Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched 183
MojoKid (1002251) writes Though solid state drives have a long way to go before they break price parity with hard drives (and may never make it, at least with the current technology), the gap continues to close. More recently, SSD manufacturers have been approaching 50 cents per GiB of storage. OCZ Storage Solutions, with the help of their parent company Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND, just launched their ARC 100 family of drives that are priced at exactly .5 per GiB at launch and it's possible street prices will drift lower down the road. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller as the higher-end OCZ Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm (Advanced 19 nanometer) NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to keep costs down. Performance-wise, OCZ's new ARC 100 240GB solid state drive didn't lead the pack in any particular category, but the drive did offer consistently competitive performance throughout testing. Large sequential transfers, small file transfers at high queue depths, and low access times were the ARC 100's strong suits, as well as its low cost. These new drives are rated at 20GB/day write endurance and carry a 3-year warranty.
Not a barrier (Score:4, Funny)
An arbitrary number is not a "barrier". A barrier is what your father should have worn.
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Indeed. $100 seems to be a common barrier.
With the 256 GB Samsung 840 EVO less then $100 ($0.78125/GB) and the 256 GB for only $130 ($0.5078125/GB) people really don't have an excuse anymore.
* http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-... [amazon.com]
* http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-... [amazon.com]
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The fourminute mile was a barrier that athletes had as a psychological barrier for years.
Then oger Bannister broke the record after training with the mentality that he could go faster, not that he had reached his peak and couldn't go any better. Record after record after record tumbled as people realised that it wasn't a limit and trained with the mindset that they COULD get better and run faster than a mile in four minutes
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Whose reality? This is reality for many people.
Besides, if you take the "per GiB" out and just talk about a 500 GiB drive for $250, that is exactly how it works.
It's called money. Learn it.
Re:Not a barrier (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends. If you have to cram a long term storage device into a small package then SSDs may win that battle regardless of the price difference. If you need virtualy 'instant on' storage or quick booting capabilities then SSDs win. If you need a very light weight solution the SSDs win. Price is but one factor.
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Depends on how you define "long term". A powered off SSD only retains data for as little as 6 months up to a few years (and as cell sizes get smaller, that will get worse).
Traditional magnetic media is still going to be better for 5-15 year lifespans on a shelf.
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Are you sure it will spin up after 5 years? sure the data will be there, but if the bearings have seized up it won't do any good.
Besides, SSDs are not intended for backup, so it's kinda a moot point.
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What for? That junk is worth less and less every day.
Re:Not a barrier (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm.. I remember the Atari 1020ST was sold as the first computer ever to be under $1 per Kilobyte. It is true that $0.50 / gigabyte is nothing magical from a tech standpoint, but this is not about tech, it is about psychology. Human beings are not entirely logical, and emotions play a large part in decisions.
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Just a nitpick : the model was designated ATARI 1040ST.
(The half-meg model was the 520ST.)
"The 1040ST was the first personal computer shipped with a base RAM configuration of 1 MB. When the list price was reduced to $999 in the U.S. it appeared on the cover of BYTE in March 1986 as the first computer to break the $1000/megabyte price barrier;"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
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Perhaps you could explain that to the stock market(s)?
Look at the price of Apple for the year - Notice that sudden drastic jump in late April? They did a 7-to-1 stock split, which has no effect whatsoever on the underlying value of the asset. And yet, people rushed to get in on "cheaper" Apple stock, driving the per-share price up by 12% in three days.
Whether it makes sense or not, in any activity dependent on human behavior, you need to factor in how humans
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Actually it is, and for exactly this. I made a decision that I wasn't going to buy an SSD until I could get a good one that was > 200GB at $0.5/gig just like this example. This was the price I was comfortable paying. I ended up getting a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB for exactly $125 (canadian) at staples.
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Yes it does.
My first SSD cost 240$ for 120GB, that's 2$/GB, many people found that way too expensive. Now that it hovers around 0.50$/GB, it means that for 120$ most people will be able to justify putting one in their system. 240GB is sufficient for almost all usage scenarios (especially laptops). Gives plenty of fast storage and a nice kick in performance without being obscenely expensive. Sure it will take a long time before it gets to price parity with spinning drives (if ever), but the way to build is S
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So you rarely find someone who says "I would pay $115 (but not $116) after shipping for a 500GB (but not 500 GiB) SSD."
Although the particular person at $115 is pretty rare, they are very important, since they are the marginal buyer [wikipedia.org] at $115. The "rare" marginal buyer at 115, and the "rare" buyer at 116, and at 117, and at 118, etc.create the demand curve.
But there are likely to be discontinuities in the curve, especially at round numbers, so the number of marginal buyers of a 500gb drive from $250 down to $249 is probably a decent sized chunk, whereas the number of buyers from say $257 to $256 is probably not so significa
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Re: Not a barrier (Score:3)
Also - how is that news? Crucial MX100 256GB that became available in the beginning of summer costs 110$ at Amazon. That is less than 0.5$/GB.
Cheaper drives (Score:5, Informative)
Good drive, for sure, but keep in mind that the Crucial MX100 broke that barrier at its launch in June (and at $0.44/GB).
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/S... [pcper.com]
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What barrier is this? Is there some reason why getting below $0.50/GB is difficult, or is it merely the result of gradually falling prices?
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no particular technical difficulty, just another step in gradually falling prices. We have seen drives hit $0.39/GB as well with standard Amazon.com pricing. The Crucial M550 (a bit faster) is at $407 for 1TB model today, for example: http://amzn.to/1kBpIs1 [amzn.to]
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It's falling prices, but it's a measure of how fast they're falling. Not too long ago, $1/GB was the "barrier" everyone wanted to cross. Before that it was probably $5/GB or something. Next we'll be looking to break $0.25/GB, then probably price parity with hard drives.
It's like the 1GHz barrier on CPUs, back in the day. It wasn't so much a barrier as it was a milestone, a mark of how far we've progressed.
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Price parity with hard drives is hard, because SSDs only really get cheaper according to Moore's law (because each transistor is the storage element - the more of them you can stuff on a die, the more storage). But hard drive capacity and cos
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There is a "good enough" point. What SSDs bring to the table is the fact that any number of processes can access the drive at virtually the same time without queuing up for the drive head to get in line with the data wanted, or hopefully find the data in the cache.
What I see that may become more common are drive units that have 256 gigs or so of SSD space and several terabytes of HDD, presenting themselves to the OS as two separate volumes. This allows the OS and core applications to boot and quickly whil
It's a mental barrier (Score:2)
The result is just one of gradually falling prices, but it is one where it is cheap enough to interest more people. At that price the drives are now "cheap enough" for them.
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Personally, I think that happened at
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What barrier is this? Is there some reason why getting below $0.50/GB is difficult, or is it merely the result of gradually falling prices?
How can people be so worked up about this "barrier" thing? It was obviously chosen as an interesting goal as it is exactly half a dollar per gigabyte. That's all there is to it.
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We laugh, I but I remember making precisely these calculations when normal Hard Drives went through the same process.
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Well there will be a point where SSD are cheap enough for people to decide to pay a little extra to get them.
As magnetic drives get cheaper per storage, they are sold at around the same price but with more storage. It isn't uncommon for someone to get a PC built with a few Terabytes of data in a magnetic drive. Or for the same price you can get a SSD rated in hundreds of Gigabytes.
At a particular point the faster SSD drives with be affordable enough to offer the space that they need at a cost they want to
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Re:Cheaper drives (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Apple will soon be breaking the $2.00/GB barrier.
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I love my Apple products, but let's be honest: their storage prices are outrageous. If we calculate the value they place on each GB based on the difference in prices between models that have different amounts of storage but are otherwise identical, the lowest they ever go with SSDs is $1.56/GB (which we see in their laptops and high-end iPads). For lower-end or mid-range iOS devices, the prices are as high as $6.25/GB (for the $100 16GB->32GB step up) or $3.13/GB (for the 32GB->64GB step up that costs $100).
So, suggesting they are $2/GB seems fair to me, even if it doesn't universally apply across all of their products.
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:4, Informative)
I don't believe they make those claims explicitly, no, though they do tend to source higher-quality components, in general.
When it comes to SSD quality, most of the distinctions would be in terms of the controllers that are used (which will play a large factor in reliability and speed) and whether it's an SLC, MLC, or TLC (single-, multi-, or triple-level cell) design. SLC has one bit per cell, MLC most often refers to two bits per cell (though it technically refers to more than that as well), while TLC has three bits per cell. 2-bit MLC and TLC are the most common in consumer-grade SSDs, with TLC becoming more common in the last year or two (e.g. Samsung 840 EVO).
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SSDs in Apple devices aren't at 2 dollars a gig. Nice FUD tho...
There is no Fear or Uncertainty when you walk into an Apple store. You are paying a premium for that hardware.
And there is no Doubt as to what price you'll pay at Apple or any other store selling Apple products. You'll pay THE price.
Let's just drop the FUD now.
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:4, Insightful)
$2.02/GB flash drive [apple.com]
Boom! Proved you wrong. ;)
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Yeah, I was reading this and thinking to myself, "haven't they been under $0.50/GB for awhile now?" Just yesterday I was speccing out parts for a new PC, and the prices for SSDs went as low as $0.35/GB [pcpartpicker.com]. They're still roughly an order of magnitude more expensive per GB than HDDs [pcpartpicker.com], but they're starting to get cheap enough that the difference is mattering less and less.
Re: Cheaper drives (Score:2)
I know the Samsung 840 1TB drive has been available for $500 or less for most of the year. I've had one since February. "Prices stay relatively constant for 6 months but LOOK new shiny!" is just less discussion worthy.
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Samsung's 840 EVO 500GB dipped below $0.5/GB unformatted on Newegg a couple weeks ago, with coupon.. IIRC the Crucial M550 512GB at newegg is below $0.5/GB without coupon..
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:4, Interesting)
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I got a 256GB MX100. I haven't done any testing, but the day to day experience is that it's good enough for everyday use. Small apps take about a second to launch and become responsive.
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The crucial MX100 will also run circles around this drive, and was reviewed here on Slashdot, including its pricepoint. How did this even make it through the submission queue.
As do you (Score:4, Funny)
> 50 cents per GiB
I prefer to think of it as 0.0007 cents per body part closeup.
Performance (Score:5, Insightful)
If SSD's had come first we'd be talking about how HDD's finally broke the 3ms latency barrier or the or the 1 Gb/s barrier. SSDs' aren't about capacity, that's just not what they're for. While it's certainly nice that you can have a usable amount of space for a decent price, 120GB is enough SSD space to see 95% of the benefits for 60% of users. If laptop manufacturers would make 2 bay laptops standard that 60% would jump to 95%.
Re:Performance (Score:4, Insightful)
Bingo. Laptop users. Laptops are on the way up, desktops are dying. And since the higher-end laptops (ultrabooks) are even ditching optical drives to save size and weight, what do you think are the odds that they will make space for a 2nd drive. In fact, I would not be surprised of the 2.5" drive bays went away entirely in the next three years, to be replaced by slots (probably PCIe or something similar). Unless you are going for a larger device -- gaming or workstation laptop, you are not going to have the luxury of two drive bays.
Re:Performance (Score:4)
Laptops, hand held devised, tablets, space exploration verticals, drones, and remote sensing equipment are probably only a few examples.
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What tasks are you performing that your performance bottleneck is more often disk I/O than lack of memory?
Are you joking? 99% of shit you run will spend more time reading/writing from disk than waiting for free RAM.
And I have 2 high end SSDs in RAID 0.
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desktops are dying
LOL. People have been saying that for over a decade and it ain't happening. It seems like the myth lives on by being rekindled in new generations of geeks who weren't around to see the prognosticating last go 'round.
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desktops are dying
LOL. People have been saying that for over a decade and it ain't happening. It seems like the myth lives on by being rekindled in new generations of geeks who weren't around to see the prognosticating last go 'round.
I agree that they're not dying as in becoming obsolete, but they're certainly dying in terms of consumer demand. I'd guess that 90-95% of my friends don't own and desktop and will never buy one again.
Add to that the fact that many companies automatically retire systems after 3 years (warranty expired) resulting in lots of incredibly capable enterprise-class desktops available for under $200 through Craigslist. Really, unless you're a gamer, there's little reason to buy a brand new desktop as a consumer.
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Many "ultrabook" class laptops moved to mini PCIe SSDs a few years ago. My NEC LaVie X has a socketed 250GB Toshiba drive that I am considering upgrading for one that supports Opal V2. I can the move it to my server machine.
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Laptops are on the way up, desktops are dying.
Lol nope. Laptops are on the way up, smartphones are on the way up, tablets are on the way up, computerized glasses are on the way up, brain-computer interfaces are on the way up, and desktops are on the way up.
Want to kill off the desktops? Find something with better display and user input.
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How about the same display and user input. Have you not heard of USB and HDMI? A laptop can be easily connected to an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor. I do this all the time! Since even a relatively low-end computer is more than good enough for most tasks, there is really little down-side to this approach. The extra expense is justified because you can carry it with you.
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The slot you're thinking of already exists, comes on some motherboards (my new HTPC Mini ITX board has one) and it's becoming standard on laptops.
Current sizes dictate they can do 500gb drives on the micro cards which go into the slots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
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I would not want to replace the SSD in my Mac Book Air with a HD ... and I doubt there is any that fits. ;) ) for me it is how long the machine is running ... 14h with my way of using it is quite superb.
For you it might be only speed (sad
Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear your song, but I heard it before by the HDD cover band before the SSD members were even born. All hardware is prone to not coming back up after the power was cut (or turned off in the case of a laptop I have), SSD is not special in this. It appears you have heard it, but if not, tune in to the greatest hits channel and you will hear the number 1 song for the past 30 years: "Always have working up to date backups". I'm glad your backups work.
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:5, Insightful)
>All hardware is prone to not coming back up after the power was cut (or turned off in the case of a laptop I have), SSD is not special in this.
But OCZ SSDs were. The failure of OCZ drives doubled the industry average failure rate, that is how bad they were. Returns were in the double digit percents.
And still I hear your statement that this could happen to any company. Which is true. But OCZ ignored the problem and pretended it did not exist, instead of showing a bit of generosity towards the (rightly) disappointed customers. This I will not forget, and like me many others.
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:4, Insightful)
And Intel had drives that reverted to 8GB after a reboot, IBM had the Deathstars, Quantum had their Fireballs, Seagate, well, about every model between 500 and 1TB.
*everyone* in the industry comes out with bad products.
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't understand. OCZ has a history of a very specific form of manufacturing and marketing strategy.
What they did for a long time was take a SSD controller that every else uses, and then disable every single data safety feature they can get away with so they can squeeze a little extra speed in benchmarks out of it. Then they actively market themselves as "fastest and cheapest SSD maker". The obvious result is that their drives are very fast, very cheap and very unreliable.
This wasn't about one model being off. This is their consistent strategy and why their returns were over double industry standard and sitting in double digits of percent. Their strategy was to sell a lot of drives with marketing hype to overcome the costs from massive amount of failed drives.
It failed and company went bankrupt and had to be bought out by Toshiba. And now it seems to continue with the trend.
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Of course. The question is what do you do when you get into that situation. OCZ was bought by Toshiba, now the question is will the follow the IBM Deathstar route and bring the product back to quality under a new name, or will they follow the Quantum Fireball, into Maxtor which then failed spectacularly only to be absorbed by a competitor?
Then there's history. IBM, Quantum, Seagate, they all had a dodgy line here or there, all of them have reasonable warranties and do a good job of repair. OCZ had a long hi
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For what obscure reason should an SSD not come back after a power cut? Care to explain?
Filesystem error, because a directory was not written, ok, but a haedware failure, I would say: no way! (And same for a HD, why should there be a hardware problem on next boot after a power loss?)
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For what obscure reason should an SSD not come back after a power cut? Care to explain?
When you tell your drive to write a block of data, SSD drives can't just write that block. They can only erase complete 128KB or 256KB pages and write into empty pages. So writing a single block always means a certain amount of bookkeeping information, and complex data structures stored somewhere. If that information isn't flushed properly, it's actually quite likely that a drive could fail after being powered down.
The problem is that making sure that the drive information is always valid after power goe
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Controller failure. This is about as "obscure" as "engine failure" is "obscure" on a car.
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So much SPAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how this whole article is anything but a commercial advertisement. $0.50/Gig was broken a long time ago, at least for your average consumer. I have a 500GB SSD in a laptop that was well under $0.50/GB from a national brick and mortar retailer.
So this is just more evidence how far Slash-dot has fallen? Come on folks, I don't mind the banner ads on the website, you all have to eat, but can we dispense with these kinds of stories?
Re:So much SPAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
flash/disk/tape ratios still stand (Score:3)
Unless one is a video hog a terabyte should be enough for anybody. And I'd stream most new content anyways. I only read/watch most stuff once.
Re:flash/disk/tape ratios still stand (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a little short sighted. Video files are not th eonly kinds of file that have grown demonstrably larger over time, due to "hey, everyone has the spaces these days, let's fill it! It's CHEAP!" being a development consideration.
Be it audio files (FLAAC vs MP3), Images (jpg vs png vs bmp vs RAW), Documents (RTF vs DOC vs DOCX) 3D object files (OBJ vs MAX vs BLEND) and of course, application files (I've seen 10mb and larger DLLs and other libraries become commonplace these days, where previously they were a few kilobytes to meg or two, with 5mb being 'large')
What you mean to say, is that 1TB is more than enough for anyone, "right now."
4 years from now, not so much.
shouldn't even be a headline (Score:2)
No thanks... (Score:2)
OCZ is known to be junk that fail with a very short lifespan. Call me when a RELIABLE SSD like a Samsung or Intel, that has a proven track record hits the $0.50 per GB mark.
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There's no such thing as "OCZ SSD that isn't bad in terms of reliability", because they were specifically designed to be cheap and fast. To achieve that they specifically cut down on reliability.
Less than 50 cent is new? Whut? (Score:2)
My 480 GB Crucial M500 cost ~200€ a month ago - that's 41.66 cents per GB.
Re:Huh... (Score:5, Informative)
OCZ's storage division was bought by Toshiba, who now sells Toshiba drives under the OCZ brand.
Not sure what the thinking was on that one.
Re:Huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many analogies I could make for that.
Ford Motor Company eliminates Ford brand and replaces it with Edsel.
Microsoft changes Windows 7 to Windows Vista Second Edition.
Cisco to deprecate Cisco trademark in favor of Linksys. *
* Yes, I realize that Cisco no longer owns Linksys.
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Did they retain any of the technology/staff, or did they just buy the toxic OCZ brand? With failure rates for the entire brand above 5%, and approaching seventeen (17%) percent I wouldn't use an OCZ branded SSD at any cost. Imagine debugging a system with a failing drive, and then the labor required to RMA, replace, replace again, and finally buy a quality drive. Screw that.
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5%, and those are just the ones that outright failed. I've never had an OCZ SSD where I didn't have to update the firmware to get it to work right.
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OCZ is a better known brand in the west, and I guess OCZ's sales guy convinced them the name wasn't tarnished beyond repair.
It is quite common for Japanese companies to either create or buy an existing western brand to sell their stuff under. Nissan created Datsun. Mitsubishi created Verbatim. I think NEC used to have a computer brand in Europe too, which was solder to Acer... Packard Bell? I think Toyota has a US brand called Scion or something.
Part of it is to make sure that the parent company's reputatio
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Ask IBM Storage Solutions how fast tech people forget a crappy storage product.
HGST is still fighting the "Deathstar" moniker 12+ years later. I still hear of people who won't touch them with a 10 ft pole, even though besides that one model line they have had a solid performance history both before and after.
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Hitachi are very popular in Japan and with professionals, i.e. people who can read stats on reliability and appreciate professional level support. They are not really a consumer brand. Same with Toshiba, who don't even sell to consumers any more.
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Indeed. I still know people that won't touch seagate after 7200.11 barracuda controller fiasco (I lost one drive to it as well).
They replaced them all upon request with 7200.12s that had no controller problem, and I do still have ~14 year old 7200.7s running, so I know it's a one freak model. But many people still won't touch them after getting burned.
OCZ was basically nothing but 7200.11. Massive failure rates.
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If you have a good manufacturing process you can build up multiple brands simultaneously and then sell off one every now and then and let some shoddy person exploit the brand while they run it to the ground.
Sounds like a close relative of "zombie brands", i.e. people buying out the brand (and little or nothing else) of bankrupt companies, then either slapping it on generic low-end product from a no-name OEM Chinese manufacturer, or whoring it out on a case-by-case basis to the highest third-party bidder, typically itself just a distributor of random generic tat upon which the brand will be slapped.
Consumers- often older ones who were familiar with the brand for many years and do not realise that the original
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Actually, most SSDs support SMART and/or have their own monitoring system. Unless you're buying bargain basement SSDs, most of them have perfectly servicable lifecycle management.
(Purely as an example, here's Samsung's listing of the SMART attributes in their SSDs: http://www.samsung.com/global/... [samsung.com])
That said, yes. When SSDs get the "computer will no longer boot to the OS" point of their lifecycle, you're a lot less likely to be able to recover any information. But, like magnetic disks, by the time you get t
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I disagree with this faith in SMART to provide aqueduct warning. So does Google.
Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count.
We conclude that it is unlikely that SMART data alone can be effectively used to build models that predict failures of individual drives.
http://static.googleuserconten... [googleusercontent.com]
Google's analysis was of spinning hard disks, but I can not believe that SMART is somehow better at monitoring SSDs than spinning hard disks. I have personally had drives that pass every smart test and hard drive scan, but click and buzz in unnatural ways. Likewise, I have had SSDs suddenly fail that were, by all external tests before and after the failure, operating within expected parameter
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Experience shows differently : SSD works perfect day 1, isn't SEEN any more by the BIOS the day after. Tried on different machines afterwards. And no, nothing special happened to the laptop in the time between. Simply went to the hotel and back to the client the day after.
(And no, it wasn't an OCZ but for the love of god don't remember if it was a Samsung or Crucial)
I've never had that happen to a HDD. That doesn't mean I've never had spinning platters fail on me; but usually things there start by either
* S
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1- Backup
2- Backup
3- Backup
And when SSDs fail, it's not more spectacular than a HDD that won't spin, or a head crash, or its controller going MIA. (you can't swap boards on most newer drives anymore, so good luck getting the data back)
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If your OS takes 512Mb then you really need to switch to something else. I fit my OS, all software and all the files I need 24/7 access to on my 512 SSD just fine and that is with a couple of 40gb VM images on it.
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It should be trivial for the manufacturers to make 1Tb drives.
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It is. These drives already exist. But costs are not trivial at all, and mainstream market ignores them. They're specialist products.
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Samsung has had 1TB drives since December of last year for msata form factor. Not sure when the 7mm cased 1TB drives were born, but they're available too. Pricing isn't too scary either.
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Mb? Really? You don't know the difference between Megabits and GigaBytes? You're off by a factor of 8192.
Not quite. You're confusing Mb with Mib and GB with GiB.
There are 1000 MB in a GB, not 1024. This was changed a while ago. I don't know why people haven't adopted the new rules. Science uses 1000 for everything, except for some things where it makes sense like temperature, and some things where other bases are much more convenient, like time.
But for computers we need to use 1000. Even though with computers things are binary and we need to deal with factors of 2 all the time, people might get confused b
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The Intel DC S3500 is only about $1/GB for a 600GB version. Which is not bad for a drive suitable for use in a server. The S3700 series is closer to $2/GB.
(Both of those drive series have the capacitor inside to enable the SSD to shutdown cleanly in cases where the drive loses power.)