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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?"
What exactly is a "sporadic statistic"?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Does anyone have any first-hand, practical experience with SSD?
I know Darth Vader had his own SSD, but that's probably not what you're talking about.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
Is that because SSDs are not actually all that durable, or that laptop HDs are?
SSD's have a short life span due to cell memory, and they aren't immune to shocks damaging them. laptop hd's will take all kinds of poundings, only a direct solid hit during a r/w would possibly damage them
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I was going to buy a small one (15GB?) and put my linux partition on it (PC, so mobile benefits don't matter), but figured not too because of the fact that the number of times you can re-write is less. But according to "Because of these wear-leveling techniques, and the fact that a modern NAND device can sustain up to one million write cycles, the overall lifetime of an SSD can be decades. So losing capacity due to flash write cycles is probably not an issue", the option is now still back on.
But the re-write times are twice as slow! (ok I can live with that). But the read times are faster...as a home user, WHERE is this going to benefit me? Will I notice a diffence in 'vim file' or playing/streaming music?
I could maybe see if I were using a laptop, but I don't get how this would benefit me.
Thanks for taking the time to answer if anyone can persuade me different.
I might just get it for the cleanness of having a small segregated linux drive - really that's the best reason I can see.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
I had a Dell D430 with the SanDisk 32GB SSD and the performance was abysmal. It was so bad that I replaced it with a standard 1.8" drive. Installing Windows itself took 3 times longer! Dell replaced the drive after I reported the problem and still no dice. There seems to be a significant problem with write performance, read performance was decent but not worth the 2-3x cost difference. I can't tell if SSD's just aren't ready yet or if Dell is just really bad at systems integration and testing before product release.
Both my home server and several systems in use at work boot from compactflash drives. Our production servers run Ubuntu LTS, and are basically VMware Server boxes--the actual apps run off of guest OSs that live on the 6TB RAID-6s on each server.
All in all, I've had seven servers running off of SSDs for about eight months, and they have worked like a charm. I never have to worry about getting paged due to the inevitable mechanical failure of magnetic drives.
Also, SSDs are NOT expensive! A CF-to-IDE adapter costs $15, and a 2GB CF card costs about $30. Two gigabytes is more than enough to boot an OS and start a RAID. Don't waste your money on a 64GB CF card. The CF+RAID hybrid approach is the way to go.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
> 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 think solid state drives will be like digital cameras. The price and usability (read size) will appear not to be mainstream enough, that is, until you've just made that "big" investment in the latest incarnation of the superseded technology.
It happened to me. I bought a new (not that expensive) film SLR about 18 months prior to digital cameras having sufficient resolution/cost ratio to supersede film for everyday use. Coming from a generation where cameras tend to last almost a lifetime (having been used to my father's Minolta SR-T 101, purchased about the time I was born). The concept of a camera becoming almost obsolete in that short timeframe was a bit annoying, at the time.
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
It just boggles my mind how modern solid-state electronics organized for parallel I/O can be less than a factor of 10 times faster than an inherently serial and decidedly ancient-sounding "mechanically moved heads over a magnetized spinning disk" approach.
What the heck is going on here?
If I've made a mistake in those calculations, I'd appreciate a correction before I feel compelled to cite them again.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
And by that I don't really mean HD -> SS, rather we are currently in a capacity transition. With burgenoning digital music collections, DVD collections and the coming of HiDef video as a mainstream resource amongst other things the capacity requirements will soon shoot up. At the moment SS drives can come close to touching the standard HD entry level machines on a laptop, 60-80 GB. Fine for web browsing and general tasks, but as the above listed capacity intense activities continue to grow and the HD capacities can transition to hold them (500 GB - 1 TB is moving towards sensible options in the next wee while) - that leaves the SS drives behind again.
SS drives will always hold a niche for the ultra-portables and the light low performance laptops - but they are not going to be able to move into mid range laptops+ - and certainly not likely to make it into desktops unless it is part of an ultra quiet setup.
We've been testing DRAM based SSDs (http://www.tigicorp.com) for a while. Very fast. They don't suffer the issues of flash based SSDs but they come at a much higher cost. A single drive an saturate any interconnect you'll find on the mass market right now. The neat thing about the Tigi drives is that they actually run Linux on the drive so it's easy to change interface type or even put applications on the drives themselves.
I am not saying it is not good, its just the idea of storing data as a few electrons of static charge on the input gate of a MOSFET (or WhatEver-FET) for a few years bothers me. Call me old fashioned..
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
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
and they aren't immune to shocks damaging them.
Yes they are, for all intents and purposes. If you don't believe me see this story about a CF card that survived the collapse of the WTC.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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).
Because of these wear-leveling techniques, and the fact that a modern NAND device can sustain up to one million write cycles, the overall lifetime of an SSD can be decades. So losing capacity due to flash write cycles is probably not an issue.
Anybody know how these really differ from the older counterparts that are in say my Sansa e280? I've already worn out a couple sectors on it in under a year, which annoys the hell out of me. Although that might have just been SanDisk creating a drive that will run out on average the day after the warranty expires.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
All I have to say is screw NAND. Give me some DDR RAM-based hard drive... Ridiculously fast, very low power, no possible questions about lifetime. Perhaps even the possibility of just swapping out one failed SODIMM instead of scrapping the whole drive, is quite enticing.
I've been using Flash longer than most... From wiring minuscule capacity EEPROMs into embedded circuits, to squeezing OSes down to 8MBs for firewalls. Floppies are a no-go for important systems.
They're low power, quiet, and have high speed seeking, but I don't really care. What I want most in a drive is seriously high throughput... That probably means RAM, with a battery back-up. In the mean time, HDDs keep getting faster and quieter.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Specs.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
I was wondering if anyone can answer a simple(?) question: Can data be recovered from an SSD after it has been overwritten once? i.e If I'm disposing of an SSD with sensitive data on it do I have to run secure erasing software to make multiple/random writes to every sector?
There's a reason that these things are commercialls available only in laptops right now. In a laptop, you boot up a lot (or resume from hibernation a lot, which is equally disk-intensive), so disk seek and read times are incredibly important. Plus, power savings are a huge benefit when you're running a system that has a limited power source. The SSDs generate less heat, which is also hugely important when all your circuitry is compacted into the smallest amount of space possibility, and it allows either for the system to be cooler (hot laptops suck, even typing on them can be uncomfortable) or allow for other components like the CPU and RAM to be sped up since they get a greater share of the system's safe heat generation capacity. The reduced noise is great - try being in a meeting with 20 laptops all with fans whirring away. Finally, the greater lifetime of an SSD (modern hard disks fails way sooner than a modern SSD will, in general) means that the machine doesn't need a new disk with a new OS install and possibly a bunch of lost data on anywhere near as frequent a basis.
Less power and less noise are good for servers and desktops, and the faster seek times can really make a different in performance for many common workloads, but the biggest benefit of SSD is that they make laptops suck way less.
I would like to see a citation for that claim. From my team's research, SSDs are much much tougher than any spindle HD. But toughness may not be a factor for you when evaluating SSDs, (it wasn't for us).
Our test SSD laptops have also demonstrated much improved battery life. On a D630 we are seeing four and a half hour battery life with standard stock batteries. That's a two hour increase. Use larger cell count batteries and battery life will just get better. A laptop equiped with an eight cell battery and a secondary battery licated in the Optical drive bay, we have experienced eight hour-plus battery life.
Our boot times are also improved with SSD. Since we also encrypt, (and if anyone has used encryption on a Windows domain then they have likely experienced a hit with login times) we were most impressed with the performance improvement of encrypted SSD, when compared to a traditional HD on the same equipment. Write times are not as much improved, but there is no negative impact either.
Our experiences have been good enough that we are planning to order SSD on all new laptops for next year. The improvement in Battery life alone is worth the price of admission. Toughness, and increased write speed are icing on the cake.
While I know this info would only be anecdotal, make sure to keep track of failure rates.
thats nice but we aren't talking about a CF card we are talking about a SSD, which has more electronics in it which can flex and malfunction
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Recent discoveries and proof of concept research seems to be pointing towards the use of bio drives in the very near future.
So, while SSD may be interesting in the short term, it's unlikely they will have more impact than Bernouilli disks did in the long run.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And I really like it. This laptop is great. I have a desktop with dual 24" displays for doing work so I don't need a laptop for that. What I do need is something ultra-portable to do email, read slashdot, occasional ssh into a remote machine while on the road, terminal into a box while at the datacenter, etc. And this thing fits the bill. The solid state disk has caused no problems so far but allows things like 10 second boot times and no noise and little heat. The prices of SSD will come down, the densities will go up, and SSD drives will proliferate.
While storing it as an ultra-small magnetic dipole moment in a piece of rust on a rapidly spinning platter which will be irreversibly damaged from just a speck of dust sounds like a sane idea ?
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....
I don't need to i have all the experience i need to make the claim. I work in pretty extreme conditions and the CF based devices we use in our trucks fail 10% of the time over 12 months, vs our laptop which get lugged around in the same conditions and don't fail any more or less.
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
My source for 1,000,000 writes before failure was Wikipedia, contemporaneous with the posting.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
Puppy Linux runs nicely on small USB memory sticks of 128MB and up. A 1GB memory stick make a beautiful system. You really don't need umpteen gazillion gigabytes of storage space for a PC.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
http://www.ryanblock.com/2007/11/the-first-macbook-pro-with-a-64gb-ssd/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIUa0mwUwW8
It takes 20 seconds to boot to the desktop, half of that is the time before it actually starts booting from the disk (gray apple).
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Funny should be given a positive score, I personally consider a funny comment at least as valid in the conversation as an insightful or informative, and the current scoring system just leads to mislabeled posts.
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).
Yeah, I failed to notice you were replying to a post about servers. So, since you asked...
Server heat generation is a HUGE problem in large server farms. Cooling and heat shielding between dense server racks cost a lot of money, and failure to handle the cooling and insulation can cause hardware death on a pretty massive scale. Having just gone through the pain of upgrading a data center that was growing fast and packing more and more hardware into a smaller and smaller amount of space, I can attest to the benefit of using servers that generate way less heat.
Plus, the power consumption reduction is also a big bonus. Sure, the savings on a single machine is small. When you have 15,000 machines, however, the power savings adds up big time.
Having spent several years of my life working in a small office that had a server rack not 15 feet from my desk, I'd also be really, really happy with any technology that reduced the noise level of a server. On hot days it almost required shouting to talk to co-workers closer to my desk than the server rack itself.
All of those advantages are rather moot at this point in time where servers are generally going to need regular hard disks even if they have SSDs, but maybe not for much larger. Most of the servers I've run had 18G or smaller disk drives. Only the SAN servers would need anything bigger than what we can get on an SSD these days. Even the servers that need larger disks might soon be able to switch to SSD, though. A moderate RAID of 64GB SSDs could handle the data sets for most small to medium companies, I'd imagine. I think the government agency I worked for (about 160 employees with about 120 desktops and laptops among them) used barely 2TB between email, documents, and web content, and backups were still on magnetic tape (ick) and secure remote backup services. The county's data set wasn't much larger, despite how much bigger the county is in terms of total employees and total residents.
And really, bringing up the write cycles issue is just silly. It's a non-issue. A cell in an average quality NAND module can sustain over a million writes. Do the math and figure out how many months' worth of constant writing you'd need to reduce the total available usable space on a 32GB flash module in half. You might be surprised to know that hard disks can't sustain infinite writes either, although it can handle way more than a flash module. (Back to non-server land, hard disks can fail pretty quickly due to too many spin-ups/spin-downs, which are quite frequent in laptops and other portables.) Unless you are doing a crapload of constant high-volume disk writing, any hard disk you put in your machine is going to die long before a (non faulty) flash module does. Even if you have some machines that _are_ doing a ton of writing, that doesn't invalidate the usefulness of SSD on all the machines that aren't.
In Soviet Russia, the positive scores you! Yeah, that adds a lot to the conversation.
:) My caveat was that it had to be actually funny.
The infamous bug in Ubuntu destroyed the magnetic disk drive in my Fujitsu P7230. I replaced the failing drive with a 16GB Samsung SSD that I bouht on Newegg for $200. I'm usually very conservative and cautious in my technology purchases, but this time I went out on a limb.
After a month or so of using the SSD, I can say it is a success. I don't need much space on my laptop, just room for the OS. I no longer have to worry so much about dropping my laptop. The already incredible battery life of the P7230 is extended for at least 30 extra minutes. And in all other ways it's just fine.
The only problem with the SSD is, of course, the fact that it can only take a certain number of write cycles before it goes down. However, considering the lack of moving parts, and the algorithms that reduce unnecessary writing, I predict it will last a lot longer than the magnetic drive did.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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)
I agree with TFA that SSD is most useful if you need the ruggedness and the read speed. I have a 16GB Samsung 1.8" SSD in my fujitsu P1510D. It's a marriage made in heaven! I am a Biologist, and use my P1510 in the field. The SSD gives piece of mind, one less thing to go wrong. In fact, almost right after I swapped in my SSD, I (yes accidentally) dropped my computer about three feet to the floor. After checking to see that screen and case wasn't cracked, I just knew it was fine, and of course it booted right up. I also work in some high altitude locations, and I find the the machine boots at higher altitudes now. (perhaps hard drives cut out at high altitude because there's not enough air to keep the head off the platter?) Finally, the P1510 uses hard to find and extremely expensive micro-DIMMs, so upgrading the memory is prohibitively expensive. That was my biggest gripe with the little machine, it was slow because I couldn't get the 1GB it really needs. This, coupled with the incredibly slow 1.8" hard drive made it kind of annoying. I still can't do much about upgrading RAM, but the read speed of the SSD allows me to just close applications, and re-open them when I need them (nearly instantaneously), so I never have more than two applications open at a time. The most telling test I've done is with Allway Sync, which I use to synchronize the files on my little laptop with my desktop. Running "Analyze" (version checking files) on my home folder used to take about about a minute, now with the SSD it's somewhere between 10-15 seconds. Sure, I wouldn't put it on a MySQL server or the like, but for my laptop, the whole experience is just so much better. I would recommend one to anyone who can use the ruggedness and read speed.
It does what I want. I was looking for a highly-portable full-featured computer, and the price was right. If I really need high-res at some point it's not like it doesn't have a VGA-out. I'm not using it for anything beyond e-mail and light surfing at the moment, but then I just got it ten days ago; I'll probably do light word processing at some point. I care much less than if I'd invested tons of cash into something nicer and it takes a fall or otherwise gets rendered a paperweight. The biggest kicker was portability -- I'm a big fan of not checking bags when I travel, and this thing makes that considerably easier.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
Let me guess, your trucks are hauling around crates full of Western Digital drives? ;)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Every time the SSD discussion comes up I see numbers quoted from 10,000 to 10,000,000 writes. Keep in mind the one number on Intel's data sheet was guaranteed writes. Also we're at the end of 2007 and this is fast moving technology. I think a lot of the lower numbers quoted are a couple years old and yet people keep quoting them. Too lazy to look up links right now, but instead of looking at data sheets there were a few recent tests done, and I seem to remember that the results were in the 2,000,0000 - 5,000,000 ballpark.
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?
Where are you putting the drives that the Bernoulli principle comes into effect? Given that the Bernoulli principle addresses issues of momentum conservation in a stream of fluid, I can't imagine a practical application where the stagnation pressure would come into play.
Wait, I know. Are you dropping running computers out of cargo aircraft at 60k feet?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
And PC Nazis will complain about SS Drives because they associate them with the Schutzstaffel.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Doesn't that only effect how they are displayed to me, not how the points are allocated?
:P
And as if I get +5 funny for a serious post!
Back around 1998 we tried using 1GB SSD's for database indexes, with the rest of the DB using standard drives. Was pretty good, however very expensive. Normal drives are much faster now, and in-memory databases like Polyhedra and Times Ten are pretty good for the same function at a much lower cost, but glad to see them comming in now.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
A year of Solid State Disk on Desktop?
Hard disks are not reliable above 10000ft (2 miles). That covers a number of interesting places, including many observatories. At the distance and speed that happens inside a HDD, the Bernoulli effect is what keeps the heads from turning your data into slightly magnetic dust. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Integrity
-Lars
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.
All these cycles are given as one cell write cycles. But flash has more than the advertised cells (spare cells). And these are written every time a block is wrote. So a newly written spare block becomes the new block while the old block is moved to the spare blocks. So in theory, you can exceed those write cycles, even by writing data to the same sector. After all, that's why it's called "wear leveling". I think DVD-RAM (and DVD+-RW, but in SW if used in packet writing mode) uses the same algorithm.
My only concern is how/where the mapping is stored.
Besides, I would be satisfied if I would get 3-5 years with no errors. I had to deal with corrupted cards, but usually it was with low-cost cards used in low-cost cameras. And I also would like to try an XP installation on my 4GB Corsair Voyaget GT.
PS: wear leveling explained by Corsair (pdf)
How long until Dell gets with the program and offers solid state drives in their Desktops as well?!
I don't know why you were unable to find MTRONs at DV Nation for a much better price! (I don't work for DV Nation, but I am a happy customer.) They come right up when I do a search.
Maybe you're leaning on Google product search a bit too much...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
They need higher read/write speeds. I should be able to saturate the SATA bus since there are no moving parts for bottlenecks.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Just FYI, the SSDs you can get in PATA/SATA connections normally support advanced transfer modes like UDMA. Most CF cards, except the ultra-high-speed ones ($$$) don't support UDMA, and in fact, the CF spec only calls for them to support PIO (you tie one pin of a CF card to ground and it'll start up in IDE mode. Most CF cards though only support PIO mode since that's the traditional way PCMCIA/CF storage cards are handled.).
So performance will be abysmal simply from the fact that the CPU spins doing I/O using a CF card. Not a big deal for a server where card's only used during bootup, but a consideration if you do a bit of disk I/O. In which case, investing in a small SSD or a better CF card with UDMA support will help a lot.
My user number is prime. Is yours?
I think both the Samsung and Super Talent SDDs are over-priced. For those that are in the market today for a solid-state-drive (mainly laptop owners), they will likely care the most about 2 things - power consumption, and weight, and any SDD will outperform a magnetic disk in those categories. I would recommend 32 GB 2.5" SATA SDD from Transcend at 1/3 of the cost of the 64 GB Samsung model. Aside from that, and especially if gigabytes are not the highest priority, there are also excellent, and much cheaper solutions for those who are willing to take the time to play around, such as this CF / IDE adapter from Addonics. Last, but not least, if it isn't already obvious, solid state disks only have a limited lifespan, and it's usually much shorter than the lifespan quoted by the manufacturer, unless they came up with a new, super-advanced wear-leveling algorithm. Never estimate the value of making periodic backups to a more reliable permanent storage facility!
OLED screens... SSD's are cool and all (when they are affordable I will prolly install one on my laptop for seek time ), but the rugged aspect really doesn't make much of a difference if you bust the LCD on your laptop, though with an SSD HD and an OLED screen you could conceivably throw the whole thing against the wall and so long as you don't break the board or power, it will still run- plus you would prolly have a standard controller for oled making replacements cheap and easy- this very much appeals to me as my laptop is mainly used for live music, so it is usually in a bar\club environment and not an office\living room environment.
I guess they will fail eventually but can this failure be pre-detemined? i.e after x number of writes. If so then you wont need a constant backup, just a backup and replace when the drive gets close to failing.
Still, if someone could say "They will never fail" and it was true, then it would half the cost (of 2 SSD s for RAID 1) and have end use of all the capacity of all the available drive slots on a server (instead of half capacity for RAID 1).
Reiser is designed to address the physical limitations of an Mechanical Drive. It puts small files in the allocation table, it tries to avoid seeking and fragmentation, and takes a good deal of effort to make sure this happens. THESE are the sterengths of an SSD, fragment all you like, SSD will still be happy. access a bunch of 90 byte config files.. still happy (well ish, the controller will still hate your guts)
ok I'm replying to an AC, but the point remains WHY?
Storm
I have a server in the basement reusing an old motherboard that doesn't do lba-48 addressing.
I replaced the first drive with an old SSD disk from a dead camera and put a custom complied linux boot kernel on it that used the sata/ata instead of the old ide interface to access drives. (/boot) Then I placed a 500GB drive on the second ide interface.
The system initially boots the kernel in the bios's older lba mode from the camera disk then switches to the kernel's lba48 accessing then runs off the 500GB drive.
Yes, I could have used an older drive for this trick but they were kind of noisy.
It made a useful server out of a piece of junk.
Are the laptops-drives running when lugged around or not?
A parked drive can withstand a lot more abuse than one that is spinning.
With a little search through the Samsung web-site I found out that their 2.5" and 1.8" harddrive are specified at 1G while operating and their SSD drives are specified at 20G while operating..
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
The Cray 1M was the first commercial system that I'm aware of that had an SSD option.
I was a sysop in the 1990s on a Cray Y-MP C916/12 512. Its SSD was a $2M option (guessing).
Here's a great photo of a Cray C90 with an SSD. The SSD is the smaller cabinet to the back of the girl. Both cabinets were liquid cooled, hence their small size.
Our Cray C90 had twelve central processing units (custom vector silicon) with a clock speed of 230 MHz and contained 512 megawords (4096 megabytes) of shared memory. It also had a 512 megaword Solid State storage Device (SSD). Its I/O subsystem also connected to a Cray 2 to handle all access to real disk - making that Cray 2 one of the most expensive disk controllers ever.
Though the vector CPUs were outmatched by newer systems, we continued to use the C90 into 1999 for oil exploration because of its incredible I/O throughput and ability to handle very large datasets (1GB) efficiently.