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OCZ Toshiba Breaks 40 Cent Per GB Barrier With New Trion 100 Series SSD
MojoKid writes: OCZ is launching a brand new series of solid state drives today, dubbed the Trion 100. Not only are they the first drives from the company to use TLC NAND, but they're also the first to use all in-house Toshiba technology with the drive's Flash memory and controller both designed and built by Toshiba. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba TLC NAND Flash memory and a Nanya DDR3 DRAM cache. Details are scarce on the Toshiba TC58 controller but it does support Toshiba's QSBC (Quadruple Swing-By Correction — a Toshiba proprietary error correction technology) and the drives have a bit of SLC cache to boost write performance in bursts and increase endurance. The OCZ Trion 100 series is targeted at budget conscious consumers and users still contemplating the upgrade from a standard hard drive. As such, they're not barn-burners in the benchmarking department, but performance is still good overall and a huge upgrade over any HDD. Pricing is going to be very competitive as well, at under .40 per GiB for capacities of 240GB, 480GB and 960GB and .50 per GiB for the smallest 120GB drive.
And yet many other people have no problems running SSDs some people still using their originals.
Whenever I see someone say "had to replace them all" I can only think of device incompatibilities engineering screwups, or part selection screw-ups.
In short, there is no reliability issue, and the write limitation is a non issue for 99.999% of the computers out there. It just doesn't seem to be working for *you*
First and second gen SSDs were garbage, people are reporting 2 petabyte write lifecycles on them. Samsung just announced 10 year warranties on their consumer models. Intel has been offering 10 year warranties on their enterprise models for a few years now.
That said, if you bought anything other than Samsung prior to about 2013, the "old" OCZ in particular (the "new" OCZ is using the corpse of their brand name for Toshiba manufactured drives now) had failure rates in the 15-20% real world return rate numbers reported by retailers. Failure/return rates for all brands are below 5% for all manufacturers now. There was a dark period from 2011-2013 where a ton of terrible drivers and bad hardware shipped, but they're generally very reliable now. Everyone I know has moved to SSD for their primary drive, and are only using rotational drives for medium length local archival purposes.
moox. for a new generation.
In consumer grade SSDs and typical desktop workload, all it takes is bad luck. I've had SSDs failing in first 3 months of use and I have one which is still alive after 5 years of constant use. In enterprise use this really depends on the workload. If you get a lot of writes, then probably TLC is not a smart idea yet, so I agree that from some angles there are reliability and write limitation uses. But for these there are drives that can handle a lot of writes - you know, you can still buy enterprise class SLC SSDs - but these cost a ton of money.
Currently drives that outperform it, like the Samsung 850 Evo, match it on a cents-per-gig level.
This sort of forces one to ask the question, who does Toshiba think it's selling to?
Also, while people are touting Toshiba's "no hassle" warranty, my experience with Toshiba urges me to wait and see how much of a hassle it really is.
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First and second gen SSDs had much wider margins of error in flash. The 2 petabytes of writes are a result of that. I would expect you cannot get that kind of results with the new ones. I would be interested to see how these new consumer grade TLC SSDs handle non-consumer grade workload with a lot of writes. I think that it's good that the consumer grade drives are getting better and better, it's just that the drives that can handle some more workload than a usual laptop and still survive a few years are going to be more and more expensive. Does that Samsung warranty say that it's void if you exceed the write counter? YMMV?
Take your concerns up with the laws of physics. I'm sure they'll care about your opinion.
This drive is not the first to break the 40 cents/GB mark. OCZ's own ARC series is cheaper than these drives while performing better; Crucial's BX series is roughly the same price while performing much better. Around the 500GB mark, Samsung's 850 EVO is the cheapest and best performer.
The controller has Toshiba's name stamped on it, but is almost certainly a Phison S10. Furthermore the firmware has obvious problems with sustained writes.
Their website says 10 Years or 150TBW for the 256GB model and 10 Years or 300TBW for the 1TB model. TBW is "terabytes written". Which isn't the "2 petabytes to failure" marathon test that took 6 months to complete, but 0.3 petabytes written on a 1TB drive is still a lot and way beyond normal consumer usage. My unofficial opinion is that only about 128gb is "hot" and the rest of the storage on a 1TB drive is typically "cold". Even a professional video editor is going to have trouble topping out their warranty.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/warranty.html
moox. for a new generation.
Yep. I'll happily take 10x the number of IOPS and limited writes (that are in most cases many years of regular service) over "infinite" writes and moving parts. I wouldn't want to keep spinning rust in service more than 3-5 years tops, and if all the SSDs I've used will survive this long, why should I use the slower solution?
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Toshiba invented flash memory. I am hopeful that they do something decent with the OCZ brand.
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..."this over there is my browser cache. In a pinch, you may throw out all of this...
The OS has no need to know about wear-leveling. It's fine as a black box. Write data, store it, read it back. That's it. Do it fast and do it reliably. Wear-leveling is NOT about occasionally throwing out valid data. It's about shuffling physical writes around to different sectors, even if the same few files are being written to all the time. The idea is that they all wear out evenly, which extends the life of the entire SSD.
Make the OS/user determine which files are "important" or not? Good lord... you're going to add a huge amount of additional complexity onto an already complex system. It's not worth it. Unless you're in some pathological case (in which case just use a spinning rust disk), it's going to be many, many years before your drive wears out. When it wears out in a decade or two, SMART monitoring will warn you, and you can go buy a new drive that's five times bigger at half the cost.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I put a SSD in front of my spinning rust RAID as a cache and use writethrough or writearound. Even if the SSD fails I won't lose data.
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Interesting? For a "works for me!" anecdote? Really mods, DaFuq? What is your experience with SSDs, 1? 2 maybe?
Well I have to have dealt with hundreds in the last couple years at the shop and its pretty damned obvious they still haven't fixed the driver controllers as they are still a complete and total CRAPSHOOT. Get a good one? Congrats you will get to write several times what the drive is rated for, you lucky dog! Get a bad one? Well I hope you didn't want that data because you will just flip the switch and the drive will be gone with zero warning, it won't even show up in BIOS/UEFI and the you will NEVER EVER get that data back!
Say what you will about spinning rust but I haven't had a single drive fail that didn't give SOME kind of warning before dying, be it delayed write failures, be it SMART, at least you got some kind of warning...SSDs? Fuck you, no warning. And has ANYBODY here had one actually fail into "read only" as the manufacturers use to tout? Anybody? Because I have yet to see that happen even once, instead the controller goes and your memories are gone FOR-EV-ER. Again at least with spinning rust you can grab another of the same model and build a clean box and do a platter swap, has anybody here actually been able to recover data from a failed SSD? I bet we won't find a single person.
So do I avoid SSDs? Nope have 'em in both my office box and my gamer box at home....as OS drives ONLY, why? Because I don't give a single fuck if I lose the OS, that's why! But all these people putting SSDs into laptops which they put all their pics and docs on? Well I just hope you have daily backups to the cloud, because the first time you flip that switch and find all your pics, including those of some now deceased relative you can never replace, is gone for good? Yeah I bet you won't be singing the praises of consumer SSDs anymore!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The 850 EVO has been gettable for around 32 cents per GB for awhile: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Sam...
>Samsung 840 EVOs are certainly a nightmare
Since when. I've installed somewhere around 100 and have only had 2 DOA's and 0, as in zero in field failures over two years. I have even more Pros in the field without failure.
He's right, though. Throughout the era of SSDs there has been concerns about Flash cell longevity. The medium of HDD does not degrade meaningfully.
And yet, hard drives can and do crash. They fail. I've replaced dozens over the years. What good is "no write limitation" on a hard drive when the head augers into the disk? When the platter bearings go south? When the media starts flaking off?
To me, the write limitation is moot. It's just a different failure mode. I haven't had enough experience with SSD's to make a definitive judgement, but I do like a lot about them so far.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Interesting? For a "works for me!" anecdote? Really mods, DaFuq? What is your experience with SSDs, 1? 2 maybe?
Well I have to have dealt with hundreds in the last couple years at the shop and its pretty damned obvious they still haven't fixed the driver controllers as they are still a complete and total CRAPSHOOT.
We have about 1100 of several brands and types deployed in our organization, and have seen a lower than hard disk failure rate, even on the cheap OEM Lite-On drives. How's that for an anecdote? (I do agree about the controller problems - we had to push out a firmware update for those Lite-Ons to fix a Deep Sleep issue.)
Since SSD's have been known to have catastrophic failures why not market drives that for all intents and purposes can't fail or can easily be repaired by changing fuses or other simple components? If it's the controller that is failing why not have a second low performance backup controller that only works in read only mode? It just doesn't make sense to me that they can't make these things 100% read only reliable or that bad parts other than the flash can't be relapsed.