It's been a long time coming, hasn't it? OCZ Technology's
Colossus is the outfit's first in the desktop SSD space, and with capacities scaling as high at 1TB, it's certainly tempting for performance junkies who just can't pry themselves away from their tower. The benchmark-minded kids over at
PC Perspective were able to get a drive in with final firmware a few weeks back, and they've pushed out a full review just prior to these things
hitting retail en masse. Needless to say, all the numbers in the world won't make this any cheaper, but for those willing to spend at least $3.24 per gigabyte on internal storage, there's hardly a better option out right now. Reviewers found that read and write speeds seriously pushed the SATA 3Gb/sec limit, and the latter were "faster than on any SATA device tested to date." Sadly, the lack of TRIM support and the inability for end-users to upgrade the firmware put somewhat of a damper on things, but if neither one of those tidbits bother you, pulling the trigger just might be the right thing to do.
posted November 22nd 2009 8:17PM
Oh yeah, it's expensive!
Yeah SSD's aren't plausible till they get way cheaper and bigger.
It's not even that. I don't know why a company would need a 1TB MLC SSD. It's not enterprise grade because it's not an SLC, meaning it's got a 10-fold decrease in read/write cycles.
I think OCZ just wants to get a product out there so economies of scale can slowly start to bring the price down. Too bad it's gonna take forever to come down to a sane man's levels (3-4 years I'd say).
Bigger than 1 TB? How much pr0n do you have?
Also, cheaper isn't true. This upgrade is the best thing you can do for a system, unless you like to deal with awful RAID setups.
That's not entirely true, an MLC drive with good wear leveling algorithms can replace SATA drives in some nearline situations. Capacity and price tend to be the bigger question for those situations.
There's really no need to put media on SSDs - you'll see the biggest improvements from moving the OS and programs onto the SSD. Unless you're copying and moving your porn all the time, I guess.
@Jeff Kibuule
When the Compact Disc came out it was $10,000 for the first players, which were single beam, no oversampling, and highly sensitive to scratches, dirt, and vibration.
It's about time solid state media is at a point it can become competitive with the antiquated mechanical drives we use now.
It is very likely other technologies will even take over SSD, but SSD is a magnificent improvement over noisy mechanical monstrosities hard drives are today. It is more likely a stepping stone to memristor or other solid state technologies.
Frankly, memory speed in general needs to improve to keep pace with the CPU speeds.
@Jeff Kibuule
For the price OCz is asking for its colosis drive, you would be better served getting a much faster PCI-e based Fusion IO SSD.
Wow, they should really try and find ways to lower the price of SSD's because the technology is game changing...
They seriously left out TRIM support? So writes on the drive are only going to be that fast until all of the cells have been written to once? That seems like sort of a dealbreaker omission at this point in the SSD game, especially with non-upgradeable firmware!
It seems to me that their garbage collection setup helps out quite a bit with this without using TRIM, so it's not quite as bad as it looks, but at the same time, yeah TRIM would be preferred.
I don't know. If it's $3.24/gb and comes in at 1TB (yes there are smaller capacities) that's $3,240. That a mid to low end BOUTIQUE PC. At that price you should be supporting firmware upgrades at the least. And definitely TRIM.
Did you guys read the article? The controllers are in a RAID setup. RAID can't handle TRIM. So they're doing it themselves.
I did read the article. It's not a failing on the part of RAID, it's a failing on the part of the RAID controller. And considering how expensive these will be, they should have better RAID controllers.
The article says :
The 4 Indilinx controllers *are* capable individually, but the the Silicon Image processor does not support TRIM forwarding so the controllers never get to see the TRIM commands.
Yes I get that it's a fault of the RAID controller, but as others have pointed out, for this price they should have better RAID controllers and/or upgradeable firmware. Saying it's the RAID controller's fault rather than the SSD boards' themselves doesn't exonerate the product; the bottom line is that TRIM doesn't work on this product and there won't be a way for a user to add it later with a firmware update.
SSD prices will eventually plummet, so many competitors, so much potential... Without TRIM on this one, no sense in buying unless you just want to READ from it.
Well....TRIM only affects write speeds. So unless if you plan to do a lot of copying onto the SSD, it won't cause too many problems for you. Your boot speeds, application load speeds etc. will still be awesome!
They have been plummetting. 75% per year. If that continued, in 2 years, they'd be like 50% per gigabyte.
Moore's law just aint fast enough.
These things have to get pretty hot... I hope there is a way these get cooled.
I'm sure you could just use bricks of money to cool it down.
@jol
Not sure how that would cool it down? The logistics fail me!
/joke
I hear gold is a great heat conductor... Just drop a bar on top and you're good to go!
Lack of moving parts means less heat is generated.. This is also why their power consumption is lower.. less power is lost through heat..
When will these babies get cheaper? I want one now!
I can't wait till the future.
Not intel, not indalinx (or else it would have trim). In other words, it might be fast, but I'm not buying it until anandtech gets a hands on review. Their the only ones I would ever trust with an ssd review, nobody else knows what their talking about...
IIRC, it uses two Indilinx SSD controllers behind a JMicron RAID controller. I'd guess that's why it doesn't support Trim, because the OS is only seeing it as a single drive, and the JMicron controller really isn't suited for this usage. But then, I don't think there's a better choice right now, so we just have to live without Trim.
Four Indilinux controllers (which support TRIM), behind a Silicon Image processor which doesn't support TRIM forwarding... but why read the article anyway? ;)
Oops, that's Indilinx.
Because I'm way too lazy to read something I can't afford while trying to work out a more pressing VPN issue. Thanks for correcting me :)
What is TRIM ?
The TRIM command allows an operating system to tell a solid-state drive (or "SSD") which data blocks are no longer in use, such as those left by deleted files. An OS operation such as delete generally only means the data blocks involved are flagged as not in use. TRIM allows the OS to pass this information on down to the SSD controller, which otherwise would not know it could trash those blocks.
The purpose of the instruction is to maintain the speed of the SSD throughout its lifespan, avoiding the slowdown that early models encountered once all of the cells had been written to once.
Dear Engadget, nice job with the site redisign! Can you please fix the iPhone site? It's ridiculous now!
iPhone rox your sox thats why its too cool for engadget
The mobile site on my WinMo phone is broken as well. Loading up Opera 10 beta or PIE, it takes me to the mobile homepage, or the normal homepage if i click the link, but when i try to go to an article, it redirects me back to the mobile homepage. Very irritating.
I think Engadget editors are under the impression, that everyone uses not only Macs, but Mac laptops specifically.
The reality is that in 2009 there were twice as many desktops sold as there were laptops (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/pc-sales/), and I Mac users are probably less than 20% of Engadget users.
The problem with Engadget's Mac bias isn't that they give better or more coverage to Apple (they arguably do, but whatevs.) The problem is that they are out of touch with reality of the market they are writing about.
Ok, correction, there are as many desktops as laptops sold. Still, it's not like everyone has a laptop.
And this applies because....?
This applies because I had a bad day I needed to vent :P
OK, venting is alright...but you should have at least found a Apple/Mac related post to vent under. After all, you wouldn't have to look very hard to find one, right? :P
enough with making them faster, they need to start making them CHEAPER. any of us with HDD's would be happy with some of the slowest SSD's so long as it didnt cost too terribly much. i'll buy one the day i can get 256GB under for $300. even if it isnt quite as fast as these performance ones.
They're probably not having that much luck with cheaper, which is why they're doing something as drastic as this.
@SmilinGoat Since the majority of the cost in an SSD are the NAND flash memory chips it's only sensible to add some speed for a few dollars extra. Speed is typically gained by reading/writing multiple banks of chips simultaneously, therefore the speed/cost of the chips is not the primary driver in overall speed of an SSD.
Why would you buy this without TRIM? Once you've written data to the drives a few times, it's going to slow down to normal MLC drive speeds!
Read the article, they dedicate a whole page to this. OCZ has its own "secret weapon" garbage collection setup which fixes the issues with that while the drive is idle. Yes, I agree that TRIM support in addition to this would be nice, but it seems this is a pretty good alternative.
I would be happy with 50MB/s sustained read/write, so make it cheaper already! My HDD only gets 30 max.
Buy a Western Digital 640gb HDD, black edition.
That'll do it.
Random read/write is more important for me.
Their review system is using Windows XP? Wow, great tech site.