SanDisk Focusing More On Desktop and Mobile SATA SSDs, Extreme II Series Tested

MojoKid writes "Odds are, if you've purchased anything that uses Flash memory in the last 20 years or so, you already own a piece of SanDisk technology. The company has been in Flash storage since the late '80s and manufactures products used in everything from smartphones to digital cameras. Even though it enjoys a long history in the Flash memory business, SanDisk is perhaps not as well known for its Solid State Drive (SSD) solutions for desktop and mobile PCs. However, SanDisk recently expanded their product stack with new, high-performance SSDs that leverage the company's own NAND Flash memory and Marvell's popular 88SSS9187 controller. The new drives are SanDisk's Extreme II family of SSDs targeted performance enthusiasts, workstations professionals and gamers. The initial line-up of drives consists of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB models. Performance specifications for the three drives come in at 545MB/s – 550MB/s for reads with write performance from 340MB/s to 510MB/s, depending on density. In the benchmarks, SanDisk's Extreme II SSD showed it has the chops to hang with some of the fastest drives on the market from Samsung, Corsair and OCZ."

Comments

you've got to be kidding me

[Trepidity]

This blurb could not possibly have been written by a regular human interested in technology, unless there is a SanDisk fanclub I was previously unaware of.

Re:you've got to be kidding me

[mcrbids]

As somebody closely following the development of SSD technology (that we use for our database servers) I would have to respectfully disagree.

You see, our results testing SSDs against PostgreSQL 9.1 showed that SSDs improved performance by at least 90%. In other words, queries, particularly the large, nasty, 10-table joins with combined inner, outter, and meta-table joins that our vertical application is rife with, take 10% or less time to run. That result isn't just dramatic, it's a game-changer. But the truth is that even that isn't enough. Being able to saturate a 6 Gbps SATA III link in a random access read-load is fine and dandy, but write performance is also a very big deal, especially since our system is highly transactional and transaction wait states are painful.

In short, unlike CPUs, SSD technology is still immature enough that every bit of good news counts quite a bit.

Re:you've got to be kidding me

[fustakrakich]

Personally, I'm more interested in durability. And I'm very suspicious that planned obsolescence plays a big part in this market.

Re:you've got to be kidding me

[samkass]

Didn't we JUST have an article about the new MacBook Air's PCIe SSD getting 700-800MB/s in both read and write? Now a pseudo-press release claiming that 500MB/s is keeping up with the competition? All you're proving with ~500MB/s is that you can keep up with SATA.

Re:you've got to be kidding me

[hairyfeet]

While I don't know about any fanclub I have to say their MP3 players, especially the M and E series? Fricking great, no matter how much abuse you throw at the things they just keep on trucking.

Now for a question...anybody who has had Sandisk SSDs, how long did it last? If it failed HOW did it fail, did it go read only or did it go tits up in the controller and take your data with it?

The reason i ask is I have some gamer customers that use SSDs and these MLC SSDs? Frankly the failure rate is just nuts. Its like things have gotten worse since coding horror put out the hot/crazy scale article talking about how for all this hot performance you pay for it with crazy failure rates. I don't know how many others are seeing this (they might want to chime in if they are seeing the same or different) but with the gamers it really don't seem to matter what brand you get, the controller WILL go and when it does poof! Hope you had a backup because your data just went bye bye.

This is why I have been recommending the hybrids (those fail safe since they always have a copy on the HDD) or caching drives because the failure rate is just too damned high on the SSDs. With the spinning rust honestly unless its REALLY abused they last for a pretty long time, but I'm not seeing this with MLC SSDs, if anything I'm seeing the opposite where with every shrink the failure rates get worse.

Finally let me say since I always get one reply that is basically "U be hatin" I don't think the technology itself is bad, just the implementation as far as i can see. I mean talking to friends that admin high end systems those SLC SSDs? Those are fine, and there are roles where I recommend an SSD despite the failure rate such as laptops where the lack of moving parts and users keeping more and more of their data in the cloud make it worth the risk.

Its just the new MLCs from what I have seen have by and large had pretty shitty failures rates and unlike HDDs where I can often get most if not all the data off a failing drive once an SSD fails that is pretty much that. so is everybody else seeing similar results, or is it just my gamer customers? Oh and before anybody says it NO they are NOT using OCZ drives, everybody knows about the crazy fail rate with those.

Endurance

[fnj]

Personally I couldn't care less if the write throughput is 300, 400 or 500 MBps, but the write endurance of 80 TB, combined with the pseudo-SLC intermediate cache look pretty promising for home use. Intel 335 only specs 18 TB endurance.

Re:Endurance

[0123456]

I can't vouch for the modern SSDs, but I've had an X25-M in my netbook for years, it's used every day, and it's now reporting that it's down to 99% of its write capacity. At that rate the netbook will be in a museum long before the SSD dies.

Re:Endurance

[fnj]

The X-25M had a write endurance of 7.5 TB for the 80 GB, and 15 TB for the 160 GB. If you've got the 160 and write an average of 100 MB per day, that's only 0.18 TB in 5 years, or barely more than 1% of the endurance. If on the other hand you wrote 10 GB a day (about two DVDs' worth), that would be 18 TB, and the drive would be likely shot. An HDD has infinite endurance. It can die from various failure modes, but not from "using up" the magnetic storage medium.

It completely depends on how much data you write.

Re:SandDisk doesn't support their SSDs

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yes, there are. For example: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/08/03/2051252/Intel-Confirms-Data-Corruption-Bug-Halts-New-SSDs

Re:SandDisk doesn't support their SSDs

[TerminaMorte]

SDSSDH-120G-G25 has known firmware issues, with no firmware coming out for it.

Re:Price per GB still a showstopper

[TerminaMorte]

You might pay the extra $ for your laptop computer, in order to save power and lower the risk of failure due to dropping.

I know I'd never go back for my laptop, personally

Re:Price per GB still a showstopper

[baka_toroi]

I'm running a 512MB SSD in my laptop

Do you have MS-DOS 6.22 as your main OS?

Re:Price per GB still a showstopper

[lgw]

My computers each have more than one drive. It generally makes sense to have an SSD as a boot/software drive, and spinning rust for the large media files.

Re:I wonder what will happen

[lightknight]

Ah, OCZ, the SSD company with the highest rate of failure I've seen thus far. Granted, the earlier Vertex drives were supposedly responsible for much of that failure, but for the life of me, I cannot understand the popularity of this company.

Now Corsair on the other hand...;-)