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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Enterprise quality SSDs are still $1.00 to $2.50 per GB.
The Intel DC S3500 is only about $1/GB for a 600GB version. Which is not bad for a drive suitable for use in a server. The S3700 series is closer to $2/GB.
(Both of those drive series have the capacitor inside to enable the SSD to shutdown cleanly in cases where the drive loses power.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?