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Solid State Drives Tested With TRIM Support
Vigile writes "Despite the rising excitement over SSDs, some of it has been tempered by performance degradation issues. The promised land is supposed to be the mighty TRIM command — a way for the OS to indicate to the SSD a range of blocks that are no longer needed because of deleted files. Apparently Windows 7 will implement TRIM of some kind but for now you can use a proprietary TRIM tool on a few select SSDs using Indilinx controllers. A new article at PC Perspective evaluates performance on a pair of Indilinx drives as well as the TRIM utility and its efficacy."
I finally got the opportunity to test out SSDs this year. There may be the odd teething problem to get over, but in my mind there is no market in the future for mechanical drives except maybe as cheap low-speed devices for storing non-critical information... in much the same way as tape drives were used a few years ago.
Well damn, I'll just have to tell our customer that has something like a 30 petabyte TAPE archive that's growing by about a terabyte or more each and every day that they're spending money on something you say is, umm, outdated and these newfangled devices that the next power surge will totally fry are the wave of the future.
Guess what? There's a whole lot more money spent on proven rock-solid technology by large organizations then you apparently know.
Tape and hard drives are going NOWHERE. For a long, long time to come.
That's a statistic that doesn't make any sense.
20% under what conditions, and in what timeframe? Over a long enough time period everything has a 100% failure rate.
Normal hard disks also will eventually fail, due to physical wear.
Also if it lasts long enough, at some point, reliability will stop being important. Even if it still works, very few people will want to use a 100MB hard disk from 15 years ago.
That's my biggest complaint about them, actually -- these "teething problems" people mention are pretty much directly a result of OSes treating SSDs as though they were spinning magnetic disks.
No, the OS should be able to do its own wear leveling. If you need to pretend it's a hard drive, do it in the BIOS and/or the drivers, not in the silicon -- at least that way, you can upgrade it later when things like this come out.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Just a small tangential nitpick: we were already more than a factor of ten past that HDD capacity fifteen years ago. The 1GB barrier was broken very early in the Nineties. I still have an HP 1GB SCSI drive from about '91 or '92, IIRC.
As far as failure rates go, I still have ALL of my disk drives (one or two outright failed) from the 15-20 years, and every single one of them still functions at least nominally. I'm still more trusting of magnetic media than I am either rewritable optical or Flash-based media.
No way, lets have the firmware do this. The problem with your approach is that the OS wont understand the drive as well as the manufacturer does, so it will always be a sub-optimal solution. Dont tie the hands of the manufacturer to put intelligence in his drives. For instance, the best way to wipe a disk is via an ATA command, and not through multi-passes of wipes. The manufacturer knows where the heads are and how the drive writes. The SSD situation is somewhat similar.
Something as simple as deleting the wrong partition becomes an irreversible operation if you do it using a tool that supports TRIM on TRIM-enabled hardware.
This seems needlessly verbose. Let me shorten it for you:
Deleting a partition should always be considered an irreversible operation.
Hmmm, even shorter:
Don't delete a partition unless you want it to go away forever.
Even if you restore the partition table from a backup, you will likely suffer silent file system corruption, which may even not be apparent until it's too late.
If TRIM support is actually implemented on the device, the device is free to 'lose' data on TRIMmed blocks until they are written at least once.
If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that a disk partitioning tool will use TRIM to not only wipe the partition table itself, but also nuke the partition data from orbit. And you the point out that it would not be adequate to rewrite just the sectors of the partition table.
If so, then the answer is: you don't just restore the partition table, you restore the whole partition (including data) from backup.
I for one consider much-faster write speeds to be a bigger advantage than possibly being able to reverse a partition deletion.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I can buy a terabyte hard drive for around $100. For the same hundred dollars, the best SSD I can find is 32GB. On my computer, Steam's cache folder is bigger than 32GB. My music player has a 120GB drive, my DVR has a 350GB drive, and my backup server has a 1.5TB raid. Just because expensive mobile gadgets use expensive solid-state drives does not mean hard drives are dead, dying, or even decaying.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio