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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.
Which Linux filesystem works best with SSDs? I don't intend to touch Win7.
My rights don't need management.
can someone explain why fragmentation in the mapping between logical blocks and
physical addresses causes performance degradation?
is it an issue with logically sequential reads being spread across multiple pages?
a multi-level lookup to perform the mapping?
?
What in the world are you talking about? The nice things about SSDs is that yes, they do fail, but they fail (or are supposed to) in a predictable, non-catastrophic way that leaves the data readable just not writable. I have had two SSDs and haven't had either fail despite heavy usage, and I don't think you could patent SSDs because the technology is everywhere because it is flash memory and even if it is patented more companies make them than just one.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Gamers, gamers, gamers and gamers. Seriously, the early adopters of any technology that is supposed to be faster on the consumer level will be gamers. Considering that most games are Windows-only it makes sense.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Because someone got paid to do it. You don't think /. editors work for free do you?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Even the best consumer-level SSDs like the Intel x-25m/e use a volatile RAM cache to speed up the writes. In fact, with the cache disabled, random write IOPS drops to about 1200, which is only about three or four times as good as a 15k 2.5" drive. The more expensive truly-enterprise SSD drives which don't need a volatile write cache cost at LEAST $20/GB, so the $/(safe random write iop) ratio is actually still pretty close, and cheap SATA drives may actually be even on that metric as the fast enterprise SSDs. Granted, this shouldn't be the case in a year, but that's where it is right now. (Also, the performance-per-slot is a lot higher for SSDs, which can translate into different $ and power and space savings.)
Meh. Just stick in 50GB worth of RAM in there. No one's filling a Blu-Ray disk with 3d environment data yet, are they?
Why should a game even hit the disk except when saving, these days?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
...Because either the game has to do a lot of initial loading or use the disk. Even copying from the HD to RAM takes time, sure, today you can pre-load a bunch of stuff, but things still need to be written and read from the disk every now and then.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
I've never heard of a 20% fail rate for SSDs. I've heard of wear concerns, as each little bit on the drive can only be written a set number of times (it's at 10,000 or so, if I remember correctly). However, thanks to the majic of wear leveling and the large amount of separate chips in an SSD drive, you can fill up your drive completely and you will have only written to each bit exactly once. That means you could theoretically fill your SSD up 10,000 times before you would expect failure. Reality is a bit lower than that, maybe 3,000-5,000 times due to having to TRIM to re-arrange the bits, but it's still significant.
Of course, even with the performance hit TFA talks about after filling your SSD (which is fixed with the TRIM function TFA also talks about) the fastest spinning disks are still much much slower than all but the very worst SSDs out there.
Anyway, the 20% fail rate may have been a specific manufacturer of SSDs, there are already some really shitty ones out there.
Lastly,
Also doesn't one of the hardware manufactures (Samsung I think) have a patent on SSD so no one else can make the drives any way. Proprietary == Dead
You may need to get some more education about how patents work, because if that were true IBM would not have the fastest SSD on the markent. See, they do this thing called licensing, which basically means company Y purchases an agreement from company X to use their technology to manufacture a product. It creates an incentive for company X to allow other manufacturers to use their technology, flooding with the market with both quality and crap, but ultimately lowering the price and speeding innovation regardless of the high quality stuff (and improving the quality of the cheap stuff, it works both ways usually).
It's actually the reason patents exist. We only get in a fuss when people patent stuff that either a.) should never need a patent (which means the patentor can sue for damages for infringement) or b.) some company goes around buying patents from legitimate inventors for the sole purpose of hoping said patents become infringed upon by an unwitting third party. The former is a failure in the patent system, and the latter is patent trolling, which is an unethical and disgusting abuse of the process.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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.
So does this mean that the a girlfriend of a geek can save her files on it too??
> Gamers, gamers, gamers and gamers.
Steve, is that you ?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Despite the rising excitement over SSDs, some of it has been tempered by performance degradation issues.
Who cares how they perform. All they have to do is sit there and scare away enemy fleets.
Which is why i don't get why the game designers aren't preloading like hell. even the cheapo cards are starting at 512Mb-1Gb, and many machines are 4Gb+. Hell the box i am typing this on i built for $500 with 1Gb on the GPU and 4Gb on the CPU, yet games insist on constantly loading from disc while a good chunk of the memory just sits there doing nothing. Surely they can scan the machine on first install and if GPU RAM equals X and system RAM equals y then prefetch like crazy. Or am I missing something?
But the other poster is right, the hardcore gamers will snatch these up first. I have dealt with customers who think nothing of shelling out $1000 just on the GPUs, and several time that on the CPU+RAM. The hardcore gamers are always the early adopters for anything that will give them a couple more FPS to brag about.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've heard that the failure rate on SSD's can be as high as 20%.
As Heinlein put it wonderfully in 'Tunnel in the Sky':
The death rate is the same for us as for anybody ... one person, one death, sooner or later. - Cpt. Helen Walker
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Doesn't RAM data become undatified when you turn the machine off?
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I'd love to get me some trim!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've heard that the failure rate on SSD's can be as high as 20%.
As Heinlein put it wonderfully in 'Tunnel in the Sky':
The death rate is the same for us as for anybody ... one person, one death, sooner or later. - Cpt. Helen Walker
Except Lazarus Long of course.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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
Yet another happy Microsoft customer vents his wrath on those wise enough to use something else.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
And what's the problem with that? Any server worth its salt will have a small battery backup for its drive array to keep it running until array/disk write caches can be flushed anyway.
most ram does yes, but there are always exceptions to the rule.
Compress the data into a tarball (or .zip file, whatever) and write it to the hard drive when you are finished working/playing, reverse the process when setting up.
Real speed junkies use RAMdisks!
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
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.
I totally agree, the fat lady hasn't sang when it comes to magnetic hard drives. It does seem like SSD's will soon find their place in performance-oriented systems though. I'm looking forward to having them sorted out enough that my next desktop will have a SSD for an OS, swap, and perhaps applications (which all tend to be hindered by the slow random access of magnetic media) - and a big honkin' magnetic drive for storage.
-Turkey
I bought a WinTec FileMate Ultra 24G from Tiger Direct that plugs into the ExpressCard Slot. I am now using that as the boot partition with reiserfs (v3), elevator=noop, and mounted noatime. This might not give the very best performance but it is much faster than the stock HD. OpenOffice loads in 2 seconds. I turned down the /sys/block/sdb/queue/read_ahead_kb but I'm not sure where it should be. I put my logs on tmpfs. Some people put the Firefox cache on tmpfs.
The most important point of hard disks are being amazingly multi platform. I didn't like the sound of "Windows driver", "OS support" to perform nicely.
SSD guys really better stick to the standards and never, ever do anything requiring a "driver" on host OS. For example, there are G4 Mac owners who happily upgrades their "old tech" magnetic drives to 500 GB or even 1TB. Who will write driver for them? Apple? SSD vendor? I don't think so.
In fact, HD vendors really better stay away from writing anything except the "smart control" stuff... Or, they better donate to smartctl project and stay away from it too...
Coriolis Systems (who produces iDefrag) jokingly referred to that issue on their blog.
" Ironically even SSDs, where you would expect the uniform access time to render fragmentation a problem of the past, still have various problems caused by exactly the same issue(1)'
of course, they add:
1 For avoidance of doubt, we strongly recommend that you don't try to defragment your SSD-based volumes. The fragmentation issue on SSDs is internal to their implementation, and defragmenting the filesystem would only make matters worse.
In case you spot a good friend who got suggested by Microsoft to defrag their drive (Win7 does it even without asking), you better tell it is not the "magnetic disk fragmentation" issue. It is really different and I heard some real bad stories from people who defragmented (!) their SSD drives.
If you can afford an SSD, why would you waste it on swap? Why not just buy more RAM? If you ever actually need swap, you are doing something wrong.
Sam ty sig.
Am I the only one that read the words "TRIM support" and immediately thought of tight fitting panties?
How about hibernate to disk? If you have lots of good SSD that should be very fast shouldn't it?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Will it work on my Commodore?
Program Intellivision!
So you're willing to spend a hundred bucks or so to speed up hibernate time by a couple seconds? Do you hibernate 10 times a day or something?!
Where are all the wonderful SSD/HD hybrid drives that were supposed to come out and prevent many of the problems SSDs have?
My dad bought me an SSD for my birthday, and it was one of those models that has horrible studdering issues (which, from what I'm reading, covers most SSDs). That was a lot of money for a drive that let me install drivers about 20 times slower than a hard drive would, and caused my machine to freeze for 20-40 seconds at a time while just surfing the web. That was after disabling all the NTFS caching and optimization nonsense, too.
I remember a long time ago talking to a guy about using a mix of fast and cheap memory in the same computer instead of a huge amount of memory running at one speed. Instead of talking about memory controller costs and OS design, he just told me, "There's no such thing as cheap memory". Well, I seem to see that SLC and MLC have a large difference in cost and performance. Is it at all practical to make a drive with a little SLC and a lot of MLC to aid in performance and wear-leveling issues? SSDs already utilize several megs of cache memory, so is it really that impractical to mix different flash technologies to solve the random-write problems?
What I don't get, is that we have wear leveling in controlers and they also have to translate virtual blocks to physical blocks.
We have file systems that are meant for hard disks, so why don't we have file systems for SSDs? You could just buy any old stupid SSD and get decent performance out of it.
Think of it as a luxury expense from the cash we save building our own systems.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
It makes less sense for non-windows OS'es. Windows always seems to make use of the pagefile, regardless of memory.
-Turkey
if by "proven rock-solid" you mean horrid fidelity and media degradation rates, i'd say you are correct about tapes.
[citation needed]
Tapes probably have a better unrecoverable error rate that drives and don't have bits flip randomly while data is at rest like hard drives are found to do. See the talk entitled "No Terabyte Left Behind" given by Andrew Hume at LISA '07 (Wed. 4-6pm):
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/tech/
hey're wasting a LOT of time just retrieving data.
High speed drives can go from shelf to data in a maximum of 60 seconds.
you should really consider a SAN NAS or similar.
Tapes have the highest measure of density when it comes to TB/kW and TB/sq. of data centre floor space. LTO-4 is up to 800 GB native in a tiny little package that takes no power, and LTO-5 is currently in draft and will be 1.6 TB native (add compression for fun). With LTO-4 (and other tape standards as well) and above there's also a standardized way to encrypt the data (AES-256), so if it goes offsite you don't have to worry about data loss.
Tape may not be for everyone, but there are certain things for which there is no replacement for. CERN is using tape to archive the 15 PB/year of data that's going to be generated by LHC: do you want to know how much power to would take to have 15 PB on SAN / NAS? Then take that power and multiply it by 2 or 3 to running the cooling.
He sould hibertate only once in a year. Oh, wait...
-- dnl
Just because expensive mobile gadgets use expensive solid-state drives does not mean hard drives are dead, dying, or even decayin
True, but mechanical hard drives usually the bottle necks for many systems who need raw speed for power applications and games.
Its not something as trivial as mobile gadgets, but many gamers have reported amazing results on their system using SSD. Soon most desktop publishing and video production houses will have SSD as their primary hard drive because they go the bick bucks to spend (no more waiting 12 hours for video to compress).
I do believe mechanical hard drives will be used in tandem with SSD for a while because sometimes you just need archiving.
Next year when I build a new gaming system I plan on using an SSD as my primary hard drive (hopefully prices will have gone done) and then an old HDD as archive purposes.
If SSD ever gets cheap enough I'll just use that as my primary drive once it gets beyond 125 GB.
(I only use a 100gb partition for my primary drive that I currently use for games because I tend to format it a lot)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Just because expensive mobile gadgets use expensive solid-state drives does not mean hard drives are dead, dying, or even decaying.
Oh and SSD vs HDD reminds me of CRT versus LCD about 5 years ago.
Many people said LCDs screens were too expensive but...
Do you see any CRTs for sale today?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Intel has specifically stated that the RAM cache on their drives is not used for writes. It is used while remapping sections of the drive, condensing sections, etc.
You missed the point, which was that the MEDIA ITSELF in those drives has not degraded significantly over all that time. That is not the case with either Flash RAM nor optical media, for both of which it's the MEDIA ITSELF that is the point of failure.
It's still a bit early to say SSD has better longevity than a traditional HDD, in theory, yes I agree, SDD probably outlasts HDDs, and this will be even more true as they improve, but I'm not about to jump on the SDD boat 100% just yet.
Better safe than sorry, we've had HDDs for decades and they're fairly acceptable albeit not perfect.
Nerds I'd Love to F#!K
Is there any way to get usage statistics out of the SSD itself? Specifically, I want to query the drive for the number of erase cycles each physical block of flash has been subjected to, verify failures, etc. This should be quite different from the logical block usage at the file-system level, so I don't expect standard HDD tools to give an accurate picture of the drive's health.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I've been also thinking that using swap decreases the system reliability a bit. What if a swapped bit gets corrupted on disk and then later returned to memory? No matter what premium ECC memory you had on the system, you essentially have corrupted RAM now.
Hard drives were once super expensive compared to floppies or tape. The benefit over floppy was massive storage. The benefit over tape was random access, but there was a huge difference in storage capacity favoring tape.
Right now SSDs are super expensive compared to rotational hard drives. The benefits are NO seek time, superfast sustained reads and writes, and no mechanical failure when you throw them across the room. For the laptop formfactor, they have proved their worth.
A year ago when purchasing a Dell XPSM1330 you could add a 64GB SSD as an upgrade from a 120GB SATA rotational drive for $800. I know because I bought one. I was very very happy with it except for the size. I carried around an external drive and it was irritating. Three months ago I bought the same computer, only this time I could upgrade from a 250GB SATA rotational drive to a 256GB SSD for $400, which I did. I gave the old laptop to my wife, and put a 32GB SD card in the front of it for MP3s. She's happy. I can keep my music library right on the main drive and still have 70GB free now. I'm happy. Really happy.
Until you've experience the virtually complete lack of seek in real-world situations, for all data including non-cached data, it's hard to appreciate the impact it has on your day to day experiences. And this is just consumer-level, you should see some of the crazy SSD solutions for server environments.
Give it another year and we'll see where we're at. I think there's a reason everyone making rotational media has been hedging by purchasing SSD technology. And Seagate suing everyone.
False, false, and false.
Ram may be around $10/GB, but it is very difficult to build a computer with more than 8GB in it. Desktop boards typically only have 4 DIMMs slots in them, and if you want cheap memory you're looking at 2GB sticks. So the best you can easily do is 4x2GB for a total of 8GB. Some Core i7 boards have six slots, so you can get 12GB into them. Besides that, you're looking at either an expensive server board (and possibly an expensive server-class processor to match), and/or expensive high density memory sticks - if you can even find them.
Howso? Even with tons of memory, Windows (or at least most apps) require a pagefile. Even when the OS doesn't actively page, it still writes to the commit change, which accesses the disk, slowing down app-loading or other disk access. I'm not very happy with the windows paging behavior. Care to show me where you think that I'm wrong, or just throw around "false, false, and false"?
-Turkey
Thank you. That is a better explanation of the exact problem than I gave, as it explains better why it is so difficult / takes so much time to find a region suitable for erase/overwrite (and why TRIM helps the drive so much).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...