If you're interested in SSD, chances are you've been paying attention to the allegations of performance degradation in Intel's
X25-M drives.
AnandTech dives into the issue (and many, many more topics) in 31 page exploration of the state of solid state. It's a spine-tingling read, in part explaining how write-speed degradation is largely thanks to partially used pages containing portions of deleted files. We all know deleted files typically aren't
really gone until they're overwritten, a problem in SSDs because to clear a section of a page the entire page needs to be cleared. That entails moving anything you want to keep to the cache, wiping the whole page, then re-writing that good data from cache. The hope is that a new delete command dubbed TRIM (set to find support in
Windows 7) will speed up writes by forcing the system to perform this work during deletes, but ahead of that the article still recommends Intel's drives; even at their worst they're still generally faster than the comparably priced competition when it comes to average use -- not to mention faster than your platters.
posted March 27th 2009 10:09AM
This was a pretty interesting article with, what I thought, was a good explanation of the ins and outs of SSDs and the technology in general...too bad I read it about a week ago when another engadgeteer kindly posted it....little slow on the uptake there, eh engadget?
A spine-tingling read? Is it written in the format of a short mystery novel?
Hey, it is an awfully long article.
Your point? Go back to asking the president to legalize marijuana.
Best. Post. Ever.
Anandtech has posted some fantastic articles on SSD, explaining both the technologies behind the drives to the layperson as well as providing benchmarks on a wide variety of these drives.
http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532&p=6 "The eight drive score of the Western Digital setup gives us an idea of how many SATA drives you need. It will take about 26-30 SATA drives to get the performance of eight SAS drives… and it will probably take about 40 SATA drives to beat one SLC SSD disk! The more your applications read and/or write randomly, the worse the "get a lot of cheap SATA spindles" plan becomes." -- WOW!
My verdict is this: With or without various performance raid configurations, the Intel X25-M and X25-E will melt your face off. It's too bad these drives still cost $13/GB, when your run-of-the-mill consumer drive runs about $0.19/GB.
From the article my personal conclusion would be that the SSD isn't ready for servers yet. I'd rather go with RAM based drive for main work volume + replication to RAID of traditional hard drives.
This article at PC Perspective looked at performance issues on SSDs a bit earlier:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669
"deleted files typically aren't really gone until they're overwritten" Or just use Truecrypt whole drive encryption and never worry about securely erasing files again.
In the context that means something different. You can't access the information any more. Yet the space on flash is marked as used. And to make it free, the expensive (and using up flash life cycle) operation to erase block is required before next write operation can take place.
And use of full drive encryption (as per article) one would actually lead SSD to worst case scenario, when every write operation would translate into flash' erase block operation. Because with full disk encryption, whole space would be "used" - written with some (often dummy) data. File-based encryption shouldn't have such sever impact, but still it would shorten SSD drive's life time much faster, as every time file is overwritten due to encryption it would look different and SSD would have to treat it as a completely new file.
This article came around at just the right time. I was considering returning my Lenovo X301 with a 128GB SSD drive for a T400 with a decent size HDD, but for what I'm using the computer I suspect the X301 will outshine the T400 performance wise, even though the T400 has a faster CPU. Riveting read!
I would love to see somebody actually started doing some long term tests - similar to real world applications. Whatever the synthetic tests tell is generally poorly connects with real world applications. I haven't yet read single post on net about dead SSD - but that what would be very interesting to read about too. I know how HDDs fail - but what to be prepared for with SSD isn't clear yet. Some of the testers should try to drive the drives into the ground and see how they would perform till their last moment.
Also, I wish somebody actually tried to explain what MTBF in case of SSD means... I understand it in case of HDD (durability of mechanical parts). But as SSDs do not have mechanical parts, the MTBF metric is quite ambiguous. E.g. drive in my UMBP17 has MTBF of 1,000,000 (wtf?!) hours. I somehow doubt (especially in light of Anand's analysis) that flash media can survive *that* long beating.
The thing about SSD's is they fail in an entirely predictable way. They hold space in reserve to be used when sectors start to fail, allowing the drive to maintain its capacity. Simple SMART monitors can alert you when this process start occurring giving you good warning to backup the contents of your drive and get a replacement.
In contract, when hard drives fail they tend to go with very little warning, so in that sense an SSD is the safer bet, even if it doesn't last as long, but as you said, nobody really knows how long they do last.
My daughter has an EEE PC 701. Linux on a flash drive. My wife has the EEE 1000HA -- XP on a hard drive. Love the former's flash drive and OS, love the latter's real keyboard and long battery life. Doesn't seem like anybody's building one for me....
You can add an SSD to any netbook. You can add Windows to any netbook. I understand you probably want to buy one without putting the extra work into it, or you want one with a warranty, but the beauty of netbooks is their mod-ability and disposable nature due to price.
Little behind the times guys... this was 9 days ago and old news. I thought this was a bleeding edge blog?
I second Bob, though I guess the old adage goes 'better late than never'. Still, must try to keep up better!
Every time I think about buying an SSD, I see the TB drives sitting at 100 even, and I can't bring myself to do it. It was always the same story with me and raptor drives. So enticing, yet so impossible for me to justify buying.
I think it is obvious that flash storage is the future, but I'd like to see some long term data integrity (or drive integrity) numbers for these things before trusting them with my data.
I just bought a 30gig vertex for a friend as a gift based on that article. We'll be putting into his laptop next week it was only $80 bux on newegg and 30gig is enough to install xp and office and chrome. for the rest he has a 2 tb external.
These drives are very nice, but they are expensive. Why would a typical consumer want to pay top dollars for a half-baked technology?
MS is always late to the game, so how do Linux and Apple handle this? I am sure they already do it better. IT salways that way isnt it?
This article was published over a week ago. I guess better late than never.
And it is actually quite an interesting article. It even got a fair bit of drama in it over the OCZ Vertex drive (spoiler alert: Anand gets his way)
Once you go SSD, you'll never go back, or you'll hate it.
This is the one piece of equipment that can make an $800 pc feel faster than a $3000 machine.
Or far slower. Read the article.
the technology isn't quite to a point where I would invest serious money in it.
I'm one of the poor saps who's made the jump to install an after-market SSD in my Sony laptop. The internal defragmentation is KILLING me. It takes 15-30 seconds or so to display any Flash content in my browser. All I see is the hard drive light going crazy anytime I visit a streaming video website. Unfortunately, the only resolution for this is to do a complete hard drive wipe and reinstall of the OS every few months. I guess that works out for me since that mean I have to reinstall my OS after each quarter at school. Start fresh every quarter, so to speak.