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Four SSDs Compared — OCZ, Super Talent, Mtron
MojoKid writes "Solid State Drive technology is set to turn the storage industry on its ear — eventually. It's just a matter of time. When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical, it doesn't take a degree in physics to understand the obvious advantages. However, as with any new technology, things take time to mature and the current batch of SSDs on the market do have some caveats and shortcomings, especially when it comes to write performance. This full performance review and showcase of four different Solid State Disks, two MLC-based and two SLC-based, gives a good perspective of where SSDs currently are strong and where they're not. OCZ, Mtron and Super Talent drives are tested here but Intel's much anticipated offering hasn't arrived to market just yet."
OCZ has two different drives reviewed.
Ultimately I think we're going to see systems with the OS essentially in ROM on a solid state disk, with room for application installation. Data will end up being stored on a traditional disk. I sincerely hope that the developers of next gen Windows, Linux, MacOS, and others, are taking this scenario and building an OS that is optimized for it. I think Linux certainly has a head start.
One manufacturer makes both an SLC and MLC drive. RTFM.
They tested two (2) different OCZ SSD models, one with SLC NAND Flash memory chips, and the other with MLC NAND Flash memory chips. 2+1+1=4
I know, I RTA...
You know, we keep talking about solid state as its better because there are no moving parts, and less wear, but chips and circuits have plenty of moving electrons and go through a lot of thermal stress. I know that for a lot of applications a circuit can seem to be more reliable, but do we really have a sufficient experience to make such a sweeping statement that in fact solid state is more -reliable- than a mechanical system? There are some steam trains out there that are running and are over 100 years old... do we really think that a CPU or a RAM or a motherboard can live that long?
This is my sig.
Yet another SSD review by clueless PC dweebs.
The whole point of SSDs is that they have no moving parts, so they don't have the seek time and rotational latency of spinning disks. That translates into faster random access. As the review says:
So what do they measure? Sequential transfer rates.
Gah.
>> When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical
As far as I can see there really aren't any, at least for conventional desktop PC use. The most obvious one would be performance, except suprisingly when comapred with the fastest of todays mechanical drives there's not much if any performance advantage. In some cases SSDs are actually worse.
There's still a lot of other disadvanteges to SSDs, like a more limited number of write operations, only small storage sizes available, and much higher cost per Gb.
Someone wake me up when there's a 1TB SSD for $250 that can do unlimited rewrite ops.
Mean Time Between Failure, as quoted directly from the manufacturer in this article, is not an accurate method of measuring disk life because how long any disk lasts varies greatly on the applications using it. For instance, MLC NAND memory has between 1,000 and 10,000 write cycles per cell, SLC memory about 100,000. Some applications will be more write intensive, so they'll wear out the memory faster.
you can copy a 1GB file as of Dec 2007 in four seconds with the right RAID controller using nine 16GB Mtron drives in RAID 0.
but i'm personally waiting for that memsistor thing.
yes i know,a long wait.
Solid State Drive technology is set to turn the storage industry on its ear. Good to know that the industry isn't going in a completely new, turned-on-its-head direction.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
Here's the printable version with all the extra crap removed.
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1211
RTFM? Shit... comments, articles, now I have to read a damn manual too. Jesus Slashdot is getting harder and harder these days.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
For instance, MLC NAND memory has between 1,000 and 10,000 write cycles per cell, SLC memory about 100,000. Some applications will be more write intensive, so they'll wear out the memory faster.
That's why modern CF, SD, and SSD controllers spread writes to a single logical sector over multiple physical sectors. They also dedicate 5 to 7 percent of their space to spare sectors in case one wears out; this accounts for the difference between a GB and a GiB. For example, a half-full 16 GB SSD with blocks of 128 KiB has over 60,000 free blocks. If your app makes 864,000 writes per day (10 writes per second 24/7), then the wear leveling circuitry would go through the entire free memory just under 15 times a day. If your SLC is guaranteed for 100,000 erases per block, then it should still last over 18 years.
I seem to have missed the boat on this one...
I was actually surprised to see the capacities and prices. As someone who's never had a hard drive bigger than 80GB (and even then only used half of it), the capacities of SSDs are starting to look pretty decent. The prices are still an order of magnitude away from what they'd need to be to get me to switch, but hopefully that's only a year or two away?
The big thing for me is the durability to shock. I don't own a desktop; I'm a purely notebook guy. Just recently I toasted a (mechanical) hard drive by dropping it on the floor. If SSDs can save me from my own stupidity, it could be worth it soon....
I am not an expert by any stretch but it seems to me that write speed issues, at least when it comes to relatively small amounts of writing, could easily be mitigated with a very long on-board RAM buffer controlled by the drive... and by very large, I mean like 1GB at least. And to keep it stable, a capacitor should be enough to keep it alive when power drops to commit any changes in buffer to the SSD storage. Maybe what I speak of is impossible or ridiculously expensive, but I don't think either is the case.
By the time they produce 1Tb for $100 SSDs our hard disks will be 10Tb for the same price.
Anybody thinking hard disks and SSDs are going to reach equal price/capacity in the next five years is dreaming.
No sig today...
I did RTFA; at least, the first several screens. Not a word about price. If you've read the whole thing, what do these suckers cost? I want to build fanless, nose-free a media center but I ain't Bill gates (good thing too because I'll base it on Linux).
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
By what WITCHCRAFT would thou know the article contents?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Well, you see, they teach nobility how to read and write. Also, how to wield a sword and ride a horse into combat.
I have magnetic media drives that are 15 years old and still work fine. Would I be able to say the same about any SSD "drive"? I doubt it. Unlike magnetic media, flash RAM technology is known to have a finite, limited, and unpredictable lifespan; it will only tolerate so many rewrites and then begin to fail, and you'll never know exactly when that will be. That sad day will come sooner than 15 years down the road, and you'll have paid a premium for it. Same for phase-change optical media, really. That doesn't really happen with magnetic media ever, AFAIK, unless the heads drag and shear off material.
It's been a decade since I first began hearing the proclamations about the rise of SSDs and the fall of magnetics, yet still magnetics rule supreme. This is marketing hype, not progress.
The usefulness of SSDs is undeniable in small devices, but there isn't much of a point of actually using it as a high performance write-heavy device with the limited life of its flash cells. Any heavy write use will quickly wear the device out, and this has already been proven pretty much with people trying to use them as generic HD replacements on microsoft systems with swap enabled.
The amount of storage is also very tiny compared to a modern hard drive in the same form factor. Combine those two together and the usefulness of SSD for any application that writes a lot of data is going to be severely limited. I don't think I would trust it even as a staging device for database transactions.
Laptops and small devices are the only consumer devices that would have a clear advantage in the use of such storage. Laptops for the solid-state nature of SSDs (not the performance), and consumer devices for the same.
On the flip side, SSDs clearly have a major advantage for serving moderately-sized static or mostly-static data sets. Such data sets are often larger then the 2-16G of main memory a server has. Having 50G of 'fast' mostly-read-only SSD storage would greatly improve the performance of static web servers.
Any mostly-read application of moderate size would benefit from SSDs by reducing the need to cache data in main memory, leaving more memory available for dynamic data sets and operations. One would no longer have to separate static and dynamic web content in heavily loaded sites, for example. The static content could be served out of SSD with very little main memory impact and the same system's horse-power and memory could then be directed to the dynamic content.
I'm hoping the research IBM is doing will yield better non-volatile, high performance solid state storage.
-Matt
For server systems, you can build a fully functionally ram based server image which will run in less than 200mb of ram.
Just add 4-128gb of memory as required.
Course, all that goes completely out of the window the instant the words "Gnome", or "Java" are mentioned. You are welcome to your rotating metal disk levels of performance there.
Deleted
These guys are idiots. A few points:
- They 'cheated' on ATTO, only configuring it to start at 8k. Last I checked, default sector size is 512b. Regular day-to-day apps, such as Outlook, perform random sector-level access to the PST when downloading mail.
- If you're going to do an SSD roundup, how about at lest grabbing a few drives off of the SSD top 10. Specifically, Memoright (#1 on that list) makes an SLC drive that competes with the other SLC drives on price, yet outperforms them all: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-top10.html
- Disclaimer: I own a Memoright drive. I don't claim to be a fanboy, I just did my research beforehand (along with trying out a few other drives), and found the best thing going at the time.
- The Intel drives, expected to come out this month, are likely to bury everything on that review.
this sig was brought to you by the letter
But Microsoft is, in a way, just symbolic for the software developers in general. We've had growing SSDs for quite some time, now (let's think thumbdrive, CF, Ramdisk, and others).
The problem with this is that as RAM becomes cheaper, the software developers deliberately bloat their software, and thus make SSDs again impractical for the latest software. Since government purchases and requirements drive everyone to the new level, SSDs have remained impractical.
So now people are coming out, saying "Well, the SSDs are getting better, so NOW they'll be practical."
Well, can someone explain to me what changed in the market forces, to make software developers want their products small enough to fit on a SSD? To a software company president, SSD = Piracy = Lost Profits.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I don't find a benefit or obvious advantage in a device that requires wear-leveling to keep from wearing itself out. The fact that it degrades its storage capacity gracefully instead of all at once doesn't offset that swap files can really work over mass storage devices and the first bad sectors have been known to start showing up after only weeks of use in some cases.
How about a solid-state non-volatile storage device with good speed, low power, dense packing, competitive price, and effectively unlimited read/write cycles? Then I'll be a convert.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Are you speaking of a binary order of magnitude, or a decimal order of magnitude?
And human years, dog years, or Internet years?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sorry, it was meant as more of a joke, but I guess my snarkasm is weak today
I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar
Speaking of handicaps and stalls, isn't that exactly what's going to happen to many of these 1st- and 2nd-generation SSD drives when they reach their maximum # of write cycles and suddenly fail to be writable anymore?
Are these "budget" SSD players able to come to market in droves because nobody is validating their write management / "wear leveling" logic?
Perhaps the budget SSDs are fine for 95% of would-be users and mainstream applications, but I wonder if enthusiasts are going to see the early SSD limitations earlier.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
I got a Core 64GB. I build large java projects. This is for my workstation, not a laptop. Power and quiet were not the reasons for my experimental purchase.
I aimed to slash my build time for complex scenarios.
I thought the Compile -> Jar -> War -> Deploy -> Expand -> Launch would be greatly spead up as the files would be accessed quickly.
I hoped effectively for a much more targeted and capacious file cache/ RAM disk.
Unfortunately, the hype does not turn out to be true.
The enormous time cost of writing files smaller than 8MB (!) [see footnotes] completely counters any read speed increase. Building a proect is making thousands of 2KiB files : one of the most pathological cases for these drives.
So is it slow? No, it's just as quick as a sluggish 7K250, but then again I just coughed up £179 for the privelege of the same speed.
So I'm ebaying mine to someone who wants it for a light and quiet laptop, perfect.
-----------------
Some "Terrible small write performance" links I found during research:
* http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram_6.html
* http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I don't see anyone asking so I will. Have solid state drives been subjected to large electromagnetic pulses? Tape in a vault will survive. Some regular hard drives will spin back up when (if) power is restored. I don't want to be in a position where 1 good air burst will fry my car AND my (pick a subject) records.
Speaking of handicaps and stalls, isn't that exactly what's going to happen to many of these 1st- and 2nd-generation SSD drives when they reach their maximum # of write cycles and suddenly fail to be writable anymore?
Just like SATA and SCSI drives, it will just build up bad sectors as the system tries to write information, resulting in a "shrinking" drive.
It is actually much less likely this type of storage device will have a sudden, catastrophic failure, when it only takes one moving part to foul in a mechanical drive to destroy everything it contained.
Including 4K numbers makes sense. If you are working inside of a filesystem (NTFS, FAT, ext3, ... and most others), the smallest IO that actually happens is 4K and these are aligned on 4K boundaries. So 512 byte numbers don't actually mean anything.
I'm with ya. I like the idea of SSDs in specific applications like portables and other quiet, low-power rigs, but for general purpose computing they're kinda pointless.
It's still far better to throw a ton of Ram into your PC and let the disk cache work its magic.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You mean one day we'll have computers that boot instantly from ROM? Wow! It'll be just like the 80's again! Turn on your computer and before the screen has even warmed up the cursor is blinking OK>
Compile -> Jar -> War -> Deploy -> Expand -> Launch
Sun's Matryoshka_doll approach to Java has become a bit much.
This is "fixable".
If you want to test a beta of our MFT software, drop an email to sales@easyco.com or read up at http://easyco.com./
ps: my apologies for the blatant advert. I think my karma can stand it. At least I was short ;)
"Four SSIDs Compared - Jeffz2Wire, Belkin_N_Wireless_8882D7, Linksys, and THOMPSON_HOME"
But does he float or sink?
you could still be a witch. as i see it, the only way to prove you're not is to see if you weigh more than a duck.
It is possible you just selected the wrong drive. I have similar workload to what you describe, and I have very much considered the Mtron PRO devices. They can supposedly do random writes in small blocks efficiently.
Since there's a lot less moving parts and no thick metal parts like hard-drives are the SSDs more Green-Friendly in the manufacturing phase and end-of-life to recycle? Since there's been a lot of consideration in the industry about environmental friendliness I through this might be something that should be brought up.
I just got a Transend 32gb MLC (slower) drive, and I'm running Archlinux on it.
No hiccups, latency is great, speed is great, and it works really well.
I wouln't have gotten it but it was so cheap that I figured I could dump it on eBay if I didn't like it.
http://transcendstore.com/ts32gssd25s-m.html
I know how to get one bit more per flash cell, without increasing error tolerance.
Kim0
What I don't understand is why the big whoop over SSD. Sure in special cases like music players and laptops,stuff that gets slung around,yeah i can see it. But why would you want one in any other place? hell,I got rid of some 400Mb(yes with an Mb. We thought they were big back in the day) drives that still purred like kittens. I think in all my years of abusing my HDDs with video transcoding and editing I have killed a grand total of two,and one of those i was able to get back with the bosses copy of spinrite.
So I just don't get why everyone is getting so buzzed about an SSD with this "countdown to extinction" hanging over its head when the HDDs just last so much longer. And with a $15 USB adapter I can take my old drives as I trade up and use them for easy backups and portable storage. So while I might get one for my laptop(when they are cheap enough) and have flash in my media player and camera I just can't see myself wanting it to many other places,and certainly not replacing my reliable HDDs. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That is completely right. But in addition, there is also the hdd's own disk cache. That is, all data going to the disk is cached twice. fsync() time is mostly irrelevant though because fsync can not force the hard disk to flush its cache (see fsync's man page for details). Which can be very irritating because many disks doesn't allow you to turn off the disk cache so no matter what you do, there just is no way to guarantee data consistency in case of a power failure.
Football Odds
The sibling post is correct about wear leveling causing a shrinking drive rather than a full sized drive which suddenly fails. I suppose its possible that they're lying about it, but there doesn't seem to be much outcry in other flash devices which use the technology.
Besides, these things have 10^7 or better write cycles if I'm reading the write endurance correctly. To put it in perspective, you probably can't burn one of these things out in 5 years, no matter how hard you try. You could just write the usenet to it continuously and not see any performance degradation for a couple of years. I'm getting numbers in the 0.5 to 2.5 Petabyte range for write capacity.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Recently, I download a math documentary in Bit torrent. Even though I had the pre-allocation on, several of the files had 500-600 fragments each by the time they were done, on Windows XP, NTFS. Having thought about it, if a hard drive seek time is 8ms, it would take 4 seconds, just to seek the file forget about reading it. The solid state drives would seek the file fragments almost instantly. Fragmentation on a solid state drive is an interesting issue. You do not have to defragment for speed. There is a double edged sward that exists. On one hand, your data may be more secure not being broken into so many parts, and not having so many jump entries in the file allocation system. On the other hand, moving the data, such as during fragmentation wears the media, which does have a limited write lifetime. I use XP for doing graphic stuff, such as PhotoShop and Rhino3D, and for a few games, such as ThiefII, yet it seems that Windows NTFS is woefully inferior as far as data security and fragmentation issues. NTFS has no journaling. I eagarly await EXT4, with it's preallocation, and wish that it was plugable into XP.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
The big win with SSDs is low latency read access - you don't have to wait for rotation or seek time to start fetching your data. That's really useful for many kinds of data applications, speeding up transactions in databases, etc. If you RTFA, and look at some of the benchmarks like Windows Startup, they totally smoke rotating disks - and if you're trying to run servers in a datacenter, you've got less downtime if you ever have to reboot the things.
They also consume less power, which is good for some kinds of applications, though they cost enough you're not going to save any money.
Battery-backed-RAM-based SSDs are a different game entirely, because they also give you very fast write speed, and that's where a lot of the whoop comes from; according to this article, the SSDs were a bit slower than a 10Krpm disk drive, so that doesn't apply here. The RAM type are really useful for database commits, where you need to get the journal saved to stable storage so you can go on to the next transaction. But even there, the low read latency of the flash-based disks is going to help a lot, especially for multi-user applications.
There's also the perception of reliability - I've certainly had lots of disk drive failures on mechanical disks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
SSDs are a really interesting market to watch - they seem like the easiest place to look today if one wonders what would have happened with the electric car before the industry canned the idea.
SSDs are somewhat untested - they're in MP3 players and thumb drives but these new ones are a bit different and more critical data is expected to sit on them. And they're a trade of faster and less energy usage - better for the environment - in exchange for a smaller size.
Electric cars were "untested," but only partly so because it's an electric CAR - certainly big electric motors had been in use for decades; and they were shorter ranged. On the upside they were more efficient and better for the environment.
So it's interesting to see SSDs being successful at their rapidly falling price points. The rate they're being bought and the demographic buying them (casual users not storing anything too critical I suspect...) is an interesting glance at where the electric car may have gone - or maybe where cars like Tesla will go. Granted, a car is a much bigger purchase (about 10x in cost) and has a much bigger impact on your life - but the analogy is there.
Oh, if you're writing a lot of small files, it's about 30 times worse than a 7k250. OCZ is going to face some pretty serious customer loss for putting out such a broken product.
Trade off space for reliability.
Maybe you would pay more for an SSD that is, say 1/4 the capacity, but lasts like this
The real issue with tech stuff is that by the time it "wears out", it is obsolete anyhow.
Maybe after computers are perfect, they can work on making them last longer :-)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
At least you weren't around back when we had to read Jon Katz. Talk about a struggle!
Seriously, get 4 GB and use 2 GB for a RAM drive, or is your project > 4 GB after compilation (I hope not)? You save the sources in version control anyway, the class files etc are not important and may be lost when something goes wrong. RAM drive for linux is free, Windows versions cost something like 20$, and RAM is rather cheap nowadays. Run your IDE and libraries and Java Docs from your SSD and watch your computer fly...
Nothing special, though most of the problems have been with new disks rather than burned-in ones. I've had desktop 3.5" drives (500MB 2007) that went bad in the first week, or that went bad after a couple of years of use, both in desktops and in USB shoeboxes, and I've had a lot of laptop drives go bad over the years from just the usual abuse that a laptop gets from a commuter with a cat that likes to sit on the desk. Maybe Spinrite can fix them, haven't tried it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I meant decimal orders of magnitude :P
If you could build purely mechanical computers that could function decently, they would of course be resistant to EMP.
This is my sig.