The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives

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."

Comments

I'll wait a while.

[carlhaagen]

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.

Re:I'll wait a while.

[Colonel Korn]

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.

Re:I'll wait a while.

[hoggoth]

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!

Re:I'll wait a while.

[obarthelemy]

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

no comment

Re:I'll wait a while.

[gmack]

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.

Welcome back to the 90s

[Elledan]

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.

Re:Welcome back to the 90s

[Gruturo]

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)

Solid State of the Art

[sackvillian]

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

great scot!

[rarel]

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

Re:Yay

[XPeter]

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

Not 400x

[radaos]

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

Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this.

[ircmaxell]

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...

Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this.

[aminorex]

It's 4000 AUSTRALIAN dollars, not human dollars.