You know those quirky, not-at-all convenient issues that can cause certain solid state drives to
lag with extensive use? Yeah -- not cool. Thankfully, the engineers at OCZ Technology and Indilinx are fed up, and rather than sitting around doing nothing, they've both collaborated on a breakthrough firmware that can actually clean and restore one's "dirtied"
SSD while the drive sits idle. In short, the firmware instructs the SSD to perform a "garbage collection" process in order to mitigate the unwanted block re-writing quandary, where the drive actively seeks and removes garbage that hinders read / write performance when handling small chunks of data. The crew over at
HotHardware managed to run a few speed tests with said firmware firmly implemented, and the results are downright shocking: after just five minutes of idle time, the SSD was restored to near new, with an hour of downtime being enough to "totally restore" performance. Don't believe us? Give that read link a tap, bub.
posted Aug 10th 2009 2:17AM
And what does this do for MTBF?
My understanding from what I've read is that this cleaning operation would have to be done no matter what, whether it be during idle time or when the drive runs out of free cells. So instead of "write -> clean -> data written", it's "clean when nothing is going on -> write -> data written". since nothing is going on during the idle time, to the end user it looks like the drive is pretty fast most of the time.
hey why isnt there a empty ssd controller card that you can throw say 10 micro sd cards into and make it into a snazzy ssd hdd?
i imagine even plain ol sd cards would do as well. like say i have like 10 10gb sd cards laying around, why isnt there some sort of card to handle this?
dont tell me it cant be done because i have a psp with a 8gb and a 2 gb plugged into a duo adapter (like both cards fit into one memory stick duo) and it gives me te combined storage space.
make me think the whole state of ssd is cash in on the hype.
@Alistair:
Here you are, though it's only in a 3.5" flavor:
http://www.geekstuff4u.com/accessories/storage/3-5-diy-ssd.html
Of course, true SSDs aren't merely just hype. Even the fastest SD cards peak around 30MB/s (more than enough for digicams, but paltry compared to even traditional 2.5" laptop HDDs) and are only really put through sequential writing commands -- and factors like access time aren't very critical. Proper SSDs that use Intel, Samsung, or Indilinx controllers will simply wipe the floor with just about any other non-volatile storage solution. Booting a modern OS off of a collection of SD cards simply is not an attractive idea -- unless all you want is a LiveCD in your favorite flavor of linux.
@fh
SSDs are essentially soldered flash cards. Each card might peak at 30 MB/s or so, but they are RAIDed together as one drive, thus greately improving their read/write performance. You can even purchase cards like this with chassis for CF or Micro SD cards.
You want a key difference? How many writes do you get per bit on an SD card, now multiply that by 1000 and thats how many writes you get on an SLC SSD. MLC SSD's are, essentially, SD cards soldered together, thats why they are cheap, and thats why they suck.
SLC SSDs are absurd, they are not just "raided SD cards", they are fast, blindingly so, there is NO platter based drive that can keep up with the fastest SLC SSDs, and there are no MLC SSDs that have as high a MTBF.
You'll kill an SD card in a very short time (months) using it as a primary boot drive, assuming you don't shoot it first from slowness. Platter based drives are 3-5 times faster. Seagate Barricuda 7200.12 drives pump at 150Mb/s.
Dirty SSD? Transfer porn to another drive! :P
ROFL that made my day
I want to know how many people actually have large porn collections...its all you guys go onabout.
I used to have many GBs of porn on my system. And then I found redtube, megaporn, pornhub, et.al.
With adblock plus turned on there's nothing to interfere and its almost instant.
Instant fap?
Now that's a breakthrough that is truly revolutionary!
I wonder how many OEMs will license and implement.
Thanks for the heads up.
Cheers
Hardly...
OCZ drives with the Indilinx controller like the Vertex are excellent drives, but they have been somewhat hindered by the fact you had to run a manual TRIM application to wipe the "dirty" blocks. Obviously this has changed now, but the newer Samsung-controller drives have been doing this type of idle cleanup already.
Also, NONE of these pseudo-TRIM replacements will matter when Windows 7 ships (assuming you are going to upgrade), since it will natively support the TRIM function and drives will not build up "dirty" blocks. And I assume with the other SSD and multi-core enhancments, most people with a fast SSD will be upgrading to 7. (or OSX Snow Leopard for the Mac people)
The Toshiba SSD I have in my laptop has already done this. It would be tough for Indilinx to patent something they didn't do first.
Just wait till Anand gets his hands on these. THEN we'll really know the deal.
no need, pc perspective already got their hands on it:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=760&type=expert&pid=1
I think he meant more as in "Anand knows what he's doing." And he does, I would trust his judgement more than PC perspective.
I think you'll find that PC Perspective is about the tops when it comes to storage testing:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=750
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=733
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691
I felt like the style of this article was really trying to tart up an otherwise boring subject. =/
Well, defragmenting drives is hardly new...
This is by no means boring, particulary if you spent upwards of $500 on a SSD.
No, it clearly has exciting applications. I just didn't think it needed the "Don't believe us? Give that read link a tap, bub" bit.
I pity the guy who thinks Ssd's are boring..they're the future man and have you looked up ssd's starting up windows and macs in seconds?theyre on YouTube They're faster than those 15000 rpm server harddrives it's like technology skipped a few years. Wait until they're on all manufactured computers.. Then ull reAlize how ignorant u were
SSD's are awesome, I'll give you that.... but......
"Then ull reAlize how ignorant u were"
pot --> kettle.
"They're faster than those 15000 rpm server harddrives it's like technology skipped a few years"
Depends on your perspective. If you just need mass storage (e.g. home media server) it's like we went back a few years. But, yes, I agree they are the future even if right now they are small and absurdly priced.
@Vidikron
"absurdly priced" is very relative. Just a few years ago, people were paying $1200 for a SLOW 64GB drive from Samsung (~$18/GB) Now you can get one of the fastest drives on the market (OCZ Vertex) with 4x the storage for one-half the price (~$2.5/GB)
OCZ Vertex 256GB
MSRP $600
Likewise, The 128GB version is MSRP $290, and the new 34nm Intel X25M 160GB is $450
As I said, I'm talking purely from a mass storage perspective.
@Vidikron
I understand, but its pointless to talk about SSDs from a mass-storage perspective since that is not their intended usage. They are clearly meant as fast boot drives for PCs and replacements for laptop harddrives.
Windows 7 already does this.
I assume this does the same as the program wiper.exe or windows 7 trim command except it is automatic.
Don't waste your money!
It's a temporary solution to a permanent problem with SSDs. Until the SSD manufacturers can aleviate the degredation issues to the extent of HDDs then 3rd party companies like this will be feeding off of people's wallets who don't know any better.
@uberfu
You are a moron, and don't have a clue to what you are talking about. First of all, this posting has nothing to do with "degradation"; it is concerning data blocks that have been written to that are no longer in use by the operating system (i.e. a file has been deleted). As far as this "dirty blocks" issue goes, it is already permanently solved in Windows 7 with it's native TRIM support that wipes the data blocks when a file is deleted.
Regarding degradation of NAND flash, there are all kinds of misconceptions.
- The mean-time-between-failure of a modern MLC SSD is an order of magnitude higher than a consumer harddrive.
- a brand new MLC SSD can replace it's entire data contents each day for years with no problems. With average use, where only a small fraction of the drive is written to each day, they will easily last longer than the machine it is in (>10 yrs)
- Compared to (frequent) catastrophic harddrive failures with all data lost (or a $1000 recovery effort), when a NAND SSD is fully "degraded", it essentially turns into a read-only disk with little or no data loss occurring.
basically it defrags it???
For those of you who think that TRIM will make this garbage collection feature unnecessary don't understand what TRIM actually does. Read the SSD Anthology from Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=10
Excellent news, though also goes some way to confirming that next year is SSD year imo. (Don't get me wrong, if you need a new drive now for general/OS usage, and you're not flat broke, I'd go for an SSD. But if you don't really need one, I think it's better to hold off a little.)
Next year features like this one (probably refined a bit) and TRIM should be standard on all drives and operating systems, removing the last remaining gotchas that early adopters have faced. Then we'll just be left with, yeah the drive costs a bit more and you get a much smaller capacity, but it's hugely faster - an easy decision for most people who either don't need a massive media-storage disk, or will use a second HD for that anyhow - and with none of the fears of slightly weird behaviour, odd tools you have to run periodically, etc.
Compact flash for your SSD?
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/06/photofast-gmonster-ssd-gets-wrestled-open-found-to-contain-comp/
here's the newest firmware for mushkin europe 2 ssd based on indilinx controller: http://maseven.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/neue-firmware-1571-mushkin-ssd/