Originally Posted by TestECull  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. |
Originally Posted by TestECull 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. |
Originally Posted by TestECull Interesting read, but I couldn't go on past the following... Quote:
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| SSDs have +5 armor immunity to random access latency... |
Originally Posted by TestECull Blech. Leave your unfounded Vista hate out of it, reviewer dude. It trashes your credibility when you make noobish statements like that. |
Originally Posted by Blameless 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. |
Originally Posted by DeathTyrant 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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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. |
