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SSD controllers store the keys internally, not on the external flash.

SSD Key storage

2. How is this key stored internally? Is it itself encrypted? Using what algorithm?
a. We do not disclose the internal details of how the key is stored in order to prevent security issues, but we do disclose it is stored in the flash memory.

Be very careful - Nvelo says you cannot install any windows update or image the drive. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?99185-OCZ-synapse-cache-128Mb-Nightmare-to-get-it-to-work-I-beg-for-help

That's a myth. Maybe it was true for some old SSDs. But it hasn't even been that true for normal usb drives.

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
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?78706-OCZ-Vertex2-180GB-lost-all-Data-after-3-Days
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html

You may say those failures are due to bugs, but when there are so many bugs, they are effectively the main failure cause of SSDs, not "wear and tear": http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/09/01/ssd-users-report-widespread-data-loss/1

And when the SSD return rates are often even higher than "spinning disk" drives you should be very careful which SSDs you use (so far I think Samsung is OK).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/components-returns-rates-5.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html

That's a myth. Maybe it was true for some old SSDs. But it hasn't even been that true for normal usb drives.

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
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?78706-OCZ-Vertex2-180GB-lost-all-Data-after-3-Days
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html

You may say those failures are due to bugs, but when there are so many bugs, they are effectively the main failure cause of SSDs, not "wear and tear": http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/09/01/ssd-users-report-widespread-data-loss/1

And when the SSD return rates are often even higher than "spinning disk" drives you should be very careful which SSDs you use (so far I think Samsung is OK).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/components-returns-rates-5.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html

See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

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
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

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
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

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.

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
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

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

I might buy a Samsung SSD. The rest (except for Intel) don't have such a great track record even when compared to hard drive failure rates (and Intel's failures haven't been very confidence inspiring).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

For some people the failure is predictable in that they can almost bet the drives will fail within a year! http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

But I don't regard that sort of predictability of failure as acceptable, unless the manufacturer is paying me to use their products and gives me plenty of spares.

Keep up to date backups of any important data:
http://www.spinics.net/lists/pgsql/msg122280.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

I'm tempted to get an SSD (or two), but the failure rates seem rather high, and the failure modes too often are worse than normal HDDs (drive totally dead or even "time warp" drive rolls back to a state X days ago : 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 ). The time warp failure mode doesn't puzzle me that much, I can think of reasons why it would happen - but it worries me from a design perspective.

Yes normal spinning disk drives do suddenly fail completely too, but that normally is a result of abuse. So far what normally happens is you have bad sectors and/or the SMART reporting stuff starts giving you some ominous signs).

If the SMART stuff worked well for SSDs, even if SSDs failed every 3 months or so, many would be happy enough - they'd buy a stack of SSDs (yes really) and swap them in whenever they see the SMART warnings.

I don't know if they're a garbage brand, but OP is certainly right. You can read OCZ's own announcement, or read Anandtech's analysis in their Vertex 3 review. Storagereview did a comparison of the 32nm and 24nm Vertex 2's which is also worth a read. .

Apparently TRIM support is already in Mac OS code in both 10.5.7 and 10.6.*. It's called IOStorage::discard. It's just not turned on.

Primary among them - when you page-fault, and then page-in, you do not need to zero-out that page. This is why I said your calculation for the time required to zero out 2GB of memory has no relevance to the topic at hand.

Oh? I was under the impression it was a security requirement for Windows. Something about not letting new processes sniff what was previously held in those memory pages.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?47212-Vista-32-64-SSD-Windows-Registry-tweaks

SSDs are quick where it counts when loading a game - access times, and read speeds. Most games load a few hundred megabytes off the HDD, and decompress those textures and levels into thousands.

Lets say for argument that a game only needs to load 200MB, then decompress it. The SSD would take about 1 second to load that data, and the CPU would take a while to decompress it.

If you're burdening your CPU with zeroing out pages, it could cause the loading to take longer. As demonstrated, perhaps as much as a half-second longer. When your load times are so short already, this is actually a noticeable amount of time.

If zeroing out pages does not in fact apply, then I'm sorry for making an invalid argument.

He probably means the TRIM firmware updates discussed on Anandtech from:

• Intel*
• Crucial
• SuperTalent
• OCZ

* Admittedly, Intel's pulled theirs temporarily due to issues.

I have never bothered with firmware updates and additional configuration steps with standard IDE, SATA, SCSI, and SAS drives. While looking around at various SSD, I found that you need to go though all of this additional crap to get things working right. OCZ, for example, has a whole forum dedicated to help tweak out their drives. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186

Go for it and post back. Either way, you should henceforth reconsider making claims of the form "X is faulty because X and Y don't work together" without verifying conclusively that Y is not faulty.

You might want to reconsider inferring things from my comments that I'm not saying. The first one failed when I plugged it into the device and read it. The device still shows up as a USB device, just not the same device it originally showed up as. The second one failed when I plugged it into an entirely different device. It also shows up as a USB device — the same as the first one. I never plugged the second drive into the device that killed the first one. I never plugged the first drive into the device that killed the second one. If you visit the OCZ flash support forum you will see that there are more problems there with ATV drives than any other product. If I hadn't had exactly the same problem by plugging the RMA'd device into a second machine, you would have more of a point. You can disagree with my conclusion but it's not as simple as making a totally unfounded assumption.

Amusingly enough, the other common problem product seems to be the Rally2 that was recommended to me. No problems with the diesel yet, so I think I made the right choice. Problem is they want me to pay shipping on this second drive that NEVER worked. It was bad from the moment I plugged it into the aforementioned Centrino Duo laptop. I've told them what I think of that idea and am waiting for their response. I don't care if it's four bucks, it's bullshit.

OCZ is clearly producing a product which does not meet customer expectations. Their tests are obviously inadequate to real world use. This is not uncommon, but it is pretty pathetic. The proper response when people are telling you "all your competitors' products work fine" is to just buy the guy's car stereo (or whatever - doesn't have to be mine, lots of people are complaining about similar problems - they could just figure out what it is and where he got it and buy another one) and find out what it is about the device that causes their product to fail, and fix it.

Here is the forum thread where I am trying to get support

And this is the private message to which he refers:

Hey,

At this point the only thing we can really do is RMA the drive again. If you'd like we can replace it with one of our other flash drives. Let me know what you'd like to do

The simple truth is that OCZ sold me a piece of junk and now wants to replace it with another piece of junk. I've been looking for other options but it looks like I'm just going to have to take another flash drive and hope it works better. Unfortunately, I BOUGHT the drive in the first place because it's waterproof, and I don't WANT a different drive. TOO BAD!

Actually, my SSD (firmware 1.10) supports TRIM and I've used it with good results. OCZ is one of the two companies mentioned that is working on a TRIM solution, but you should also know, that Windows 7 definitely supports TRIM. Google is your friend.

Actually, my SSD (firmware 1.10) supports TRIM and I've used it with good results. OCZ is one of the two companies mentioned that is working on a TRIM solution, but you should also know, that Windows 7 definitely supports TRIM. Google is your friend.

20% is too little. I've seen drives, even SLC drives, drop by more than 50%. Only some drives bounce back properly. Others rely on TRIM to clean up their fragmentation mess.

A more important note is that some initial TRIM implementations have been poorly implemented, resulting in severe data corruption and loss:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54770

I posted elsewhere regarding the fragmentation issue here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1227271&cid=27883769

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Yes. The soon-to-be-released OCZ Vertex is discussed in this forum, with a poll from an OCZ guy on how the firmware will be optimized... many IO/s or many MB/s? http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186 Partition alignment is important, as is some registry tweaks. Disable prefetch and search indexing, probably some other services that are useless and/or just waste the SSD's life span instead of enhancing performance.

Makes sense to me... We already know the random access on an SSD blows standard HDDs out of the water (Three of the drives are 1 MS access).

not so much, really

So, why would you pay $4 per GB for this when you can get a 1TB drive for around $140ish or so? Practically 0 seek time AND ~120MB/sec reads and ~90MB/sec writes. Hence WD upping the RPM's to 20K. SSD's, while pretty much in infancy for the consumer market, are already the fastest thing out there. It won't be long until they catch up on capacity.

Now, the only thing that stopped me from picking one of these bad boys up was checking out their support forums. It looks like these things have some pretty serious problems for at least some chipsets. While I realize that support forums represent the voiced minority, just running through those posts show some major issues at least with certain system combinations. Not to mention, these SSD's are pretty new, yet OCZ just announced a new rev for the lineup, now complete with a USB interface built into the drive to allow for firmware upgrades? I know this is bleeding edge stuff, but wow.

Anyway, I really wanted to upgrade with one of these because the hard drive is the slowest component in the system usually and I didn't see the VelociRaptor as a big enough upgrade for the $$. However, after all these reported problems, I think I'll wait to see how things are in 6 months or so.

There's a nice bit on OCZ's forums where they show some screenshots of the software and what's in the box.. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=38413

Try these links instead: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/475/1/ http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=38413