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Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched
MojoKid (1002251) writes Though solid state drives have a long way to go before they break price parity with hard drives (and may never make it, at least with the current technology), the gap continues to close. More recently, SSD manufacturers have been approaching 50 cents per GiB of storage. OCZ Storage Solutions, with the help of their parent company Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND, just launched their ARC 100 family of drives that are priced at exactly .5 per GiB at launch and it's possible street prices will drift lower down the road. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller as the higher-end OCZ Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm (Advanced 19 nanometer) NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to keep costs down. Performance-wise, OCZ's new ARC 100 240GB solid state drive didn't lead the pack in any particular category, but the drive did offer consistently competitive performance throughout testing. Large sequential transfers, small file transfers at high queue depths, and low access times were the ARC 100's strong suits, as well as its low cost. These new drives are rated at 20GB/day write endurance and carry a 3-year warranty.
An arbitrary number is not a "barrier". A barrier is what your father should have worn.
Good drive, for sure, but keep in mind that the Crucial MX100 broke that barrier at its launch in June (and at $0.44/GB).
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/S...
> 50 cents per GiB
I prefer to think of it as 0.0007 cents per body part closeup.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I've saw 1TB SSD under 500 bucks on amazon for a long time. Maybe "Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier for average user" would be a better title.
Elok
If SSD's had come first we'd be talking about how HDD's finally broke the 3ms latency barrier or the or the 1 Gb/s barrier. SSDs' aren't about capacity, that's just not what they're for. While it's certainly nice that you can have a usable amount of space for a decent price, 120GB is enough SSD space to see 95% of the benefits for 60% of users. If laptop manufacturers would make 2 bay laptops standard that 60% would jump to 95%.
After my only two Vertex drives spontaneously died when the power was cut, I'll never own another OCZ product. This turned out to be a common problem with the first gen Vertex, and I will not forgive their engineers. Thankfully my backups worked. +1 for Acronis.
I don't see how this whole article is anything but a commercial advertisement. $0.50/Gig was broken a long time ago, at least for your average consumer. I have a 500GB SSD in a laptop that was well under $0.50/GB from a national brick and mortar retailer.
So this is just more evidence how far Slash-dot has fallen? Come on folks, I don't mind the banner ads on the website, you all have to eat, but can we dispense with these kinds of stories?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Cheapest retail magnetic disks are about 3 cents a gigabyte and a fraction of cent gigabyte for digital tape.
Unless one is a video hog a terabyte should be enough for anybody. And I'd stream most new content anyways. I only read/watch most stuff once.
The result is just one of gradually falling prices, but it is one where it is cheap enough to interest more people. At that price the drives are now "cheap enough" for them.
OCZ's storage division was bought by Toshiba, who now sells Toshiba drives under the OCZ brand.
Not sure what the thinking was on that one.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Actually, most SSDs support SMART and/or have their own monitoring system. Unless you're buying bargain basement SSDs, most of them have perfectly servicable lifecycle management.
(Purely as an example, here's Samsung's listing of the SMART attributes in their SSDs: http://www.samsung.com/global/...)
That said, yes. When SSDs get the "computer will no longer boot to the OS" point of their lifecycle, you're a lot less likely to be able to recover any information. But, like magnetic disks, by the time you get to that point, you've generally been ignoring other symptoms.
There are so many analogies I could make for that.
Ford Motor Company eliminates Ford brand and replaces it with Edsel.
Microsoft changes Windows 7 to Windows Vista Second Edition.
Cisco to deprecate Cisco trademark in favor of Linksys. *
* Yes, I realize that Cisco no longer owns Linksys.
1) Buy crappy brand cheap.
2) Sell quality stuff with it for a couple of years to improve brand value.
3) Sell brand to someone who needs a quality brand.
4) Profit!
If you sell exactly the same product but with different brands and the same price you aren't really losing anything on it. The customer might not buy the brand with the bad reputation but if they do the income you get there offsets what you lost on not making the sale on your other brand.
If you have a good manufacturing process you can build up multiple brands simultaneously and then sell off one every now and then and let some shoddy person exploit the brand while they run it to the ground.
Look at the car industry, people are still buying cars based on brand quality from 30 years ago, completely oblivious of that they are assembled from parts that were made in the same production line.
Did they retain any of the technology/staff, or did they just buy the toxic OCZ brand? With failure rates for the entire brand above 5%, and approaching seventeen (17%) percent I wouldn't use an OCZ branded SSD at any cost. Imagine debugging a system with a failing drive, and then the labor required to RMA, replace, replace again, and finally buy a quality drive. Screw that.
moox. for a new generation.
If you have a good manufacturing process you can build up multiple brands simultaneously and then sell off one every now and then and let some shoddy person exploit the brand while they run it to the ground.
Sounds like a close relative of "zombie brands", i.e. people buying out the brand (and little or nothing else) of bankrupt companies, then either slapping it on generic low-end product from a no-name OEM Chinese manufacturer, or whoring it out on a case-by-case basis to the highest third-party bidder, typically itself just a distributor of random generic tat upon which the brand will be slapped.
Consumers- often older ones who were familiar with the brand for many years and do not realise that the original company went bankrupt- are then more likely to buy such goods on the "strength" of the brand and its reputation. Which is obviously meaningless now, but they don't know that.
Polaroid is an example of this. The original company went bankrupt well over ten years ago. The assets were bought out by some random marketing operation, with only (AFAIK) the film-based cameras being "true" Polaroid products (*). Everything else- including "their" digital cameras of the time- were just rebranded generic goods with the name used under license. Polaroid was never even a manufacturer of TV and video equipment in the first place, but the name was used to sell generally mediocre flat-panel televisions anyway.
Ironically, the "new" Polaroid itself went bankrupt under shady circumstances, and was bought out again. The new owners at least seemed to be attempting to exploit the heritage with some respect (e.g. hiring Lady Ga Ga as the "creative director" a few years back- even if it *was* a blatant publicity stunt- and using her name in connection with would-be high-end photo printers). But they're still whoring it out for LCD TVs and the like.
(*) Insofar as the "new" Polaroid was "true" anyway.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I disagree with this faith in SMART to provide aqueduct warning. So does Google.
Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count.
We conclude that it is unlikely that SMART data alone can be effectively used to build models that predict failures of individual drives.
http://static.googleuserconten...
Google's analysis was of spinning hard disks, but I can not believe that SMART is somehow better at monitoring SSDs than spinning hard disks. I have personally had drives that pass every smart test and hard drive scan, but click and buzz in unnatural ways. Likewise, I have had SSDs suddenly fail that were, by all external tests before and after the failure, operating within expected parameters. It doesn't help that many SSDs have a habit of rendering the stored data inaccessible with no chance of recovery when they loose power. Spinning HD manufacturers solved that problem decades ago with self-parking read-write heads. Then again, there is no SMART test that's going to predict when an electrical component is going to suddenly burst into flames. (I've seen it happen!) With a spinning HD I could replace the logic board or send the disk out for recovery and get that data back, probably unscathed. With an SSD the odds would be in no-one's favor.
When it comes to SSDs, the PC vendors need to step up their game on data redundancy. SSD Raid 1 arrays or integrated backup to cheaper storage should be standard configurations.
Taobao has a 64GB SSD @ RMB200 (US$32.47) before shipping. That's 50 cents per GiB for you, with a SM2246EN Silicon Motion controller and Intel 25m IMFT NAND flash. According to Tom's review on this controller, this can hold its own against Samsung 840 EVO.
5%, and those are just the ones that outright failed. I've never had an OCZ SSD where I didn't have to update the firmware to get it to work right.
newegg has a 1TB one on sale for like 390... which would be 39 cents per GB, 50 cents a GB has been the rule of thumb for SSDs for over a year now.
OCZ is known to be junk that fail with a very short lifespan. Call me when a RELIABLE SSD like a Samsung or Intel, that has a proven track record hits the $0.50 per GB mark.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If your OS takes 512Mb then you really need to switch to something else. I fit my OS, all software and all the files I need 24/7 access to on my 512 SSD just fine and that is with a couple of 40gb VM images on it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What the market will bear... remember? In these kinds of markets supply and demand don't enter into the picture.
Damn things are worth 10 cents on the dollar, if that much.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Try not to scrimp on that because you are literally killing off the entire product class by having shitty drivers and quality. No, really, you are. Half the consumers out there are getting SSD's are slower than 7200rpm SATA drives at half the reliability for 5x the cost.
OCZ is a better known brand in the west, and I guess OCZ's sales guy convinced them the name wasn't tarnished beyond repair.
It is quite common for Japanese companies to either create or buy an existing western brand to sell their stuff under. Nissan created Datsun. Mitsubishi created Verbatim. I think NEC used to have a computer brand in Europe too, which was solder to Acer... Packard Bell? I think Toyota has a US brand called Scion or something.
Part of it is to make sure that the parent company's reputation isn't damaged if the foreign company screws up. The goods they sell overseas tend to be heavily "localized" in terms of features and models, and sometimes having a non-Japanese name is part of that. Ironically some western brands set up their own Japanese sounding trade names like Matsui in the UK, because everyone realized that British electronics where shit and Japanese ones extremely high quality and reliable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Mb? Really? You don't know the difference between Megabits and GigaBytes? You're off by a factor of 8192.
Not quite. You're confusing Mb with Mib and GB with GiB.
There are 1000 MB in a GB, not 1024. This was changed a while ago. I don't know why people haven't adopted the new rules. Science uses 1000 for everything, except for some things where it makes sense like temperature, and some things where other bases are much more convenient, like time.
But for computers we need to use 1000. Even though with computers things are binary and we need to deal with factors of 2 all the time, people might get confused between 1000 and 1024 when they buy a hard drive. So for science purposes we need to use 1000. I know this is confusing, but once everyone starts using 1000 for Kb and 1024 for Kib, and we update all the old references that people already wrote, it'll be much easier for everyone.
The next step is to change a byte to be 10 bits. Don't worry - the IEC and SI are already working on the best way to force this bullshit down your throat, too.
Ask IBM Storage Solutions how fast tech people forget a crappy storage product.
HGST is still fighting the "Deathstar" moniker 12+ years later. I still hear of people who won't touch them with a 10 ft pole, even though besides that one model line they have had a solid performance history both before and after.
1- Backup
2- Backup
3- Backup
And when SSDs fail, it's not more spectacular than a HDD that won't spin, or a head crash, or its controller going MIA. (you can't swap boards on most newer drives anymore, so good luck getting the data back)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
His point still stands. 240Gb is big enough for some people, but they have to be mindful of disk usage. That is wasted effort. For me, a 512Gb drive would still be a pain. 750Gb is where I would become really usable, comfortable, but 1Tb would be the point were I could function without having to really think about my disk usage.
It should be trivial for the manufacturers to make 1Tb drives.
My 480 GB Crucial M500 cost ~200€ a month ago - that's 41.66 cents per GB.
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Hitachi are very popular in Japan and with professionals, i.e. people who can read stats on reliability and appreciate professional level support. They are not really a consumer brand. Same with Toshiba, who don't even sell to consumers any more.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Indeed. I still know people that won't touch seagate after 7200.11 barracuda controller fiasco (I lost one drive to it as well).
They replaced them all upon request with 7200.12s that had no controller problem, and I do still have ~14 year old 7200.7s running, so I know it's a one freak model. But many people still won't touch them after getting burned.
OCZ was basically nothing but 7200.11. Massive failure rates.
It is. These drives already exist. But costs are not trivial at all, and mainstream market ignores them. They're specialist products.
Experience shows differently : SSD works perfect day 1, isn't SEEN any more by the BIOS the day after. Tried on different machines afterwards. And no, nothing special happened to the laptop in the time between. Simply went to the hotel and back to the client the day after.
(And no, it wasn't an OCZ but for the love of god don't remember if it was a Samsung or Crucial)
I've never had that happen to a HDD. That doesn't mean I've never had spinning platters fail on me; but usually things there start by either
* SMART reporting non-recoverable errors
* major slow-down of the entire system for no apparent good reason, usually accompanied by a HDD-LED that simply simply keeps on all the time.
In all cases I was able to recover 99% of the data on there. In one case I had to put the disk in the freezer (USB enclosure) as it would only work when the temperature was _very_ low. Sure it always took a long time to do and was a PITA, but I still prefer that to the failing SSD.
I've heard the theory over and over again that an SSD that runs out of writes will settle as a read-only disk so you might not be able to run an OS from it any more, but surely can mount it as a data-drive to recover all your info.... In practice all I've heard/read/experienced is that things look A-OK for one moment and go poof the next.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Samsung EVO and I've revived my dad's pc with my old Intel SSD; but making sure to backup things on a regular basis is absolutely crucial.
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Samsung has had 1TB drives since December of last year for msata form factor. Not sure when the 7mm cased 1TB drives were born, but they're available too. Pricing isn't too scary either.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
No they just need to step up in basic design theory, such as power failure compensation.
There's nothing inherently bad about SSDs which would make them unreliable compared to HDDs under any normal workload. The problem is they appear to fail with out of spec errors such as powerdips or similar powersupply problems.
GiB....what does the i stand for?
It's short for Gibibyte.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!