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Western Digital Launches First SSD
Vigile writes "The solid state disk market keeps getting more crowded, but the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD marks the first offering from a player that currently dominates the market of traditional spindle-based hard drives. It was a year ago this month that WD purchased SiliconSystems for $65m, a small, enterprise-level SSD vendor that developed its own storage controller. Western Digital obviously made the move to prepare the company for the inevitable situation it finds itself in today: solid state has surpassed traditional media in performance and will likely soon become the mainstream storage choice for computers. PC Perspective has put the first consumer-level SSD option from one of the kings of HDDs through the wringer and found the drive to be a solid first offering, with performance on par with the some of the better solutions in the market while not quite fast enough to take away the top seatings from Intel and others. Western Digital has seen the writing on the wall; the only question is when the other players in the hard drive market will as well."
Hot Hardware ran their own series of tests, coming to a similar conclusion: "There is no question the SiliconEdge Blue doesn't light up the benchmarks like some of the more recent SSDs we've tested, but it's a solid product from a well-respected brand name storage company."
Intel is going to release products based on their 25nm manufacturing process in 4Q. Toshiba just doubled their flash density as well and products will start shipping soon. Next few years expect to see a huge explosion in SSD. Just like the late 1990's for hard drives
Here is a link to the review of the disk over at anandtech. Interestingly, it seems this drive will not be using one of the higher performance SSD controllers (Sandforce / Indilinx), so the performance should be worse than other competitors. If the price is as predicted (128 GB @ $529), then this drive wont make much sense compared to faster drives from OCZ etc
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You can get 500GB+ drives, but not from Intel.
On newegg, OCZ has a PCI-E SSD that has 500GB or (either 750GB or 1TB) of storage, and data transfer rates of 700MB/s +/- 100MB/s depending on read/write.
Of course, the $1k-$2k price tags might scare off most customers.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Wear leveling isn't some magical pixie dust that suddenly solves the write cycle limit. It just spreads the writes so that it takes longer wear it out.
But for some numbers they give (if I read it right) they say you can write 42.1GB each day on the largest (256GB) for 5 years. Which is about 76832GB before it goes 'poof'.
And some more info, the 256GB SSD contains 16x K9MDG08U5M-PCB00 chips. Which are 128Gbit each. Which comes to 256GB, which is odd, as you need spare space for wear leveling. But, specs save us again. 256GB SSD contains: 500118192 user sectors. Which is 238GB in flash. So that leaves 18GB for wear leveling.
(See: http://www.samsung.com/global/system/business/semiconductor/family/2010/1/1/Nand_Flash.pdf for info about the chip size)
Uh, where was I going with this? 42.1GB each day, or a max of 76832TB writing. On 238GB, which is 322 full write cycles.
I'm afRAID to tell you that the TRIM command is unavailable in RAID sets, thereby putting you in the same situation you have with Gen1 Intel SSDs, where performance degrades over time.
I bought an Intel SSD in March 09. Fast forward to February 2010 and WEI showed a 5.9 score--the same as a spindle drive. I did a secure erase using hdderase 3.3 and performance shot up to 7.4. HDTune also showed massive improvements (don't have the numbers for that handy, though).
TRIM makes a HUUUUGE difference.
Get the OCZ Colossus.
120, 250, and 500 GB* versions.
And the best part is that it's in the good ol' 3.5" format. No more bullshit converters. No more having the casing take up almost as much volume as the innards.
And the performance is great. 260 MB/sec / 260 MB/sec.
*GB here refers to 1,000,000,000 bytes of wrongness.
Use your SSD for the stuff that needs lightning fast access: your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.
If you are keeping software/game disc images to mount and use, just copy the source for a few of the ones you use most often to your SSD and leave the rest on regular storage. If you are keeping them as an archive to burn another disk if your master gets screwed up, don't even think of putting it on an SSD. The price per GB is way to high to use it as a warehouse.
You really don't need to keep media on an SSD. Just how fast to you plan to watch that movie or television show, anyway? Traditional media WAY more than suffices to stash your terabytes of audio and/or video. You can put the media application (e.g. Windows Media Player, VLC, whatever) on your SSD so that it launches and responds quickly, but putting the media itself on your SSD is a colossal waste. (With one possible exception: if you are editing media files, it might be worth having a workspace on your SSD.)
My suggestion is to buy one SSD and install your OS and essential applications on it. The contents on this drive should remain relatively stable. Also install a pair of large traditional media drives in a redundant configuration (RAID 1) and store all of your data (including SSD backups!) on it. Whenever you upgrade your OS or install new software on the SSD, create an image of it using something like Acronis or PING. If you're paranoid, keep an extra SSD on-hand in case the one you installed fails, so that you can get back up and running quickly.
You get the best of all worlds. Speed, redundancy, and not spending as much as your car costs to have a terabyte of storage. A few hundred bucks should be plenty.
I tend to have a lot of software/game disc images, movies, and TV shows sitting around on my PC (both "very legit" and actually legit), and while I don't strictly need to have them all on the disk at once, I'm in love with the convenience of being able to pull anything up at a moment's notice.
If you are keeping a personal archive of a terabyte of video and software installers, I'd recommend keeping the works that you're not currently using on an external RAID. Put your media on that and use an SSD for your operating system, installed applications, and frequently used documents. Just don't use RAID 5 if you aren't prepared to suffer the consequences of one drive failing and then another failing during recovery.
A software RAID implementation could do this easily. A hardware RAID implementation will need to be TRIM-aware, and most cheap (and some not-so-cheap) RAID controllers aren't firmware-upgradable (or aren't supported anymore) so won't get this. This is one reason why the ZFS approach is better than the make-the-volumes-all-look-like-a-single-block-device approach. With ZFS, the TRIM commands will be issued by the bottom layer of the stack because it knows exactly which blocks are in use and which aren't.
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My problem with SSDs isn't even the price per GB (which is bad enough). It's the amount of space, period. Currently, on Newegg, their Intel SSDs (I singled out Intel as they reportedly make the best) come in a maximum of 160 GB. That is honestly a pathetic amount of storage. When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them. Not a moment before.
You're doing it wrong. You don't get an SSD for document storage. That's what spinning disks and RAID are for. No, you get an SSD for your root partition including /etc /bin /lib /usr and /var (or C:\windows and C:\program files). You don't really need /home to be fast (although velociraptor drives and RAID are nice), but putting your binaries, config files, and shared program files on SSD is the thing that will give you the biggest performance jump you've had in years (disk access being the bottleneck that it is). Most people can fit their root partition on a cheap 30GB SSD with plenty of room to spare; I'm personally at 13.22GB/29.35GB on an OCZ Vertex 30GB and loving the 10s boots and instant OpenOffice coldstarts. Of course it's better than just fast application launching--programs which load a lot of data (i.e. from /usr/share) are also much quicker.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.