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OCZ Releases First 1TB Laptop SSD
Lucas123 writes "OCZ today released a new line of 2.5-in solid state drives that have up to 1TB of capacity. The new Octane SSD line is based on Indilix's new Everest flash controller, which allows it to reduce boot-up times by half over previous SSD models. The new SSD line is also selling for $1.10 to $1.30 per gigabyte of capacity, meaning you can buy the 128GB for about $166."
Supposedly the fixed one BSOD bug a few days ago. That wouldn't be with this controller anyway, but their record isn't spotless. Then again, Intel managed a SSD blemish too so... you're seeing an industry moving at breakneck speed, just make sure yours isn't on the line.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
OCZ's reliability record is in no way different to any other Data Storage Manufacturer past or present.
Seagate's recent 1TB woes: ST31000340AS
Western Digital's recent woes: Caviar Green EARS 1.0TB and 1.5TB SATA
Going further back, anyone who's been around in IT for a decade or longer recalls the old Micropolis 9GB drive failures that sent the company into bankruptcy. In any case, OCZ is a relatively good company and a notable innovator of SSD technology and I personally find most of their products to be just as reliable as any other in the same category.
10/17/2011 : After months of end user complaints, SandForce has finally duplicated, verified and provided a fix for the infamous BSOD/disconnect issue that affected SF-2200 based SSDs.
wow, that's not something anyone wants to see, a bug in their hard drive. CPU I can replace, ram I can replace... pretty much everything I can swap out, but my hard drive is where everything is stored, I can't risk losing data because of a bug.
Intel just had problems too that cause loss of data:
"JULY 13TH, 2011 : Intel has recently acknowledged issues with the new SSD 320 series, where by repetitively power cycling the drives, some may become unresponive or report an 8MB drive capacity."
I was waiting on an SSD until they worked out the bugs and there were no articles about problems for awhile but with stories like these I'll keep waiting, it's just not worth the risk.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Well my experience was that the issue wasn't fixed. I just returned one of these drives due to lockups, "disappearing drive" and random BSODs. This happened with a Corsair 120GB Force 3 SSD, but I know the OCZ drives are also affected. The issues have been going on for months.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
SSDs aren't meant/ready as a mass storage solution. They are a performance product aimed at system drives and portable devices -- situations where replacing them isn't a big deal data wise.
Also. if you're storing data on one one drive you're an idiot no matter what kind of drive you are using.
It's not so easy they require reads to write. Say you have 5 drives that's 4 blocks of data and 1 block of parity info the OS has to be able to write out as little as a single block so you have to read 4 blocks then write out 5. In reality the stripe size is bigger than one block. Now the controller has to handle a pile of these at the same time, all real raid controllers do this in hardware. Not your el chepo motherboard built in raid but most of the add in cards over a couple hundred bucks. If you realy want to get more space on your ssd's try something like an adaptec 6q it does hot read and write caching, if your running linux dm-cache and similar will do the same thing. ioFusion and other have proprietary software to do this with there SSD's.in windows as well.
No sir I dont like it.
Not so fast!
You can use my https://github.com/Cyberax/mdtrim/ to periodically TRIM unused space on software RAID-1 on Linux (ext3/4 are supported right now).
Extending it for RAID-0/5/6 is not hard, but right now I don't have time for this.
So - I'm wondering why, exactly, do people want to do RAID with SSD? There are really only two reasons (that I'm aware of) for a RAID. Either you need performance - which the SSD delivers, or you need redundant security for your data. Even in a corporate setting, it seems that running the OS and applications from from the SSD, while keeping data on RAID would be a good solution. Investing in enough SSD's for RAID arrays seems a bit of a waste.
Servers, on the other hand, might make good use of SSD's in RAID arrays. I wonder if Google or Amazon are going that route yet? About the time that they both finish upgrading all of their servers to SSD RAIDs, the price of SSD's should be down where I can afford a terrabyte drive!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I seem to remember a while ago that google published stats on their hard disk failures and that SMART wasn't particularly useful in predicting failure times of drives.
I've personally seen several drives fail with no warning whatsoever and that's without anything dramatic like a nearby electrical storm to fuse the drive controller. If you don't have your data replicated, then either you don't care about the data (easy to recreate) or you will eventually become wiser.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
So - I'm wondering why, exactly, do people want to do RAID with SSD? There are really only two reasons (that I'm aware of) for a RAID.
And both are as valid for SSD as they are for spinning disks.
RAID-0 can turn SSDs from fast to insane (if you have the controller bandwidth). Any of the data-protection RAID levels will help if your drive-with-really-new-and-somewhat-untested-technology dies an untimely death.
It's not easy to implement it completely correctly, even in software. My approach is to create a large file which takes almost all free space, then TRIM its content and then just remove this file. Obviously, it's a bit racy if you have services which could suddenly need several more gigabytes of disk. On the other hand, TRIM-ing 160Gb SSD drives takes about 5 seconds, so I don't worry about it.
Here is a thread about it on linux-raid: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/31941/focus=32022
As far as I know, there are no hardware RAIDs with TRIM support.
I was waiting on an SSD until they worked out the bugs and there were no articles about problems for awhile but with stories like these I'll keep waiting, it's just not worth the risk.
You didn't think HDDs have similar dumb BIOS errors?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Just when their controller matures a bit they switch to a different one....?
No sig today...
Well I had used the firmware available on the same day this article was posted. I returned the drive on that day, after it still failed to fix the issues. I had tried the drive on 2 different machines with different motherboards, and in each case the problems occured in the same way when the drive was used. There are plenty of other people on the forums who have had the same experience so basically I had no faith whatsoever in the Sandforce controller-based SSDs. I've bought several in the past - my gaming rig has a RAID(0) setup with the OCZ SSDs, and it experiences random lockups as one or other drive disappears. On the gaming rig the problem seems less frequent, and as it's just used for games it isn't so much of an issue - although I'll be replacing them soon.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I know I'm supposed to care that an SSD is unreliable, but the truth is you have to back up everything anyway because hard drives aren't reliable. I have a server with conventional drives in a raid array for data security, I want my main machine to fly.... and SSD lets you do that. I just wish it didn't cost so much.
Seagate was the most recent one - depending on how you rebooted your PC, it could just up and not show up. It was traced to a logfile bug - if the logfile reached a multiple of N, the next reset would hang the drive unless you cleared it manually. Heck, there are stupid firmware bugs in optical drives as well (I remember a Fedora release that killed drives merely because LG decided to use a common command as "firmware update").
And anyhow, blaming SSD problems on firmware is disingenous compared to hard drives - in an SSD, practically the only reason it dies prematurely are due to firmware bugs. A hard drive can fail is more ways that firmware errors are but a small part of the failure modes.
IBM's death star was due to using platters that weren't certified for the data density (an error when testing the platters).
And as I mentioned before, Apple buys and sells more SSD-equipped computers than anyone else (mostly Macbook Airs, but a few Pros are preconfigured with SSDs as well). They've sold enough that if there was a genuine SSD problem, it would've been big news. I don't know exact figures, but Apple would've shipped millions by now.
If you avoid the cutting edge super-high-performance SSDs, then you really ought to be fine, like Apple. They're not the fastest (still getting transfers around 150MB/sec rather than 250MB+/sec these new SSDs get), but they work reliably.
The only reason you may get warnings with hard drives is when they're failing mechanically. They can still up and die suddenly (usually more due to mechanical issues, but like Seagate, they can die due to firmware), especially if something happens that corrupts the on-disk firmware (hard drives "boot" from the platters - there's a bit of firmware that's just capable of spinning up the drive and seeking to the right spot in order to load the real drive firmware).