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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
They aren't good replacements for mechanical HDs. They require tons of background work to keep wear leveling working and I don't trust normal day to day use (rather than occasional like you have now with SSDs in netbooks and storage drives) won't wear the things down incredibly quick.
Plus every single one I've ever tried do not have significant overall performance increase. Burst speed seems good but sustained and general use seems to be on par or even worse than standard mechanical drives, and writes are horribly slow.
But of course, since it's new and exciting and tons of attention are being focused on them, they will become standard despite their huge limitations, much like LCDs with their horrible motion tearing, flimsy hardware (barely touch any LCD screen and it's fucked) and overdriven colors that just makes things look "shiny" to make people think they look better when they really don't.
But soon enough I won't be able to even buy a goddamn real HD, just like I can't buy a CRT now thanks to companies convincing people to buy inferior products.
I really wish I could leave off AC on this post, but I know idiot mods are going to treat it as a troll post and mod it down to oblivion. But I truly believe this and am just stunned to the point of near-frustration at the ignorance of the buying public lately who will buy any new pile of garbage as long as it's hyped to hell. I mean, you have something like the worst piece of hardware ever that is KNOWN to fail eventually regardless (the XBox 360) and people are still buying the damn thing. That's incredible consumer ignorance, and makes companies realize they can put any pile of garbage out and people will buy it as long as it's hyped to death, which is horribly wrong.
Get some sense, people.
Just when large CRT monitors became affordable albeit heavy, the companies rolled out smaller flat panels. Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.
Similarly right when magnetic drives are near-free, the companies roll out smaller, and in some cases slower SSD's which are less expensive to make, cheaper to ship and over the long run (probably) have lower field defect rates born of their no moving parts. So of course they will charge more for them.
Everything old is new again. Wait and see companies that offer Netbooks with NO storage as an 'option' and then charge up the wazoo for a crappy sized SSD touted as 'premium'.
My Intel M25 G2 is supposed to last 5 years assuming 20GB are written to it daily, which is pretty conservative. I doubt that in 5 years I am going to use any piece of electronics I own now, so the problem of write cycle limit can be considered solved for all practical purposes.
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.
Granted, I probably wouldn't use RAID 5 because the drives aren't prone to random death like magnetic drives
You must be pretty new to SSDs. My experience with old ones is they work great, until one random day they never work again, at all, with 100% data loss. Some people experience they "merely" fail to write but can still be read. It seems pretty random.
Hard drives at least some of the time fail gradually and sometimes making horrible noises or taking a long time to spin up.
SSDs, so far in my experience, pretty much define random death, although they're overall pretty reliable.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.