Crucial M500 SSD Promises 960GB For $600

crookedvulture writes "SSD prices are falling as drive makers start using next-generation NAND built on smaller fabrication processes. Micron and Crucial have announced a new M500 drive that's particularly aggressive on that front, promising 960GB for just $600, or about $0.63 per gigabyte. SSDs in the terabyte range currently cost $1,000 and up, so the new model represents substantial savings; you can thank the move to 20-nm MLC NAND for the price reduction. Although the 960GB version will be limited to a 2.5" form factor, there will be mSATA and NGFF-based variants with 120-480GB of storage. The M500 is rated for peak read and write speeds of 500 and 400MB/s, respectively, and it can crunch 80k random 4KB IOps. Crucial covers the drive with a three-year warranty and rates it for 72TB of total bytes written. Expect the M500 to be available this quarter as both a standalone drive and inside pre-built systems."

Comments

72 TB is not a lot of data written

[schlachter]

Seems like this kind of drive is best suited for read only focused applications. Depending on what you're doing you could write 72TB pretty quickly on a 1TB drive.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[kannibal_klown]

These drives typically are used for the OS and whatever apps you want the fastest performance. Fast boot times, quick load times, quick action-times within the application, etc.

But even with 500GB, some people have so many apps and games that 500 is pushing it... so they have to decide which application do they want fast performance and which can they just throw on their large HDD drive.

Some people I know don't want one because they can't fit their 3TB movie collection on them. That's not what they're really for at the moment since the sizes aren't that high. And besides, the average person doesn't really need the performance of a SSD just to watch a movie. To edit/scratch/whatever perhaps, but not to watch movies or listen to mp3s. A slower HDD is fine for that.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure there are programs out there that log how much data was written to your HDD.

I'm sure 72TB is enough for the life of an averagely used PC, and possibly even a gaming PC.

What are the maximum write cycles for todays SSDs? I'm sure they are similar.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

That kind of use case (booting OS, some binaries) doesn't make sense for a 960GB drive, though. This drive seems pretty clearly sized for data storage, unless the extra space is simply padding to keep the write times fast (as I understand it, SSD speeds are still tied to free space on the drive).

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[arth1]

What are the maximum write cycles for todays SSDs? I'm sure they are similar.

Typical figures:
SLC: 100,000
MLC: 10,000
TLC: 5,000

You get more storage for the price with MLC and TLC, which is why they're popular. But I'd much rather have a 128 GB SLC drive than a 1 TB MLC drive, for the same price.
What's sad is that it's almost impossible to find SLC drives now, due to consumerism.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

You do?

On my 1.5TB disk the data is pretty much permanent storage. Write once and don't touch.
The files I write a lot are my project files and they are ironicallty placed on a much smaller SSD.

I guess people use their computers differently.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Who puts a $600 SSD in an "averagely used PC" or a "gaming PC"? 72TB isn't much data written for a 1TB disk. At 400MB/s, you could write that much in 50 hours.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[tattood]

I'm sure 72TB is enough for the life of an averagely used PC, and possibly even a gaming PC.

Yeah, 72TB should be more than enough for anybody.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[enemabagjones]

I think it's plenty for any desktop - I use an SSD for both applications and data (productivity, web browsing and gaming), and average less than 1GB writes a day. Even if you're downloading a new game from Steam every day, say 10GB of writes a day, that's still 20 years of usage. If you're writing lots of tiny files and the disk is mostly full (pretty much the worst case scenario for SSDs) so the write amplification is, say, 5x, that's still 4 years of usage.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

72TB for a 960GB drive is only 75 writes per storage byte, assuming perfect wear levelling. I didn't realise the figures were as bad as this, I would have expeted something closer to 72 PetaBytes.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like some sort of error, that'd be a whopping 75 write cycles ...
More likely the 72TB is for the 120GB model.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

50 hours at 400MB/s.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: 72TB should be enough for 90% of the population for the predicted life of the drive (3 years).

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[ssam]

27TB seems odd. each cell can only be rewritten ~72 times (assuming good wear levelling)? surely you should be able to rewrite cells 1000s of times, and have some spare ones to replace any that fail early.

i'd say you would need a very *write heavy* workload to burn through this. I've shot a film on a DSLR and at most generated 20-30 GB in a day. So if i loaded that on to the drive each day, and then threw it away (or copied it somewhere else) at some point so i could keep filming more, that would be 10 years non-stop. (in practice we shot weekends for a few months and ended up with ~500GB of footage that will be kept long term).

I guess there a caching applications were you have streams that you need to record continuously, and then discard. But i think as a typical drive for a home user (even one who shoots a lot of video) 72TB would last a long time. A programmer on a large project might generate multi-gigabyte builds, but i doubt they would be rebuilding the whole codebase everyday (the project build server would be a different issue, but i assume that could use a 32GB ram disk or something).

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[girlintraining]

...due to consumerism.

Damn you free market! Daaaamn yooooouuu!

Personally I don't see the problem with disposable hardware... it's like the serpentine belt on a car. Nobody should be going without regular backups anyway.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[jtownatpunk.net]

I have a 750 gig Seagate hybrid drive on my gaming computer. Only thing on it is the OS, games, and a few apps. No movies, no music, no "junk drawer". I'm currently using 562 gigs. That's with all but the most recent restore point deleted, and a recent disk cleanup. I don't even have productivity software installed.

So a 960 gig SSD is of interest to me. What would be of more interest is a 2tb or larger hybrid drive with a moderately sized SSD. Something like the 3tb fusion drive Apple has would be excellent. I've been quite happy with the performance of my hybrid drive and I'd rather pay $200 or so for a 2tb hybrid than $600 for a 960gb SSD.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[enemabagjones]

That's because the endurance rating isn't the most optimistic figure set by the manufacturer (unlike laptop battery life for example). Instead they follow standard usage patterns established by committee (such as JESD) so that they provide somewhat realistic figure. So, if all you're doing with this SSD was continuously writing large files, then you may expect it to last 5PB as 5000 write cycles on the NAND allows.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[PTBarnum]

You carry a spare serpentine belt with you whenever you drive? That's hardcore.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[franc0ph0bic]

It is very easy to find SLC drives, you just have to look at enterprise drives instead of consumer drives. For example OCZ offers this: http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-products/deneva-2-r-sata-6g-2.5-slc.html 50PB endurance...

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Kjella]

Too high, with process size reductions it's more like:

SLC: still around?
eMLC: 30000
MLC: 5000
TLC: 3000

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[flargleblarg]

And besides, the average person doesn't really need the performance of a SSD just to watch a movie. To edit/scratch/whatever perhaps, but not to watch movies or listen to mp3s. A slower HDD is fine for that.

Um, the average person doesn't need SSD performance just to watch a movie??? I don't think anyone needs SSD speeds to watch a movie. Even uncompressed 1080p24 video at 16:9 aspect ratio is only 149.3 MB/s. And nobody watches a movie as uncompressed video, unless you're in the editing room, in which case you're not watching it anyway but editing and scrubbing and stuff.

A two-hour long 50GB Blu-Ray movie is only 6.9 MB/s. Multiply that by 4x for 3840x2160 (which isn't even available yet) and you're still only talking 27.8 MB/s — which even USB2 can handle easily.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you don't want to risk your serpent's pants falling down.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Sir_Sri]

It's sized for people who don't want to think about what to store on the drive and can pay 12x the price of a regular drive the do that, or for people who need to work on large files at high speed. In the same way the market for 64 Gig of ram machines is low but high value. People who want that performance will pay for it.

I agree with a couple of other people though, I think the way this makes the most sense to go is mainstream commercial drives with a fast SSD cache and slower magnetic tap drive, and they could be cheap, but I could be wrong, in 6 or 7 years SSD's could be just double the price of magnetic drives and that makes high capacity appealing for the convenience if nothing else.

SSD speeds require there to be *some* free space on the drive, but that's not an issue so much in the 240 Gig + drives because you can easily find a few GB to leave free.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[kannibal_klown]

Hence why I put the editing bit...

The average person just watches a movie: a 5,600 RPM drive is more than fine.

The Beyond-average users might watch a movie that they're ALSO going to be editing... in which case I imagine a higher random-seek-time might be nicer if they're cutting/pasting/adding-effects/etc. Home movies, stuff for professional work, etc.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[PlusFiveTroll]

Spot on. What most people don't get is that regular harddrives provide good streaming throughput on large unfragmented files. You want movies and other large, most read files on spinning disk because it's cheap. Where SSD rules is random IO and IOPS. Your small file read and writes, logging, and database just excel on SSD. People bitching that the SSD isn't big enough for their media would be the same person that would bitch that their race car doesn't hold as much as a semi (lorry).

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Sir_Sri]

How often do you really rewrite most of the contents of a drive though? With a 60 or 120 gig drive the vast majority of your space is going to be taken up by relatively static programs (OS and productivity programs themselves), give or take patch cycles that change some of the stuff. With a 960 gig drive now you're looking at a significant amount of user data, so that might not survive as long, but most drives can also detect a failed sector and turn it off so it might be that you start to see see the effective capacity of the drive shrinking.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[kannibal_klown]

This

A bunch of my friends have a large gaming library installed and like their SSD because it reduces load times and such.

However, said friends also do NOT delete the older games they no longer play... in case they want to return to it in x months/years. This was they don't have to go to the hastle of re-installing AND they get to keep their save-games + progress. As games are now measured in the multi-GB range, a 250GB drive fills up (relatively) quickly.

Personally I delete my older games and only have a couple of large ones on at a time. However I also use my PC for development and thus need room for tools. In my case, 500GB is the sweet-spot... as I have have the extra room in case I need to install some more development / database stuff or if I want to install a handful more games

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Vreejack]

You might see his legs, and that must never happen.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course SLC is still around, for people like you who fail to realize that a disk with almost 10 times the capacity but 1/10th the per block endurance is just as reliable if the bigger capacity isn't used, thanks to wear leveling, and probably much faster due to parallel access to more chips.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

And another idiot with no clue what write leveling is.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[bananaquackmoo]

I think there's definitely a market for these drives. Think of an HTPC for example. I leave mine on all of the time. I have terrabytes of video, BUT that video is only written once. It rarely ever gets anything but reads. Yes I could and do use an HDD for this, but they aren't silent or low power. This SSD could be just what the doctor ordered for this type of use.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Immerman]

What would be really nice is if you could buy a single drive and then decide to operate it in SLC or MLC mode depending on your particular needs. I wouldn't think it would be that difficult, or expensive, to modify the read/write circuitry to handle either mode, and it would even let the hardware degrade semi-gracefully: You could operate your snazzy new SSD in 1TB mode for a year or two until reliability became an issue, and then switch it to the far-more reliable 512GB mode and reformat to get another decade out of it. Or am I the only one who has 2-3 generations of drives in their computer at any given time?

Seems to me like a great way to increase the market for any given drive considerably, while incurring minimal overhead. I know I'd certainly be more inclined to buy a SSD, especially a high-capacity one, if I knew it wouldn't become completely useless within a year or two.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Immerman]

It was only a couple years ago that $500 was the entry price for a SSD of useful size and performance, and they were still quite popular in high-end gaming PCs, and I could well imagine high-end "cost is no object! Give me the biggest numbers!" laptops using them. Still probably more of an enterprise-oriented device, but lots of applications there that are fairly write-invariant but still benefit from SSDs incredible seek times - web servers for example.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[arth1]

Of course SLC is still around, for people like you who fail to realize that a disk with almost 10 times the capacity but 1/10th the per block endurance is just as reliable if the bigger capacity isn't used, thanks to wear leveling

You, on the other hand, fail to realise that this is only true if every write is a rewrite, so wear levelling applies. It isn't, so it doesn't.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting into perspective what 72TB is: over the above 3 year life span that is writing 60GB per day, every day, for the life of the drive. I wouldn't recommend it for heavy commercial use, but for consumer use that is more then enough.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[schlachter]

To each his own...but I've got my OS and a huge amount of apps on my 256GB SSD and I've stil got 100GB free. The remainder of my data sits on an internal 500GB HD and a 2TB network drive.

I would think one of the best applications for a 1TB SSD is video/movie editing and data analysis...both of which would require swapping out HD contents on a regular basis.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[blahplusplus]

"What's sad is that it's almost impossible to find SLC drives now, due to consumerism."

For most people they don't need SLC. You only need SLC if you're writing a lot to a drive (things like enterprise apps). The thing killing SLC is cost and the fact that hard drives still have a huge lead because they are dirt cheap. Even a 512GB SSD right now is roughly $369 bucks, you can get 9TB of hard drive space (3x3tb drives) for that kind of money. So you can get roughly ~17x the space of a 512GB SSD for the same money. That is significant.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[dgatwood]

A proper wear leveling algorithm takes care of that by periodically remapping content that doesn't change often so that low-use blocks can be reclaimed into the free pool. So in effect, yes, it is true unless your wear leveling algorithm sucks.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't operate in "SLC/MLC" mode as these are physically layout in chips how the electrical bits are stored. Is it store as a simple '0' or '1' or multiple VOLTAGE levels that are used to encode multiple bits. Each of these have implication on the physical shapes and the densities that can be achieved.

It is not a software compression option that you can just turn on or off.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[schlachter]

Crucial wouldn't confirm the write-erase limit of the m4's flash chips, but it does publish endurance specifications for the drive as a whole. According to the company, the m4 can write 72 terabytes of data over its lifetime. Amortize that over a five-year span, and you're looking at 40GB per day.

Just noticed that Crucial made the same claim on their m4 drives...only 72TB seems like a lot more when you're dealing with a 128/256GB drive.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[dgatwood]

First, proper wear leveling considers the entire disk (or at least a particular slice of it) as candidates for replacement, not just the block you're writing. So when you need to write to block 345, rather than rewriting cell 345 (which has been rewritten six times already), it might elect to read block 976 at cell 976 (which has been written only once), migrate that data to cell 345, and write block 345 into cell 976.

Second, there are extra blocks specifically for replacing high-use cells. Your capacity should never shrink. With an SSD, by the time you start getting write errors, it's time to copy all the data off the drive and scrap it.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[viperidaenz]

5000 cycles on the NAND? The smaller the geometry, the lower the number of cycles (the insulating layer is smaller, so wears out quicker) These are 20nm.

34nm MLC NAND was good for around 5000 erase cycles.
20nm is claimed to be 3000 cycles.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[kannibal_klown]

256 was enough for me: the OS, Office, a couple of AAA games, and my development stuff.

After a while, I needed to install some other stuff too... apps that I needed to run fast for developing. I got a little closer to the 256 than I'd feel comfortable so I upgraded the PC to 512GB SSD and moved the 256GB SSD to a cheap laptop.

256GB probably would've been fine in the long run, but I wanted a little wiggle room.

Meanwhile, I have about 1.5TB of iTunes videos and such on a second hard drive.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[aztracker1]

I've made friends with mklink in newer versions of windows... install to C: .. then when you aren't using it a lot move it to D:\!c_maps\Program...\game\ and link it back to C ... My first SSD was 60GB and was not nearly enough... got used to it. About to drop in a 240GB drive as my main drive, my ESXi Server is using a pair of 480GB drives... works great.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Those numbers leave behind the questions, which technology is going to replace flash? When is that technology going to start seeing large-scale introduction?

The two I'm aware of are PCRAM (phase-change) and MRAM (magnetic). Apparently MRAM is beginning to ramp-up, but it isn't anywhere near the point of seeing large-scale devices on the market for a couple years. I haven't seen much on PCRAM, but it has also been seen as a potential contender. Then there is the possibility of something else suddenly being discovered and taking the market by storm. I certainly hope this happens soon since flash has been pushed as far as it will go.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Immerman]

I know that - but basically given one storage location you could store 3 bits (TLC) with 8 voltage levels, 2 bits(MLC) with 4 levels, or 1 bit (SLC) with two levels, which is done is a matter of the control circuitry. As flash cells degrade they're no longer capable maintaining voltage levels precisely enough to represent the desired number of bits. You could however "downgrade" your controller so that rather than trying to store two or three bits in each pit you only store one. The easiest way would likely be to simply use a TLC controller (0-7), and then in SLC mode simply always write 0s or 7s , and have a read-back mapping of something like 0-2 -> 0 and 3-7 -> 1 (or whatever, degradation affects voltage levels non-symmetricly), then only the highest-level logic would have to be at all concerned about what mode it's operating in.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Sir_Sri]

First, proper wear leveling considers the entire disk (or at least a particular slice of it) as candidates for replacement

yes, but not really relevant if you're only rarely ever writing anything to the disk at all. Yes, when you do write 1GB of changes it pushes data around to the most suitable sector for it, but you have to have data you are trying to write at all for that to be relevant.

Your capacity should never shrink. With an SSD, by the time you start getting write errors, it's time to copy all the data off the drive and scrap it.

All of my SSD's (and I've got 6 around here right now) started with about 0.1% of sectors not working, and have gradually crept up since then to somewhere around 0.4%. That seems to be pretty normal.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[lightknight]

That's under the assumption that that's all the machine will do for the next two hours. Installing updates in the background, etc., etc. and you'll definitely want a faster hard drive.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[dgatwood]

I assume you mean 0.1% of cells. If there's even a single logical block not working, something is wrong.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Nirvelli]

You might want to take a look at Link Shell Extension

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sure a small number of zero'ings or Secure Erases, especially since you need to fill the entire drive in both cases. Does anyone know if on SSD's the reserve cells are truly reserved until needed for fault recovery or if all the cells are in rotation for wear-leveling but a certain amount of capacity not reported available for use to the OS?

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

For the 3 year lifetime, that would be completely re-writing everything on your drive every 15 days. If your is data so worthless that you overwrite it that often, then why do you bother storing it in the first place?

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the life time of the memory cell that is the problem here and not the memory cell forgetting the contents. Making the memory cell smaller makes them more easily physically damaged by the high electric field during the erase/write cycles.

It just happens that the older SLC technology also uses a larger geometry and also can tolerate a bit more than the newer smaller geometries which also use a trick to compare analog voltage.

So whether you are trying to store 1-bit or 3-bit, it doesn't matter as the tiny memory cell will be destroyed by the erase/write cycle. If it is forgetting the contents because of low SNR, it is a matter of refreshing the memory cells in a DRAM refresh manner.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

This should be modded up.

It's easy to jump to knee-jerk conclusions about some arbitrary number which "feels small". Once you do the math, as the parent just did, it becomes clear that it is perfectly fine. In fact, writing 60 GB / day is for most home user a HUGE margin, so the drive should be able to last much longer than three years.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[TheRaven64]

Even 5,000 rewrite cycles is a lot. It's been 72 days since I last rebooted my laptop, and in that time I've written 600GB to its 256GB SSD. I rebuild LLVM every few days, so I probably have a higher than average write rate. I also ripped a few DVDs to watch on the train when I visited my mother over Christmas, so that adds a little spike, but let's assume that's a pretty average burn rate. That's 0.0326 rewrite cycles per day, assuming perfect wear levelling. In the magic happy land of perfect wear levelling, this drive would therefore last 15,360 days, or about 42 years. Given that laptops rarely last 10 years, and 3-5 is a good operational life, if wear levelling is only 25% effective, the disk will outlast the rest of the laptop.

Wear levelling can't be perfect, because some sectors are never rewritten and so it must use up a write cycle to move the data to a more worn one. Fortunately, manufacturers compensate for this somewhat by adding more cells than are exposed directly and remapping the spare ones over the dead ones.

As long as the typical amount of data written grows at a slower rate than the size of the SSDs, the wear levelling will be able to keep them lasting a long time. I first did this calculation several years ago, when a 32GB SSD was just about affordable, and came up with a burn rate of about 2GB/day. Now I'm at about 8GB/day, but a 256GB SSD is affordable. My average write speed has doubled twice, but the capacity has doubled three times.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[TheRaven64]

I said in another post that I've written 600GB to my laptop's SSD in the last 72 days. At that rate, writing 72TB would take about 23 years. I do have a 23-year-old laptop in an attic somewhere, but its 60MB hard disk is long since dead.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[flargleblarg]

That's assuming the disk is relatively quiet, yes. But I really doubt that the additional seeks from other activities would make a noticeable difference on a 1080p compressed movie. A 12-GB 2-hour movie, for example, is only 1.7 MBytes/second of data, which is easily slurped up by the disk controller in a single seek (unless the disk is highly fragmented). A media player will pre-buffer a couple seconds of video, so you should be able to do quite a bit else in the background. Now, if we're talking uncompressed video, then I completely agree that performance would suffer from doing other things in the background.

Still a ways to go

[GameboyRMH]

That's about 6x the cost of a hard drive, in terms of dollars per GB. If it was 2x or maybe even 4x I'd replace the RAID0 array in my gaming machine with one of these.

Re:Still a ways to go

[tantrum]

I'm already using striped SSD's in my gaming/photo/video rig. It is a bit overkill, but I'll never go back to use spinning disks for anything besides "long term storage".

Re:Still a ways to go

[sdguero]

Just get a 120 or 250 GB on sale for your OS and applications. Keep your data on a traditional HDD.

It's worth it dude. Trust me. The upgrade to SSD was the most noticeable single component upgrade I've ever done to one of my machines.

Re:Still a ways to go

[Anonymous Coward]

O.o; RAID0...really?

Re:Still a ways to go

[GameboyRMH]

I've been thinking about it...I wonder how I could transfer an existing Win7 install like that, in Linux it would just be a few lines in fstab...

Re:Still a ways to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? Intel RST supports TRIM on raid0/1/10.
Also, due to nearly all drives being limited in read speed by SATA3, a pair of 256s is a good deal faster than a single 512.

Re:Still a ways to go

[sdguero]

I would definitely re-install. As I recall Windows 7 recognizes SSDs and adds some special sauce to make the OS run better on them.

Re:Still a ways to go

[0123456]

That's about 6x the cost of a hard drive, in terms of dollars per GB.

Only if you buy a 1TB hard drive. If you buy a 3TB drive, it's about 12x the cost per GB.

Hard drives have a minimum price they can't go below, because of all the hardware required to get those disks spinning and read and write to them. Additional capacity doesn't add so much once you go above that level.

Re:Still a ways to go

[PRMan]

The Kingston drives (and probably some others) come with Acronis TrueImage HD on a CD. Takes about 20 minutes to copy to the new drive by booting from the CD. Disconnect the old drive and reboot. Super easy. And this was a Windows 2008 R2 Server. When I recently upgraded from the 64GB Kingston to a 180 GB Intel, it took 5 minutes and extended the partition to 180 GB automatically.

Re:Still a ways to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet, have the same, works great! Have a Green Caviar for files storage, it slows down when not in use, the SSDs just for OS/programs

Re:Still a ways to go

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, it's cool if that's what you want. Just have a decent, confirmed backup process in place. o.o; I'd hate to be around when one of those drives go.

Re:Still a ways to go

[radish]

Which it does on every boot. Doesn't need to be reinstalled. Most retail SSDs come with software which can do the transfer, otherwise you're choice of bootable linux USB sticks will do the magic (with a win 7 recovery disk to rewrite the MBR).

Re:Still a ways to go

[Kaenneth]

You are better off re-installing to a freshly created partition, not cloning an existing disc. There are disk-block alignment issues that may occur otherwise (where a logical block occupies parts of two memory blocks), increasing the wear rate, and thus lowering the life of the SSD. The performance won't noticeably suffer at first (It'll still be damn faster than disc) but it's better for the health of the drive in the long term.

SSD replacements?

[girlintraining]

While it's nice to see SSD capacities increasing, the real metric is the cost per gigabyte, which is still nowhere near conventional harddrives. A good number of us have massive multimedia collections; It's still cost-prohibitive to store all of it on SSDs. And at least for the short-term, a primary drive over 200GB isn't really something most users need. A select few, perhaps, but not many. This may be something more useful in the enterprise, but then... looking at the specs, it seems it wouldn't survive very long in a database server.

Re:SSD replacements?

[ByOhTek]

They are coming closer to outpacing the high-performance rotary drives, that's a start

(still regretting the purchasing of two velociraptors for RAID-0)

Re:SSD replacements?

[girlintraining]

(still regretting the purchasing of two velociraptors for RAID-0)

I suppose redundancy is important when cloning killer dinosaurs.

Re:SSD replacements?

[AmiMoJo]

I think you would be more likely to want something like this for HD/4k video editing. Problem with that is that the drive can only be re-written 72 times before it dies according to the spec.

That's why a lot of these newer SSDs are so cheap. If you can only write 72TB to a 1TB drive that suggests that each cell probably only has a lifetime in the low thousands of rewrites (accounting for write amplification and re-writes due to partial block updates).

Re:SSD replacements?

[h4rr4r]

Too bad RAID0 won't give you any.

Re:SSD replacements?

[LordLimecat]

RAID 0 is not redundancy; its almost the opposite of it (double the failure rate).

Re:SSD replacements?

[arth1]

I suppose redundancy is important when cloning killer dinosaurs.

There's no redundancy with RAID 0.

Anyhow, for database work, I'd much rather have a set of short-stroked 15k rpm drives than SSDs. The worst-case commit time is often in the second range with SSDs, even if the average is lower.

Re:SSD replacements?

[slashmydots]

Hey, I can put in a second 1TB+ magnetic drive, no problem. I'm WAY more concerned about the number of writes that a flash chip in an SSD can perform before it fails (2000-9000 usually). My estimation says I'd likely completely destroy a 256GB medium quality SSD in about a year. That's a problem. The way I understand it, it's per-chip, not per bit, and there are only like 16 chips in an average SSD. It'd take me a while to write 256GB 9000 times but if a 100MB write hits 3 different chips, that's a problem.

Re:SSD replacements?

[ByOhTek]

RAID-0 isn't redundancy, it's striping. It's kindof the opposite. Higher fatal-failure rate, on average, slightly increased latency (though with out-of-order-reads, this can be mitigated), much higher throughput.

Sadly I read that as "kitten dinosaurs". Now I want one. Could you imagine the death, terror and destruction that would bring?

Re:SSD replacements?

[ByOhTek]

No, it doesn't double it, but it does increase it by something like a standard deviation.

Re:SSD replacements?

[tnk1]

If you used it in a situation where you maintain static data for reads, it may well last a long amount of time indeed. I agree that most databases could cause the lifetime of this to be less than you'd want, but if the database was mostly used for reads, and updates were relatively infrequent, which you might get in some archival systems, it would be very usable.

At home, I have a relatively small data set, and for things like movies, I've never seen the need to store them for long periods of time. I think that is one benefit of something like Netflix or whatever. There is little utility to maintaining large movie files for long periods of time locally. All it buys you is the ability to re-watch a movie you have already seen at a moment's notice, and while there are some you might want to pull out to rewatch for quotes or fun, there's not *that* many. MP3 collections still respond fairly well to being burned on DVD-Rs since the file sizes are small enough so that you can more efficiently fill them to capacity. I only have 1 1 TB archive drive, and its not even close to full. Not that I need an SSD for that, but it would certainly be an upgrade for my 300GB 10K SATA drive.

Of course, I agree that 960GB is an awkward size at the moment, but it could have real applications in things like disk shelves where you can offset the small individual size by aggregating them with hardware RAID and well thought out management software. That software could also even out writes to the individual disks to ensure their lifetime remains most efficiently utilized.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail at understanding how wear leveling works.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.
Wear leveling on modern drives has WA in the low 1.x range, so those cells would have to be rated for 100 write cycles.
even really bad 20nm MLC and is rated for >1k erases.
I suspect that should've been 720TB

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you doing that requires 1400 GB of writes per day on the same drive? That's 2 hours worth of writing at 200 MBps

256 GB x 2000 writes 365 days = 1402 GB/day.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

We use short-stroking on (many) HDs for db tables and indexes on SSDs (all RAID0'd as well, on top of RAID1).

SSDs versus HDs are like having deeply satisfying spiritually mindblowing dirty doggy-style sex with Megan Fox versus wanking over a pic of her.

Just not the same... Once you've had the real thing, there's no going back.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

Overprovision your SSDs for better minimum performance. Enterprise drives have more overprovisioning and sacrifice max performance for higher minimum performance. See this link. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it decreases reliability by half. If any one of the drives fail, you cannot recover data off the other.

Re:SSD replacements?

[PRMan]

It doesn't really matter. 99% of people will NEVER write 72 TB to a 1 TB drive.

Re:SSD replacements?

[MozeeToby]

Why do you want your media collection on an SSD? So long as the disk is fast enough to stream what you need it to stream you should be fine, at least until SSDs are cheaper than spinning disks. Personally, I have a (very) small SSD in my laptop and a spinning drive plugged into my wireless router that anyone on the network can use. Data goes on the NAS, software goes on the SSD. Even an 80gb SSD is large enough (though only just barely) as long as you don't play games like WoW with 16gb installs.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter. That figure is wrong. That's only 72 write cycles on the 1TB drive. It should be around 3000 write cycles.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

The write cycle limit is per erase block. Flash memory is written bit-wise but erased block-wise. Writes change bits in one direction (0 to 1, for example) and erasures change a whole block of bits back to the default value (0 in the example). The erasure is what damages the cells. "Wear leveling" is the name of a category of algorithms which are used for minimizing and distributing block erasures. Without wear leveling, a normal filesystem would wear out a flash disk in no time due to the frequent overwrites of central file system data structures. Where flash is used directly, i.e. without a controller that does wear leveling, special file systems are used which are designed with the peculiarities of flash memory in mind. Erase cycle limitations are not a cause of practically relevant problems in current SSDs.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Ravaldy]

Depends what your time is worth. I consider my time to be worth something so every minute counts. SSDs help improve production significantly. I estimate my daily time saving around 20 minutes since I updated to an SSD. So say I cost the company $20 an hour, at the end of the year the company saves $4000 worth of my salary. Well worth the $150 to $400 investment

SSD are also a great solution for improving database speeds. Most data in a database doesn't change so the rewrite issue is not really an issue.

Re:SSD replacements?

[scheme]

No it decreases reliability by half. If any one of the drives fail, you cannot recover data off the other.

It's more than that. If p is the probability that one of the drives will fail in a given timespan, the chances of your array staying up is 1-(2*p + p^2) . The problem is that you need to consider the possibility of both drives failing so the probability of the array going down is p+p+p^2 so things are worse than just having two independent drives.

Re:SSD replacements?

[bobaferret]

Just as an FYI, we've switched most of our databases to running RAID10 arrays of m4 512GB drives. We now use arrays of 8 drives, and sustain read rates of 1.7GB/sec. We switched over from fiber channel and SCSI arrays of 14 drives each w/ 73 or 146 GB drives in them and a top sustained read speed of 160MB/s. We will probably never go back to that. Whether it's because of the speed increases, the power usage, the noise, or shelf space required. We still use rotational media for slow access things like videos and documents, but as far as DB's go, "once you go SSD, you'll never go back".

Re:SSD replacements?

[girlintraining]

Too bad RAID0 won't give you any.

I'd rather believe that the velociraptors are redundantly linked because making them faster is an even scarier proposition.

Re:SSD replacements?

[ByOhTek]

You also have to consider the likelihood of a drive failing at all (there's the possibility that you will cease needing them before they fail). Add to that the likelihood of failure during a given time frame - Drives done have an even percent failure rate every month of life.

Re:SSD replacements?

[ByOhTek]

Also, there's the consideration of failure raite in RAID-0 agains
1) a single independant drive that does the work of those n drives in RAID-0
and
2) Haveing the same n drives do that work.

Finally, lifespan, which is what I was thinking of -
If one drive has a life expectancy of an average of 5 years, given the failure distribution average over time, does a second drive in the array take it down to 2.5 years, 4, years, or something else?

Re:SSD replacements?

[viperidaenz]

It'd be 3000 if they used top quality MLC chips. If they use the cheap left overs...

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

3000 cycles is actually the minimum for a quality drive. The number they give is worst case scenario. Enterprise drives use eMLC and are probably more like 5000 cycles, again worst case scenario.

Re:SSD replacements?

[slashmydots]

I thought that I read somewhere that if one block fails, the entire chip it's on fails as well but I don't know if that's true for SSDs. RAM won't do that but flash drives will do that so it's a tough call.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:SSD replacements?

[slashmydots]

Oh, I'd have about 150GB sitting there static though from game installs and stuff. Vertex 4 drives will shift the data very rarely when one chip has an 8000 write count and the other has 1 write count from the initial image but that counts as another write. Or it will attempt to. That's over 50% capacity of the drive so there's not enough buffer room to move all of the data. So that results in more frequent shifts and more write operations as it does it fractionally over time. But moving 150GB of data (or a large portion of it) is hard. Eventually, at some point, for performance reasons, it will write to the same location over and over the fuller the drive gets. So that REALLY kills the useable life.
I bet my web browser is 1GB and 100,000 writes of tiny cache files in a day. Then there's large downloads like Nvidia drivers and windows updates. Then every Netflix movie is around 1.1GB and is immediately deleted. I doubt that buffers straight to memory 100% of the time. Then there's system restore points, which it would be stupid to turn off completely. Then there's the fact that anything sensitive I'm working on has to be run through a file-overwriting shredder and sometimes that's a lot of data. Then there's Windows updates. Then there's the pagefile, which I'm not exactly sure how often that's overwritten completely but I think it accurately reflects the data stored in the memory to some degree most of the time. Then there's the hibernation file if it's a laptop. Boom, you just wrote 4GB of data in 10 seconds every time you hit hibernate. It's not unusual to have 50-100GB of writes to a drive on a computer that runs windows and that you actually use. Then since just 1 chip has to fail, not all of them, and wear leveling isn't flawlessly symmetrical, you lose a huge about of your 1402GB/day rate so yeah, it's not going to last the full life of the year.

Re:SSD replacements?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the worst quality MLC NAND should be better than TLC NAND which currently has 1000 write cycles. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand

Re:SSD replacements?

[petermgreen]

There isn't much point in putting video on a SSD anyway. Hard drives are more than capable of sequential streaming at typical video bitrates.

I see two main usecases for this.

1: laptop users who like to keep a lot of stuff on their laptop. This lets them have the speed benefits of SSD without sacrificing too much on the total storage or sacrificing the optical drive.
2: gamers who like to keep a LOT of large games installed at once.

Re:SSD replacements?

[mjwx]

(still regretting the purchasing of two velociraptors for RAID-0)

I suppose redundancy is important when cloning killer dinosaurs.

RAID0 is striping, which is important for camouflage.

However when it comes to a good backup plan, you need to make them lysine deficient so that if the velocoraptors aren't completely supplied with with the amino acid lysine by you they slip into a coma and die.

Re:SSD replacements?

[QQBoss]

Assuming you don't have enough, buy some more RAM and make a ram disk. Point your browsers caches and any temp files to your ram disk, along with your pagefile. Have your netflix movies download to it, too (I will usually download all files to the RAM disk, but I know I never download more than 2 GB unattended, if I do need to download a huge file I can manually point it to my spinning rust). My 24 GB RAM system has an 8 GB RAM disk which typically runs about 1/2 full with occasional spikes up to the full 8, but I could get away with just 4 GB if I felt like it. If you are running an SSD, consider stopping using hibernation- sleep or shutdown, there is no middle option (just as there was no Matrix 2 or 3... shush, there wasn't!). Don't point your system restores there, obviously, but the above steps will have you stop sweating bullets and preventing you from sleeping comfortably each night with your SSD.

I don't use this program, but it is free and good for 4 GB support, though it requires you manually tweaking what you want. There are other options a little google-fu will easily produce for you.

That's great, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I can't think of many reasons to get that big of an SSD.
I'd much rather buy a smaller SSD and just store things that don't need the speed on something like this which is a fraction of the cost for far more space.

Re:That's great, but...

[jones_supa]

Do I have to click the link to see what "this" might be?

Re:That's great, but...

[gl4ss]

it's a 3tb usb3 drive.

kinda boring really.

72TB of total bytes written?

[Anonymous Coward]

For any useful application, I'll have to replace these like toner cartridges, probably even more often.

Re:72TB of total bytes written?

[ByOhTek]

if it were read, I'd agree with you, but there are a lot of things that don't get written /that/ often.

Primary OS, your application installs, main configuration files, possibly even some of your data.

Yeah, it'd suck for a swap/scratch disk, and for things like content files you may be working on (or the disk housing the current update/area info for your favorite MMO).

Re:72TB of total bytes written?

[Baloroth]

For any useful application, I'll have to replace these like toner cartridges, probably even more often.

About every 3 years, if you write 65GB of data to them every single day. What the hell kind of application are you working with that requires you to write 65GB of data a day? I probably write closer to a couple of gigs a day, which means these will last for more like a hundred years.

Re:72TB of total bytes written?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless its already 50% full. Then the writable clusters are being used up twice as fast.

Reliability should be the focus

[GodfatherofSoul]

I really don't care about extra capacity for SSDs. I just set up a new laptop with a 256 GB SSD for the OS and 2 750 GBs in a RAID 1 for safe storage. So long as the SSD is big enough for the OS and a few apps installed for speed, I'm getting my money's worth. Now, if the SSD craps out fairly quickly warranty or not, then I have a problem.

Re:Reliability should be the focus

[PRMan]

I just put my old SSD in my old netbook and it really breathed life into that thing. It's actually usable now. Definitely makes a great upgrade for old laptops (where the spec'd drive is sometimes only 4200 rpm(!?!) and never more than 5400).

Re:Reliability should be the focus

[AmiMoJo]

What kind of laptop has room for an SSD and two HDDs?

Re:Reliability should be the focus

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell M6600 or M6700 can do that. 1x mSATA SSD plus 2x 2.5" HDD/SSD. The smaller M4600 and M4700 have room for 1x mSATA SSD and 1x 2.5" HDD/SSD.

Re:Reliability should be the focus

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering that too.

Best I could think of was a 17" with two drive bays and he replaced the optical drive for a third.

Re:Reliability should be the focus

[shiftyphil]

Horize P170EM (Available under other names as well). 2x 2.5" HDD/SSD + mSATA SSD + Optical Bay for another if you want

Re:Reliability should be the focus

[GodfatherofSoul]

Alienware M18x

960 GB, really

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Since the amount of storage on SSD these days seems to be arbitrary and nothing to do with exponents of 2, how about creating nice rounded values, like 1000 GB.

Anyways, maybe this year will be the year of SSD, just like the last 30 years.

Re:960 GB, really

[BLToday]

It has to do with over provisioning. I figure it's probably 1024 GB with 64 GB for over provisioning, that's ~6.7% which is in line with what we're normally seeing on the lower end of the market.

Re:960 GB, really

[radish]

Anyways, maybe this year will be the year of SSD, just like the last 30 years.

Wasn't that a few years ago? I can't imagine using a machine with a non-SSD boot drive these days, and I can't understand anyone who knows anything about computers not having one. You don't need a big one typically, I recently got a really nice 160GB Intel for my mother in law's laptop for under $100 - made a 2008 vintage Vista machine feel brand new. Without a shadow of a doubt the most significant performance boost you can add to a machine $ for $.

Price per GB not that much better than today

[xaoslaad]

Granted, this is nearly twice as big, but the Samsung 840 (non Pro) can already be gotten for $349.99 for 500GB = $0.69...

Re:Price per GB not that much better than today

[Anonymous Coward]

Non pro has TLC NAND which only has 1000 write cycles. M500 has MLC.

Re:Price per GB not that much better than today

[Overzeetop]

Non pro has TLC NAND which only has 1000 write cycles. M500 has MLC.

...which appears to only have 72 write cycles.

Data transfer kits

[sjbe]

I've been thinking about it...I wonder how I could transfer an existing Win7 install like that, in Linux it would just be a few lines in fstab...

Crucial sells a kit that lets you transfer the entire contents of a drive to a new one. Includes the hardware and software needed to hook up both drives. I did this with a Win7 laptop when I went to using a SSD. Worked great and did the whole job in about an hour.

Re:Data transfer kits

[GameboyRMH]

I'm not worried about the actual data copying, I'd probably use Robocopy for that, I'm wondering how I'd change from a single-disk filesystem to one where certain apps are on a different disk. How can I delete the original directories and "mount" the ones on another disk while the computer's not running?

Re:Data transfer kits

[sjbe]

I'm wondering how I'd change from a single-disk filesystem to one where certain apps are on a different disk.

With Windows the easiest thing is unfortunately to reinstall the apps. You can move everything over if you keep it on one volume but if you split volumes the only option I'm aware of is to uninstall the apps and reinstall them in the new drive configuration. There may be a better way but I certainly have never seen it.

Re:Data transfer kits

[GameboyRMH]

Actually I just got an idea. If the linking can be done from the CLI (and most things can be on Vista and later), it should be possible from the recovery console. Configure disks, copy data, shut down computer, delete and link moved directories. Looks like the mklink command is what I need.

Re:Data transfer kits

[viperidaenz]

http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

The HD manufacturers had better look out

[FridayBob]

Following the floods in Bangkok, HD production got going again, but the prices for these devices have not continued to fall as before. However, as this article points out, that is not the case with SSDs. The result? I suspect that sooner rather than later, significant numbers of people will start buying SSDs instead, realize the advantages over those old spinning platters of rust and then never look back. When the very few HD manufacturers that are now left finally realize the consequences of their greed and lack of willingness to compete against each other, it'll be too late and their profits will only continue to shrink.

Re:The HD manufacturers had better look out

[afidel]

That crossing point is still a LONG way off, you can get a 3TB drive for about $150, 5% of the cost/GB of this drive. In fact without something like the re-anneal in place tech talked about here on slashdot recently it'll never happen, this drive is already rated by the manufacture for 72 write cycles, what do you think the life will be after a few more process shrinks?

Serpentine Belt

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually, yes. Replace at the service interval, threw the old one in the trunk. Weighs less than a pound, very small, and it's one of those roadside repairs that's plausible and easy. Unlikely to fail if you change the belt regularly, but shit does happen. Changed one on the side of the road about 7 years ago. Given no capital investment and the trivial opportunity cost of not having that square inch or so of trunk space ... it's not hardcore.

Re:Reliability should be the focus...Firmware?

[BoRegardless]

Firmware Updates?

My Crucial SSD went poof, but it turned out Crucial said it could be reset (with my Windows PC only).

I hadn't kept the Firmware updated (& didn't know I needed to do so and was not warned about that). Then I read Crucial's note on how to update the firmware.

I simply couldn't understand all the crap I would have to go through. Either there is a one click firmware update or it is a royal pain to update and I won't buy.

Crucial, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, not buying anything from them any more. I have had 2 sticks of Ballistics RAM fail (I have 4x 2GB sticks, DDR3 1600). The second replacement DIMM was not the same as what I sent in (the second failure was more important to me than the different model of DIMM. The DIMM was rated the same as the old one, so it works, but it looks completely different in the case than the others), and took far longer to arrive than the first RMA. Both failures came after 1 year of use, not within the ~30day "normal" failure times for new components. This particular system is still in use as a second PC for a friend of mine (nothing important stored on it, used primarily for games). The system I replaced it with was built with Corsair RAM (also 4x 2GB sticks of DDR3 1600), and has gone over 2 years with no issues.

Nice but....

[erp_consultant]

It seems to address an issue that just isn't there for most people, in my view. For everyday computing needs 960GB SSD is just way overkill. I'm not a gamer so in my case my needs are even less. I've got a 120GB SSD as my primary boot drive (OS and Apps) with the rest of the data on a separate conventional 500GB drive. On my MacBook Pro it's using about 40GB on the SSD. My Windows laptop is using about the same amount of space.

Now if you're a gamer or doing video production or CAD or running a database server then, sure, the larger SSD is great. Incidentally, moving one of my Virtual Machines to the SSD didn't really give me any performance improvement over the regular HD which was kind of surprising to me. So I just moved it back to the HD. As others have mentioned, the performance increase over a conventional HD for bootup and app launching is simply remarkable. Once you get one you'll never go back.

Re:Nice but....

[Anonymous Coward]

For everyday computing needs 960GB SSD is just way overkill. I'm not a gamer so in my case my needs are even less.

You're not a gamer, so you don't realise that a couple of dozen modern games will eat up your entire 960GB drive.

I haven't even installed all my Steam games and I've already eaten up over 1TB in my new Windows PC. Which has 6TB of hard drive space which cost about $250.

Absolutely false

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. You need a hard drive from Monster to handle data that quickly. Anything less and your digital stream will be sub-optimal and your video look terrible.

Re:Absolutely false

[flargleblarg]

LOL