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Intel Plans 'Overclocking' Capability On SSDs
Lucas123 writes "Anticipating it will make a 'big splash,' Intel is planning to release an product late this year or very early next that will allow users to 'overclock' solid-state drives. The overclocking capability is expected to allow users to tweak the percentage of an SSD's capacity that's used for data compression. At its Intel Developers Forum next month in San Francisco, Intel has scheduled an information session on overclocking SSDs. The IDF session is aimed at system manufacturers and developers as well as do-it-yourself enthusiasts, such as gamers. 'We've debated how people would use it. I think the cool factor is somewhat high on this, but we don't see it changing the macro-level environment. But, as far as being a trendsetter, it has potential,' said Intel spokesman Alan Frost. Michael Yang, a principal analyst with IHS Research, said the product Intel plans to release could be the next evolution of SandForce controller, 'user definable and [with the] ability to allocate specified size on the SSD. Interesting, but we will have to see how much performance and capacity [it has] over existing solutions,' Yang said in an email reply to Computerworld."
Time to make some watercooling blocks and special fans and make money from those with too much.
So, what Intel are saying, is that they are going to take a SSD controller with unstable, buggy firmware - and then add a feature that allows users to modify the internal constants the firmware uses to do it's job. This can only end very badly, unless Intel and Sandforce do some serious testing to find and fix the data corruption issues, the problems with the drive ignoring the host, and the problems where the drive gets stuck in busy.
(all problems detailed in this post have been experienced with an Intel branded, Sandforce controller-ed drive)
Translation: :D"
"It's useless, but idiot gamers will buy anything if we call it over clocked
BSOD
If you are lucky. A silent killer of data, sneaking around like Jack the Ripper, never known by name, only by result.
Intel
Nuf said
I guess the word "Turbo" is out of favor these days.
Time for Seagate to make some real hard drives that spin at 20000 RPM
Over-provisioning already exists on a ton of different SSDs like Samsung and OCZ. Intel didn't invent anything new and the controller's MHz isn't going anywhere, nor would that be a good idea anyway. One flaw in the data and it's goodbye boot drive data integrity. What a useless "catching up" announcement.
would I want to use compression at all, if my goal is speed? If maximizing total capacity is not the concern, I would use none of the drive for compression. I think the point to be taken from this is that Intel is recognizing that storage capacities for SSDs are reaching the point where compression is no longer necessary to make the technology a viable alternative to mechanical drives, and we will now begin seeing the true speed potential of the technology.
Intel was never an enemy of overclocking, Intel was an enemy of people taking their CPU's and turning them into a puff of smoke because they thought they would just set the clock speed and multiplier to maximum and start playing Quake immediately. Eventually they decided to prevent the average moron from destroying their CPU in a nanosecond by putting in more restrictions. Also they realized that these days that with the quality of GPU's and the fact few people even maximize the speed of a single core, let alone all 4 or 8 cores, overclocking a CPU is moot.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Wow. You really like the taste of the koolaid huh. Intel has always been against overclocking because it eats into their margin. They had thermal protection so overheating is not a problem. Overvoltage might fry your cpu, but only after a very long time or a very high voltage - both of which can be controlled, so it's not like you'd pump 5V through a 1.35V part.
And Intel traditionally bins its parts - you might want to check that out.
It's the ancient tradeoff of CPU vs. IO. When you have more of one than you need, burn it to improve the other.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"Overclocking" is technically a misnomer. It's a sort of tweaking, but it's a bit more than that; we could call it ... twerking!
Why would I want to tweak "how much data is used for compression"? If the drive compresses data internally, why not just do compression for all data?
And, all the consumer drives are bottlenecked by the SATA bus anyway.
"...gimmick?"
You are welcome on my lawn.
Worthy of your name there, buddy... But while don't expect parent to be 100% right, I think you're overly optimistic when it comes to Intel's view of the market. You're probably right that they didn't care much about someone having to buy extra CPUs because they ruined the first one. They surely did care about people selling overclocked systems and digging away at their profit margins though. I think they got spooked when enthusiasts started buying celerons instead of pentiums to build decent gaming boxes on the cheap.
Mind the frickin' laser...
tl;dr Allow users to adjust the compressed vs. uncompressed section sizes. Compressed goes faster, but rewrites a lot more and thus wears it out faster.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They're using "overclocking" here as a metaphor, but people seem to take it literally. Overclocking the drive would involve raising voltage and increasing clock speeds. That's probably possible. But what they're talking about appears to be to give the user the ability to influence the amount of overprovisioning on the drive. For an SSD, the physical capacity is larger than the logical capacity. This is important in order to decrease the amount of sector migration needed when looking for a block to erase. From zero, adding overprovisioning will substantially increase write performance, but at a diminishing rate as you add more extra space.
As for compression, it does two things. It allows more sectors to be consolidated into the same page, amplifying the very limited flash write bandwidth. And it effectively increases the amount of overprovisioning. These two mean that more compressible data will have substantially higher write performance and somewhat higher read performance. (Although reads are already fast enough, on many drives, to max out the SATA bandwidth.)
Anyhow, giving the user the ability to tweak overprovisioning seems pretty worthless to me. At best, some users will be able to increase the logical capacity, at the expense of having lousy write performance. Maybe this would help for drives where you store large amounts of media that you write once and read a lot. But how much more capacity could you get? 25%? Another knob might be compression "effort", which trades off compute time against SSD bandwidth. There's going to be a balancing point between the two, and that probably should be dynamic in the controller, not tweaked by users who don't know the internal architecture of the drive. Some writes will take longer than others due to wear leveling, migration, and garbage collection, giving the drive controller more or less free time to spend on compressing data.
After you deal with HD & SSD failures, you are only concerned with reliability.
Intel is not a enemy overclocking, but do charge a premium price for overclocking friendly CPU. Is those SSD gonna be labeled as "K" SSD???
Sheldon, is that you? Why aren't you working on your sciencey stuff instead of playing on slashdot?
They had thermal protection so overheating is not a problem.
Thermal protection schemes have been around for some time now, but are far from a guaranteed protection against frying your processor from thermal damage. This is something I've had to deal with first hand.
And? Was it an overclocked CPU? If not, how is it relevant to OP's claims? Of course thermal protection is not perfect, and I've never claimed so. I only pointed out that it is there and helps with the issue because an overclocked CPU might just run a tad hotter.
Overvoltage might fry your cpu, but only after a very long time or a very high voltage - both of which can be controlled, so it's not like you'd pump 5V through a 1.35V part.
That would be beyond Intel's control and up to the motherboard what voltage options they give you. Kind of by the nature of those trying to push the system, there would certainly be options going beyond any official limit given by Intel.
And....? If your motherboard puts 5V through a 1.35V pin, it doesn't matter whether the CPU is overclocked or not in that case.
Considering SandForce sells controllers to multiple vendors isn't the only difference between them how they choose to provision the drives. I know there can be hardware differences, but lets say we have two drives with basically the same internals. Lets also suppose that Drive X is faster than Intel's equivalent, but Intel's is cheaper (not likely but stay with me here). Now you may be able to tweak the Intel drive's settings and get it to match or closely match Drive X for cheaper. That could be a good use.
Or you want to use the consumer level drive in a small business. You don't want to spend the money on the enterprise level drive so you take this new drive, reserve more space for failure (such as dropping the 250GB down to 220GB or something) and continue on.
Overall I agree that this won't be much use to most people but it does have potential for the unusual cases.
It is not an overclock but the ability to adjust the "spare area". This is the percentage of flash on the drive that is not exposed to the user and is used for garbage collection, write acceleration (by having pre-erased blocks), reduction of write amplification, etc. You can emulate more spare area on drives already if you take SSD and format it to less that it's full capacity.
This is the SSD equivalent to short stroking a hard drive.
It's worth noting that the higher performance and enterprise level drives already have much more spare area but that results in a tradeoff of capacity for performance. They are just going to let you set this slider between consumer level (maximum capacity per $$$) and performance level (higher performance but less capcity).
Mod AC up! How does one even 'clock' an SSD, much less 'overclock'? SSDs are made up of NAND flash, which do NOT include a clock input - they operate in asynchronous operation. So how does that even start to make sense?
And are we talking just read speeds here? They are typically 70ns for single word mode, and somewhat less - say 50ns for page mode. That would translate to 20MHz. Not your 2 or 3GHz that one thinks of, particularly w/ CPUs and DDR3 RAM
They're using "overclocking" here as a metaphor, but people seem to take it literally.
Because it is a specific technical term that shouldn't be misappropriated for something completely unrelated. This foolishness is what happens when the marketing department steers the ship. Something Intel should have learned their lesson on with the MHz wars and the P4.
Then again maybe I've just been ahead of the curve all these years when I "overclock" a new ext[2-4] partition with the minimum superuser reserved space. I've also taken a liking to "overclocking" my tarballs by switching from gzip to bzip2.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I look at Intel's decision to not encourage overclocking as a move to keep their products stables. The minute you take hardware outside it's originally tested context you risk instability. If you know how processors are tested then you understand that 2 processors side by side have completely different capabilities. One may be overclockable by 10% while the other by 20%. Regardless, IMHO overclocking if for hobbiest, not business. It serves no real purpose in the business world and that is why Intel is the #1 choice for Corporations and Enterprises.
You seem to be using HDD terminology in SSDs, when the analogies simply don't hold good. The terms 'sectors' or 'blocks', which mean different things in HDDs, are almost synonymous in SSDs. Essentially, they mean the minumum erasable areas that one can erase before one can write to one or more locations within that area. There is no concept of 'sectors within the same page' or anything like it. If the flash device in question supports page mode reading or programming, it simply defines the area that can be written in a single operation.
Its just unlocking more of the safety margin for general use. Either way, an OC'd CPU might fall over and you lose an online game - a FUBAR'd overclocked SSD could result in bye bye all your data.
wrong.
sector: smallest addressable unit of space
in hdd this is the same for reads and writes. for ssd its the smallest adressanle unit but....
blocks: no such concept with hdd. traditionally there were cylinders, heads and sectors (addressing scheme) and some folks may have used block to refer to a sector, but normally in data storage a block is the smallest addressable unit in a file system, sometimes called a cluster.
for ssd its different: it can only write either ones or zeros, not both. by definition, a sector is the smallest addressable unit on the drive: so whatever the smallest data unit that can be written at a time is, is a sector. This can be complicated (as it is for high capacity hdd) by the drive lying about its sector size. but wiping is done in groups of pages -- all at once, all data in that "block" is wiped out. Confusingly, called a "block" which is also a term from file systems, joy.
in short, you are backwards and confused. sector/block are *not* "amost synomymous in SSDs". If you take the SSD "block" (smallest unit that can be erased) and note that, for a spinning platter drive, sector and *this* notion of a "block" are synomymous then you realize that the aboev statement was reversed. Writing for SSDs is much more complicated than for spinning platter due to the separation of writing ones and zeros, the consequent requirement for over capacity, and the wear that comes from writing to an SSD (whereas frequent writing to a spinning platter drive keeps it "refreshed").
They have somewhat compensated for that by improving the compression ratio from a factor 2 to a factor 2.5. I have no idea what that number is supposed to mean though
I'd imagine it compares to the upgrade from DEFLATE (used in PKZIP and Gzip) to LZMA (used in 7-Zip). As I understand the claim being made, the original algorithm compressed a representative corpus of data to 50% of its original size and the new algorithm 40%.
In SSD's - which ultimately boils down to the NAND flash, there is no such thing as 'sectors' the way you defined it above. The smallest addressable unit there is a word, if one is talking about reads. If one is talking about programming, one can program a page, which is smaller than a block. Also, NAND flash has to be erased first (set to all '1's) before any area of it can be programmed. The only type of flash where one can write either '0's or '1's is the EEPROMs (or E-square), but those things are of the order of less than 1kbit, not the GB or TB that people are thinking of here.
Writing for SSDs ain't complicated on its own - one can easily just write to wherever the assigned addresses are. It's just that since the endurance of a flash - the number of times a block can be erased - is 10k cycles or less for each block - it is undesirable to discard a flash where a few blocks have been repeatedly written to, while some other blocks may be totally unused - one would then end up having to discard a flash that still has some perfectly good areas. To avoid that, you have memory management routines that would try and use different areas of the flash and even out the usage, so that the lifetime of the flash can be maximized. But that seems different from doing compression, and using compression techniques to alter write performance. Write performance is a silicon level issue and would have to be fixed at that end - the SSD can't give a performance higher than that, regardless of whether compression is used or not.
The smallest of those problems is the question about who decides what is a representative corpus.
Wikipedia's article about LTO claims that the algorithm is based on Hifn's LZS, and benchmarks are relative to the Calgary corpus.
An example of something which is clearly cheating would be to define the compression such that if the input is identical to the benchmark corpus, then the compressed output is simply a single zero bit.
This would require the compressor and decompressor to contain an exact copy of the benchmark corpus, which would likely result in copyright problems.
In certain scenarios you would get around that sort of "cheating" by measuring not just the size of the compressed data but also the size of the decompression code. That however requires somebody to specify on what platform the code will have to run.
I assume it would run on whatever platform the drive's microcontroller uses, and compression on an MCU might not favor use of a multimegabyte corpus. But I see your point that more transparency in this benchmarking would be good for consumers.