"Limited Edition" SSD Has Fastest Storage Speed

Vigile writes "The idea of having a 'Limited Edition' solid state drive might seem counter-intuitive, but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the 'Vertex 2 Pro' and included a super-capacitor for data integrity, the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspectives's performance tests, the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow-down effects, and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge."

Comments

Re:oh god...

[goldaryn]

"I was so eager to test it that I pounded on this drive all night "

Possible poor choice of words?

"Er, I was testing IOs per second."

Re:Dial M

[XanC]

Because we're talking about the home/enthusiast market, which is completely different (including and especially in price point) from the enterprise storage market.

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[beelsebob]

Why does it matter if they get their blazing fast speed by fragmenting all the data all over the place? On hard disks fragmentation is a bad thing, on SSDs it's a good thing, what's your point?

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[MrNemesis]

If "almost a halt" is 200MB/s read speeds as opposed to 260, I think I can live with it before I upgrade to my TRIM firmware, which negates the whole issue... whoops, I started using TRIM on my home drives months ago.

Seriously, the SSD market has exploded in the last 12 months. It's gone from being an expensive tool useful to enthusiasts to a not-quite-as-expensive-but-faster-than-any-number-of-hard-drives-can-provide utility that's worth five times it's price, especially for enterprise users.

* Proud owner of 1 intel SSD, 3 OCZ SSD's and administrator of about 3TB of SSD SAN and >8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[timeOday]

The whole issue with SSDs is that their blazing speed gained in this fashion eventually slows down to almost a halt, once the nodes near being full.

I've had one in my laptop for about 8 months and write gigabytes to it every day, particularly suspending VMWare images to disk. It still writes at 140 MB/s sustained (to ext3 filesystem, not just raw write speed). That might be slower than when it was new, I don't remember, but it destroys any laptop harddrive. This drive was expensive though, like $800 IIRC, but it also supports full-disk hardware encryption which was mandated at my workplace.

Before that I had a first-gen X25M. It did slow down more, but still completely blew away hard drives. "Slowing down to almost a halt," no, not even close. Especially for multitasking, which brings HDDs almost to a halt.

As you can see for this newer drive, there is practically no slowdown, and in any case even its slowest results are many times faster than any laptop HDD.

Misleading title

[dnaumov]

The new OCZ SSDs, while a welcome addition to the market aren't anywhere near "fastest storage".
Crucial RealSSD C300: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3118/crucial_realssd_c300_256gb_sata_6gbps_solid_state_disk/index5.html
Fusion-IO: http://storage-news.com/2009/10/29/hothardware-shows-first-benchmarks-for-fusion-io-drive/

Re:Misleading title

[AllynM]

- We included some early C300 results with the benches. The C300 will read faster (sequentially) under SATA 6Gb/sec, but it is simply not as in most other usage.
- Fusion-IO - good luck using that for your OS (not bootable). Fast storage is, for many, useless unless you can boot from it.

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Re:Misleading title

[Khyber]

"Fusion-IO - good luck using that for your OS (not bootable)."

Not until Q4, when we release the firmware upgrade to get it working.

Then, your point will be moot.

Re:Misleading title

[AllynM]

I've got a copy of the fusion-IO faq from early 2008 that reads as follows:

> Will the ioDrive be a bootable device?
> This feature will not be included until Q3 2008 ...Then it was promised for the Duo (and never happened). ...Then it was promised for the ioXtreme and even it was released without the ability.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of fusionIO, but you can only fool a guy so many times before he gives up hope on a repeatedly promised feature.

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Re:Misleading title

[TheRaven64]

Not every thing uses BIOS, you know. There's more than just BIOS and EFI.

True, but we're talking about booting Windows and Linux, maybe *BSD and Solaris. That basically means BIOS. EFI if you want to boot OS X too, but EFI anywhere else will emulate a BIOS for the purpose of interfacing with disk controllers. You need just enough working to get the boot loader to read the kernel.

Then to add to that - NOT ALL BIOS ARE THE SAME.

And yet every ISA, PCI, or PCIe IDE or SCIS controller manages to work with every BIOS that supports the correct bus. How? Because this stuff has not changed significantly for a decade. That's one of the main reasons why the OS doesn't use the BIOS interfaces for talking to the disk as soon as it's loaded a real driver. You don't need a high performance implementation, you just need something that can read a few (virtual) sectors into RAM at a designated location.

Something tells me you've never done hardware development before.

No, but I've done hypervisor development (and written a book about it) and worked with code that emulates this stuff and deals with all of the 16-bit weirdness that happens during boot. We're not talking about needing to support DOS, or operating systems that actually make serious use of the BIOS for disk I/O, we're talking about supporting a couple of boot loaders that copy a kernel image from disk and then let the kernel load real drivers. No one cares about the performance of this code, because it's used for a couple of seconds at system boot time and then ignored.

Supporting other firmwares is more effort, but how many of your customers actually care about anything other than x86? If you want to support IBM and Sun machines with OpenFirmware, then it's even easier; you can write the whole thing in Forth, including the device tree enumeration, which is probably the least fun bit of doing this on x86, you don't even need any assembly knowledge (yes, it's quite slow, that's why operating systems install a real driver as soon as they can during boot).

I agree with Rockoon's assessment; it sounds like you've hired an incompetent programmer who is feeding you a line of garbage about why he can't do the job he's paid to do.

How hard can it be?

[bertok]

I'm kinda fed up waiting for the SSD manufacturers to get their act together. There's just no reason for drives to be only 10-50x faster than physical drives. It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

I suspect that most drives we're seeing are too full of compromises to unlock the real potential of flash storage. Manufacturers are sticking to 'safe' markets and form factors. For example, they all seem to target the 2.5" laptop drive market, so all the SSD controllers I've seen so far are all very low power (~1W), which seriously limits their performance. Also, very few drives use PCI-e natively as a bus, most consumer PCI-e SSDs are actually four SATA SSDs attached to a generic SATA RAID card, which is just... sad. It's also telling that it's a factor of two cheaper to just go and buy four SSDs and RAID them using an off-the-shelf RAID controller! (*)

Meanwhile, FusionIO makes PCI-e cards that can do 100-200K IOPS at speeds of about 1GB/sec! Sure, they're expensive, but 90% of that is because they're a very small volume product targeted at the 'enterprise' market, which automatically inflates the price by a '0' or two. Take a look at a photo of one of their cards. The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

This reminiscent of the early days of the 3D accelerator market. On one side, there was the high-performing 'enterprise' series of products from Silicon Graphics, at an insane price, and at the low-end of the market there were companies making half-assed cards that actually decelerated graphics performance. Then NVIDIA happened, and now Silicon Graphics is a has been because they didn't understand that consumers want performance at a sane price point. Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks, which just boggles the mind, and on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

Back when I was a young kid first entering university, SGI came to do a sales pitch, targeted at people doing engineering or whatever. They were trying to market their "low-end" workstations with special discount "educational" pricing. At the time, I had a first-generation 3Dfx accelerator in one of the first Athlons, which cost me about $1500 total and could run circles around the SGI machine. Nonetheless, I was curious about the old-school SGI machine, so I asked for a price quote. The sales guy mumbled a lot about how it's "totally worth it", and "actually very cost effective". It took me about five minutes to extract a number. The base model, empty, with no RAM, drive, or 3D accelerator was $40K. The SSD market is exactly at the same point. I'm just waiting for a new ''NVIDIA" or "ATI" to come along, crush the competition with vastly superior products with no stupid compromises, and steal all the engineers from FusionIO and then buy the company for their IP for a bag of beans a couple of years later.

*) This really is stupid: 256GB OCZ Z-Drive p84 PCI-Express is $2420, but I can get four of these 60GB OCZ Vertex SATA at $308 each for a total of $1232, or about half. Most motherboards have 4 built-in ports with RAID capability, so I don't even need a dedicated controller!

Re:How hard can it be?

[Microlith]

It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes. They also target the 2.5" SATA market because it gives them an immediate in. Directly into new desktops and systems without consuming a slot the high performance people who would buy these are likely shoving an excess of games into. The high end is already using those slots for storage.

Believe me, the industry -is- looking into ways of getting SSDs on to faster buses, but it takes time and some significant rearchitecture. Also, NAND sucks ass, with high block failure rates fresh out of the fab outweighed by sheer density. And it's only going to get worse as lithography gets smaller.

The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

No, it's because the thing's running an Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA. It also costs a ton as it's using 96GB of SLC NAND, and is part of a fairly modular design that is reused in the io-drive Duo and io-drive Quad.

Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks

If you're referring to the older JMicron drives that failed utterly at 4K random reads/writes, then you're mistaken. That was the case of a shit controller being exposed. Even the Indilinx controllers, which paled next to the Intel chip, outclassed mechanical drives at the same task.

on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

If you think that's bad, consider that the Virtex5 they're using on it costs on the order of $500 for the chip itself. You linked the "pro" model, which supports multiple devices in the same system in some fashion. You want this one, which is only $900. Both models use MLC NAND, and neither are really intended for mass-market buyers (you can't boot from them, after all.)

Re:How hard can it be?

[bertok]

Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes. They also target the 2.5" SATA market because it gives them an immediate in. Directly into new desktops and systems without consuming a slot the high performance people who would buy these are likely shoving an excess of games into. The high end is already using those slots for storage.

Believe me, the industry -is- looking into ways of getting SSDs on to faster buses, but it takes time and some significant rearchitecture. Also, NAND sucks ass, with high block failure rates fresh out of the fab outweighed by sheer density. And it's only going to get worse as lithography gets smaller.

From what I gather, the performance limit is actually largely in the controllers, otherwise FusionIO's workstation class cards wouldn't perform as well as they do, despite using a relatively small number of MLC chips. Similarly, if the limit was caused by Flash, then why is it that Intel's controllers shit all over the competition? The Indilinx controllers got significant speed boosts from a mere firmware upgrade! There's a huge amount of headroom for performance, especially for small random IOs, where the controller makes all the difference (storage layout, algorithms, performance, caching, support for TRIM, etc...).

And there's no need to "rearchitect" at all! PCI/PCI-e is old, storage controllers of all sorts have been made for it for decades. There are RAID or FC controllers out on the market right now that can do almost 1GB/sec with huge IOPS. It's not rocket science, storage controllers are far simpler internally than, say, a 3D accelerator.

I also disagree that people are running out of expansion slots. On the contrary, other than a video card, I haven't had to use an add-in card for anything for the last three machines I've purchased. Motherboards have everything built-in now. Server and workstations boards have so many expansion sockets, it's just crazy.

If you think that's bad, consider that the Virtex5 they're using on it costs on the order of $500 for the chip itself. You linked the "pro" model, which supports multiple devices in the same system in some fashion. You want this one, which is only $900. Both models use MLC NAND, and neither are really intended for mass-market buyers (you can't boot from them, after all.)

Precisely my point! Every vendor is making some stupid compromises somewhere. Using an FPGA is really inefficient, but still better in some ways than what everyone else is doing, which ought to really make you wonder just how immature the market is.

Similarly, look at the price difference between the two FusionIO drives, the "Pro" and the "Non-Pro" model. I bet there's no physical difference, because all of the specs are identical, but there's a 2x price difference! It's probably just a slightly different firmware that allows RAID. This is artificial segmentation. If they had decent competition, the drive would cost 1/4 as much per GB, and all models would allow RAID.

Re:How hard can it be?

[hlge]

If you want to go real fast http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/f5100/ OK, not something that you would use in home setting, but it shows that there is still lot of room for innovation in the SSD space. But to your point, rather than using traditional SSDs Sun created a "SO-DIM" with flash that allows for higher packing density as well better performance. Info on the flash modules. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/flash_modules/index.xml

Re:How hard can it be?

[m.dillon]

Yah. And that's the one overriding advantage to SSDs in the SATA form factor. They have lots and lots of competition. The custom solutions... the PCI-e cards and the flash-on-board or daughter-board systems wind up being relegated to the extreme application space, which means they are sold for tons of money because they can't do any volume production and have to compete against the cheaper SATA-based SSDs on the low-end. These bits of hardware are thus solely targeted to the high-end solution space where a few microseconds actually matters.

Now with 6GBit (600 MByte/sec) SATA coming out I fully expect the SATA based SSDs to start pushing 400MB+/sec per drive within the next 12 months. If Intel can push 200MB/sec+ (reading) in their low-end 40G MLC SSD, then we clearly already have the technological capability to push more with 6GBit SATA without having to resort to expensive, custom PCI-e jobs.

-Matt

Re:How hard can it be?

[bertok]

You are basically saying contradictory things:

"lots and lots of competition" is the opposite of an "overriding advantage". It's a huge disadvantage. No company wants to enter a market with massive competition.

The PCI-e cards aren't any more "custom" than the SATA drives. Is a 3D accelerator a "custom" PCI-e card? What about a PCI-e network card? Right now, a SATA SSD and a PCI-e SSD is actually more or less the same electronics, except that the PCI-e card also has a SATA controller built in.

There's zero need to squeeze a solid-state storage device into the form factor that was designed for mechanical drives with moving parts. Hard drives are the shape and size they are because it's a good size for a casing containing a couple of spinning platters. They are connected with long, flexible, but relatively low-bandwidth cables because mechanical drives are so glacially slow that the cabling was never the performance limit, and having flexible cabling is an advantage for case design, so in that case, it was worth it.

Meanwhile, SSDs have hit the SATA 3 Gbps bus speed limit in about two generations, and will probably saturate SATA 6 Gbps in just one more generation. There are drives already available that can exceed 2x the speed of SATA 6, which means that we'll have to wait years for some SATA 12 Gbps standard or something to get any further speed improvement.

Meanwhile, there's already several 20-80 Gbps PCI-e ports on every motherboard, which is cheap and easy for manufacturers to interface with. If flexible cabling is an absolute requirement, then there is PCI-e cabling.

Re:How hard can it be?

[AllynM]

> Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes.

There's the thing. Most SSD's are only using the legacy transfer mode of the flash. The newer versions of ONFi support upwards of 200MB/sec transfer rates *per chip*, and modern controllers are using 4, 8, or even 10 (Intel) channels. Once these controllers start actually kicking the flash interface into high gear, there will be no problem pegging SATA or even PCI-e interfaces.

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Re:How hard can it be?

[m.dillon]

I think you're missing the point. The SATA form factor is going to have much higher demand than any PCI-e card, period, for the simple fact that PCI-e is not really expandable while SATA is. SATA has a massive amount of infrastructure and momentum behind it for deployments ranging the gauntlet, small to large. That means SATA-based SSD drives are going to be in very high volume production relative to PCI-e cards. It DOES NOT MATTER if the PCI-e card is actually cheaper to produce, it will still be priced at a premium verses the SATA form factor due to the lack of volume and PCI-e will never achieve the same volume due to its lack of flexibility.

The fact that the form factor has volume demand means that many manufacturers can get a piece of a large pie by selling devices in that form factor. A larger piece than they could get selling PCI-e cards.

In addition, the competition in the space creates innovation. This is why we are seeing such a fast ramp-up in SSD performance and features. The SATA form is driving the ramp-up.

Yes, SSDs are hitting the 3Gbit SATA II phy limit. And your point is what? 99.9% of the installations out there don't actually need more bandwidth, so hitting the limit is not going to magically create more demand for PCI-e and other non-SATA solutions. The SATA phy standards will progress along with everything else. We'll have 6Gbit/s soon enough, and the delay is not going to have any real effect on SATA being the dominant form factor standard for the technology. The single port limit isn't even that big of a hurdle today since most motherboards have several SATA/E-SATA ports.

PCI-e based solutions will track the same lines as all other bus-card solutions have tracked: Low volume, premium pricing, highly-specialized, and non-standard drivers. If you are hoping to see SATA based SSDs disappear in favor of a PCI-e card you are in for one hell of a disappointment.

-Matt

Re:How hard can it be?

[bertok]

I think you're missing the point. The SATA form factor is going to have much higher demand than any PCI-e card, period, for the simple fact that PCI-e is not really expandable while SATA is.

I think you're missing *my* point. The PCI-e standard is for expansion slots. You know, for... expansion. There already are 1TB SSD PCI-E cards, and you can plug at least 4 into most motherboards, and 6-8 into most dual-socket server or workstation boards. Just how much expandability do you *need*?

Keep in mind that 99% of the point of SSD is the speed. It finally removes that hideous mechanical component that's been holding back computing performance for over a decade now. Nothing stops you from having a couple of 2TB spinning disk drives in there for holding your movies and photos and all that junk that doesn't need 100K IOPS.

The jump from 100 IOPS of mechanical drives to the 5K IOPS of a typical SSD is huge. The improvement from 5K to 100K is just as noticeable, especially for people doing real work on their machines. I've heard from owners of both the Intel and Indilinx controller based drives that the Intel is noticably "snappier", even though the performance difference there is at most 2x.

The fact that the form factor has volume demand means that many manufacturers can get a piece of a large pie by selling devices in that form factor. A larger piece than they could get selling PCI-e cards.

How do you know? The form factor is not the only consideration, performance counts also. If a PCI-e SSD at the same price as an equal capacity SATA drive provided literally 100 times the performance, would people ignore it because.. wait... it's a funny shape for a drive? Seriously? Do you expect to buy your 3D accelerators in little brick shaped metal boxes? No? Why not? Maybe it's because the performance is more important!

Speaking of 'expandability', people often buy multiple PCI-e 3D accelerators. Two is common, and some people go as high as 3 or 4 in a single system. Nobody talks about the "limited" market of PCI-e 3D cards because they are "insufficiently expandable".

PCI-e based solutions will track the same lines as all other bus-card solutions have tracked: Low volume, premium pricing, highly-specialized, and non-standard drivers. If you are hoping to see SATA based SSDs disappear in favor of a PCI-e card you are in for one hell of a disappointment.

Err.. what? Most PCI-e SSDs look like a generic SATA host bus adapter to the OS, or use some generic SCSI HBA interface. The SATA speed limit is in the cable, not the drivers or the protocol.

I'm saying that the reason the volumes are low is because the pricing is insane. There's no need to price PCI-e devices higher than the SATA form factor. It's the same electronics. There is basically no difference, except that the PCI-e devices can be much, much faster.

I'm betting that you'll be the one shocked to find that in 5-10 years, most entry-level motherboards, especially those designed for corporate desktops, will have something like a 64GB flash drive built right into them. Heck, we're half-way there already, just give it time.

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[MrNemesis]

Irish coffee's bring out the best in everyone ;)

Reason I started using them at home was due to video editing - not very useful for encoding when you can rarely outpace your CPU's capability to encode stuff, but for random seeking/non-linear stuff/extracting streams/muxing, SSD's are a boon. Depending on your workload you can even get away with using crappy SSD's that are shit at random workloads but awesome at sequential.

TBH though you'll get the most noticeable improvement with using it as your system drive; apps start almost instantly and there's never any thrashing as $bloaty_app loads. Heck, my linux machines boot in 5s with the comparatively cheap OCZ Agility drives; the difference is less noticeable in windows however. Try running a laptop off an SSD for a month and then go back to a mechanical drive - the apparent slowness will drive you crazy :)

The benefits for enterprise users are especially large because 20k of SSD can replace 100k of fibre channel whilst getting 10x the performance and greater reliability. Plus Picard totally loves SSD's as he can rest his tea, earl grey, hot, on them without risking Data loss.

Re:All things are a "Limited Edition"

[TheLink]

This is computer stuff, so "Limited Edition" is more likely to mean: "After a few months when we need something 'new' for marketing reasons, we'll just add the super capacitor, call it the 'Pro' edition, and phase out the 'Limited Edition'".

Not really impressed with OCZ

[m.dillon]

At least not the Colossus I bought. Write speeds are great but read speeds suck compared to the Intels. The Colossus doesn't even have NCQ for some reason! There's just one tag. The Intels beat the hell out of it on reading because of that. Sure, the 40G Intel's write speed isn't too hot but once you get to 80G and beyond it's just fine.

The problem with write speeds for MLC flash based drives is, well, its a bit oxymoronic. With the limited durability you don't want to be writing at high sustained bandwidths anyway. The SLC stuff is more suited to it though of course we're talking at least 2x the price per gigabyte for SLC.

--

We've just started using SSDs in DragonFly-land to cache filesystem data and meta-data, and to back tmpfs. It's interesting how much of an effect the SSD has. It only takes 6GB of SSD storage for every 14 million or so inodes to essentially cache ALL the meta-data in a filesystem, so even on 32-bit kernels with its 32-64G swap configuration limit the SSD effectively removes all overhead from find, ls, rdist, cvsup, git, and other directory traversals (64-bit kernels can do 512G-1TB or so of SSD swap). So its in the bag for meta-data caching.

Data-caching is a bit more difficult to quantify but certainly any data set which actually fits in the SSD can push your web server to 100MB/s out the network with a single SSD (A single 40G Intel SSD can do 170-200MB/sec reading after all). So a GigE interface basically can be saturated. For the purposes of serving data out a network the SSD data-cache is almost like an extension of memory and allows considerably cheaper hardware to be used... no need for lots of spindles or big motherboards sporting 16-64G of ram. The difficulty, of course, is when the active data-set doesn't fit into the SSD.

Even using it as general swap space for a workstation has visible benefits when it comes to juggling applications and medium-sized data sets (like e.g. videos or lots of pictures in RAW format), not to mention program text and data that would normally be throw away overnight or by other large programs.

Another interesting outcome of using the SSD as a cache instead of loading an actual filesystem on it is that it seems to be fairly unstressed when it comes to fragmentation. The kernel pages data out in 64K-256K chunks and multiple chunks are often linear, so the SSD doesn't have to do much write combining at all.

In most of these use-cases read bandwidth is the overriding factor. Write bandwidth is not.

-Matt

Re:Not really impressed with OCZ

[AllynM]

Matt,

Totally with you on the Colossus not being great on random-IO, that's why we reviewed one!:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=821&type=expert&pid=7
The cause is mainly that RAID chip. It doesn't pass any NCQ, TRIM or other ATA commands onto the drives, so they have no choice but to serve each request in a purely sequential fashion. The end result is even with 4 controllers on board, the random access of a Colossus looks more like that of just a single Vertex SSD.

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[Jeffrey Baker]

This is completely backwards. It is hard drives which fail without warning. See Google's recent paper on the futility of S.M.A.R.T. And when an HDD fails, your data is _gone_. The best you can hope for is spending huge amounts of money to put the platters into another drive and reading the data back. The predominant failure mode for flash is erase cycle endurance exhaustion, upon which time the flash reverts to being read-only. Compared to a HDD the flash failure mode is hugely desirable. You can also monitor an SSD and replace it when it reaches the 100,000 erase cycle limit (or 10,000 for MLC). HDD has no such mechanism.

Re:Don't we want raw access + NILFS?

[Rectal Prolapse]

I think I would prefer MILFS on top, don't you?

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[seifried]

Try running a laptop off an SSD for a month and then go back to a mechanical drive - the apparent slowness will drive you crazy :)

Not to mention the battery life decrease, HD -> SSD got me 40% longer battery life on my netbooks. About 11 hours in total now, which is the way it should be. Plus no more worries about vibrations, decreased heat and it's quieter.

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[atamido]

The predominant failure mode for flash is erase cycle endurance exhaustion, upon which time the flash reverts to being read-only. Compared to a HDD the flash failure mode is hugely desirable.

At my company a few years ago we purchased two OCZ SSD drives (using the now infamous JMicron controllers). They were for two identical systems, but we kept having problems with the first one we were setting up (using Linux). Everything would seem fine at first, but the system would start crashing and become unbootable within hours. We formatted and started over a couple of times replacing various pieces of hardware. Eventually we narrowed it down to the SSD by using a command (I forget the command used in Linux) to fill the drive with specified patterns of bits and then read back the data to see if it is correct. There was a patch where every other bit would not flip from 0 to 1. Of course, due to wear leveling the location of the patch would move around for each test, but it was easily reproducible in size. The drive was silently failing on write, producing random garbage. OCZ ended up replacing the drive, but we ended up not using them due to other performance issues. (OCZ has hidden the relevant threads on their forums since then.)

Anyway, that's my anecdote for the day.