Most SSDs Now Under a Dollar Per Gigabyte

crookedvulture writes "SSD prices continue plummeting. In just the past quarter, street prices have fallen by double-digit percentages for most models, with some slashed by 30% or more. We've reached the point where the majority of drives cost less than a dollar per gigabyte, and that's without the special coupon codes and mail-in rebates usually attached to weekly deals. Lower-capacity drives seem more resistant to deep price cuts, making 120-256GB offerings the best values right now. It's nice to see a new class of devices go from prohibitively expensive to eminently affordable in such a relatively short amount of time."

Comments

Don't let it fool you

[EmagGeek]

The reason they've come down so much in price is because of the smaller process sizes being used, requiring less silicon for the same capacity.

Of course you pay for it with reduced endurance and drive lifetime.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[ThatsMyNick]

Would you claim the same for processors? They use less silicon for the same speed. Just curious. I have no idea how this relates to reliability.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-sequitur

Re:Don't let it fool you

[geekoid]

It doesn't, he's an idiot.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[fustakrakich]

Not really. Low priced hard drives and CD/DVD burners are terribly unreliable now. Durability is not seen as a good thing in this business. I fondly remember the long gone days of expecting an appliance to last 15-20 years. I still have a perfectly functional, but very slow, 15 year old laptop and 13 year old iMac, both with their original drives. Now I am expected to be happy with anything that lasts over 5-6 years.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[LordLimecat]

Yes, it absolutely does with flash memory. This is a known issue-- just google the write endurance of 25nm flash vs 34nm.

Whether or not it is a sufficient difference to worry about is another issue-- but absolutely a 1GB flash stick will last longer on 34nm process than it would on 25nm process. Of course, that also ignores that smaller processes will generally have higher capacities, which causes the endurance of a particular cell to be less important.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

With today's materials, process shrinks results in worse flash "endurance", a measure of the number of times you can write/erase a cell before it goes kaputt. This loss of endurance is combatted through error-correcting codes and over-provisioning (added redundant flash) used for wear-leveling.

That said, the price drops we're seeing now are NOT mainly because of process shrinkage, and worrying about endurance is a fools errand. You simply have to buy products from trusted manufacturers who you trust to have done the necessary testing.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Penguinisto]

The difference is in price. Even discounting inflation, that 1997 laptop likely cost you (or whoever bought it first) well over $2500 or more. Now you can get the same relative level of bleeding-edge badass for less than half the price. Hell, look at the 1980's-era machines... At the high end, those things cost you almost as much as a new compact car at the time. Nowadays, you can use one to scare the kids into eating their vegetables, but that's about it. ("Now Johnny, you either eat that effing broccoli or you'll be talking to facebook over a 9600-baud modem for a month - you hear me, boy!?" )

One other thing, though - not all new items die off in 5-6 years. Instead, we just get bored with it and move on. I have an old 1994-era dual G5 Mac that I can pull out of the closet and, in full confidence, expect it to come right up. Same story with the 2001-era Dell Inspiron 8100 I bought, then eventually gave to my mother - and she still uses the damned thing almost daily (yes the battery is pretty much dead weight by now, but it still works just fine otherwise).

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you pay for it with reduced endurance and drive lifetime.

That's the whole thing with SSD's in general. They're less reliable than the old crappy spinning media. On top of that they're 10 times as expensive.

Sign me up! Not.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[fustakrakich]

The difference is in price.

And that's why I expect these 'low priced' SSDs to last about as long as any other chaff. And now, with almost the entire process being mechanized there's no justification for it.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[geekoid]

Stop it, you're just looking stupid now. Thing go down in price and quality can go up. Manufacturing techniques, volume, shipping. All those thing go down as production ramp up.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[rrohbeck]

They used to be (even Intel) but newer drives from reputable vendors like Intel or Samsung plus some tier 2 like Crucial M4 are very reliable these days.

Of course you can still buy crap today but you can always do that, even on the HD front.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[geekoid]

literally correct, practically it doesn't matter. we are talking many, many decades of use. 80+ years instead of 100+ years. And that assume completely filling the drive almost every 10 days, then erasing it.

Assumption Min 3000 complete write/erase cycles and intelligent software. Not really that big of an assumption any more.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but they're more reliable than the new even crappier spinning media (pretty much anything with > 500GB/platter develops unreadable sectors by sitting on a shelf for a few months).
They also have over 100 times faster access times (<0.1 ms vs >10 ms for a 7.2k).

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Guspaz]

Despite all the, errm, uninformed ladies and gentlemen responding with kneejerk reactions, smaller process sizes really do reduce the program/erase endurance of NAND flash. At 50nm, MLC was at about 10,000 cycles. 34nm took us down to about 5,000 cycles. 25nm took us down to 3,000 to 5,000 cycles, which is where we're at now. So, technically, we are reducing cost at the expense of reliability.

There are mitigating factors, however. Over the same timespan, SSD controllers have improved, substantially reducing write amplification, and capacities have increased, preventing the total *writable* lifespan of drives from decreasing.

As an example, a 60GB drive good for 10,000 cycles with a write amplification factor of 2.0 has a total theoretical write lifespan of 300 TB. On the other hand, a 120GB drive good for 3,000 cycles with a write amplification factor of 1.1 has a theoretical write lifespan of 327 TB. Despite having less than a third of the "reliability" (on a cell level), the drive can actually handle slightly MORE activity overall.

It will always be a balancing act between cost and reliability when it comes to SSDs. As compared to Single Level Cells (SLC), Multi Level Cells (MLC), used by all consumer drives, has a tenth the endurance, but half the cost (storing two bits per cell rather than one). Basically, SLCs store data by trying to differentiate between two voltage levels: high, low. MLC increases that to four states (high, medium-high, medium-low, low). The reduced endurance is because it becomes harder to differentiate the levels sooner. Triple Level Cells (TLC) is starting to show up, and this stores three bits per cell using eight states. It helps density, but once again, at the cost of endurance.

This might be a good time to point out that cell-level "reliability" has no real bearing on the reliability of the entire SSD. Reduced cycle endurance means your drive will wear out faster, but it will still take years to wear them out (if ever), and when they do, they don't lose data, they just stop being able to write. If you're having your SSDs just up and die on you out of the blue, that has nothing to do with the trend towards decreasing write endurance.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[fustakrakich]

Believe what you want. I don't care.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Improbus]

You still have a POTS line?

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and a Ferrari 458 is less reliable and way more expensive than a Toyota Corolla. Why would anyone want one?

Re:Don't let it fool you

[AHuxley]

Warranty on trusted brands is still 3 years. 5 years if you shop around.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[franc0ph0bic]

I am an engineer at an SSD company and I would like to vouch for this being a great explanation. Thank You.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[0123456]

Completely filling the disk and deleting it is a pretty easy life for an SSD. Creating lots of small files, such as repeated compilation, can easily kill them within a year.

Of course the savings in programmer time from faster compilations easily outweigh that. But there are plenty of use cases which will kill an SSD much faster than an HDD.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely filling the disk and deleting it is a pretty easy life for an SSD. Creating lots of small files, such as repeated compilation, can easily kill them within a year.

Absolute fucking hogwash. No, strike that, not hogwash, just downright utter FUD.

As someone who has used SSDs exclusively in FreeBSD servers for OS disks (that means root filesystem, swap, /usr, /var, and /tmp -- where all world rebuilds happen), I have only seen two of our drives result in 2 reallocated NAND pages: and that's over the course of 3 years, using an OS version that lacks TRIM support. The drives are Intel X25-M 80GB drives, which are MLC-based.

When it comes to SSDs, there is absolutely nothing different about creating many small files vs. creating one big file. The filesize doesn't matter; the FTL doesn't give a shit about "files": it cares about LBAs. Specifically, 10,000 4KByte files are going to have the exact same effect on the drive as one 40,000KByte file. The FTL is going to have to map just as many LBAs, although I will admit (depending on the FTL implementation) there may be less FTL map entries on the larger file (depends on of the FTL map is implemented as start/end LBA ranges or a true 1:1 LBA map).

I wish people unfamiliar with storage subsystems and storage technology would stop spreading this fucking nonsense. Those of us who are have to go to great lengths to undo the bullshit folks like you spread. There are other reasons to be "worried" about SSDs, but NAND lifetime isn't one of them. Wear levelling algorithms work extremely well with present-generation SSDs.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[0123456]

Absolute fucking hogwash. No, strike that, not hogwash, just downright utter FUD.

I presume you're talking about your own post, because I'm quoting from actual, real-world experience with SSDs. A number of developers have posted on the web about how their SSDs dramatically improve compilation speed but die within a year.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[ShanghaiBill]

That's the whole thing with SSD's in general. They're less reliable than the old crappy spinning media.

This is wrong. SSDs are much more reliable for nearly all use cases. If a someone buys an SSD and an HHD of the same capacity and uses it in the same way, the HHD is far more likely to fail, and when it fails it is much more likely to fail unpredictably and catastrophically.

The SSD is only more likely to fail if you do massive amounts of writes. Even then it is more accurate to say it "wears out" than to say it "fails", since it will stop working at a predictable point. And when it wears out, only writes will fail, you can still read any existing data, so there is no catastrophic loss.

For 99% of users, an SSD is much more reliable than a HHD.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Hatta]

I have an old 1994-era dual G5 Mac

Holy crap a time travelling Apple!

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, the date seemed odd to me as well.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had platter drives die within a week, and compiling is hard on them as well, so I suspect the average difference is small even in that use scenario.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[citizenr]

literally correct, practically it doesn't matter. we are talking many, many decades of use. 80+ years instead of 100+ years. And that assume completely filling the drive almost every 10 days, then erasing it.

Assumption Min 3000 complete write/erase cycles and intelligent software. Not really that big of an assumption any more.

try below 1000 cycles with single MLC cells holding TENS of electrons

Re:Don't let it fool you

[citizenr]

Reduced cycle endurance means your drive will wear out faster, but it will still take years to wear them out (if ever), and when they do, they don't lose data, they just stop being able to write. If you're having your SSDs just up and die on you out of the blue, that has nothing to do with the trend towards decreasing write endurance.

1 try using Bcache and you will be swapping SSD drives every month
2 when SSD runs out of write cycles it usually dies, there is no graceful degradation

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Guspaz]

If you're using a consumer SSD for enterprise tasks, you shouldn't be surprised if it wears out more quickly than normal. That's why enterprise-grade drives tend to use SLC, or binned MLC with tons of spare area. If you're talking about consumer-level caching, the same is true there; Intel has a line of SSDs designed for caching, which use a small amount (24GB) of SLC flash in order to keep the endurance high enough. While it is virtually impossible for a consumer to wear out a good quality SSD using anything remotely like normal usage patterns, it's still important to use the best tool for the job.

That said, it's impossible to wear out a decent consumer SSD in a single month. If we take the 240GB Intel 330 drives as an example (which are reported to have a lifecycle of 10k, perhaps because Intel manufactures flash and picks the best bins for themselves), wearing out the drive in a single month (ignoring spare space to compensate for not taking write amplification into account) would require that you write uninterrupted 24/7 at about one gigabyte per second. Considering the drive can't write that fast, your one month figure is likely FUD.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[fafaforza]

I just ordered one cause I got tired of my wrists going numb from my drive vibrating. That's one benefit no one mentions. And even if these things are three quarters as reliable, who isn't making backups and expecting to replace a drive anyway.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Jane Q. Public]

Please tell that to Apple.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

"So, technically, we are reducing cost at the expense of reliability."

So IOW cheap, fast, reliable. Pick 2.
Sounds familiar.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[modecx]

I, on the other hand, have a 2004 dual 2.0 GHz G5 Power Mac which has been rendered inoperable due to circuit board creep on the mainboard. If I heat it with a hair-dryer (expanding the glass and epoxy and pushing the circuits back together) it will start, but as it cools off it crashes. Turns out it's a fairly common occurrence, and something that was resolved in later models. It was about six years old when it gave up the ghost, which is disappointing to say the least for the premium I was charged for it, and the fact that it was still useful to me.

I only keep it around because I intend to rip the guts out and mod in an ATX system. I kinda like the case.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[jedidiah]

Nope. They're more expensive to operate and can't move any faster in traffic. The insurance alone would likely make the idea completely infeasable.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[jedidiah]

Reliability claims are pretty much bullshit. Particular brands are quite notorious for reliability issues. Ultimately, it comes down to developing a proven track record and SSDs just haven't been around long enough for that.

Fanboy blathering is just wishful thinking backed up with no real world experience.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be better to call it durability? When the write lifespan is reached the drive still functions and the data is still accessible in read-only form. IMHO, that's pretty reliable (i.e. I can rely on that happening as opposed to random or complete failure which is unreliable). That said, when my first SSD reached the end of its life I started getting random Windows crashes, presumably when one of the 1 million (?!?!) writes performed for every boot failed. (I was closely monitoring the number of block erases near its EOL, which is the source for that number.) Either way, it's far preferable to how HDDs die.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

The only correlation between the price a good is sold at and the cost to manufacture it is that the former is usually more than the latter. People expect more quality with higher prices, so companies exploit this gullibility to make higher profits. Technically, price is determined by the value created for the consumer, which is basically whatever makes the most customers pay the most money. Savvy consumers will sway price a bit (i.e. not pay much for junk), but I think we all know how rare they are.

The failure modes for SSDs and HDDs are going to be different. An SSD is entirely electronic, so units should fail shortly after being manufactured, and rarely thereafter. A HDD is both electrical and mechanical, so you have to add in the inevitable failure with time for any mechanical system.

Do SSDs differ significantly in quality and will a higher quality one last longer? Perhaps. Can you tell quality by price? Not really. A cheap flash drive is essentially as reliable as an expensive one, so I doubt SSDs will be any different.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Adriax]

Modem connected to the sound card of a better machine on broadband running an emulator to go bridge it to skype, which dials another computer in the same house running an emulated modem bank connected to the house broadband.

Oh how I wish I had thought this up as a joke and not seen it in production to keep a 20 year old piece of software happy...

Re:Don't let it fool you

[adolf]

I've got some rather old machines, too, which certainly still work just fine.

I have less faith in newer stuff, though. From bonding failures on video card GPUs (IIRC the Geforce 8800 was initially a timebomb), to consumer electronics failing due to bad solder joints from lead-free solder (Xbox 360 RRoD), along with bad laser diodes (early PS3), not to mention the ongoing* bad capacitor debacle: In many cases, things simply aren't as good as they used to be.

*: I had to replace some caps in my not-so-old Samsung 52" LCD awhile back. The repair only cost me $2, using tools I already had, but seriously: WTF? Stuff just dies these days.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[hairyfeet]

With processors the thing you have to worry about with die shrinks is electrons jumping the gates, which is why each die shrink from Intel and AMD has taken longer and longer to pull off. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if even with all their money Intel isn't able to pull off the 6nm they have listed on their roadmap. But as long as they aren't jumping the gate you'll actually gain in less heat and power because it has less distance to travel.

With NAND, especially the MLC stuff everybody is cranking out now, as you shrink the failure rate for cells starts going WAY up. Now this can be overcome, if the shrink lets you put in 4 times the cells and only 1 out of say 6 cells dies prematurely? Well its all good. Also the shrinks let you put more spare cells into the case which again can help mitigate the cells failing sooner.

In the end I'd tell you like I tell my customers though...just don't trust the damned things. I've had gamer customers spend crazy amounts of money on SSDs and frankly they don't last a damned bit longer than the cheapos, whereas I've still got a 300Mb HDD that runs great, not that I have a use for something that small anymore. If you are gonna get an SSD make DAMN SURE you've got backups and have a sensible backups schedule in place, preferably on a big fat slow 5400RPM HDD as I've found that the slower drives, especially for externals, have a lot less heat issues and are pretty reliable. At least with modern HDDs one does tend to get a warning before it's tits up, I can't say the same for SSDs which tend to just die without warning.

That said after the holidays I plan to grab one of the after XMas sale 128Gb drives for my netbook, I dread having to disassemble the thing to put in the SSD but from all the reviews it is well worth it for my particular model. One place where SSDs make a lot of sense is in mobile, no motor sucking power and the much faster load times help with the slower CPUs found in netbooks and laptops. Just remember to always have backups, good advice in any case, and you should be good.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[citizenr]

My one month figure is from experience (ocz, not intel). They die within a month, die as in poof no harddrive in bios.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[hairyfeet]

If you are an engineer at an SSD company I'd like to ask you a question that has been bugging me for awhile...WTF is it with the controller chips and just dying? I've got gamer customers that buy all the big name SSDs trying to stay top dog on the benches and frankly no matter what brand you buy its NOT the cells dying that bites you in the ass, its the controller chips.

Hell if it was just the cells dying? I honestly wouldn't care because as others have pointed out when the cells die you basically have a DVD ROM, you can still get the data that was there off, you just can't write more data to it. But when the controller dies? Give it up chuck, everything you had is gone, bye bye, adios muchacho.

So why can't the OEMs seem to fix the controller issues? Or at the very least have a backup controller that will insure the drive fails to read only? It just seems to me like a problem that should have been licked by now but you hit the forums or check Google and you'll see there is still plenty of folks getting bit in the ass by this issue. I'm sure i speak for most folks when i say I don't give a rat's ass about the drive, that's easily replaceable but my data? Is not.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[hairyfeet]

Actually I'd say you are both right and both wrong. yes parts like cheap HDDs, cheap DVDs, cheap SSDs, hell cheap everything, do die a hell of a lot quicker but are cheaper as a result the reason most stuff gets shitcanned is you can't get the parts at a price that makes it worth fixing. hell I have 2 laptops sitting in the shop closet right now, one a nice C2D 17 inch, the other a nice Athlon dual core netbook (boy you can't find netbooks with real Athlons anymore) and in both cases the cost of replacement parts? Cost more than they are worth. I'm gonna take the Athlon over to an engineer friend as a last ditch attempt to save it (customer fried the power input by cutting the power cable with his chair) but the replacement board costs more than the entire unit would on the used market and have you ever priced a 17 inch laptop screen? Holy shit do they gouge the hell out of you!

This is why I've always preferred desktops and tell customers not to sink a lot of money in laptops, because at least with the desktops you are talking bog standard parts made by a half a dozen companies and the competition keeps prices low. Motherboards, GPUs, CPUs, drives, its all plentiful and cheap. With the damned laptops its all proprietary as hell, nothing fits anything else, and because of that the OEMs, which don't want you to fix anything but buy a new one anyway, can gouge the living hell out of you on replacement parts.

I just hope my engineer buddy can save the netbook, as a real Athlon dual with a real separate GPU with 128Mb of its own VRAM in a 12 inch FF? Man you just can't find something like that anymore.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

So... don't buy "fuck reliability, just make it fast" drives from OCZ?
Our bcache text box has a pair of 256GB samsung 830s in raid0 with 50% overprovisioning (= only using the first 128GB of each, for 256GB total) as a writeback cache for a 12*300GB/10k SAS raid10.
After 3 months of hammering it the SSDs are reporting 92% remaining life and had no issues whatsoever.
That would translate to >3 years lifetime of the cache drives in our application. With 25nm MLC flash SSDs...

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Compaqt]

OK, given that:

If the SSD companies are now trying to distinguish 4 voltage levels, and if that gets harder to do once the chip is worn and busted, then: How about "reformatting" (through a special utility program?) the flash chip to only try to distinguish 2 voltage levels? Or using the capacity of the chip in an error-correcting manner? 120GB to 40GB w/ error correction?

Re:Don't let it fool you

[hairyfeet]

Ya know, I really can't blame ya there. I have a perfectly working B&W G3 sitting in the closet in the shop...runs Panther or something, haven't checked in awhile, that I am keeping just for that beautiful case. I figure I'll rewire the PSU (I hear you have to swap a couple of lines) and put an AMD E350 miniboard in it and make it into an artsy fartsy office box. Say what you will about Apple but you just gotta love their cases, so pretty.

If you don't mind a little advice geeks has a Liano quad for $96 which you could pair with a cheap FM1 board and it would probably fit that case great. Too big for my B&W but those Power macs had more room and that would give you a nice quad with GPU for dirt cheap, and of course that sweet case to put it in.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Compaqt]

At the point where that matters, you'd be better off giving your programmers 8GB RAM instead of an 8GB flash drive, and putting /tmp in memory. And even faster than the flash drive.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Guspaz]

OCZ drives have a very high failure rate, and those kinds of failures have nothing to do with write endurance. Of course, products from all brands fail, but you're a lot less likely to have problems with Intel or Samsung drives.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Compaqt]

That brings up the point: I have the strange notion, call it a suspicion, that full, everyday backups may actually cause your drive to fail faster than if you didn't. I don't think this would be the case with flash, but with HDDs, it's an actual mechanical device.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Guspaz]

And, of course, three years down the road, something immensely better for the price will be available.

Three years is roughly time timespan between my purchase of a 160GB Intel x25-m for $700, and my purchase of a 180GB Intel 330 for $140... And the 330 is, on top of being immensely cheaper, enormously faster in almost every respect. By the time your 256GB Samsung 830s wear out, you'll likely be able to get something much faster, cheaper, and more capacious.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Guspaz]

Sure, Windows doesn't take kindly to critical system writes failing, but it's nice that the failure scenario does let you mount the drive on another machine read-only to pull your data off it.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have unadvertised extra capacity and plenty of complicated error correction algorithms (which is one reason why there have been numerous obscure firmware problems with controllers).

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also an engineer at an SSD company. The problem honestly is the firmware of an SSD is quite complex. It is juggling lots of data around the NAND while coping with the uncertainties of NAND behavior. Testing the firmware to find all the bugs is a major effort also.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[greylion3]

OCZ is the lowest-cost brand in SSDs. Look at any shop listing SSDs, you'll find OCZ at the cheap end of the list.
It is virtually certain that OCZ uses bottom-of-the-barrel Flash chips and controllers to be able to sell SSDs that cheap.
I don't know what the failure/RMA rate is, but probably closer to (if not actually at) a double-digit percentage, than both you and OCZ would like.

OCZ also pulled a fast one not so long ago: The Vertex 2 series was changed to use 25 nm Flash chips without changing the product code .

Benchmarks were not quite the same with 25 nm chips (most benchmarks slower, a few slightly faster), and endurance is likely to be a low single-digit number of years, depending on how much data is written to it.
I wouldn't trust a SSD from OCZ with 25 nm chips, to last over a year.
25 nm Flash chips use a larger percentage of spare area to compensate (though I suspect far from entirely) for the reduced endurance from the smaller die-size.
With the new 64 Gbit chips with an even larger spare area, that meant a somewhat smaller Vertex 2 than advertised; not quite the, for example 120 GB ( 120 billion bytes), but only 115 GB (in BIOS).
After the news about it spread, OCZ now offers to swap drives, but still to ones with 25 nm, just not 64 Gbit chips, instead double the 32 Gbit chips so the capacity is actually 120 GB, primarily to help customers with RAID setups, but that's basically too little, too late.

I am NEVER buying a OCZ SSD - that company is only interested in making money and now that they've started to screw over their customers to do so, I'll bet that company goes the way of the Dodo in a few years.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

you made that up, right? skype is designed for voice, using lossy compression and low frequencies only, therefore it can't work with modems.
for same reason people cant load mp3 into ZXspectrum/C64.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

but, if you have 120GB drive instead of 60Gb, you'll probably want to write much more on it, not just 327/300 more.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[wonkey_monkey]

A number of developers have posted on the web

Must be true then. Best disregard the GP's factual technical information.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[hairyfeet]

That still don't explain why they don't have a backup emergency controller, something that will come on if the main controller fails, mark the whole drive as read only and say 'Your controller has failed, get your data off NOW".

Because right now the SSD OEMs are really shooting themselves in the face as it only takes one "flip the switch and poof! Your data is gone" to turn people off your product for years. like I said we really don't care about the drive, that's easily replaced. the data? Not so much.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

My one month figure is from experience (ocz, not intel). They die within a month, die as in poof no harddrive in bios.

If it doesn't show up in bios it is no way that it is a wear leveling issue. The controller is broken. Get an SSD from a vendor without a faulty controller.
Mechanical drive manufacturers generally don't talk about this but they can not even handle the number of writes that a flash memory can. Back in the 90's before mechanical drives got wear leveling they died like flies. If your SSDs dies and your mechanical drives doesn't you can be pretty sure that it is a controller issue.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[hairyfish]

I vaguely remember the first PC I bought with my own money was a 486DX-33Mhz cost me the equivalent of 12 weeks pay back in 92. The last PC I bought was a Dell Optiplex last year for about 2 days pay. That is really absurd change in value. As far life cycle, I'm typing this on my Dell Inspiron (no Dell link here - just coincidence) I bought in 2005. 7 years and going strong and have no plans to replace it (although it's about due for a new battery and maybe a new SSD)

Re:Don't let it fool you

[petermgreen]

the GP's factual technical information.

The GPs post is an anecdote just like the reports from many developers on the internet. Worse he doesn't even really describe his usge scenario. He doesn't give any information on how many servers he is talking about, or how often he "rebuilds world" and what else the servers do

That aside though the impression I get is the quality of the controller is a key factor. Ideally a controller would spread the writes evenly arround the flash while minimising write amplification and avoiding screwing things up itself, even in the event of sudden power loss during a remapping operation. However that is a complex buisness and i'm convinced not all SSD vendors get it right. I notice that the GP is using intel SSDs which have a reputation for being among the most reliable.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[gl4ss]

you made that up, right? skype is designed for voice, using lossy compression and low frequencies only, therefore it can't work with modems.
for same reason people cant load mp3 into ZXspectrum/C64.

afaik current skype audio codec goes up to 12khz.. it certainly sounds better than telephone. it's not that far fetched that you could run 2400/9600 over it.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

The cool thing is that G5 motherboard is actually pretty ridiculously large compared to most ATX configurations, the case is easily large enough to handle some of the larger server/workstation boards out there.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

This definitely reminds me of a friend who once was telling me about how reliable his 60 GB hard drive from 1993 was. I had started to question just what connections he may have had that he wasn't telling me about when my inquiry finally got him to realize that he said 1993, not 2003...

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Dogtanian]

[My] 486DX-33Mhz cost me the equivalent of 12 weeks pay back in 92. The last PC I bought was a Dell Optiplex last year for about 2 days pay.

You make a good point, but can we also assume that you haven't accounted for the fact you were also (probably) getting paid a lot less back then?

For all you know, you were in your first "proper" job, or even 12 years old and delivering newspapers for $2 an hour!

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Guspaz]

Initially, sure, as you fill it. But being able to cram more games from Steam on a hard disk doesn't mean you can play more than one game at the same time. It doesn't scale linearly to size.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[BevanFindlay]

He said "trusted brands"... Sorry, shameless troll, couldn't resist. ;-)

Re:Don't let it fool you

[BevanFindlay]

Another way to do that (and I know someone who had a workplace that did, though admittedly slightly before SSDs became common) is to put rediculous amounts of RAM in the dev's machine, create a RAM disk and put the relevant parts of your source tree there for compiling. You have to have something that copies it back out to proper media once in a while, but it'd beat an SSD and have a longer lifetime (well, and cost more, but hey... trade-offs).

Will be neat when memristor-based storage comes online though.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also an engineer at a major SSD company. The vast majority of 'dead' drives that come back to me are due to a capacitor or are running outdated firmware with known issues. Either a burnt out tantalum cap or a leaked super cap that corroded the board. I have seen drives that had FPGA/ASIC and DRAM issues but they still power up and become ready but report a fault.

I also will not use a consumer grade SSD in my own computers. HDD's are more reliable and worth taking the hit on speed.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[Anonymous Coward]

Because FPGA's and ASIC's are quite expensive. It wouldn't make financial sense to include two for redundancy for a consumer grade device. Would you spend a load extra to have a 'backup CPU' in a computer?

Re:Don't let it fool you

[hairyfeet]

You can buy 800MHz ARM chips for $4 a pop from China so give me a break, surely to have a basic controller (remember it will be ONLY for allowing the drive to be read, NOT written to) wouldn't add more than $8 a pop and being able to brag you can always get your data back would be a hell of a selling point.

They could even get together as an SSD consortium and place specs to make it universal, like SMART for HDDs. Seems like a no brainer to me.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[aralin]

80% of those controllers are from LSI (Sandforce) and the VCs fired very early the CTO and with him went the chief chip designer and most of the senior engineering staff. They are just coasting on what they had 3 years ago. So there. A bit of insider news.

Re:Don't let it fool you

[franc0ph0bic]

What you are basically describing is an enterprise-class SSD. Many companies make them - they are normally over-provisioned around 100% (120GB drive will actually have 240GB NAND).

Re:Don't let it fool you

[franc0ph0bic]

What it comes down to is that if a drive was something like $15 more expensive, but had failure protection, the consumer market would simply not buy it. Right now we are really forced into making drives as cheap as possible and as fast as possible, with reliability being a lesser concern. This issue is mostly that once a single SSD company makes a less reliable, but faster and cheaper drive, they will outsell the companies that make the slower, expensive, reliable drives, so everyone has to follow suit. There are lots of very reliable drives out there though - they are just made as enterprise drives. They will have better controllers, more reliable firmware, more over-provisioning, but will be much slower, and cost roughly double that of a consumer drive.

Still need a big data drive in most uses

[Joe_Dragon]

Still need a big data drive in most uses

as 120GB-256GB is small for some uses and the cloud is slower and ISP data caps suck.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[avandesande]

Most uses? What's that? I would suggest a minority.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[wisnoskij]

Right now I am hardly getting by with my 2TB storage space.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[The Snowman]

Still need a big data drive in most uses

as 120GB-256GB is small for some uses and the cloud is slower and ISP data caps suck.

I'm going to pick one up for my desktop. I'm thinking of around 256GB. That'll work for my primary system. My data lives on a server behind my desk with approximately 3.5 TB of hard drives. No RAID, but the data I care about is backed up and stored on multiple spinning rust platters.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[corychristison]

I do agree, but the 120-128GB range will do the average Joe now.

Its been a while since I've used Windows but the OS only takes around 20GB. 100GB is useful for most peoples word documents, some music, movies, etc.

Its the media hoarders like myself that need the big "Media" drives.

I am personally looking ti move to an SSD. Even with my workload an amount of data in my /home partition a 128GB drive is more than enought for my OS/personal data/work data. I currently have about 1.3TB of movies, music and Televison episodes I've collected over the past 10 years or so. A lot of them purchased or gifts from friends/family on dvd/bluray that I have ripped for use on my media center somy kids don't destroy the discs. I have most of the discs still packed away. The kids ruined a few of them though.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[epp_b]

So? Get an SSD for OS, software and frequently accessed files and an HDD for large capacity.

I've been seriously toying with the idea of buying an SSD for my laptop and installing a media bay adapter for an HDD to replace the optical drive that I almost never use.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[Kjella]

Depends on who "most" is. Many business users will never use up 120GB, even with Windows+WinSXS eating 20-30 of them. A lot of people just aren't very media heavy, they do email and facebook and some digicam photos but nothing to fill a disk. Just like many people that run Steam for games don't actually have very good gaming cards or high resolution monitors - just check the Steam survey. Even Intel and their IGPs have 10%+ market share. Having a cheap bulk drive is no problem though, if you're not in a single-slot laptop.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[sunderland56]

Mostly for media (pictures/music/video/games/etc), where ultimate r/w performance is not an issue. A SSD for OS and general use, and a terabyte+ HD for data, is a perfect setup for many people.

On a laptop - where you don't generally have huge amounts of data - a SSD alone is a major win, for both performance and battery life.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[hairyfeet]

Pictures, videos, and music? I can tell you I've had to swap out drives for a LOT of customers because of those three, HD cams and camcorders are frankly dirt cheap now and when mamma is filming everything junior does? Tends to suck up some space. Ripping your CD collections to your PC is pretty old hat now, even my older customers had either already ripped their music or asked me while I had it in there to show them how to rip their music and 20 years worth of CDs? Again not easy on the space.

This is what i tell my customers when it comes to SSDs...if its gonna go in a laptop, where you have everything backed up to a USB drive and need the extra battery life and improved performance? Sure SSD works there. if its gonna go in a desktop as an OS drive while leaving the HDD for backups and data? Again not a bad use case. if its something mission critical or is gonna seriously hurt if the drive controller fries and is down for a few days while we get a replacement? then no, that isn't a smart idea.

Both style of drives have their place, and with Win 7 having superfetch as long as you have plenty of RAM the only real gains you'll see is boot. Again this is GREAT for mobile, where you are dealing with slower CPUs and spinning that drive sucks power, but desktops? Meh, its okay, for the average person with average PC usage its really not gonna make a big difference in their lives.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[Anonymous Coward]

As I see it, SSDs right now are only useful as a boot/OS partition and caching; which will dramatically improve the responsiveness of the desktop/laptop. Storage data should be put on harddrives; if a laptop, use an external USB drive for mirroring important user data.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[unixisc]

It would seem to me that the drive controller is the most robust part of the drive. The NAND flash that makes up the memory is what is delicate - particularly if it happens to use multi-bit per cell techniques. Also, for such usage, their endurance is not much to write home about - a mere 10k cycles per block, so that would tend to wear them down really quick. And the demands for Terabytes is what is likely to keep SSD acceptance pretty low - to keep those hours of videos - both the kids, as well as the movies.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[Anonymous Coward]

Use an SSD for the operating system and programs, and a traditional HDD for media (external or a NAS even). The two technologies have different strengths, so use each accordingly. The OS and programs aren't huge but benefit from low latency and high speeds. Media doesn't require much speed but price per gigabyte is crucial.

BTW, I *really* hope you aren't implying you want a single drive for everything... That would imply you are keeping all your data on a single device, which will eventually fail and take all your data down with it.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[hairyfeet]

Now you would think that was the case unixsc, but it ain't. i have some gamer customers that buy new SSDs pretty much constantly because they want to biggest and baddest (hell one has his grandma on a skulltrail, that was the weakest hand me down he had, swear to God) but its NOT the cells dying that bites you right in the ass, its the controller.

In fact that has been one has kept me from recommending SSDs for anything but mobile, and even those only for those that are willing to stick to a backup schedule, because I can tell you the SSD OEMs are still having some SERIOUS issues with the controller chips.

Now maybe its like how Seagate drives above 700Gb suck because they used cheapo ARM controllers and crappy code from their Maxtor buyout, maybe they have a vendor in the chain cutting corners on QA and QC, who knows, but I can tell you for some damned reason and it don't seem to matter who made the drive that the controller will fail long before the drive has lost enough cells to be worthless. And this is a BIG problem as with the cells when they die they just become read only but when that controller fails you flip the switch and there is just nothing, it doesn't even show up in BIOS or give you any warning at all, seriously nasty.

That's why while I'll put one in my netbook after the holidays, since I'll have an OS image and I won't have any data on the thing I can't easily replace, I'd be reluctant to put one in my desktop. I use this for work as well as play and flipping the switch one morning and have it go tits up? NOT good.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[AmiMoJo]

You would be amazed how much your OS will hammer an SSD, and many of the newer ones just are not going to last very long.

A few years back I bought an Intel XM25 SSD. It failed due to reaching its lifetime write limit after about 18 months. Something like 14TB of writes. The machine it was in was running Windows 7 with 16 GB of RAM and was mostly for developing, browsing and some VM stuff.

The cheap newer models have even less spare capacity, with individual cells down to four digit lifetime write limits. Sandforce claim to get around this by compressing data so the available spare capacity is amplified, but that is all dependent on you storing compressible data. If you used the drive as a high speed video storage medium for editing or dumped large numbers of JPEG photos on it that compression isn't going to do much.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[Anonymous Coward]

This, this is the biggest problem right here.

As SSDs get more dense, they are going to have to do a horrible balancing act of efficiency and lifetime.
Hard drives are considerably higher in both regards, given they are kept in vibration-free environments. (the number 1 reason for hard drive failure, as well as slow-down too, if you remember that huge survey of hard drives that was done by, uh, Google, or IBM, I can't remember. Even shouting at the hard drive had an effect on it)

HDDs for mass backing storage, SSDs for smaller program storage, RAM / RAM Drives for working space since they offer the advantages of an SSD without the eventual failure (outside of the terrible new RoHS crap), at the disadvantage of power loss if you don't have a UPS setup.
RAM is considerably cheaper now, so is very good for making massive working spaces given you get the right setup.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[Anonymous Coward]

I smell bullshit.
There's no such thing as a XM25.
If parent means a X25-M ... those had 8000 P/E cycle 50nm flash, so even assuming a 80GB model and a 2.5x write amplification factor (pretty much the worst achievable even with synthetic workloads), good for >240TB of writes.
So one of them reporting EOL after 14TB would be rather... unusual.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[WuphonsReach]

Win7/WinXP install is more like 30-40GB after a few months of usage (as all of the old patch files are kept).

120GB is still generally big enough for most people. As long as you have a 2nd old-style big slow HD for the data hogs.

Re:Still need a big data drive in most uses

[Wolfrider]

--Crap Cleaner software can help with the patch/update detritus. I have nothing to do with the company, but after I backup, I run CC and then do a Registry scan twice - and the patch files get cleaned up. Just FYI

Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the duds.

[Anonymous Coward]

Newegg has sales all the time. I've picked up some great drives for a steal. Non-crap 120-128GB devices for less than 80 dollars is a shock.
The price of flash is imploding and the quality of the drives/controllers/firmware is improving quite a bit. The latest crop of devices are far better in terms of speed and reliability so don't bother getting an older model to save money. Only pick up a latest gen device. You can find them cheap too, don't worry.

The latest crop of sandforce based drives are fast and cheap and seem pretty reliable. (The new firmware really makes them shine)
Intels are still more expensive, but are generally the most reliable of the bunch.

I picked up an OCZ vertex 4 128gb for less than 80 bux and it gave my laptop a whole new life.

Re:Misread Title

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Did anyone else initially see "STDs"?

STD's really aren't on our radar, so ... no.

SSD still not fast enough

[Smartcowboy]

I just replaced a week ago the 250gb HD that came with my iMac Alu with a 256gb SSD. I paid about 1$/gb and I can say that my system is noticiably faster. For most of my computer usage, the file system access is still the botteneck, even with the increased speed. Also, stupid OS X needed an external utility to enable TRIM and fiddling in the command line to enable noatime. We clearly need (at least on the apple side) more support from the OS and more speed for the drive.

Re:SSD still not fast enough

[DECula]

Scotty: I'm giving her all she's got, Captain!

Re:SSD still not fast enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Get more drives, and use raid. I am getting fantastic speeds with this!

Re:SSD still not fast enough

[corychristison]

There seem to be 3 classes for SSD.
- Consumer (what the article is referring to) - good speeds for a good price.
- Business - reliable drive w/ good speed for about double the price
- Server/Power Users (PCI-E drives) - insane performance/IO for an insane price.

Re:SSD still not fast enough

[Mashiki]

Remember it's not read/write speed that really counts with SSD. It's IOPS.

Re:SSD still not fast enough

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also at least 3 classes of "Consumer" drives.
1. Cheap. (usually using older gen controllers, low endurance flash, ...) the low-end stuff from dozens of manufacturers.
2. Fast. (bleeding edge controllers and firmware, sometimes with severe bugs...). OCZ is *the* name in this segment.
3. Reliable. Slower than 2, commonly using binned flash rated for more writes and extensively tested controller firmware on previous-gen controllers. Speedwise somewhere between 1 and 2. (intel and samsung mostly come to mind here).

Re:SSD still not fast enough

[franc0ph0bic]

Most SSDs are not designed for iMac use, it is basically something that is thrown in later (excluding the ones made to be built in). You probably could get a huge performance increase by updating your firmware and/or waiting for a better firmware release.

Re:SSD still not fast enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the insane prices are starting to be reasonable..

I was just looking at a pci-e 4x 230gig card for $200 That's getting real cheap now. No more hd!

It's a sweet idea. the os just stays on the card. no drive. no cables. nothing to screw with.

And one really big multi tb hd for everything else. Until the cards get real cheap.
Then no more drives at all! i have 5000 tb of storage on a chip!

big data drive is in my NAS

[Chirs]

I have a dual-drive RAID1 NAS with 2TB drives that is my main household storage. I've got a couple of 2TB external drives to back up the NAS, and one of them lives off-site.

The other devices all mostly access big files from the NAS.

Works fairly well.

Re:big data drive is in my NAS

[fast turtle]

I wish I only needed 2TB of storage as I've got 4+ between the 4 desktops in the house. Add in the laptops and I've got close to 5TB of storage and all of it's spinning rust.

The next system I build is going to use a 30GB SSD for the OS and it will have a trio of drives and they'll likely be 2TB or larger.

Calculation

[darkpixel2k]

Most SSDs Now Under a Dollar Per Gigabyte

So does that mean a 1 TB drive is $1000 or $1024?

Re:Calculation

[wisnoskij]

1TB drives are far bigger than normal SSDs, and normally the price is more per results in extremely low and extremely high performance devices.
So I could imagine it is entirely possible that it is several times that amount.

Re:Calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoooosh!!

Re:Calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

1 tb drive would then be 1 k$.

Re:Calculation

[chrismcb]

Is that Ki$ or K$?

Re:Calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Calculation

[petermgreen]

No, unfortunately at least on newegg there is only one such drive and it's $2,299.99

As usual there is a central range where cost per gigabyte is lowest and drives outside that range are significantly more expensive.

Re:Calculation

[martin-boundary]

Sucker! $640 should be enough to buy *any* SSD drive.

Re:Calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confused over the the new SI "ki$" kibidollars.

Re:Calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

A kibi-dollar or a Kelvin-dollar?

Re:Calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say $1k.

Re:Calculation

[n0tquitesane]

That's $640k should be enough.

Completely worth the money

[BLToday]

But your experience may vary. My first SSD was a Mushkin Chronos, terrible out of the box. BSODs all over the place, RMA'ed. Replacement Chronos has been solid and very fast. No crashes.

Flash wears out. Smaller flash wears out faster

[Firethorn]

okay, unlike processors, it's already known that flash only has so many write cycles before it's worn out. Thus far, the reports I've read say that smaller process flash, especially MLC flash, wears out quicker. HOWEVER, shrinking the process so you fit 4X the cells into a given area doesn't give you cells with 1/4 the lifespan; maybe 2/3rds, maybe 1/2. That part isn't clear. Thus, a theoretical 1TB flash chip might only have 10TB worth of 'writes' to it, that 10TB is still better than a 1GB chip that has 100GB worth of writes. Wear leveling takes care of the rest.

Meh

[rrohbeck]

Are those list prices?
Half a dollar on sale is where it's at right now.

Re:Meh

[corychristison]

I see you didn't bother to read the summary...

that's without the special coupon codes and mail-in rebates usually attached to weekly deals.

Re:Meh

[rrohbeck]

I'm watching SSDs prices because I need one so no stinkin' RTFA for me :)

Re:Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the dud

[Mashiki]

Really at the price the drives are falling through the floor, by Black Friday or Christmas, people should be able to pick up a nice 240-360GB SSD for $100-200, might need to toss in instant and Mail in rebates too. But I've seen 240GB SSD's in the last week here in Canada hit $139 counting a MiR+instant rebate.

Re:Flash wears out. Smaller flash wears out faster

[geekoid]

"That part isn't clear"
no, it's pretty clear,a nd its about 20% less life time. So over 80 years.

What? Not at the moment

[slashmydots]

This story came out just in time for newegg to jack up the price on the average SSD $10-15! Even their "sales" are crap right now. I got my last Vertex 4, Intel 330, Agility 4, and Crucial M4 all for $70-85 and now they're all $95-110! But still, a good and reliable 120-128GB SSD is almost exactly the same price as a good and reliable 500GB Seagate spinning hard drive. Out of the last 10 custom builds at my shop, zero have had spinning drives as the main drive because nobody needed more than that amount of space.

Reality check

[Tough Love]

Consumer disk storage is 6 cents a gig. Still a factor of 16 less than flash. As long as that ratio holds there will be no overnight takeover of the storage market by flash. Instead it's a creeping progression largely driven by the mobile market, outside of which the vast majority of mass storage being sold is still rotating disks. Sure a few geeks like me have begun to swap out their noisy, slow hard disks for ssd, but that's a few geeks. The PC market, the cloud, and enterprise storage, which together completely dwarf the mobile segment in terms of capacity, will continue to prefer cheap over fast and quiet for some time to come.

Re:Reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Best Buy, Wal Mart, and Apple stores start selling stock machines with included SSDs they will never overtake spinning platters. Most people don't replace internal components, and even fewer build PCs from scratch, and of those that do, most will continue to buy platter drives for backups and file servers. People pay the cost premium on SSDs for the same reason people buy core i5/i7s instead of pentium and i3s, to get work (or play) done faster. When I bought my SSD a year ago, cost per GB wasn't a factor, it was the fact that my hard drive was a bottleneck, and the only way to speed up my system would be a raid 0, which multiplies failure rates, or a SSD.

And no, enterprise doesn't favor cheaper per GB over faster and quieter, they prefer the solution which provides the best return on investment. If a big company can get more work done in a shorter amount of time for less money outside of the IT cost, they're going to buy a solid state solution.

Re:Reality check

[jo_ham]

Apple already has started to do this - the Air and the rMBP both have stock SSD drives. I would be shocked if the updated iMac that should probably arrive sometime before Christmas didn't ship with a stock SSD+HDD combo on the higher spec model too.

Re:Reality check

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"The PC market, the cloud, and enterprise storage"

You mean the invisible majority? The PC market is "flatlining", to borrow the title of quite a few Slashdot stories. In the short term the problem probably won't be the storage market shrinking but changing focus. Fewer rotary drives will be made for the home enthusiast and more for the Big Data like Google and Facebook. This could mean either more realiable but more expensive hard drives or, this is what I fear, cheaper, more TB's/$ but less reliable drives since Big Data tends to be redundantly stored unlike the files of the average media pirate.

Re:Reality check

[jedidiah]

That "flatlining" is simply reflecting the fact that a 5 year old PC is still useful but a year old ARM device is considered rediculously out of date. The PC market is saturated and the PC is a mature technology.

Re:Reality check

[Kjella]

And no, enterprise doesn't favor cheaper per GB over faster and quieter, they prefer the solution which provides the best return on investment. If a big company can get more work done in a shorter amount of time for less money outside of the IT cost, they're going to buy a solid state solution.

Actually, most enterprises seem to suffer from Not My Budget(TM) syndrome. I've wasted many hours on storage/memory/network/software issues because there's budget for a $150/hour consultant spending three hours working around a problem but not a $100 upgrade to solve it. It's like telling a carpenter to work without power tools, sure he can but don't blame him when things go slooooooooooooow.

Re:Reality check

[jon3k]

That's not really accurate. The current generation of consumer laptops are really focused on the "Ultrabook" segment. Most of which come with an SSD. It's also pretty much standard equipment in Apple laptops now, which account for over 27% of the US market.

Thanks for the sales pitch

[Osgeld]

Now make them as cheap as mechanical drives, it shouldnt be as hard considering all the mechanical parts are gone and it doesnt take percision manufacturing

I would like to have a 250ish gig drive for the wifes computer, but its hard to justify loosing 10 gigs and paying 140$ more than I did for the mech drive

Re:Thanks for the sales pitch

[SScorpio]

240GB SSDs have repeatedly been down to $140-150 on Newegg for the last month. One of the best deals I saw as an Intel 330 240GB with $140 shipped, no rebate or coupon needed.

Yes they are still more expensive than an equal sized mechanical drive, but they are getting cheaper and there should be some really nice black Friday/cyber Monday deals in seven weeks. I'd be very surprised if 240GB drivers didn't get down to $99.

Re:Thanks for the sales pitch

[EnsilZah]

I guess you also live on rice and water because the occasional steak and a glass of wine provide the same caloric intake for a significant increase in price?

Re:Thanks for the sales pitch

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't take precision manufacturing? LOL! What do you think goes on inside a chip plant if NOT precision manufacturing?

Re:Thanks for the sales pitch

[jon3k]

Depends on what she does the performance difference between an HDD and an SSD can be shocking. I tried the original Vertex years ago and haven't gone back since. I have a large-ish fileserver for mass storage, so I don't really miss the capacity.

Thailand floods

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what role the price gouging last summer had to do with encouraging this new trend.

It's not just consumer drives

[bertok]

I've been waiting for "enterprise" SSD prices to drop for ages, because even though I'm now on my fourth consumer SSD, I've only seen SSD drives in the enterprise space for three out of the last twenty customers or so! Anything esoteric you plug into a server magically becomes 10 to 50 times as expensive. Currently, that's SSD drives and GPUs. The latter has only some niche uses, but everybody could benefit from 1000x lower I/O latencies.

I recently noticed that there's a new OCZ brand for enterprise SSD storage. They sell drives in every form factor, and with very impressive specs. Their drives are already between the $3-$7 per GB mark and dropping. Until recently, most vendors were selling the same kind of thing for over $15 per GB, which is insane.

Competition is good! 8)

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[SScorpio]

Enterprise SSDs are actually different from consumer SSDs though. Most Enterprise SSDs generally have higher IOP counts so you can get higher random access reads off them. The $15/GB drivers you saw were also likely SLC, SLC has a single bit per cell while MLC has two bits per cell. The cheaper OCZ is very likely an MLC drive.

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but I'd trust intel consumer gear over OCZ "enterprise" anything any day.
Guess what, selling buggy crap and blaming the customer tends to ruin your reputation.

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[bertok]

True, but MLC has come a long way. For example, the Z-Drive R5 has ridiculous specs: 2.52 million IOPS and 7.2GB/s throughput.

I'd like to see the workload for which that is "just not good enough"! 8)

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but MLC has come a long way. For example, the Z-Drive R5 has ridiculous specs: 2.52 million IOPS and 7.2GB/s throughput.

I'd like to see the workload for which that is "just not good enough"! 8)

It seems that a workload in which reliability is a factor would meet your challenge criteria.

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[Paradise Pete]

I've been waiting for "enterprise" SSD prices to drop for ages

Ages? I know this is Internet Time, but come on.

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[Little_Professor]

No serious enterprise would use an OCZ SSD, they are reknowned for poor reliability and lack of manufacturer support.

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[aralin]

Look at skyera.com. They are going to offer SSD at the price of HDD and with some compression and deduplication it might go under $1 per GB enterprise as well.

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[aralin]

Not only that, but there are also MLC-E and MLC-C flash chips. The enterprise MLC are done to higher spec with higher number of cycles and lower latency. The consumer level MLC chips sometimes only have 1000 cycles and are generally what is used to build the sub $1 per GB drives.

Re:It's not just consumer drives

[jon3k]

It would be faster and far more reliable using SLC, assuming you had a workload that included lots of writing.

Yay for SSD boot drive.

[eriks]

Just did a re-install about a month ago: 128GB adata SX900 -- which newegg now has for $15 less than I paid (always happens) -- on a 3+ year old system.

Best. Upgrade. Ever.

12 second boot instead of 45 seconds (not that I reboot much) but the big win: lag is nonexistent. Disk intensive stuff like browsing/picking through my heavy photo catalog just flies. Most of my stuff is, of course, still on spinning drives, but key apps & data, like email and photo libraries I'm working with are on the SSD. Actions that used to take several seconds (per photo) now are nearly instantaneous. Full-text searching through email is a lot faster. Sleep/Hibernate is practically instantaneous. $100 is nothing for not having to wait a few seconds (every few seconds!) when doing photo work. I make backups of critical data onto multiple spinning disks, regardless of what kind of disk I'm using, so reliability isn't a concern. I wish I took the plunge sooner.

Re:Yay for SSD boot drive.

[jo_ham]

I think you have the right idea, and I'm sure you're not the only one; a smaller SSD boot drive with OS and apps and some data, with spinning drives for less speed-sensitive large files, with the crucial step of regular backups.

Although, SSD or not, regular backups are always a crucial thing, and not just "up to the Cloud(tm)" - a cheap, large local drive (or a pair of them that mirror their data, but not in a RAID) with a simple automated backup solution is one of the best investments any computer user can make.

Re:Yay for SSD boot drive.

[eriks]

I use some "cloud" storage as a *third* (or fourth) copy, for some stuff. Mostly small-ish stuff, though that includes all my email. Managing backups over a long timespan is usually hard, expensive, or both, but worth it. I have as a pretty simple system though. I like to have all my photos and music on two live, spinning disks, with the "cream" also stored offline, and maybe also on a server I control, and maybe also elsewhere on the internet. My system is far from ideal, and not as robust (or automated) as it should be, but the primary "two spinning disk" rule is a pretty good first line of defense against hardware failure and accidental deletion. I don't mirror disks, I just add new stuff to both disks.

This will only ever be a problem (for me) if disks stop getting bigger, since I invariably replace a (still functioning) drive every few years, with one 2-3 times bigger than the previous one, and then just copy the whole old disk to the new one.

Re:Yay for SSD boot drive.

[Rich0]

Why not backup to the cloud? It is offsite storage - it doesn't get much more secure than that. The only way you lose out is if both the cloud and your local copy are lost at the same time, which seems a lot less likely than losing a local backup hard drive at the same time as your primary.

Cloud backup is also easier to automate, unless you leave your backup drive plugged in all the time which is risky.

Now, cloud backup does tend to be more expensive. I tend to be selective with it as a result.

Re:Yay for SSD boot drive.

[jo_ham]

Oh I didn't rule it out, I just said "not just to the cloud". Like any backup solution you don't really want it to be the only one you have because it's just moving the single point of failure to a different place.

The cloud is very useful, and in combination with a local disk backup it's an excellent way to add redundancy into your solution.

Re:Yay for SSD boot drive.

[Rich0]

How can a backup be a single point of failure? It is already redundant by definition? Unless double redundancy is your goal...

Re:Yay for SSD boot drive.

[jo_ham]

How can a backup be a single point of failure? It is already redundant by definition? Unless double redundancy is your goal...

Yes, that's what I meant. For example, if your only backup was the cloud and your drive fails so you go to restore, and your ISP is out, or the cloud provider's servers are down for maintenance or they've gone out of business or something so you're stuck unless you can fall back onto your other backup.

Don't get me wrong, having even one backup is much better than most people who simply don't back up at all, but I like to make sure I have options for restoring - it's the whole point of backing up in the first place.

Ooh, forgot to post this...

[epp_b]

I was passed on this handy list. Sort by disk rating or rank to get the best one.

The * by the price tag

[rossdee]

Means 'after mail in rebate'

And of course they are only made in 2.5 inch size, so you'll have to buy a bracket to put one in your desktop.
Actually I have a spare 5.25 in bay I would like to put one in there.so I guess I would need two brackets.

I am not sure about whether you need adapter cables for the power and data connections - I have an old HP 2450.

Re:The * by the price tag

[0123456]

And of course they are only made in 2.5 inch size, so you'll have to buy a bracket to put one in your desktop.

My latest tower case came with mounting holes for both 3.5 and 2.5 inch disks in its drive trays. The SSD looks kind of silly in the huge tray, but it fits fine.

Re:The * by the price tag

[petermgreen]

You can get a single bracket that will put a couple of SSDs in a 5.25 inch bay

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816119028

2.5 inch and 3.5 inch SATA drives use the same power and data connectors as do full-sized sata optical drives. 1.8 inch drives and slimline optical drives use different connectors IIRC.

Re:The * by the price tag

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think someone would make a 2x2.5" bracket for the 5.25" bays. There wouldn't be a *lot* of extra space, but there's enough. (Hell, you could probably stack them 2 high as well, and fit 4 of the drives into one 5.25" bay. You might need to add a cooling solution for that scenario though, I don't know.)

Re:The * by the price tag

[rcw-home]

It's been done. Here's one. There are few others out there too.

Re:The * by the price tag

[petermgreen]

In fact there is a SIX drive one out there.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215303

Re:The * by the price tag

[gl4ss]

you could just screw it to the 5.25" bay from only it's other side.
it's not like it's going to vibrate.

if you got sata, you're good to go.

Re:Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the dud

[antdude]

Aren't the latest stuff buggy? I want cheaper and stability.

Re:Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the dud

[lexman098]

You can get some good deals, but I call BS on that one. http://camelegg.com/product/N82E16820227791

Anyway to tell how much life an SSD drive has left

[detain]

If at some predictable point the SSD drives become unable to write or write unreliably, is there a tool (or /proc type entry) that you can use to see how much life is in the device?

Re:Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the dud

[manaway]

The OCZ Vertex 2 reportedly has Sandforce problems.

Have your read the reviwes on SSD's ?

[bobjr94]

When ever I get board and start looking at ssd's at newegg, seems like 1 out of 4 reviews say something like after a few months they get constant blue screens, disk errors requiring several reinstallations of their favorite os. They warranty the drive and have the problem again.

Re:Have your read the reviwes on SSD's ?

[gl4ss]

I've been using a vertex2 for 1.5 years, daily desktop use, no issues.

ssd is so much faster that even if it lasted 2.5 years it would still be worth it.
I do keep media on a different, bigger, drive.

Re:Misread Title

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you'd have to have sex in order to get a sexually transmitted disease, so it's not really on the Slashdot agenda.

Re: Reliability

[MrL0G1C]

No, Crucial's are currently by far the most reliable, Intel's are a distant second, see:
Components returns rates (6)

Although if you'd have said that last year then you'd have been correct (things change quickly).

$1 per gig

[GameboyRMH]

...Or about 10x the cost per gig of a hard drive.

Re:$1 per gig

[jon3k]

And about 500 times the performance (7200 RPM SATA disk at 100 4k iops vs 50k iops, which is very conservative for modern SSD).

Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

My question is this do you still have to dance around solidstates to get the to maintain peak performance or is trim still required?

Re:Anyway to tell how much life an SSD drive has l

[petteyg359]

smartctl, just like with any other drive made in the last decade.

Holding off on Flash-based SSD's here... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ultimately, it comes down to developing a proven track record and SSDs just haven't been around long enough for that." - by jedidiah (1196) on Saturday October 06, @12:37AM (#41566101) Homepage

Which is the ONLY THING "holding me back" from buying Flash RAM based SSD units here... long-term reliability has yet to be proven on them, over a long enough timeframe.

* However - here, I've used PC-133 DRAM based (Cenatek RocketDrive - uses PCI slots) &/or am using (currently, due to a 64-bit driver present for it, I don't have one for my Cenatek unit) a DDR-2 DRAM based (Gigabyte IRAM - uses PCI-x slots & SATA bus) "TRUE SSD"s, as I call them, since they're based on DRAM!

The first (rocketdrive) is still working, but I took down the system it was in (32-bit Windows Server 2003, since I have 32-bit drivers for it, but I no longer run 32-bit OS here though), & has been solidly donig so, since 2003!

The 2nd/latter (IRAM) is as well & I use it now. I bought it in 2007 (iirc, as to the dates) and it kicks ass...

---

I put these things onto them, offloading my Velociraptor 10k rpm 16mb buffered main harddisk (running off a SATA II PCI-x Promise Ex-8350 128mb ECC RAM Caching RAID controller):

1.) Pagefile.sys
2.) %TEMP% ops (from both OS &/or apps)
3.) %TMP% ops (from both OS &/or apps)
4.) Print Spooling
5.) Logging (from both OS &/or apps)
6.) %COMSPEC% location
7.) Certain apps (webbrowsers & their caches)
8.) Hosts file location (for faster seek on load access)

(That ALL functions to "offload" & lessen workloads on my main disk, effectively "speeding it up"...)

---

BOTH have wicked-fast access/seek ( sub 1 ns ) & write speeds on them are consistent with read speeds (close, but not as far apart as I have "heard tell" about those on Flash RAM based SSD solutions).

APK

P.S.=> Until I get MORE SOLID LONG-TERM Endurance data on Flash based SSD units, I'll wait on making a judgement on whether to buy them, or not...

... apk

That depressing moment when...

[BevanFindlay]

...you realise they're talking USD$1/GB, not NZD$1/GB. Doh.

Still, with current exchange rates, that's not really that different any more (a.k.a. "an optimist's view of the GFC" :-)

Re:Flash wears out. Smaller flash wears out faster

[Firethorn]

What I was poorly trying to say with that part is that the number of writes lost as you shrink the process depends on how much you shrink the process, whether it's SLC or MLC, what type of MLC, whether they've figured out any tricks to increase the durability lately, etc... It's not just 20% per 4X increase in density.

Generally speaking, all commercial products have more than enough durability for home or even server use. If I remember right, the 80 year figure is for 'average use', while it's more like 2.5 years if you continuously max out the interface's write speeds.

NTFS journalling helps too... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows' NTFS is a journalling filesystem -> http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_NTFS_journaling

---

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

NTFS file system maintains a change journal. When any change is made to a file or directory in a volume, the change journal for that volume is updated with a description of the change and the name of the file or directory. Change journals are also needed to recover file system indexing - for example after a computer or volume failure. The ability to recover indexing means the file system can avoid the time-consuming process of reindexing the entire volume in such cases."

---

* MOST modern Operating Systems've incorporated this feature, afaik...

APK

P.S.=>

"Sure, Windows doesn't take kindly to critical system writes failing, but it's nice that the failure scenario does let you mount the drive on another machine read-only to pull your data off it." - by Guspaz (556486) on Saturday October 06, @03:28AM (#41566523) Homepage

There IS that, after you give yourself RIGHTS to said newly imported volume, but you shouldn't really HAVE to, per the above - whatever you HAD on your system, prior to write-commission during crash, should still be there & in "tip-top shape" (minus changes that DIDN'T COMMIT cleanly, that is)...

... apk

Re:NTFS journalling helps too... apk

[Guspaz]

If the system won't boot because the system volume is the one wearing out, you're still going to need to put it into another machine, Windows or otherwise.

Re:Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the dud

[jon3k]

The current generation is Vertex 4. I have a Vertex 2 and it's been great. Judging by the feedback the vast majority of people have positive experiences. But yeah earlier generations had their issues.

Re:Some good values. Read reviews to avoid the dud

[jon3k]

They run mail in rebates some times and knock another $20 or $30 off.