Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 25, 2011 @05:17AM from the new-toys dept.

MojoKid writes "Although they haven't been big hits with enthusiasts, Samsung's solid state drives have been successful due to strong relationships with a number of OEMs, including Apple. With the release of their new SSD 830 Series Solid State Drives, however, Samsung appears ready to make inroads with enthusiasts as well. The SSD 830 tested here is 256GB model, with eight 32GB Samsung NAND flash memory chips, 256MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory, and a new Samsung SSD Controller. The Samsung controller features a 3-ARM core design with support for SATA III 6Gb/s interface speeds. Performance-wise, the Samsung SSD 830 Series drive offered the best Read performance of the group that was tested, even versus the latest SandForce-based SSDs, though the SSD 830 couldn't quite catch SandForce in writes."

148 comments

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusiasts" by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 05:22 · Score: 1

I assume if anywhere there are "enthusiasts" here on Slashdot, so per the summary, why haven't Samsung's solid state drives "been big hits with enthusaists"? Whose drives have?
I'm thinking of sprucing up an old laptop with an SSD - any recommendations?
What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-09-25 05:28 · Score: 2

Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.

When SSDs were newer, I argued here on /. (against vociferous claims to the contrary) that I could write a program that would break an SSD quickly. The wear-leveling is better today, but since then such applications have actually been written and tested, and they work.
1. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 05:35 · Score: 0
  
  And that has been proven and confirmed by the links you provided ?
2. Re:What will happen when they die? by Microlith · 2011-09-25 05:35 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
  That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early. And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.
  
  I could write a program that would break an SSD quickly
  Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do. And if your typical IO pattern is one that will break an SSD, then you should plan for it and determine if the speedup is worth the cost.
3. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · 2011-09-25 05:36 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Fortunately the Intel SSDs come with a 'wear indicator' showing how much life is left. Mine are all showing 99-100% life left, so unless I hit the Intel 320 8MB bug that randomly trashes the drive I don't see failure being a problem before I replace them.
4. Re:What will happen when they die? by vadim_t · 2011-09-25 05:38 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.
  SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
  Everybody should have a backup plan, regardless of storage tech.
5. Re:What will happen when they die? by SiMac · 2011-09-25 05:38 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
  
  Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable. If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles and so when your SSD reaches the end of its lifespan, your data will become read only. Even if not, you can still tell very easily if you're approaching end of lifespan using SMART status. I suspect that SSD death is much more predictable than HD death...
6. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · 2011-09-25 05:39 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.
  Mirroring an SSD to another SSD which is likely to fail at almost the same time doesn't seem a great plan to me :).
7. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · 2011-09-25 05:41 · Score: 1, Troll
  
  So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.
  HDDs usually fail gracefully starting with a few bad blocks, giving you time to get the data off. SSDs have a marked tendency to fail catastrophically and lose everything.
8. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-09-25 05:41 · Score: 0
  
  "That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early."
  I am aware of how they are constructed and how they work, thank you very much. None of that changes the essential point: they can and do wear out, and probably cannot be expected to last as long as a modern hard drive, depending of course on usage.
  
  The amount of I/O required to break an SSD (if one is doing it deliberately) is nowhere near as much as you seem to think. One only has to do it intelligently.
  
  I can envision a simple virus that could break SSDs willy-nilly, although its operation would be transparent to anyone who knew what to look for.
9. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-09-25 05:44 · Score: 1
  
  That would seem to be a useful answer to the problem. It will be interesting to see how long they do indeed last under normal use.
10. Re:What will happen when they die? by Eluan · 2011-09-25 05:45 · Score: 1
  
  So... A virus could force my ssd to die within days or months? Interesting, I hadn't tought about this!
11. Re:What will happen when they die? by Microlith · 2011-09-25 05:45 · Score: 1
  
  SSDs aren't exactly inexpensive, are they?
  Perhaps I wasn't clear: you'd keep copies on a RAID made of regular disks.
12. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 05:45 · Score: 0
  
  SDD's can die in two ways, one is when they loose the table to map the actual data to how its stored on the chips and the other is when you can't write anything anymore, but can still read everything. However, today, it's mostly the table that gets lost, so you have a black hole effect... usually with the sand force or other controllers aimed at speed instead of reliability.
  Samsung goes for reliability instead of speed, so you should be good with regular backups like usually.
13. Re:What will happen when they die? by DamonHD · 2011-09-25 05:48 · Score: 2
  
  Running a busy USENET server (I think I hovered at ~#10 in the stats for while) used to wear out normal hard drives too, back in the day; SSDs aren't especially novel in that regard IMHO. It's really only a matter of how frequent and comprehensive your backups are.
  And as my USENET data didn't last longer than about a week then I think I regarded backups as largely pointless except for some very low-traffic local groups and just threw away a drive when it died and let the new one fill up again!
  BTW, I've been running a server entirely on a mixture of SD cards and USB Flash for a couple of years so far, so good. I have taken efforts to reduce spurious writes but I still make sure that I have backups of critical stuff elsewhere: http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html
  Rgds
  Damon
  
  --
  http://m.earth.org.uk/
14. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · 2011-09-25 05:49 · Score: 1
  
  SSDs aren't exactly inexpensive, are they?
  Byte-by-byte they're about the same price as the 15k SAS drives we use in the RAID on the servers I maintain; and a lot cheaper than those drives were when first installed a few years ago.
15. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 05:50 · Score: 0
  
  Luckily, I don't plan to run your poxy program - so my backup plan is the same as it's always been.
  a) most of the stuff on my disk is cache, or close enough to - i.e git repositories that are frequently pushed elsewhere, mail that is just a replica of the IMAP server.
  b) anything else is backed up to another machine that actually has RAID on a regular basis.
  But my laptop just runs a whole lot better with an SSD, and is nicer to use. The SSD (x25m 80Gb in my case) has been running happily for over a year - that's a pretty good run for something that makes me safe against basic power failures and is blindingly fast.
16. Re:What will happen when they die? by DamonHD · 2011-09-25 05:50 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think you've been doing it right and having enough fun! I've experienced plenty of catastrophic HDD failures with little warning or possible recovery, including my last MacBook's internal HDD killed pretty abruptly by static AFAIK. (I managed to recover my SSH key, but that was about it.)
  Rgds
  Damon
  
  --
  http://m.earth.org.uk/
17. Re:What will happen when they die? by Terrasque · 2011-09-25 05:52 · Score: 2
  
  This might be of interest to you :
  SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm
  
  --
  It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
18. Re:What will happen when they die? by Microlith · 2011-09-25 05:52 · Score: 2
  
  Depends on your perspective then, I suppose. Inexpensive for a server isn't exactly inexpensive for the average home user.
19. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · 2011-09-25 05:53 · Score: 2
  
  The SSD (x25m 80Gb in my case) has been running happily for over a year - that's a pretty good run for something that makes me safe against basic power failures and is blindingly fast.
  I believe that 'basic power failures' were the primary cause of the Intel 320 8MB bug; from what I've read it seemed that when the power went out it didn't update the mapping table properly so the drive was toast when you rebooted.
20. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 05:54 · Score: 0
  
  After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes.
  This is just plain wrong. Magnetic media also have a limited number of writes but due to the usage of solid state memories in critical applications it is far better specified. Good luck finding out how many write your magnetic media will tolerate before worn out.
  
  When SSDs were newer, I argued here on /. (against vociferous claims to the contrary) that I could write a program that would break an SSD quickly.
  I do not doubt that at all, the process if fairly straightforward for magnetic drives, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to SSDs.
21. Re:What will happen when they die? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2011-09-25 05:55 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Because they are somewhat more expensive, an SSD failure is a little more painful than an HDD failure; but the basic rules of "don't trust a hard drive" really haven't changed.
  
  The mechanicals sometimes last a decade if you get lucky, or die within days of install if you don't. Moral of the story: If you store anything on a hard drive, you don't love that something very much. You'd better have backups.
  
  The shape of the failure probability/time graph is likely a bit different for SSDs; but the "You'd better have backups" message, and the available means of taking those backups are pretty much exactly the same.
  
  Again, because of the somewhat higher cost, burning your way through SSDs is a little more painful than burning your way through HDDs; but anybody whose plans involve just trusting a hard drive has always been doomed.
22. Re:What will happen when they die? by Terrasque · 2011-09-25 05:56 · Score: 1
  
  HDD's usually fail by not spinning up, or just stop answering commands properly, in my experience. Which is from 100 to *Crash* before you know what's happening.
  On my fileserver I've had two disks stop working, with notices like :
  
  [1995429.300714] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdi] Unhandled error code
  [1995429.300718] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdi] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
  [1995429.300723] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdi] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
  [1995429.300738] end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 0
  Because of RAID, I didn't lose any data, but the funny part was that even after it stopped working properly, SMART still reported it as fully functional.
  
  --
  It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
23. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-09-25 06:00 · Score: 1, Flamebait
  
  "If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles"
  You would have to be very lucky, since such a creature does not exist.
  
  Maintaining a count of how many times any given cell has been written would take a lot more memory (not to mention processing power) than these devices contain.
  
  Instead, what they do is over-provision, so that a detected bad block is replaced with a spare. (Most hard drives do much the same thing.) However, there are only so many spares.
  
  As someone else mentioned: with any real luck your firmware might report what percentage of those "spare" cells are left. If it doesn't, then you are left with sudden unexpected failure when the last of them is used up and another cell goes bad.
24. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · 2011-09-25 06:00 · Score: 1
  
  HDD's usually fail by not spinning up, or just stop answering commands properly, in my experience.
  Whereas I've never had any of those happen. Every hard drive failure I've seen has been easily predicted by looking at the SMART data for reallocated blocks.
  In fact, no drive has ever actually stopped working, probably because I get them replaced within a few days of the bad sectors appearing. Even my old laptop drive that had been sitting around in a box for a decade still worked when I plugged it in, though it had developed a bunch of bad sectors over that time.
25. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-09-25 06:03 · Score: 1
  
  "BTW, I've been running a server entirely on a mixture of SD cards and USB Flash for a couple of years so far, so good."
  Unless you have some kind of RAID-style paralleling arrangement, that has to be slow as molasses.
26. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 06:10 · Score: 0
  
  Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early.
  Still a kludge. I'll be waiting for a technology that doesn't wear out at all - or at least not within a human lifetime. Flash memory is still half-baked IMHO.
27. Re:What will happen when they die? by DamonHD · 2011-09-25 06:13 · Score: 2
  
  It's entirely fast enough for my purposes: I have front-end mirrors and CDN to serve data quickly to end users. It also handles my mail (including many thousands of SPAMs per day), and SVN and so on.
  And it does mean that I've been able to run the entire system off-grid, on a few solar panels propped up against a wall! B^>
  Rgds
  Damon
  
  --
  http://m.earth.org.uk/
28. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 06:15 · Score: 1
  
  Hard disks fail in many ways. I've had hard disks fail with a few isolated bad blocks rapidly spreading to the rest of the drive. I've seen a broken head, where a quarter of the capacity instantly became unreadable. One drive went from 100% OK to absent from the bus over night. I've had a drive that wouldn't spin up anymore until I (literally) kicked it. I once struggled with a drive that would work fine for hours and then randomly corrupt data (and it wasn't a power-of-2 overflow issue).
  Needless to say, I have actual backups, not just plans to make backups, knock on wood.
29. Re:What will happen when they die? by vadim_t · 2011-09-25 06:26 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Maintaining a count of how many times any given cell has been written would take a lot more memory (not to mention processing power) than these devices contain.
  Bullshit.
  SSDs erase in extremely large blocks, like 256K. Having a counter per block is not a problem. It works out to 16K of memory per GB for a 32 bit counter per block.
  It probably doesn't even take an extra space, since a block probably already contains metadata and ECC, so a simple counter probably fits in there nicely, It won't even cause any extra wear because the only time you want to change the counter is when the block is being rewritten anyway.
30. Re:What will happen when they die? by lucifuge31337 · 2011-09-25 06:30 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early.
  Still a kludge. I'll be waiting for a technology that doesn't wear out at all - or at least not within a human lifetime. Flash memory is still half-baked IMHO.
  So what exactly are you doing for data storage right now? Surely not a regular hard drive, because that doesn't meet your criteria either. Are you carving things into brass plates?
  
  --
  Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
31. Re:What will happen when they die? by TheLink · 2011-09-25 06:47 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
  http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
  These rates are probably for "normal users" (as in normal users who buy SSDs ;) ):
  http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
  http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html
  Note the common failure modes are not very graceful, they're usually brutal and/or weird:
  http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
  http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help
  http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs
  In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.
  --
  
  Too many replies beneath your current threshold
32. Re:What will happen when they die? by Tapewolf · 2011-09-25 06:47 · Score: 1
  
  SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
  My boot drive failed by destroying half the Linux partition. I was able to copy off /etc, kernel config and a bunch of useful scripts and things, but most of it was just a bunch of unreadable sectors. Shortly afterwards the drive failed completely and was no longer recognised as a disk. It was just under a year old - I used the noatime option, swap was on an HDD and it was only about 3/4 full.
33. Re:What will happen when they die? by jovius · 2011-09-25 06:51 · Score: 1
  
  What exactly happens when an SSD dies. Are the cells just read-only then or complete garbage?
34. Re:What will happen when they die? by izomiac · 2011-09-25 06:52 · Score: 2
  
  Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
  That's been my experience exactly. Every PC I've owned has "died" from a HDD crash, usually sudden. The last SSD I had hit its erase limit in about two years (small SSD and I'm prone to reinstalling various OSes monthly). The lovely thing was that I could run a maintenance tool and see exactly how many erases were left on each cell (BTW the wear leveling was only 1% from mathematically perfect). This allowed a simple extrapolation down to the day some cells would start hitting their advertised capacity, although the drive held out overall a bit longer.
  
  The initial symptoms were Windows blue screening on boot (1,000,000 writes per boot, so no surprises there), so I quick formatted the disk and reinstalling thinking it was probably Windows sucking again. From there the drive lasted a couple more days and became completely read-only. I keep good backups so I didn't need to salvage anything, but even now I can throw it in a USB enclosure and get my data off of it.
35. Re:What will happen when they die? by isama · 2011-09-25 06:59 · Score: 1
  
  One of the strangest failures I've ever seen is a drive which will work perfectly when held vertically and do nothing when horizontal. I still use it, as a backup of backups... Just for fun.
36. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 07:02 · Score: 0
  
  They go to SSD heaven of course!
37. Re:What will happen when they die? by hedwards · 2011-09-25 07:35 · Score: 1
  
  Google did a study awhile back and came to the conclusion that when you start seeing SMART errors that the disks are 10x or so more likely to fail than ones without. But, when it comes to HDD, or really any storage medium, when you stop having complete faith in the unit, it's time to get a new one.
  I have a few HDD that probably will work for some time, but since I don't trust them and I can't prove them to be reliable, they're going to be recycled.
  It kind of sucks, but the disks are a lot less expensive to replace than they are to do data recovery on.
38. Re:What will happen when they die? by aztracker1 · 2011-09-25 07:35 · Score: 1
  
  I only have applications and the OS for the most part on my SSD, On my laptop anything important is in my dropbox directory, that syncs to my desktop... My desktop gets daily backups (+ whatever is in the dropbox), I have a few HDDs as well in my desktop all also backed up. I have a 4x1TB nas box (synology), but have out grown it, so will be building an (up to) 11 drive nas probably based around FreeNAS. within the next few months.
  
  I've been a bit tepid in doing the upgrade to the homebrew nas solution, as 3TB drives still aren't at a reliability level I would like, and FreeNAS didn't support the 2-drive redundancy version of ZFS as recently as a few months ago... plan is an initial 5x3TB drive configuration with ZFS(2-drive redundancy) giving me 14.5TB of usable storage and when I need it, adding a lower cost raid card for another 6 drives (with 8 supported) with a similar config, for another 17.3TB usable storage. With FreeNAS installed to a USB thumb drive mounted internally.
  
  My advice to anyone going SSD, is if you run windows, go for something >=80GB as once you get apps installed, it tends to fill up quickly. Get familiar with the mklink command (symbolic links), as it's really helpful for mounting your media to an HDD, or relocating rarely used games and programs, while keeping the mount point where it needs to be. Do this with GameTap, Steam and similar programs. If you are in a laptop, go at least 160GB as you will want that bit extra if you intend to carry any media with you or do VMs. If you're running a lighter linux distro without a crap ton of games/media, then 40-64GB may be suitable.
  
  --
  Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
39. Re:What will happen when they die? by aztracker1 · 2011-09-25 07:36 · Score: 1
  
  grr... 8.5TB and 11.3 respectively usable... Need to proofread better.
  
  --
  Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
40. Re:What will happen when they die? by thetoadwarrior · 2011-09-25 07:36 · Score: 1
  
  No drive has unlimited writes. They all die eventually so the back up plan is the same as before. You either back-up nothing and lose it or back-up often and don't worry if it dies.
41. Re:What will happen when they die? by hedwards · 2011-09-25 07:38 · Score: 1
  
  Personally, that's fine by me, since I don't consider SSDs to be cost effective for a desktop, the ones I get always go in laptops for that reason.
42. Re:What will happen when they die? by saleenS281 · 2011-09-25 07:38 · Score: 1
  
  If you aren't taking backups, or at the very least using RAID, expect to lose data. "A few blocks" if they're the wrong blocks is everything.
43. Re:What will happen when they die? by couchslug · 2011-09-25 07:40 · Score: 1
  
  "Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? "
  Same plan as ever. If it matters, burn it to DVD at slow speed. If it's large and matters, copy to different computers and external hard drives.
  
  --
  "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
44. Re:What will happen when they die? by aztracker1 · 2011-09-25 07:44 · Score: 2
  
  Have had that on two Intel drives now... :( The one in my laptop is still going, and I used crucual & corsair drives last turn around... won't go back to HDD for boot devices, too big a difference.
  
  --
  Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
45. Re:What will happen when they die? by thetoadwarrior · 2011-09-25 07:46 · Score: 1
  
  Both of you are giving personal experiences which don't really mean anything. I've had HDs slowly die and I've yanked the data off first and some that just decided one day to not work at all. Luckily I back things up so I've not really lost anything of value since probably about 1995 when I tried transferring data from one computer to another via a big ass stack of floppies and stupidly deleted the source data after putting it on floppies only to find out a couple were bad.
46. Re:What will happen when they die? by Redlazer · 2011-09-25 07:48 · Score: 1
  
  Psh. I've NEVER had HDD drive gracefully, and I've lost at least 20.
  I had a laptop drive right in the middle of booting into Linux once. That was cool. Typed in my password, boomheadcrash.
  "What was that noise? Why is it taking so long to load?"
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
47. Re:What will happen when they die? by aztracker1 · 2011-09-25 07:48 · Score: 1
  
  I've seen Raid-1 fail in such a way that the second drive fails within a few days of the first drive (twice)... IMHO it's urgent to replace that first failed drive quickly.. as the second is likely to go soon. The first time the second drive died before the RMA replacement made it back... for my NAS box, It's raid-5 with a spare drive sitting next to the box, just in case.
  
  --
  Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
48. Re:What will happen when they die? by bbn · 2011-09-25 08:24 · Score: 1
  
  It is worth noting that most of these failures do not seem to be wear related. There must be some severe quality issues where they build these things.
49. Re:What will happen when they die? by rev0lt · 2011-09-25 08:32 · Score: 1
  
  As usually the disks are from the same provider, and often from the same lot, they share the same problems. If you're building a raid-1/10/3/4 setup, you should buy your disks (or disk sets) with the same specs, but from different manufacturers. Today it is easier said than done on server-grade stuff, but still possible on homemade builds.
50. Re:What will happen when they die? by Bengie · 2011-09-25 08:35 · Score: 1
  
  "Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes"
  Most 128GB drives are good for 10TB+ per day for 5 years. Even when you hit the write cap, you can still read from the drive, it just turns read-only.
51. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 08:37 · Score: 0
  
  The amount of I/O required to break an SSD (if one is doing it deliberately) is nowhere near as much as you seem to think. One only has to do it intelligently.
  I can envision a simple virus that could break SSDs willy-nilly, although its operation would be transparent to anyone who knew what to look for.
  The reason you imagine these things are true is that you know much less about how SSDs work than you think you do.
  SSDs with a true wear-leveling controller won't die quickly no matter what pattern of writes you do. If you know low level details about the algorithms used by a particular controller, you might be able to tailor a pattern to it to force it to operate with a higher write amplification factor than it would under ordinary loads. (Write amplification is an increase in the effective amount of data written, i.e. a factor of 1.3 would mean that for every 1.0 units of data written by the user, the drive writes 1.3x to the flash media. It's a way of measuring the overhead of wear-leveling.) But you're unlikely to grossly break it and force a ridiculously high amplification factor.
  I'd guess you think that you can overwrite single sectors over and over until they fail, and use that to run the drive out of its spare capacity and thus induce failure. That might actually work on lots of USB sticks, SD cards, and so forth, but wear-leveling SSDs don't work that way. For them, the mapping between logical block addresses and physical media locations is completely arbitrary, and they change the mapping as needed to spread erase/write cycles evenly across the entire drive. (That's what write amplification factor is about; sometimes the drive must move data around to ensure that wear is even.)
52. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 08:40 · Score: 0
  
  You miss the point - if I'm looking for a technology to replace hard drives (which, though imperfect, have been more or less your only choice until recently) I expect it to be *better* than hard drives in reliability, not just performance.
  This is about upgrading; why upgrade to a crappy technology just because it's faster?
53. Re:What will happen when they die? by Bengie · 2011-09-25 08:40 · Score: 1
  
  "Byte-by-byte they're about the same price as the 15k SAS"
  If that's the case, what about power costs and gained IO performance?
  I'm curious from someone who works with them in servers.
54. Re:What will happen when they die? by ShakaUVM · 2011-09-25 08:47 · Score: 1
  
  >>It is worth noting that most of these failures do not seem to be wear related. There must be some severe quality issues where they build these things.
  Exactly. Before buying my SSD, I read thousands of comments on Newegg, looking both at the highest average ratings and also filtering down to the "1 egg" rating to see what the reasons were for the low scores. If a pattern emerged ("Drive suddenly died" or "Firmware update destroyed data on the drive, and drive dies without firmware update") then I'd skip it and move on.
  Normally I only care about performance in these sorts of things, but since SSDs have such a high failure rate, it became a primary criterion for me.
55. Re:What will happen when they die? by lucifuge31337 · 2011-09-25 08:49 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  This is about upgrading; why upgrade to a crappy technology just because it's faster?
  I see you haven't spent much time in the computer industry. Enjoy your Windows 95 and ham radio license.
  
  --
  Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
56. Re:What will happen when they die? by wagnerrp · 2011-09-25 08:50 · Score: 1
  
  And here I just thought it would be slow as molasses because it's running on a "plug computer" with a marginal amount of memory. Just because ones duty cycle is only 5% doesn't mean you actually want to get by with only 5% the computer.
57. Re:What will happen when they die? by ShakaUVM · 2011-09-25 08:51 · Score: 1
  
  >>Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable.
  Write failures are predictable and reportable.
  Unfortunately, the more common SSD failure mode is turning it on one day and it doesn't work. As I mentioned elsewhere, I read through thousands of comments on Newegg looking both at the overall score and the 1-egg ratings, to see if failure patterns emerged. One I remembered was a drive that would arbitrarily corrupt its data without a firmware update, but the firmware update also would wipe the drive...
58. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anne+Thwacks · 2011-09-25 08:52 · Score: 1
  
  Unlike HDDs which, in my experience, generally go strait to hell! (I know this because: there is often an earsplitting scream of pain as they go!)
  
  --
  Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
59. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jeremi · 2011-09-25 08:52 · Score: 1
  
  Mirroring an SSD to another SSD which is likely to fail at almost the same time doesn't seem a great plan to me :).
  Assuming SSDs are likely to fail after a certain number of writes (as opposed to after a certain number of hours of uptime), a Time-Machine style backup system would work fine (since the number of writes to the backup drive would be much less than the number of writes to the primary). RAID-0 probably would be a bad idea, for the reason you mentioned.
  
  --
  
  I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
60. Re:What will happen when they die? by DamonHD · 2011-09-25 09:01 · Score: 1
  
  It works for me. Maybe it wouldn't do for you, I can't tell.
  But as I actually enjoy the challenge of working with resource-constrained 'embedded' systems (my first job was designing and implementing a robotic OS and hardware 25+ years ago), this part of the fun.
  Rgds
  Damon
  
  --
  http://m.earth.org.uk/
61. Re:What will happen when they die? by Kjella · 2011-09-25 09:09 · Score: 1
  
  Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do.
  For me it took all of 18 months, I must say I didn't optimize my system to minimize writes and I used and abused it heavily - my OS was on it, it was running a freenet node and downloading incoming torrents, keeping it almost full so it had to work really hard to wear it levelly and so on. And it wasn't a premature failure either, the chips were rated to 10k writes and when it failed I had an average of 8.7k writes with the worst cells having almost 15k writes. If I'd taken the easy steps to reduce writes it'd probably last 5 years, with heavy steps maybe 15 years. But if you just don't care at all and use it for everything because it's so damn fast, you will run it into the ground in 1-2 years. Also in theory the cells will go read-only but file systems don't cope, I could recover most of it but the file system was corrupt.
  In short, to me it's more for the user experience than the extremely high random read/write IOPS. If you use those - at least the writes - for any extended period of time you'll burn through its lifetime very quickly.
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
62. Re:What will happen when they die? by klui · 2011-09-25 09:30 · Score: 1
  
  Predictable in theory but not necessarily in practice. When your metadata goes RO on you I think that's why some responses are in the area of a corrupt file system or a drive that is not recognized at all. The ones about partitions being corrupted is a much bigger issue. You would think one wouldn't normally mess with partition metadata.
  Probably the file systems and low level utilities need to be updated to take into account SSD-type failures.
63. Re:What will happen when they die? by Bengie · 2011-09-25 10:03 · Score: 1
  
  If it's a write cycle death, it should die gracefully in a read-only state. If it dies for defect reasons, then it's a up to luck.
64. Re:What will happen when they die? by Surt · 2011-09-25 10:28 · Score: 1
  
  I have bad news for you about your magnetic media, which also has a limited number of writes.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
65. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 10:35 · Score: 0
  
  Solid-state devices are a different bird from hard drives. They can remain functional for 100 years or more, so we should expect better from them than from a motor-driven spinning magnetic wheel.
  Flash was never meant for permanent (or say indefinite) storage of data. It was always intended for use in devices like cameras and USB sticks for transferring data, not as a long-term storage device. IMHO trying to use it to replace hard drives is a Bad Ideaâ.
66. Re:What will happen when they die? by vadim_t · 2011-09-25 11:19 · Score: 1
  
  Still a kludge. I'll be waiting for a technology that doesn't wear out at all - or at least not within a human lifetime. Flash memory is still half-baked IMHO.
  There will never be one.
  Hard drives and SSDs both push the limits of what can be manufactured at the time, both operate on fairly narrow margins. It'd be possible to make a modern 100GB drive using the modern tech intended for 2TB and have a drive that's really, really reliable.
  But who'd buy it? It would lose badly on performance and capacity parameters, which is all people look at when buying.
  Remember perpendicular recording? What we got thanks to that is getting data packed more tightly, not more redundancy.
67. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 11:21 · Score: 0
  
  You do realize that a solid state device *IS* flash, correct?
  Flash will last between 10 and 100 years without the voltage in a cell dropping to an unreadable state, however constant writes have the potential to 'stick' a cell in either the on or off position, depending on which they're set up to erase to.
  Flash makes for great long term storage, with fewer risks than a hard disk (like the lubrication breaking down and sticking, drive heads becoming stuck, moisture getting in and corroding components, etc.)
  However it's till not perfect, but for certain types of activities (either speed versus longevity, or use in situations that a hard disk would fail, such as high G/vibration) it's a much better fit.
68. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · 2011-09-25 11:29 · Score: 1
  
  If that's the case, what about power costs and gained IO performance?
  I'm curious from someone who works with them in servers.
  I would definitely like to replace the SAS drives with SSDs because it would significantly increase database performance. But we'd then have to buy SLC drives to handle the increased write cycles, which were about 4x more expensive last I looked.
69. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 11:43 · Score: 0
  
  You do realize that a solid state device *IS* flash, correct?
  YES, that's why I brought it up.
  
  Flash will last between 10 and 100 years without the voltage in a cell dropping to an unreadable state
  I highly doubt it will last 100 years, but that's an empirical question that will be answered in time.
  
  however constant writes have the potential to 'stick' a cell in either the on or off position, depending on which they're set up to erase to.
  Yep. Lame.
  
  Flash makes for great long term storage, with fewer risks than a hard disk (like the lubrication breaking down and sticking, drive heads becoming stuck, moisture getting in and corroding components, etc.)
  Only if you don't use it on a day-to-day basis, like wanting to actually write files to a filesystem and things like that. Write it once and leave it untouched, sure... maybe it's best used for backups.
  
  However it's till not perfect, but for certain types of activities (either speed versus longevity, or use in situations that a hard disk would fail, such as high G/vibration) it's a much better fit.
  It's okay *for now*, but I wouldn't spend any precious coin on SSDs until something better comes along.
70. Re:What will happen when they die? by mgblst · 2011-09-25 12:45 · Score: 1
  
  Would have been quite useful to tell us how long you have had the drive, 99% after 1 month or after 2 years.
71. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-09-25 13:09 · Score: 1
  
  I stand corrected. GP did write blocks; I was thinking cells.
  
  On the other hand, large block sizes detract enormously from both the write efficiency and the lifetime of the unit. The smaller the block size, the faster the write time (in general), and also longer life. But the smaller the block size, the greater the overhead of keeping track of the health of any block.
72. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · 2011-09-25 13:12 · Score: 1
  
  Pardon me: I meant the greater the overhead of keeping track of the health of all blocks.
73. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 13:29 · Score: 1
  
  Because they are somewhat more expensive, an SSD failure is a little more painful than an HDD failure; but the basic rules of "don't trust a hard drive" really haven't changed.
  SSDs are only more expensive if your primary criterion is GB/$. If your concern is IOPS/$, they are cheaper.
  
  Moral of the story: If you store anything on a hard drive, you don't love that something very much. You'd better have backups.
  200% agree with this.
  
  The shape of the failure probability/time graph is likely a bit different for SSDs; but the "You'd better have backups" message, and the available means of taking those backups are pretty much exactly the same.
  Turns out it isn't all that different
74. Re:What will happen when they die? by Jonner · 2011-09-25 14:17 · Score: 1
  
  Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die?
  Don't you mean "Does anybody have a backup plan for when their storage devices die?" Even if SSDs fail more quickly than hard drives (which isn't necessarily true any more), no storage device will last forever. Everyone should backup whatever he doesn't want to lose regardless of what type of device he uses. I do.
75. Re:What will happen when they die? by VJmes · 2011-09-25 14:32 · Score: 1
  
  I've got 8TB worth of RAID-6 network-attached storage with mechanical drives. The advantage is there'a an industry built around recovering the data on failed mechanical drives, if your data is that valuable, or you have the money you can have a mechanical drive recovered far easier and cheaper than you could ever recover an SSD. Compliment this with a cloud-based backup/storage solution for your most important documents, and you can't go wrong really. SSDs are great for your general purpose laptop or desktop, but they will more readily fail as they age. An SSD failure is far more abrupt and recovery can be very costly and difficult.
76. Re:What will happen when they die? by LordLimecat · 2011-09-25 15:13 · Score: 1
  
  Ive seen hard drives installed that failed after 27 years in service. Can that be said or even assumed for SSDs?
77. Re:What will happen when they die? by dgatwood · 2011-09-25 15:27 · Score: 1
  
  Really? Yikes. That's just poor design. Even my $25 DVD player has a backup firmware zone so that there is always one known good copy of the data. I would have assumed that a solid state drive would keep at least one previous copy of something as critical as its page mapping tables....
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
78. Re:What will happen when they die? by Bengie · 2011-09-25 15:47 · Score: 1
  
  Curious which SSD you had.
79. Re:What will happen when they die? by KingMotley · 2011-09-25 16:00 · Score: 1
  
  SSDs fail on write, not on read, which makes your whole argument rather meaningless.
80. Re:What will happen when they die? by cthulhu11 · 2011-09-25 17:10 · Score: 1
  
  I'm more curious how the poster could know write count, especially per-cell.
81. Re:What will happen when they die? by cthulhu11 · 2011-09-25 17:14 · Score: 1
  
  Why would you believe that the second SSD would be likely to fail at almost the same time? SSD's have an MTBF just like disks or tape, yet we don't regularly see mirror pairs dying at the same time (though 3-way mirroring was really nice until Oracle killed it)
82. Re:What will happen when they die? by mcrbids · 2011-09-25 17:21 · Score: 1
  
  We use SSDs in our CentOS Postgresql database servers, the OCZ Vertex 3. The difference has been jaw-dropping. The SSD drives, used as the partition the DB servers mount on, so thoroughly stomp 15K SCSI drives that the performance ratio is something like 10:1. Server loads drop from 3 to 0.3, and everybody notices the speed.
  I put them into production over the summer, just for safety's sake I'll replace them over Christmas and keep the original set handy for emergencies.
  Oh, and we back up all our databases every hour and always have, keeping the hourlies for 24 hour. If we should have an incident, recovery should be quick with minimal loss. (knock on wood)
  
  --
  I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
83. Re:What will happen when they die? by FreakyGreenLeaky · 2011-09-25 18:05 · Score: 1
  
  I'm sure people like you made similar tired arguments when magnetic media first came out - as opposed to nice reliable, stackable, punch cards.
  You do realise that magnetic disks also fail, right? You seem to be missing the point about SSDs: performance, reliability.
  We use SSDs extensively in our enterprise data centre - the performance gains are worth the price and if they fail (only one has btw, while tens of traditional drives fail every year), then you simply replace them.
  You speak about A Backup Plan as if it's a Novel Thing.
84. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 18:27 · Score: 0
  
  Magnetic drives wear out and die, too. All storage dies. Some types die sooner than others. It would be foolish not to plan for the death of any storage device.
85. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 18:49 · Score: 0
  
  Just in case you've missed it, Intel has released a firmware update that should fix that problem.
  Intel® SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool
  I was on pins and needles for them to fix it, since I've already been down the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Firmware SD15 path of firmware horror.
  Didn't want to go there again.
86. Re:What will happen when they die? by adolf · 2011-09-25 19:09 · Score: 1
  
  I wouldn't assume that: SSDs are sold for speed, not capacity and sometimes not even reliability.
  If keeping two copies of anything hurts benchmark performance significantly, there's a good chance that it just won't bother doing it at all -- as a design decision.
  A DVD player (and most other consumer electronics which have upgradeable firmware) has a totally different set of design goals, with "speed of writes" not being among them at all.
  That all said: I'd like to see it be a user-selectable option. There's plenty of instances where an end-user would willingly opt for greater speed over improved reliability (gamers are fond of RAID 0, after all), and plenty of other instances where reliability is considered far more important than speed.
  
  --
  Kid-proof tablet..
87. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 22:11 · Score: 0
  
  The metadata _already_ contains said counter. It's essential for wear levelling. The controller prefers to erase blocks with a low write counter.
  As a result, the "fail to read-only mode" is implemented trivially by falling out of the for-loop in the wear-levelling algorithm. If you can't find any blocks to erase, stop accepting writes. (You'd have to stuff the remaining data in blocks that are already erased, which could potentially cause a small amount of data to be lost.)
88. Re:What will happen when they die? by mikael_j · 2011-09-25 22:59 · Score: 1
  
  Speaking of not answering commands properly, one of the reasons I switched from using my hardware RAID controller in my home server as an actual RAID controller to just having it pretend to be a bunch of SATA ports was actually one disk which managed to confuse the controller to the point where it would freeze up on its own or get the kernel to hang (FreeBSD btw).
  That one disk worked fine for about a year and a half, then it started to show write errors, but only when it was more than 80% or so full. And the big problem was that from what I could tell (it's been a couple of years now so my memory is a bit hazy) it didn't just tell the controller that something went wrong, it just stopped responding for a while. And what happens when it keeps doing this to the point where writes are impossible? Yup, controller eventually freaks out...
  These days I just use ZFS with RAIDZ, it may be "experimental" but it sure has been more stable than hardware RAID.
  
  --
  Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
89. Re:What will happen when they die? by drinkypoo · 2011-09-26 00:32 · Score: 1
  
  Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die?
  Fud, fud? Fud fud fud fud fud? Fud fud, fud.
  Does anybody have a backup plan for when their HDDs die? After all, unlike SSDs, stepper motor bearings get ground out of round eventually. AFAIK, none of the disks made in the last decade are going to be spinning much longer, so they are bound to fail at some point.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
90. Re:What will happen when they die? by CSMoran · 2011-09-26 02:19 · Score: 1
  
  Ive seen hard drives installed that failed after 27 years in service. Can that be said or even assumed for SSDs?
  A better question might be "do we care if they still work after 27 years?".
  
  --
  Every end has half a stick.
91. Re:What will happen when they die? by Voyager529 · 2011-09-26 08:56 · Score: 1
  
  As someone who has FINALLY gotten his FreeNAS to a point where I'm satisfied with its performance, I'd like to share a few pointers that may help you out...
  1.) get a good SATA/SAS controller. I don't care how many SATA ports your motherboard has. Ignore that entirely and get a good PCI-Express SATA controller. the one that was recommended to me - and that ultimately solved my problem - was an IBM BR10i that was force-flashed the LSI IT firmware, along with a pair of SAS-SATA breakout cables. There are some other excellent SATA cards running around, but you won't do much better for a card that costs $42 from Sears and another $22 for the breakout cables from Monoprice. Whether you go that route or for another card, don't get one of the el cheapo PCI port multiplier controllers. Get a good one.
  1a.) Get a good motherboard that has enough PCI-Express lanes to handle both your NIC and your SATA card under full load. The lower end mobos tend to share the lanes a bit too much which can turn into a bottleneck very easily.
  2.) While I agree with the hesitance on the 3TByte drives, there are other reasons why going smaller is desirable. Namely the fact that swapping out a defective drive will take less time to go through the resilvering process if it requires less data to be written. My FreeNAS build uses 500GByte drives; while that might be a bit small for your needs, i think the 1TByte drives have reached a pretty good point of reliability, though you may get stuck with using the 2TByte drives if you need 16TBytes of storage in any rationally sized case.
  3.) Check out NexentaStor as well and see if it fits your needs a bit better. Its single largest caveat is that it doesn't fare too well when installed on a USB flash drive; you'll need it stored on a real hard disk to work right. Second to that is that the Community Edition is limited to 18TBytes of storage, after that you need to get their commercial offerings. However, it does support RAIDz2 and the deduplication features of ZFS better than FreeNAS does, and assigning permissions is better handled than FreeNAS as well.
  4.) Get at least 4GB of RAM, 8GB if you can afford it. while purpose-built appliances tend to do well with lesser amounts of RAM, ZFS gobbles it up quite well as to proivde good caching and fast write speeds under heavy compression algorithms. Feed the beast.
  Best of luck!
92. Re:What will happen when they die? by cffrost · 2011-09-27 02:18 · Score: 1
  
  [U]nlike SSDs, stepper motor bearings get ground out of round eventually.
  Voice coils replaced stepper motors for HDD head actuation a couple decades ago. Also, don't forget about fluid-dynamic bearings or ramped head parking/unloading, the latter of which reduces the occurrence of sticktion (and head crashes).
  I'm not disputing that the laws of physics guarantee that all mechanisms will fail; I'm merely pointing out some friction-reducing technologies present in modern HDDs.
  PS: Mad props for not forcing apostrophes into pluralized initialisms.
  
  --
  Thank you, Edward Snowden.
  
  "Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
93. Re:What will happen when they die? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-27 03:48 · Score: 0
  
  >> I'll be waiting for a technology that doesn't wear out at all - or at least not within a human lifetime.
  > There will never be one.
  Really. You can say that definitively? This looks like a good candidate, though it's still in R&D stage:
  http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/27/1327235/purdue-researchers-demonstrate-low-power-fast-fetram-memory
94. Re:What will happen when they die? by vadim_t · 2011-09-27 04:30 · Score: 1
  
  Really. You can say that definitively? This looks like a good candidate, though it's still in R&D stage:
  http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/27/1327235/purdue-researchers-demonstrate-low-power-fast-fetram-memory
  I'm sure it still wears out in some manner or other. Probably by electromigration, maybe by some other mechanism as well (don't know since I'm not familiar with this tech)
95. Re:What will happen when they die? by aztracker1 · 2011-10-02 15:59 · Score: 1
  
  Understandable, just pointing this out, since it happens a lot... for my NAS box, I planned on buying the drives from different vendors over about a 2 month period. Same drives, just different vendors and times, to decrease the chances of identical defects... Also have a spare drive parked next to the NAS. Been lucky so far, now looking at replacing with larger drives and/or a new homebrew NAS, with the reliability of 3TB drives not as good as I'd hope, it's kinda scary.
  
  --
  Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
96. Re:What will happen when they die? by rev0lt · 2011-10-02 21:48 · Score: 1
  
  Recently I've come across a controller that apparently corrupted SATA disks - a disk connected to a specific channel died 3 times within 2 months. Changed to another channel, and works like a charm, so you may have some problem with your SATA controller.
Big questions by rsborg · 2011-09-25 05:35 · Score: 4, Informative

1) How does this Samsung chipset compare vs latest Sandforce2 in terms of compressed read/writes?
2) TRIM support?
3) OSX friendliness?
4) Cost?
5) Size max?
So far I've identified 2 use cases that have very nice sweet-spot answers - a) For a desktop with PCI-e, the OCZ Revodrive3 X2 just gives amazing performance, completely bypassing SATA and delivering unbeatable performance/cost ratio. b) For a laptop solution, I'm more interested in max storage/price/performance, and the 512GB Crucial m4 seems unparalleled in delivering this (expensive at $700, but can completely replace an laptop HDD).
It will be interesting to see if Samsung is ready to challenge this market.

--
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
1. Re:Big questions by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 06:10 · Score: 1
  
  Home users do not need large capacity SSDs. Putting the OS and applications on the SSD gives a massive performance boost. Putting media on a HDD is more than adequate because you never read it beyond playback bandwidth requirements, which is trivial compared to SATA rates.
2. Re:Big questions by tepples · 2011-09-25 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  Putting the OS and applications on the SSD gives a massive performance boost. Putting media on a HDD is more than adequate because you never read it beyond playback bandwidth requirements
  Are video games "applications" or "media"?
3. Re:Big questions by MemoryDragon · 2011-09-25 06:41 · Score: 0
  
  Trim is relatively pointless if you have a good garbage collection. Most Sandforce drives have a gc mechanism which works like a deferred trim.
  (Aka once a block should be overwritten and already is allocated it is stored and marked as deletable, the new data is written elsehwhere and when the drive idles the block is erased.
  Samsungs however in the past relied on filesystem features and hence only worked with NTFS properly in this area. It would be more interesting to see if Samsung finally has resolved that issue.
4. Re:Big questions by Anne+Thwacks · 2011-09-25 08:54 · Score: 1
  
  Are video games "applications" or "media"?
  No. Next question please.
  
  --
  Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
5. Re:Big questions by Nahor · 2011-09-25 08:57 · Score: 2
  
  A good garbage collection can't replace TRIM. Overwritten blocks are not the only ones that can be GC'ed. There is also the blocks from deleted files. And unless the FS uses those blocks first (which any recent filesystem will avoid to do to prevent fragmentation on hard-drives), they will eventually use a significant amount of the SSD and kill the drive performance.
  And worse, some modern filesystems use "copy-on-write", so no data is ever overwritten (from the SSD point of view) the SSD performance will drop even more quickly.
6. Re:Big questions by Nemyst · 2011-09-25 09:20 · Score: 1
  
  AnandTech has a review up. For your questions, the drive has TRIM support, Samsung has been the SSD manufacturer of choice for Apple so I'd say OSX support is a given, costs will be in line with the SSD 470 which is within the range of the OCZ Vertex 3, Crucial m4 and Intel SSD 510 and it goes up to 512gb, which is the sample that has been reviewed.
  Notably, they say that this is the first really exciting release by Samsung. Apparently, garbage collection is delayed to moments with low IO activity, making torture tests dip down to as low as 50mb/s, but on the flip side this boosts peak speeds. In normal operation such issues are not quite as problematic. Another thing to note is that this SSD is less dependent on compression. SandForce based drives like the Vertex 3 suffer tremendously with incompressible data, whereas Samsung's offering doesn't dip that much.
7. Re:Big questions by Bengie · 2011-09-25 10:52 · Score: 1
  
  There are two types of "deleted" data. There is "remapped" deleted data caused by wear leveling, and "File System" deleted data.
  In the case of a deleted file, the TRIM command would let the SSD know that it can clear that block, In the case of no TRIM, the SSD will still think data is there. If the block is cleared and the SSD writes to it, nothing has to be done. If TRIM has not happened and the block is not cleared, the SSD will read up that block, remap it, then write that data to another block.
  In this case, TRIM saves a read. There are worse cases.
  Assume you deleted a file and the filesystem deleted all 256k from a block. To the FS, that 256k is clear, but to the SSD, it isn't. Now assume you write 128k of data to the block. With TRIM, that 128k get written, no extra work to be done and the other free 128k can be written to with no extra work either. Without TRIM, the SSD copies up all 256k of that block, then modifies 128k of it, then writes all 256k to another block. If the other 128k get modifed, the SSD must again read up all 256k of data, modify the other 128k, then write to another block.
  In this case, you save two reads and one write. You gained write performance while saving an extra write cycle.
  The real question is how much overhead and complexity TRIM adds.
8. Re:Big questions by MemoryDragon · 2011-09-25 18:49 · Score: 0
  
  You have to make a difference, overwritten blocks are recognized instantaneously as being erasable by the SSDs gc, and blocks which are deleted are recognized at a time when the operating system wants to write them anew. In both cases the GC of the ssd can work given it has enough free blocks for reallocation of the write operation (hence most sandforce drives spare about 10% of their cells for the gc)
  So there is not too much of a difference to a trim, except that the hd does it itself. And given that I have seen enough user run benchmarks the impact of not using trim is neglectable on such drives. (which also is what I am getting here on my SSD)
9. Re:Big questions by petermgreen · 2011-09-25 23:56 · Score: 1
  
  mmm, games are a tricky one. On the one hand some games (particularly those with excruciating load times like RCT3) benefit big time from being on a SSD. On the other hand modern games are pretty big.
  Still unless you are someone who hops madly between games a 120GB SSD (not that big by todays standards) should be enough to keep all the games you play frequently on the SSD.
  
  --
  note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
10. Re:Big questions by Nahor · 2011-09-26 05:05 · Score: 1
  
  The impact of missing TRIM depends a lot on your usage. When the FS starts to reuse blocks from delete files, performance starts to go down because the SSD doesn't know that part of the block can be discarded and will have to do extra work to keep that unused part intact (as Bengie explained in more detail in his answer).
  So if you mostly use big files, the impact will be negligible because the FS won't use partial blocks very often.
  Or if you don't delete files often, the impact will be negligible because there isn't many blocks to partially reuse.
  But think of it, if TRIM was added, it's not just for the fun of it, people saw the performance degradation first. Just read the comments on the web before TRIM was added. Just read the benchmarks when the first drives with TRIM came out. Yes some user will never notice it, but that doesn't mean that nobody does and that TRIM isn't useful.
Price??? by Rick+Richardson · 2011-09-25 05:39 · Score: 3, Informative

"It's really hard to rate a solid-state drive (SSD) without knowing its exact pricing, and that's just what we had to do with the Samsung 830 series. Samsung has been very tight-lipped about how much the 830 costs and will not reveal that until the drive is available for purchase in October." - CNET
1. Re:Price??? by d4fseeker · 2011-09-25 05:44 · Score: 1
  
  In other words; it's gonna be very expensive and they dont want to trash all their good pub right now/
2. Re:Price??? by timeOday · 2011-09-25 06:35 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  New high-end products reduce prices by devaluing older products, not by being cheap in themselves.
3. Re:Price??? by klui · 2011-09-25 09:53 · Score: 1
  
  From Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/show/4863/the-samsung-ssd-830-review:
  "The Samsung SSD 830 will be available to consumers starting in mid October. Although Samsung isn't announcing pricing at this time, I've been told to expect the drive to be priced around where the SSD 470 is today."
4. Re:Price??? by Anomalyst · 2011-09-26 02:52 · Score: 1
  
  Lowest Street price for a Mz-5pa256 256G SSD 470 appears to be about $310 and $350-$400 at the next tier.
  
  --
  There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Dell OEM Samsung drives are bad by DigiShaman · 2011-09-25 05:43 · Score: 4, Informative

If you're purchasing a Dell, stay away from the Samsung SSD option as they're OEM. The drives are absolute shit. Most likely a firmware issue, often Windows will just freeze because writes cannot be further committed. I've been through two different Dell laptops models and they experienced the same issue using this same drive. Only when we swapped drives did the issue go away. And that was after Dell decided to swap the motherboard, ram, CPU, and video card. Nice.

--
Life is not for the lazy.
1. Re:Dell OEM Samsung drives are bad by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 07:17 · Score: 0
  
  I have excactly that issue, if anybody knows any more details, why/what, then please spill!!
  My firmware is VBM24D1Q.
2. Re:Dell OEM Samsung drives are bad by DigiShaman · 2011-09-25 08:44 · Score: 2
  
  http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/disk-drives/f/3534/t/19310219.aspx Good luck!
  
  --
  Life is not for the lazy.
3. Re:Dell OEM Samsung drives are bad by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 09:50 · Score: 0
  
  I've read something about it being due to the owner's immense faggotry.
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2011-09-25 05:50 · Score: 5, Informative

Historically, Samsung's offerings have been relatively solid; but quite unexciting in performance terms, and pretty tepid in performance/dollar.

OEMs love 'em because, while mediocre, they have been comparatively reliable(no equivalents of the Jmicron controller debacle, firmware that makes them show up as only 8MB in size, assorted bleeding-edge weirdness and general "No, we really do have to offer these things under a 3-year warranty to get business customers"-stopping issues.)

The enthusiast-darling crown has changed hands a number of times. Intel was the one to have a little while ago, I think that they've been eclipsed by some of the newer Sandforce gear of late. There are rather more brands than there are chipsets, so brand enthusiasm tends to swing wildly based on cost and who is releasing the new hotness chipset this month.
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by JonySuede · 2011-09-25 05:51 · Score: 5, Interesting

Avoid SuperTalent like the plague they are.
Avoid anything used or refurbished.
Avoid any hybrid solution as they drain more battery.
If you don't need a lot space and need extreme reliability look at intel 311 series (those drives kick ass) or any SLC based SSD for that matter.
If you don't need extreme reliability, but don't want to play a game of Russian roulette with 3 bullets instead of one (like in the case of a SuperTalent drive), look and anything sand-force based.
Since you have an aging laptop, you do not need something that can saturate sata 6Gb/s so try to find something like an OCZ Vertex 2 1 drive or a Corsair Force 1 as in real life they are quite similar (you do not need the third edition (both drives have a V3) in an aging laptop).
Also bench the writing speed only one or two time as the more you bench the slower your drive get, you can usually bring some of it back by emptying the drive by formating it to ntfs in windows 7 and the use a force trim utility, wait about 15 minutes. After that you can reformat your drive to your file system of choice and the performance should be OK
1- In synthetic benchmark they differs a little bit but it is imperceptible in real life, unless your main workload is approximated correctly by the synthetic benchmark you were looking at.

--
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by JonySuede · 2011-09-25 05:54 · Score: 0

yay, the sup html tag is to hot for Slashdot a site for supposed nerd.....

--
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by ArsenneLupin · 2011-09-25 05:59 · Score: 4, Funny

yay, the sup html tag is to hot for Slashdot a site for supposed nerd.....
And apparently, you are too sexy for preview...
Usually? by SuperKendall · 2011-09-25 06:04 · Score: 1

HDDs usually fail gracefully starting with a few bad blocks
I have never had a hard drive fail in this way. I have never seen a SMART status go bad before I had a very sudden loss.
I have had several drives that simply would not spin up one day (even after a trip to Mr Freezer). I have had large swaths of data oct in catastrophic storms, barley able to recover half my data after multiple passes with recovery tools.
I've been fortunate in that I've lost almost no data, primarily because I was able to recover recent work. But over time I've become more and more paranoid to the point that I will not go daily without at least one backup if possible. So I could care less if an SSD fails suddenly, even though it seems like that is less likely with an SSD than a mechanical drive.

--
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. Re:Usually? by TheLink · 2011-09-25 07:27 · Score: 2
  
  I have never had a hard drive fail in this way. I have never seen a SMART status go bad before I had a very sudden loss.
  What do you use to monitor SMART on your drives?
  --
  
  Too many replies beneath your current threshold
2. Re:Usually? by SuperKendall · 2011-09-25 15:43 · Score: 1
  
  smartmontools
  You can run it daily via cron if you like, I have to admit my approach is more manual.
  
  --
  "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
3. Re:Usually? by TheLink · 2011-09-26 02:10 · Score: 1
  
  I use smartd, and configure stuff to run short self-tests daily, long self-tests weekly, and send email notifications if "stuff happens".
  
  If you stick to a manual approach you might end up not checking often or regularly enough. That might explain why you never see a SMART status go bad before a sudden loss.
  
  Yes there can be sudden complete losses, but from my experience, the first time you get a sector, CRC or other problem, you usually have a few hours or even a few days before the drive fails completely.
  
  SMART is not good at predicting when you will get a problem (that's what Google's research has found also), but what I use SMART etc for is to detect errors ASAP so that I can replace the HDD before the other drives in the array fail too.
  --
  
  Too many replies beneath your current threshold
I have a couple of 470s, partly chosen on price. by Robert+Frazier · 2011-09-25 06:33 · Score: 1

When I recently built a couple of boxes (one for me, one for my wife), I put in each a 64GB Samsung 470. In this neck of the woods, they were the amongst the first to break the 1GBP per gigabyte price (on sale). So, price was an important consideration. Admittedly, I was also terribly keen to get relatively solid, but quite unexciting performance.
(The only other SSD I have is an Intel.)
Best wishes,
Bob
Predictable? by TheLink · 2011-09-25 06:37 · Score: 2

SSD failure is predictable.

That's bullshit. You call the following predictable?
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs
I might buy a Samsung SSD. The rest (except for Intel) don't have such a great track record even when compared to hard drive failure rates (and Intel's failures haven't been very confidence inspiring).
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html
For some people the failure is predictable in that they can almost bet the drives will fail within a year! http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
But I don't regard that sort of predictability of failure as acceptable, unless the manufacturer is paying me to use their products and gives me plenty of spares.
--
- Too many replies beneath your current threshold
1. Re:Predictable? by orange47 · 2011-09-25 08:04 · Score: 1
  
  it is obvious they are referring to one kind of SSD failure that is predictable.
  a lightning strike for eg. is quite unpredictable, and it might cause SSD/HDD failure.
2. Re:Predictable? by vadim_t · 2011-09-25 08:56 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Different kind of failure. You're linking to firmware bugs. HDDs have those as well
  In this thread we're discussing wear induced failure.
3. Re:Predictable? by TheLink · 2011-09-26 01:39 · Score: 1
  
  Do you really think the bulk of those 2-3% return rates (see the linked behardware articles) are due to wear induced failures?
  
  a) If they are then the "wear levelling" stuff sure isn't working well enough.
  b) If they aren't then isn't it ridiculous to talk about wear induced failures being predictable when the bulk of the failures are due the bugs and other faults? And judging from google and feedback many of those don't seem as predictable.
  
  One might try to claim the RMAs are mainly due to PEBKAC but note that the HDDs are showing similar return rates, and Intel has much better figures than the rest.
  
  So I can only conclude that the SSD failures are not due to conventional wear, and they are due to the SSDs being crappier than they should be.
  --
  
  Too many replies beneath your current threshold
4. Re:Predictable? by TheLink · 2011-09-26 01:55 · Score: 1
  
  But who cares about that rare predictable failure method when the popular SSDs mainly fail in other ways?
  
  I find it ridiculous that there are people here posting that SSDs fail predictably and when they start to wear out, they're go read only, when the real-world evidence (which I've linked to) says otherwise.
  
  Maybe the old-fashioned ones did go read-only. But the newer ones are going poof in crazy and stupid ways.
  
  The RMA rates show that with the exception of Intel, they are not significantly safer.
  
  My guess is that the Samsung 470 SSDs are also as safe or even safer than Intel's - just google search for samsung SSD failed/bug vs ocz/sandforce/intel ssd failed/bugs and results seem to indicate that Samsung SSDs are of acceptable quality.
  
  If the launch of the Samsung 830 SSD brings the Samsung 470 prices down enough, I might buy one or two :).
  --
  
  Too many replies beneath your current threshold
5. Re:Predictable? by vadim_t · 2011-09-27 09:07 · Score: 1
  
  But I'm not arguing about that. SSDs are new, bugs are expected until issues are hammered out. However, both SSDs and HDDs share a considerable amount of failure modes (circuitry, firmware, sensibility to power problems in the computer), so on those parameters neither is intrinsically better than the other.
  Now, the one thing that is different is how the actual storage is done. SSDs can manage the underlying flash in a way that provides for somewhat elegant failure modes.
  Hard disks on the other hand, can't do that. A rotating platter is a rotating platter, if the mechanism is broken there's no way of providing a safe readonly mode, as it's not possible to prevent the head from scraping the platter if something breaks or wears out.
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by JonySuede · 2011-09-25 07:46 · Score: 1

Hell, yeah, with my tone biceps and defined abs and my "I work on my backyard, with my torso naked, each weekend" tan , I am definitively to hot for that ;)
But, on a more serious note, I gave up on the preview system yesterday because I corrected every nonsensical phrases*1 in my post about Scala only to notice that the message slash posted was the one before all the corrections. It might not be a slah bug, it might be a Firefox 9 bug (it is a nightly build after all) but it made me gave up on it nonetheless.
1- I do not know why but when I turned 30 some years ago, coffee started to hit me more than any hard stimulant that I ever tried in college; now when I drink coffee, I write like a methhead

--
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by ArsenneLupin · 2011-09-25 08:38 · Score: 1

Hell, yeah, with my tone biceps and defined abs and my "I work on my backyard, with my torso naked, each weekend" tan , I am definitively to hot for that ;)
Indeed, sounds hot. Any chest hair with that? Photo?

Firefox 9 bug
Oops, here I go off the internet for just five minutes, and when I come back, Firefox has jumped 3 major versions...

I do not know why but when I turned 30 some years ago, coffee started to hit me more than any hard stimulant that I ever tried in college; now when I drink coffee, I write like a methhead
Lucky you. For me, coffee seems to have less and less effect the older I get. Fortunately, there's Red Bull, which still seems to keep some of its power...
External drives by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 08:44 · Score: 0

These are probably best suited for two case scenarios:
1) Read-only/Read-Mostly, external USB drives/eSata/Thunderbolt where the majority of the usage is reading, like with video and photographic work.
2) Archives, where backups are rotated. In this scenario the fast read and write speed is desireable, but cycled through infrequently, it's more energy efficient than tape and conventional hard drive backups since they can be powered off and on with no wear.
For everyday use, I'd not recommend SSD's except as a boot/application installation for launch speed, however the OS and software (eg photoshop) need to be configured to use a conventional drive for scratch/swap file space since they will rapidly wear out a SSD.
1. Re:External drives by Z34107 · 2011-09-25 10:06 · Score: 1
  
  Why on earth would you backup to a solid state drive? I think the only way you could spend more money per gigabyte of backup involves robots.
  For everyday use, I'd not recommend SSD's except as a boot/application installation for launch speed, however the OS and software (eg photoshop) need to be configured to use a conventional drive for scratch/swap file space since they will rapidly wear out a SSD.
  No, they won't.
  
  --
  DATABASE WOW WOW
fusion-io drives 10000x better by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 08:57 · Score: 0

fusion-io still beats this drive by completely skipping the SATA layer. It's like having a SAN on a board.
770 MB/s
http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive/
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by JonySuede · 2011-09-25 08:59 · Score: 1

Any chest hair with that?
Hell, Yeah, just the right amount and I wear an hybrid between the Disney villain mustache and the smug bastard two month later mustache as depicted on that page : http://www.fearlessrp.net/showthread.php?tid=120 .

Photo?
Hell no, my wife would kill me, in conjugal life, you have to choose your battles wisely!

--
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I'd like to see SSD's use ganged mode. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 13:00 · Score: 0

A 256GB SSD that has two controllers on it and can emulate RAID0 with the motherboard seamlessly.
1.2gbps of disk bandwidth is conqueres some mighty bottlenecks indeed.
Re:who makes it ? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-25 14:30 · Score: 0

How's Bre tasting today? Cheesy? Creamy? I mean, sure, he took an open source reprap and asked money for it. When other people do that, it's bad though. When Bre does it, and charges twice what the thing is worth, it's all good. My God, he's the Steve Jobs of plastic trinkets! You paid so much for essentially a toy, rather than accept you got scammed, you just believe the lie even more.
Oh well, in a year we'll see broken Makerbots at the curbside and stacked high in plastic bins at the local hackerspace. In ten years we'll see a "What were they thinking?" retrospective.
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by blackraven14250 · 2011-09-25 14:56 · Score: 1

Interesting you mention SuperTalent drives. I have a pair of the 64GB SSDs from 2 years back in RAID0, with no issues. I never upgraded the firmware to support TRIM, if that gives you a time reference. What was the problem with them?
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by JonySuede · 2011-09-25 15:07 · Score: 1

died a month after the updated to support trim and the replacement drive died on me to, at that point a gave up and bought something else....

--
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
low ram systems by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-26 00:29 · Score: 0

What happens when a machine has less RAM then is ideal. and the caching to the drive increases. This would add a lot to the mtbf (mean time before failure) or in this case writes before read only.
Does this mean we all need a lot more ram to increase the life of these drives?
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by blackraven14250 · 2011-09-26 06:53 · Score: 1

Guess it may have to do with that firmware then. I remember there was an issue with it originally, they retracted the original firmware, and released another trim version, but I never got around to doing it because of the full wipe.