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Solid State Drives - Fast, Rugged, and Expensive
Nick Breen writes "Are solid state drives becoming a reality? Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech has written an article concerning the current state of SSD with a comparison between a Samsung 64GB SATA and a Super Talent 32GB SATA. While they showed impressive speed rates when placed against a hard disk drive, the occasional sporadic statistic (and high cost) indicate they're not quite ready for the mainstream. Dell and Alienware have been shipping laptops with SSDs for months now, and Apple may be rolling out one of their own next year. Is the time of the solid-state drive almost at hand? Does anyone have any first-hand, practical experience with SSD?"
A statistic that is neither a lie nor a damn lie.
They appear very sporadically. (For values of "sporadically" approaching epsilon, at least 19 times out of 20)
I've put one 32GB 1.8" IDE SuperTalent SSD in my Thinkpad X40, to replace that ever-failing 1.8" mechanical Hitachi crap, and formatted it with Reiser4 + cryptcompress. I LOVE IT. Fast, silent, more battery life, and, best of all, reliable. It was worth every buck.
> Does anyone have any first-hand, practical experience with SSD?
Yes. Transcendent 4GB 266x Compact Flash card, fast, silent, installed Ubuntu 7.04, currently 1.4 GB free.
Price for the card + card to ide bridge was about two 80GB HDD drives.
Only problem was that I had to make my own drive mount first, because all I got was a board with a Compact Flash slot and a IDE connector.
If you are happy with a few GB of disk space, go for it. If you want to store big amount of data, wait. The price will fall.
I have first hand experience with SSDs as I have bought one of the Samsung 64 GB SATA SSDs. In terms of writing performance, they're approximately on par with regular hard disks, as far as I can tell. Disk reads, however, are very good. To give you a vague idea of the read speed, Windows XP on this drive boots to login screen without the black logo screen appearing at all. Additionally, for those who are interested, here's what Linux's hdparm has to say about it:
/dev/sda1 /dev/sda1:
# hdparm -tT
Timing cached reads: 7352 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3679.72 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 168 MB in 3.01 seconds = 55.86 MB/sec
You're off by a factor of 10 there, 1sec/5ms=200 I/O's per second which still gives only 1.6MB/s for totally random reads for 8KB blocks.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Basically the reviews on Anandtech & Tom's Hardware have drawn some interesting conclusions... In terms of write performance, some are significantly worse than most notebook HDs, but all are better in terms of read performance. The idle of SATA SSD drives are significantly worse than UDMA ones (0.5w vs. 0.05w).
Basically, do your research... How much speed you'll get depends on how they bank the flash chips. More banks of lower density chips will yield a higher transfer rate--but uses more power. (Good luck finding how any one brand of SSD drive is banked...) Tom's Hardware found that the Samsung 64GB SSD offered double the transfer rate than their 32GB SSD. Anandtech found the Transcend & Super Talent SSD's to be extremely weak offerings. But then again Anandtech found the MTRON 32GB SSD far superior to most other drives they tested.
Basically SSD drives help with bootup times but in mixed tests, only the MTRON SSD drives are near Raptor speed, but I found only one retailer that even sells them--and a 32GB one for $2336.95 !!!
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Been using arrays of 4 and 8 32GB SSDs as both RAID0 and RAID5, off hardware RAID controllers and as Linux softraid, to push seek time to near 0 and throughput as far as possible. Bottom line is, they're significantly faster than "real" disks. We've found MTrons to be faster than Samsungs, generally 20 to 40%, and the MTron seek times are significantly better (they probably don't write-balance check as often under heavy usage). Only reliability problems I had were with another brand (neither Samsung nor MTron).
Unless you know of some special reason why sustained write speed is critical, you should probably be looking more closely at access time, where SSD blows mechanical drives out of the water.
No doubt, mechanical drives still rule capacity/price, but with the growth rates of the two technologies over the past several years, SSD could take over soon.
Specs.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
I on the other hand am basing my assumptions on real world experiences working with industrial equipment that uses CF cards for hard drives in mobile fleet equipment.
in the real world i've seen a 10% failure rate on CF cards (which are tougher then SSD's i might add) over 12 months WITHOUT any write action at all.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
1,000,000 writes/bitfailure / 139.8 writes/year = 7153 years/bitfailure
I haven't confirmed the rest of your math but you appear to be off by an order of magnitude for the number of erase/write cycles without an error.This quote is from a recent Intel 2Gb NAND chip; First block (block address 00h): -- Guaranteed to be valid up to 1,000 PROGRAM/ERASE cycles (you can view the first block as the boot block, that is - very important) And; On-chip control logic automates PROGRAM and ERASE operations to maximize cycle endurance. ERASE/ PROGRAM endurance is specified at 100,000 cycles when using appropriate error correcting code (ECC) and error management. I interpret this to mean 100,000 cycles without an uncorrectable error but you can expect to see random bit errors after only 1,000 cycles. You will need the overhead of error detection and correction as well as mapping the bad section of memory to another area (your read times will be slower than the theoretical max). You will find the 1,000/100,000 numbers pretty much standard among NAND manufactures.
That said, I agree that NAND is reliable and is most certainly _the_ replacement for mechanical hard drives.
I've been using a Sandisk 32 GB SSD on a Dell Latitude D630 running Vista for about 3 months now. This wasn't cheap, and even with an early adopter mindset, this is a big disappointment; it does indeed reads much faster (about 30 times), but writes at least 3 times slower than the same D630 running a SATA. My typical usage involved web/email, Microsoft Office, photography/photoshop, compiling large projects, etc.
Quiet is great, more battery is fine, and I hardly ever reboot using Vista almost instant-sleep feature, but installing software or writing large files is *painful*. Moreover, you should plan for a lot of physical memory: you do *not* want to see your system paging for virtual memory.
Now maybe Vista is to blame, but the whole system will hang now and then for 10 secs or more. Is it indexing something, writing whatever system logs to disk, who knows, but a a few other users have reported the same issue with this SSD on Dell forums. No driver update has been released either since the SSD option was out. This is also probably not coincidental that SSD vendors emphasize read speed but remain somehow quiet about the write speed (or lack thereof).
I, for one, am switching back to a 7200 RPM SATA. This is *not* ready for prime time, even if Samsung claims slightly better write speed on its 64 GB; *do* check the user forums (say, Dell), and you will find a lot of frustrated users. This was worth a shot, and I'll eventually consider that technology again in 10 months.
Hope this helps
Samsung's datasheet says their drive is rated to 1,000g, that's 10x better than even the best shock isolated laptop drives with physical spindles and enough shock that you'd probably break the motherboard, lcd, etc long before you damaged the drive.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Performance wise, once you switch to desktops, you are able to use performance drives like Western Digital Raptor WD1500.
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php
Compare the Western Digital Raptor WD1500 No NCQ to the Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS with NCQ (250 GB SATA). The Scorpio consumes a lot less power, but isn't that much quieter. The Raptor has about 2.5x the performance.
SSD wins on noise and power, and the Raptor wins on price. Depending on the application, either could win in performance.
Not sure where the Wiki is getting its numbers from maybe reference [5]? an old (2003) Toshiba marketing pamphlet (for some reason hosted by a chip programmer company [Data-io]).
I would like to see a real datasheet claiming 1,000,000 writes.
Even Mtron is only claiming 140 years for their SSD with its "advanced wear-leveling technology" (they reiterate 100,000 cycles for an individual chip).
:) My caveat was that it had to be actually funny.
On a D630 we are seeing four and a half hour battery life with standard stock batteries
I also have a D630 with the stock battery and I get just over 4 hours with a normal hard drive thanks to using RightMark's CPU utility to lower the voltage by 30% from the factory setting. You should try it in combination with the SSD and the thing will run for days on an extended battery. (your CPU might not be stable at 30% lower like mine but you'll be able to lower it some)
Well, the CF fits directly into the motherboard, freeing up two more slots in the case for the RAID. Also, we spec'd the servers and ordered them from a local business, which built them for us. Buying through our "official" lines would have cost quadruple the price. It cost us no extra time because nobody would have sold us a preconfigured Ubuntu LTS server anyway... at least not with the kind of hardware we required.
There's also the inherent awesomeness of booting from flash.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
That's the beauty of Slashcode. Use the Reason Modifier, and funny WILL be given a positive score.
My user number is prime. Is yours?
I do the same trick. I've had more than 300 systems running for around 3.5 years, both read only and read write with plain old ext3. Not a single cf card has failed. Nearly 1/5 of all the rotating disks we've delployed in the same time frame have either failed completely of shown some sort of strange behavior or smartd error. Booting off the cf card leaves us with enough system after the mechanical disk fails to tell us what has gone wrong without an expensive truck roll.
It is true that eventually cf cards will wear out due to write fatigue. It will happen much much later than mechanical disks will fail for all of the reasons that they do. This seems to be true "even if you do a lot of writes".*
*The sample space here is around 300 systems for a bit over 3 years, 24/7 operation.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
I bought a Samsung 32GB SSD for my Portege 3505. Oddly enough it is not able to find the SSD during booting. Also I had to grind off some part of the SSD case because it didn't fit into the laptop drive bay.
This turned out to be a big nuissance since the SSD is somewhat pricey. This is a BIOS issue since Linux recognizes the disk flawlessly. I wondered about getting one of those Flash floppy drives from HP which allow booting from a fake floppy. I think I'll make a USB drive out of the SSD now.
Ultimately I settled for a 2.5'' IDE to CF adapter + 8GB flash running Ubuntu 7.10. This works well enough but it seems that the laptop gets short hangs occasionally. Those hangs were reduced by building my own kernel with preemption set for low latency desktop, and 1000 ticks per second. I don't know what those changes exactly do to my problem but they seemed worth a try.
The laptop is ultra quiet now until the fan starts, I guess my next project is undervolting it. So far I had no success with the phc patch however.
Je me souviens.
Nah, not even close. All my fans are 120mm and run at 7V, making them pretty much inaudible. My power supply is a Seasonic S12 with an extremely quiet 120mm fan as well. It'll ramp up fan speed as temperature increases, but even with four disks and an 8800GT I've never been able to hear it above the disk whine.
Peter Gutman, a Kiwi, has studied this and reported on it. Find his home page at:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/
and go down a couple of screens to the section marked "Design and Analysis of Security Systems". He gives some links to his papers and presentations.
Berke Durak wrote some software called wipe to do secure file deletions, and its documentation references Peter Gutman's paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory". Wipe is available in Ubuntu's universe repository, and presumably many other places. Install it and read the docs.
Regards, Non.
There is another theory that states that this has already happened.