the SSD.
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A good garbage collection can't replace TRIM. Overwritten blocks are not the only ones that can be GC'ed. There is also the blocks from deleted files. And unless the FS uses those blocks first (which any recent filesystem will avoid to do to prevent fragmentation on hard-drives), they will eventually use a significant amount of the SSD and kill the drive performance.
And worse, some modern filesystems use "copy-on-write", so no data is ever overwritten (from the SSD point of view) the SSD performance will dr
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The impact of missing TRIM depends a lot on your usage. When the FS starts to reuse blocks from delete files, performance starts to go down because the SSD doesn't know that part of the block can be discarded and will have to do extra work to keep that unused part intact (as Bengie explained in more detail in his answer).
So if you mostly use big files, the impact will be negligible because the FS won't use partial blocks very often.
Or if you don't delete files often, the impact will be negligible because th
Price??? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Price??? (Score:4, Insightful)
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From Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/show/4863/the-samsung-ssd-830-review [anandtech.com]:
"The Samsung SSD 830 will be available to consumers starting in mid October. Although Samsung isn't announcing pricing at this time, I've been told to expect the drive to be priced around where the SSD 470 is today."
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Why on earth would you backup to a solid state drive? I think the only way you could spend more money per gigabyte of backup involves robots.
For everyday use, I'd not recommend SSD's except as a boot/application installation for launch speed, however the OS and software (eg photoshop) need to be configured to use a conventional drive for scratch/swap file space since they will rapidly wear out a SSD.
No, they won't.