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The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that-should-be-enough dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC, but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB, the drive offers offers massive storage capacities of the level normally not seen in SSDs. While 1TB of SSD space hits right at the heart of the traditional hard disk market, it comes at a high price — at around $4,000 for the 1TB model, these drives are in the realm of aspirational rather than practical."

43 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. I'll wait a while. by carlhaagen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a handful of friends who adopted Intel's latest G2 X25-m models at their release. With new firmware, they are all still reporting notably reduced performance over time. Everyone knows what causes it, it is entirely understandable given the storage technology in question, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag. I'll wait and see how things change before doing the switch.

    1. Re:I'll wait a while. by Nyder · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have a handful of friends who adopted Intel's latest G2 X25-m models at their release. With new firmware, they are all still reporting notably reduced performance over time. Everyone knows what causes it, it is entirely understandable given the storage technology in question, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag. I'll wait and see how things change before doing the switch.

      Everyone knows what causes it huh?

      Sorry, that's a really stupid assumption, because, I don't know what causes it.

      So I guess not everyone knows what causes it.

      --
      Be seeing you...
    2. Re:I'll wait a while. by zkrige · · Score: 2, Funny

      Just defrag it :P

    3. Re:I'll wait a while. by aicrules · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think maybe it's something like this: http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/43400.aspx

      But since he's so mysterious about it, perhaps it's not.

    4. Re:I'll wait a while. by Colonel+Korn · · Score: 4, Informative

      They are Windows 7 and Linux users. TRIM seems to just ameliorate temporary.

      Your friends aren't benchmarking. Welcome to subjective perceptions. As quantitative data has proven conclusively (see anandtech.com, pcper.com, etc.), TRIM does truly prevent lost performance over time.

      --
      "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
    5. Re:I'll wait a while. by hoggoth · · Score: 5, Informative

      That article was low on logic and common sense.

      The article's take-away that SSDs slow down over time may be right, however the reasoning behind the explanations doesn't even make sense.

      > "Because they have a two-part write/erase cycle, unlike the single write cycle of mechanical hard drives, they wear out at least twice as fast as their spinning counterparts."

      Umm, what? SSD writes are done in two stages, yes, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the way a traditional hard drive does writes. So how could you say SSD's wear out "twice" as fast as traditional drives because they have to write twice? It could be that an SSD could write a thousands times more or a thousand times less than a traditional hard drive before wearing out because they are completely different technologies.

      > "This isn't helped by the architecture of most SSDs. Usually, data is laid down within a block of available memory, meaning that it might not take up all the available space--yet will still write to all of it"

      Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.

      > "Defragmenting or "defragging" a SSD takes up many write/erase cycles... which shortens the lifetime of an SSD, even if it's also cleaning up the drive."

      No, defragging is not cleaning up an SSD drive. There is no reason to defrag an SSD because their is no latency getting to a further sector.

      > "it's a delicate balance, how often you should defrag your SSD for optimum performance and lifetime"

      How about "NEVER"?

      > "Only defrag when necessary!"

      Argh!

      --
      - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
    6. Re:I'll wait a while. by obarthelemy · · Score: 4, Informative

      google: why do ssd get slower over time. first answer: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8

      no comment

      --
      The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
    7. Re:I'll wait a while. by gmack · · Score: 5, Informative

      That seems written by someone who really has little to no idea how SSD drives work. It should take years to see problems caused by flash wearing out even under intense use.

      The actual problem involves the way modern SSD drives write your new data to an unused portion of the disk before erasing the old flash to improve speed. If the drives think they are full then you are stuck waiting for the old blocks to be cleared before you can write your data.

      TRIM was added to fix this problem by letting the OS tell the drive when blocks become unused but it only works on very recent drives and new operating systems. You are out of luck on that front if your running XP or a Linux kernel older than 2.6.33 but on the upside the problem only affects write speed.

    8. Re:I'll wait a while. by gmack · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It is only a slight performance improvement for large files. For large amounts of small files it's a huge gain thanks to the lack of head movement.

      I picked up a 32gb SSD drive to handle the OS and apps and left my 1TB drive for movies. The difference in boot times and app load times are very noticeable.

    9. Re:I'll wait a while. by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "This isn't helped by the architecture of most SSDs. Usually, data is laid down within a block of available memory, meaning that it might not take up all the available space--yet will still write to all of it"

      Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.

      Yes, but these blocks of memory might be much bigger than sectors on a hard disk.

      And filesystem code in operating systems knows about the (small) sectors of disks, and might not be able to cope with the large blocks of SSDs. Meaning that the SSD must be sufficiently smart to read the entire block, change whatever range needs to be changed, and rewrites it. And this might happen lots of times, because the higher level code (filesystems) might not be aware of the issue.

      There is no reason to defrag an SSD because their is no latency getting to a further sector.

      There is no latency, but defragging may be useful for a different purpose: making sure that each memory block is occupied by as few different files as possible (in order to dampen the effect of the phenomenon outlined above).

    10. Re:I'll wait a while. by Alastor187 · · Score: 2, Informative

      TRIM was added to fix this problem by letting the OS tell the drive when blocks become unused but it only works on very recent drives and new operating systems. You are out of luck on that front if your running XP or a Linux kernel older than 2.6.33 but on the upside the problem only affects write speed.

      For Intel Drives the new SSD Toolbox supports Trim on older OSes. I have been using it with WinXP...though that probably doesn't help anyone on Linux.

    11. Re:I'll wait a while. by billcopc · · Score: 2, Informative

      As someone who took the SSD plunge a few months ago, I can tell you that the performance delta entirely depends on two things: your multitasking habits, and the quality of the SSD controller chipset. Some are only good at sequential read/write (like conventional drives), but the better ones are also good at random access, and these are the ones that make your machine zippy. On a spinning platter hard drive, if you have two apps accessing the disk simultaneously, it has to seek back and forth between the two files, reading a little piece each time, and this literally decimates your throughput because the drive spends more time moving the magnetic heads than actually transiting data. This seek time is nil on an SSD, so you regain the full read/write speed, even if you're accessing 100 files in random order. This is what makes the desktop so much faster, because no matter which app you launch, it's always just a microsecond away.

      Windows boots in about 10 seconds, apps pop up almost instantly, large compilation jobs finish in a third of the time. I don't run benches but if my boot drive has slowed down in the 4-5 months since I bought it, I haven't noticed at all. I also have four of them in a RAID-0, and I still hit the 700mb/sec writes I've enjoyed since day one. The only detail I still worry about is reliability / longevity. These consumer-grade SSDs are still very new, and we don't yet have any good empirical data on how likely they are to die, or what the real-world wear-out period looks like. I know I beat the crap out of mine, with an inordinate amount of churn these days as I'm ripping thousands of CDs and DVDs back into images for archival, but that's what warranties are for.

      --
      -Billco, Fnarg.com
  2. That's a much better deal than a 5GB Hard Drive! by hellop2 · · Score: 2, Funny

    1000GB for only $23544.00

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  3. Speed? by kingofnexus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Paying $4000 for a hard drive is one thing, but how fast is it? Slapping what I assume to be a ton of chips together wont make for an impressive benchmark. If I had the cash to blow on this sort of thing I would rather raid together a bunch of and small fast ssd's than 1 big one.

  4. Yay by Pojut · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can we please get an affordable, 60GB one that is actually worth buying now? Last time I checked (two months ago), most of the less expensive drives were real spotty with their reliability.

    Any suggestions for a decent 60GB SSD for under $120?

    --
    Living With a Nerd
    1. Re:Yay by IBBoard · · Score: 2, Informative

      You can get 60GB for under $120? Damnit, I considered an SSD recently and 30/40GB was £100 for the cheapest ones. Didn't get it in the end because of reports of degrading performance over time. That'd be one hell of a downer if you'd bought something that large and expensive!

    2. Re:Yay by XPeter · · Score: 5, Informative

      You can get 60GB for under $120? Damnit, I considered an SSD recently and 30/40GB was £100 for the cheapest ones. Didn't get it in the end because of reports of degrading performance over time. That'd be one hell of a downer if you'd bought something that large and expensive!

      No, you can't.

      http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636%201421439415&name=60GB

      The lowest price for a 60GB SSD is $140, and that's from a no-name company. If you want quality for that spec, your wallet will be taking a hit of about $200

      --
      "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
    3. Re:Yay by icebraining · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That would be excellent, if those damn HP people didn't disable the virtualization support of the CPU in the BIOS, with no option to turn it on!

      > modprobe kvm-amd
      kvm: disabled by bios

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    4. Re:Yay by Yvanhoe · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Heh, everyday I find a new reason why we need open BIOSes as well.

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
  5. Welcome back to the 90s by Elledan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So at roughly $4/GB that'd place us where, back at the late 90s? I'm not sure what part of 'catching up' people seem to think of when they're talking about SSDs replacing HDDs. Yes, they're faster in a number of applications, but HDDs are crazy cheap at $0.10/GB or better, fast enough for most purposes and have a longer life than Flash-based media. I guess I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.

    Considering Flash is reaching the point with its feature sizes (32 nm) where its data retention rate (1 year) and number of write cycles (8,000) is dropping rapidly (enterprise SSDs use 65+ nm SLC Flash instead), it's hard to see how Flash-based SSDs are winning, exactly.

    --
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    1. Re:Welcome back to the 90s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Um, they are WAY faster. They are also growing in size more rapidly than traditional hard drives. They have gone from like 32gb to 1000gb in just a couple of years. They are also rapidly dropping in price.

      Even now, a lot of people only use like 30gb worth of disk space. Sure, they have more, but they don't use it.

      32 GB / $125 USD / Sequential Write: 187.5 MB/s / Sequential Read: 294.5 MB/s.
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211419
      For a lot of people, that would be the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give there computer. Maybe reducing the time to load photoshop from 8 seconds to 2. Loading Word for 3 seconds to instant. Simple as that. For $125 dollars.

      64 GB / $149 USD / Similar speed
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139132

      128 GB / $351 USD / Similar speed
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148319

      Again, these are the largest speed improvements that you can possibly give your computer right now. That isn't insignificant. At all.

      Sure, they aren't really there YET, but it won't be that long.

    2. Re:Welcome back to the 90s by Gruturo · · Score: 4, Informative

      I guess I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.

      This being Slashdot, I'd expect better of you :-)
      A 1km-tall stack of cards, which, according to Wikipedia are 0.178mm thick and can storage 64 bytes with the most efficient coding, results in a measly 342.89 megabytes (assuming 1 megabyte= 2^20, which is admittedly uncommon when quoting storage, esp when a vendor does it. They'd use the 10^6 version, so 359.55 megabytes (I'm aware of the kibibyte/mebibyte etc scale, but I don't like using it))

      For a full terabyte you're looking at slighly over 3058km worth of stacked punch cards (or 2781.25 km if using the storage vendors' definition)

      (Disappointingly, Wolfram Alpha was no help doing the above calculations)

      --

      Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
    3. Re:Welcome back to the 90s by 0123456 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      32 GB / $125 USD / Sequential Write: 187.5 MB/s / Sequential Read: 294.5 MB/s.
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211419

      You do realise that sequential reads and writes are pretty much irrelevant to most people, right? The big benefit of SSDs is _random_ read and write speed, which is where HDDs really suck.

      For a lot of people, that would be the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give there computer. Maybe reducing the time to load photoshop from 8 seconds to 2.

      And how often do you load photoshop? For most people, saving six seconds on something they do once a day is hardly going to be 'the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give their computer'.

      I put an SSD in my new HTPC because I wanted it to boot up fast, and while it probably halves the boot time there it's otherwise pretty underwhelming.

    4. Re:Welcome back to the 90s by vlm · · Score: 2, Informative

      So at roughly $4/GB that'd place us where, back at the late 90s? I'm not sure what part of 'catching up' people seem to think of when they're talking about SSDs replacing HDDs.

      I deployed a 586 based single board computer using a 4 gig CF as the boot drive about a year ago. Entire system draws about 4 watts total and no moving parts. I would call it vaguely mid 90s ish specifications. If you define HDD as advancing about one year per year, then SSDs seem to be advancing about half a decade per year, thus "catching up" at a rate of about 4 years per calendar year, and currently "about a decade behind" so figure SSD will pass HDD around the end of the world, late 2012-ish. Sign of the Apocalypse?

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    5. Re:Welcome back to the 90s by vlm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I put an SSD in my new HTPC because I wanted it to boot up fast, and while it probably halves the boot time there it's otherwise pretty underwhelming.

      Isn't it quieter? When I installed a SSD in my mythtv frontend, hard drive noise went from noticeable, to gone.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  6. Solid State of the Art by sackvillian · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's too bad that I won't be able to take this baby for a spin...

    --
    Hey mate, spare a sig?
    1. Re:Solid State of the Art by theY4Kman · · Score: 2, Funny

      I think that all the time at the park!

  7. great scot! by rarel · · Score: 5, Funny

    This sucker's electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to compress the data to the 1 terabyte of capacity I need.

  8. Not so sure about the "aspirational" line by vikingpower · · Score: 2, Informative

    "aspirational more than affordable" ? For business ( on-site programming ) purposes I just ordered a new laptop with two 256-Gb SSD drives. Only a few hundred bucks more expensive than one with disks. Wait a year or two, and 1 Tb SSD drives will be perfectly normal items on a medium to high end computer.

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
  9. Uhmm.... by sonicmerlin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This has been on newegg for a very long time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500

    I've been waiting forever for its price to drop, but nothing seems to be happening. I don't think SSDs will be of any consequence to mainstream users before memristors become all the rage.

    1. Re:Uhmm.... by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2, Funny

      But look, it's only $1.99 shipping! What a deal!

  10. Not 400x by radaos · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maths fail in article. $4000 / $100 != 400x

  11. Re:That's a lot of money..... by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You don't need a solid state drive for storing media. It's completely useless. There's only a few really good uses of these things. Mostly in places where you have a lot of reads all over the disk in a very short amount of time. Mostly for things like Databases and stuff. For personal use, it really only makes sense to store your programs and OS on it. There's no reason to store things like movies and MP3s on there. Get a second drive spinning platter drive for that.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  12. Snow Leopard by blackfrancis75 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's a real pity OSX 10.6 failed to add TRIM support. With Win7, this is the first time I've seen MS cut Apple's lunch.

  13. Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. by ircmaxell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, a normal 15k RPM SAS drive costs about $1400 per TB ($700 for a 500gb drive) and draws around 16 watts of power (for a Seagate Cheetah at least). Let's assume these SSD's will be like the others and draw around 1 watt. So that's a difference of $2600 and 31 watts (Because you need 2 SAS drives per SSD). So every hour, each SSD will consume 31 watts less. So with a price of $0.12 / kWh, every hour the SSD will save about $0.0036. Over the course of a year, that will add up to about $31.44 in power savings. So you'd need to run the drives for around 82 years to recoup the added cost from power savings (A higher electricty cost will lower this, but even at $0.50 per kWh, you're looking at nearly 20 years). Needless to say, that's well beyond the life span of the drive. So no, a prudent company won't buy these for power savings...

    --
    If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
  14. Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Imagine the power savings and time savings replacing existing storage with these.

    As a media producer who uses DAW and video editing apps, solid state storage is a dream for me. I'm using much smaller SSDs now and although the power savings don't mean much to me, they are certainly quieter and faster than magnetic or optical media.

    My 15k rpm drives are too loud and too warm.

    When a 1TB SSD hits $1000, I'm in for two.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  15. Not so bad, compared to: by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 2, Informative

    Paying $4000 for a thousand gigabytes is not so bad. Some of us have worked on:

    DEC DF-32: 32K 12-bit words for around $5000 (1971)

    DEC RKO5- 2.5 megabytes for $10,000 ( 1973 )

    Mac HD-20: 20 megabytes for $1000 ( 1985 )

    All those were like, 1000x or more per byte. AND WE WERE PERFECTLY HAPPY. (Well, a little cramped on the DF32)

  16. Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    The only real "enterprise" case for SSDs(besides just making the boss's laptop quieter and more responsive for a few hundred bucks extra) is IOPS.

    As a mass storage option, SSDs are pretty pitiful. As you note, even 15k RPM SAS stuff, hardly the cheap seats, is substantially cheaper per gigabyte. If you can step down to 10K RPM, or even the nicer grade of 7200RPM SATA(SAS/SATA compatibility can be quite convenient), the difference gets even starker.

    If you are talking IOPS/$, though, SSDs passed the "economically viable" point some time ago and were last seen running for a location somewhere between "not even fair" and "Good God, man, it's like curb-stomping a puppy!" in their competition with even the zippiest of mechanical drives.

  17. Affordable by Mr_Silver · · Score: 3, Informative

    Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC

    When I can get a 1TB 3.5" SATA drive for £61.33 (approx $94.58), I'm not sure how something which is 42 times more expensive can be considered "affordable".

    Maybe I have a different definition of the word.

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  18. we paid that for a megabyte in late 1970s by peter303 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Its all relative, folks.

  19. Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. by aminorex · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's 4000 AUSTRALIAN dollars, not human dollars.

    --
    -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
  20. Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. by ircmaxell · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oh, I'm not saying that they don't have a good place in the market. I am saying that it would be foolish to buy them from a power consumption standpoint alone. If you need IOPS, then the added cost can definitely be worth it...

    The other thing you need to look at is lifespan. A 15k drive should last a company at least 3 years (I know some companies replace them yearly, but a typical rotation is 3 to 5 years based on what I've seen). Can an SSD (that's under high I/O) last that long? Or are you going to be replacing them yearly because of wear leveling issues? Again, I'm not saying that they are not worth the money. All I am saying is that it's far from a simple math problem to determine if they are the right fit for an enterprise...

    --
    If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
  21. Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. by siride · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You have a strange sense of economics. Reduced demand usually means reduced prices and vice versa. Reduced consumption means less need for more power-plants and other related expenses. On the flip side, much increased demand means that the power companies have to build new plants or upgrade old ones, or upgrade infrastructure. The fact is, using resources costs money and the more you use, the more it costs somewhere. Reducing consumption does not make costs go up unless there's a false economy created by imprudent decisions on the part of the power companies or some sort of insane government involvement that keeps fixed costs high (which I can buy).

    Ahh, why bother? Let's just burn through all our natural resources like there's no tomorrow so that the status quo can be preserved at all costs. I'm sure that'll work out somehow.