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[Anand]The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

2336 Views 21 Replies 20 Participants Last post by  Kirmie
Hey guys,

This is probably the best SSD guide I've ever read. It explains why SSDs degrade over time, why the stuttering on some of them and many other useful information.

Here's the article in printer friendly format.
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Interesting read, but I couldn't go on past the following...

Quote:
SSDs make Vista usable.
Blech. Leave your unfounded Vista hate out of it, reviewer dude. It trashes your credibility when you make noobish statements like that.
Interesting article, especially the HDDErase part.

+1
Quote:

Originally Posted by TestECull View Post
Interesting read, but I couldn't go on past the following...

Blech. Leave your unfounded Vista hate out of it, reviewer dude. It trashes your credibility when you make noobish statements like that.
Lol, way to get raged over a supposedly harmless joke
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2
Great article with some humor that i havent seen from anandtech.

This:

Quote:
This is Ryan Petersen:

He’s the CEO of OCZ Technology. He wasn’t too happy after my Intel X25-M SSD review.


And This:



Quote:
O RLY?
Were pretty funny
.
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3
Quote:

Originally Posted by TestECull View Post
Interesting read, but I couldn't go on past the following...

Blech. Leave your unfounded Vista hate out of it, reviewer dude. It trashes your credibility when you make noobish statements like that.
Lol, you should have read further. The implication was that Vista was super duper fast with SSDs. So fast that you can't handle it.

And that "reviewer dude" is Anand Lal Shimpi.....and you owe him your allegiance.
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Overall the article was very well written (though, there were a fair number of grammatical mistakes).

Quote:

Originally Posted by TestECull View Post
Interesting read, but I couldn't go on past the following...

Quote:
SSD make Vista usable
Blech. Leave your unfounded Vista hate out of it, reviewer dude. It trashes your credibility when you make noobish statements like that.
I am inclined to agree with TestECull. Vista bashing isn't funny, it is Vista bashing. It is like real life, you don't make jokes that degrade others, unless you know the person very well and are certain they won't view it as an insult.

Quote:
SSDs have +5 armor immunity to random access latency...
See, you can make a funny joke without bashing something!
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My next drive is going to be an SSD.
Most important information in the article, IMO, is how crappy the JMicron controlers still are.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TestECull View Post
Blech. Leave your unfounded Vista hate out of it, reviewer dude. It trashes your credibility when you make noobish statements like that.


I'm certain Anand has used Vista quite extensively, so his critisims involving Vista are hardly unfounded, or "noobish", even if the comment is clearly an exaggeration.

Fact is, Vista, left to it's own devices, is constantly be swaping, indexing, and running all sorts of background tasks that do not have a positive impact on harddrive performance.
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But I find Apple bashing funny even though I like Apple!

If you're "down" with something, you can still poke fun at it.
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Best read I've had in quite a while.
Best information Ive seen yet on SSD's. Makes me much happier that im getting the Intel X25-M for my OS drive.

Its nice to see that there is an interface between the reviewers and the actual manufacturers to ensure better products. Dont usually get to see that behind the scenes stuff.
Quote:

Originally Posted by Blameless View Post
Most important information in the article, IMO, is how crappy the JMicron controlers still are.



I'm certain Anand has used Vista quite extensively, so his critisims involving Vista are hardly unfounded, or "noobish", even if the comment is clearly an exaggeration.

Fact is, Vista, left to it's own devices, runs a few background tasks when it detects that you are not doing anything on the computer that do have a positive impact on hard drive performance
.
Fixed.
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3
Wow, I have some real respect for OCZ for the time they spent going back and forth with this guy, to 'get it done right'!
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Quote:

Originally Posted by DeathTyrant View Post
Wow, I have some real respect for OCZ for the time they spent going back and forth with this guy, to 'get it done right'!

No doubt.

Very very informative, definitely know that I would want a Vertex some day.
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OCZ get a +rep from me for ssd's, although I don't like their cheap ram that they make shinny and try to say it's overclockable. Other than the fact that their ram has horrible timings and voltage for their speeds most of the time, I might actually buy an OCZ product.
Ya OCZ truly rocks for SSDs, I love my Apex and I get no stuttering, I can only imagine the Vertex with onboard cache writes even faster.
edit: woops... seems it already was posted.. how was it missed? ><

Quote:


A single NAND flash die is subdivided into blocks. The typical case these days is that each block is 512KB in size. Each block is further subdivided into pages, with the typical page size these days being 4KB.

Now you can read and write to individual pages, so long as they are empty. However once a page has been written, it can't be overwritten, it must be erased first before you can write to it again. And therein lies the problem, the smallest structure you can erase in a NAND flash device today is a block. Once more, you can read/write 4KB at a time, but you can only erase 512KB at a time.

It gets worse. Every time you erase a block, you reduce the lifespan of the flash. Standard MLC NAND flash can only be erased 10,000 times before it goes bad and stops storing data.

Based on what I've just told you there are two things you don't want to do when writing to flash: 1) you don't want to overwrite data, and 2) you don't want to erase data. If flash were used as a replacement for DVD-Rs then we wouldn't have a problem, but it's being used as a replacement for conventional HDDs. Who thought that would be a good idea?

It turns out that the benefits are more than worth the inconvenience of dealing with these pesky rules; so we work around them.

Most people don't fill up their drives, so SSD controller makers get around the problem by writing to every page on the drive before ever erasing a single block.

If you go about using all available pages to write to and never erasing anything from the drive, you'll eventually run out of available pages. I'm sure there's a fossil fuel analogy somewhere in there. While your drive won't technically be full (you may have been diligently deleting files along the way and only using a fraction of your drive's capacity), eventually every single block on your drive will be full of both valid and invalid pages.

In other words, even if you're using only 60% of your drive, chances are that 100% of your drive will get written to simply by day to day creation/deletion of files.



Source

I searched around and couldn't find this in the news section... hope this isn't a repost. Good for a first news post? Feedback please!
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