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Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive
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."
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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
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.
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.
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
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.
yay, the sup html tag is to hot for Slashdot a site for supposed nerd.....
And apparently, you are too sexy for preview...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Different kind of failure. You're linking to firmware bugs. HDDs have those as well
In this thread we're discussing wear induced failure.