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Solid State Drives, Worth anything or paperweights at this time?

830 Views 22 Replies 11 Participants Last post by  dmreeves
Hello,

I just want to see what everyone thought about them or if anyone has any. I have read a little bit but was confused and seems like they still have a bit farther to go before being really practical. Not that I am willing to pay 2 times the amount for less gigs. Just want to see where they stand this days.
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I've got a G.Skill Titan 256GB, arguably the best bang for buck SSD out right now.

Its basicaly two 128GB SSD's in a raid 0 config using two JMicron controllers. Fast as hell. I benched it at 226MB/s read & 165MB/s write with 0.2ms access time.

Its around $500 dollars I believe, I picked mine up for £400 in the UK.

It might be a good idea to hang fire though as SSD's are getting faster and cheaper very quickly. The only reason I bought mine now was because the 7200RPM WD I had in my laptop was running at 63c under load and I wanted the fastest possible replacement for a reasonable price
Wow Joe I didn't know? Two? RAID 0, I don't see the point but maybe just me. I say because one with a 2ms RA seems fine to me.

Anyway SSD's are the real deal and especially for Joe with a notebook.

Research your purchase as performance varies widely, write times mostly. SLC is better than MLC.
well, I am going raid 0 with 4 vrapters and thats a alot of cash to get 4 SSD in raid 0 and have enough space that i need. And if 1 drive is 2 then i would be putting 8 raid 0 right? Plus the temp, how is that? and what about the stip thing people are talking about? Not even sure what that is, something about setting to 2?? stip or something. And how does it handle vista 64? got me wanting to know now even more.
4 vraptors i RAID 0? You are a bad man! Not sure you have your RAID terminology down but hey, sounds good.
what RAID terminology do i not have down? I am going to put 4 VelociRaptor ( yes I see that I mispelled raptor) in raid 0. I am willing to learn since this will be my first raid system ever.
Quote:


Originally Posted by Joeking78
View Post

I've got a G.Skill Titan 256GB, arguably the best bang for buck SSD out right now.

Its basicaly two 128GB SSD's in a raid 0 config using two JMicron controllers. Fast as hell. I benched it at 226MB/s read & 165MB/s write with 0.2ms access time.

Its around $500 dollars I believe, I picked mine up for £400 in the UK.

It might be a good idea to hang fire though as SSD's are getting faster and cheaper very quickly. The only reason I bought mine now was because the 7200RPM WD I had in my laptop was running at 63c under load and I wanted the fastest possible replacement for a reasonable price

You might want to reconsider that line of SSDs specifically

http://anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531

SSD's are good, but only if you buy the right ones
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Quote:


Originally Posted by Darkshadow74
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what RAID terminology do i not have down? I am going to put 4 VelociRaptor ( yes I see that I mispelled raptor) in raid 0. I am willing to learn since this will be my first raid system ever.

I reread it was 8 HDD in RAID 0 that caught my eye. You do have your RAID terminology down.

On the other hand you are insane to even think of 8 HDD in a Raid 0. What do you do? Do you know what a HDD does? Do you really need?
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IMO, no they are not. SSD's have limited read/write operations, unlike ATA drives (platter). That just turns me off the whole issue..
Quote:

Originally Posted by Asus Mobile View Post
I reread it was 8 HDD in RAID 0 that caught my eye. You do have your RAID terminology down.

On the other hand you are insane to even think of 8 HDD in a Raid 0. What do you do? Do you know what a HDD does? Do you really need?
I am only going to put 4 drives in regardless of VR's or SSD's (which I am not going to put up 2500 dollars for 600+ gigs) but someone in the thread the that 256g SSD was like 2 drives in one, so 4x2=8, not saying I would put 8 drives in. I cant see Raid 0 any more then 4 before seeing the performance to price go down.
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Quote:

Originally Posted by Drakan290 View Post
IMO, no they are not. SSD's have limited read/write operations, unlike ATA drives (platter). That just turns me off the whole issue..
~10000 erase operations per area is pretty minimal, considering how fast the harddrive/SSD sizes grow. You'll be replacing it within 2 years, and only a server using some sort of DB management is close to those 10k erases.

You know HDD's do have limited writes too, but not as much as SSD's do
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2
Quote:

Originally Posted by Darkshadow74 View Post
I am only going to put 4 drives in regardless of VR's or SSD's (which I am not going to put up 2500 dollars for 600+ gigs) but someone in the thread the that 256g SSD was like 2 drives in one, so 4x2=8, not saying I would put 8 drives in. I cant see Raid 0 any more then 4 before seeing the performance to price go down.
Sadly you make sense. You are insane still.
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so what would a normal person witha gaming computer expect the life of a SSD to be with ~10000 erase operations per area? I mean is 2 year a good fair figure or more like 4 years?
Quote:

Originally Posted by Darkshadow74 View Post
so what would a normal person witha gaming computer expect the life of a SSD to be with ~10000 erase operations per area? I mean is 2 year a good fair figure or more like 4 years?

God I would hope it would be much more then that for how much those things are running for.
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gonX is off his rocker. First he is missing a zero or two. And not a couple of years more like many years. You can expect it to last longer than a normal HDD.
Limited write (erase) cycles: Flash-memory cells will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC[13], while high endurance cells may have an endurance of 1-5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer).[28] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device (so-called wear levelling), rather than rewriting files in place.[29] In 2008 wear levelling was just beginning to be incorporated into consumer level devices.[13] However, effective write cycles can be much less, because when a write request is made to a particular memory block, all data in the block is overwritten even when only part of the memory is altered. The write amplification, as referred by Intel, can be reduced using write memory buffer.[30] In combination with wear leveling, over-provisioning SSD flash drives with spared memory capacity also delays the loss of user-accessible memory capacity. NAND memory can be negatively impacted by read and program (write) disturbs arising from over accessing a particular NAND location. This overuse of NAND locations causes bits within the NAND block to erroneously change values. Wear leveling, by redirecting SSD writes to lesser-used NAND locations, thus reduces the potential for program or write disturbs.[31] An example for the lifetime of SSD is explained in detail in this wiki.[dubious - discuss] SSDs based on DRAM, however, do not suffer from this problem.
Limited write (erase) cycles: Flash-memory cells will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC[13], while high endurance cells may have an endurance of 1-5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer).[28] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device (so-called wear levelling), rather than rewriting files in place.[29] In 2008 wear levelling was just beginning to be incorporated into consumer level devices.[13] However, effective write cycles can be much less, because when a write request is made to a particular memory block, all data in the block is overwritten even when only part of the memory is altered. The write amplification, as referred by Intel, can be reduced using write memory buffer.[30] In combination with wear leveling, over-provisioning SSD flash drives with spared memory capacity also delays the loss of user-accessible memory capacity. NAND memory can be negatively impacted by read and program (write) disturbs arising from over accessing a particular NAND location. This overuse of NAND locations causes bits within the NAND block to erroneously change values. Wear leveling, by redirecting SSD writes to lesser-used NAND locations, thus reduces the potential for program or write disturbs.[31] An example for the lifetime of SSD is explained in detail in this wiki.[dubious - discuss] SSDs based on DRAM, however, do not suffer from this problem.
Limited write (erase) cycles: Flash-memory cells will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC[13], while high endurance cells may have an endurance of 1-5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer).[28] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device (so-called wear levelling), rather than rewriting files in place.[29] In 2008 wear levelling was just beginning to be incorporated into consumer level devices.[13] However, effective write cycles can be much less, because when a write request is made to a particular memory block, all data in the block is overwritten even when only part of the memory is altered. The write amplification, as referred by Intel, can be reduced using write memory buffer.[30] In combination with wear leveling, over-provisioning SSD flash drives with spared memory capacity also delays the loss of user-accessible memory capacity. NAND memory can be negatively impacted by read and program (write) disturbs arising from over accessing a particular NAND location. This overuse of NAND locations causes bits within the NAND block to erroneously change values. Wear leveling, by redirecting SSD writes to lesser-used NAND locations, thus reduces the potential for program or write disturbs.[31] An example for the lifetime of SSD is explained in detail in this wiki.[dubious - discuss] SSDs based on DRAM, however, do not suffer from this problem.

From Wikipedia

The majority of lower-end cheap disks are MLC, and the more expensive ones are SLC.
I am not aware of any high-endurance consumer level drives out on the market right now, either.
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here is a review, and the page i am linking has some info on a intel x25-m, and how long is should last. Here
Quote:


Originally Posted by Darkshadow74
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here is a review, and the page i am linking has some info on a intel x25-m, and how long is should last. Here

See also, the price of an X25-m SSD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167015
Yes, correct, $700.

A MLC drive (The most common, cheaper SSD's that people are buying) like the OCZ core (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227360) is $160 and not worth the money.

But why are we debating this, everyone knows the facts here.
SSD's are premature and expensive right now. MLC drives are not worth the $$, and high-endurance SLC (Intel X25) are way to expensive for their storage space.

When prices come down, it will be worth it. Right now, the price/performance just doesn't match up for most people.
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Good info Drakan and DarkShadow.

Right now the most reliable SSD drive and according to Intel, the fastest ssd is in fact the X25. I was at one of the product launch seminars for those drives and they are impressive. They are also extremely expensive and not a lot of people are using them right now. Once they have been on the market a while and real world MTBF rates can be determined you will see a lot more people start using them. We have a customer that is waiting for the price drop and then he is going to build a product around them. He wanted to get a dozen of them and start MTBF tests himself (he does that right now for other HDD's), but intel will only give him 2 units max for eval. He must buy the rest. We will see how things go in that market by August.

Side note: I used to work on a device made by StorageTek (now SUN, soon to be IBM) called an SSD. It was the size of 2 full equipment racks, 500MB (or less) and broke every couple of months. The main issue was damaged memory cells. They could not take the repeated read/writes andwere better suited for long term storage, but they were too small in size (memory). They canceled the product after 2 years becasue it cost them too much to keep running.
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I just got my Intel X25-M installed (80GB for $363 on Newegg). I spent my own money on it (with overnight shipping and tax it was about $425 and I had to buy a $17 set of tiny screw drivers to get a type 00 to change drives on my Macbook) and it was EASILY worth every penny. You honestly can not comprehend how ridiculously fast everything happens until you have it installed in your machine and start using it. Read Anandtech's article about why most SSDs (particularly MLC drives) that are not made by Intel are not worth your money due to poorly designed controllers. Intel makes their own controllers and does not suffer from most of the issues that make MLC drives undesirable.

Yes, SLC is superior. Yes, Intel's X25-E writes many times faster than the X25-M. No, I have never felt a massive performance increase comparable to replacing my Macbook's standard drive with the X25-M.

Last year I went from a Pentium D 3.0GHz to a Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz, 2GB of RAM to 4GB and the performance increase was nowhere near the performance increase when I switched to an SSD yesterday.

These are just my thoughts, feel free to disagree. Also, while I love my drive and feel it was worth the money, you're probably better off waiting a year for the new 34nm versions of Intel's SSDs with the revised controller since they should easily be much faster and are supposed to be double the capacities available today and will obviously be cheaper as well.
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