Intel Solid State Drives

[Chalenge]

Skuzzy now that Intel has shipped SSDs I have to know if this would give a system boost over traditional hard drives. From the sound of things it will be a wonderful thing but we all know how ideas like this can go sour. Do you think there could be a problem in drivers or OSs that may present a major problem or rather then hurry to try one out should I just adopt the old wait-and-see attitude?

[NHawk]

SSDs have been out for a while now. I've had a Samsung 32Gb for almost 6 months...

Read Average: 97.6MB/sec
Read Access Time: 0.5ms
Write Average: 36.6MB/sec
Write Access Time: 0.5ms

You decide.

Edit:Windows loads in about 5 seconds. That's from after Post to Desktop.

[Chalenge]

I thought the new Intel types were supposed to work directly with Intel chipsets? and speed things up even more? Feel free to inform me if thats not correct.

[Skuzzy]

I am still on the fence about SSD's.  They still seem to have a limit on the number of writes before they start failing.  Of course, it is a huge number, but it is one of the stealth kind of failures.  You have no idea it is about to happen until it does.

Most HD's give you a mechanical sense of a problem coming.  Not always, but most of the time.

Do not get me wrong.  SSD's have come a long way in the last couple of years.  There is a new technology on the horizon which will make SSD's the drive of choice.  I am waiting for it to hit the streets.  It is based on a new type of memory module design.

[Chalenge]

Thanks Skuzzy 'wait-and-see' mode active.

[Vulcan]

I thought SSDs were relatively slow compared to a modern SATA drive (and not just slow, more expensive, significantly less space per $)?

[Tigger29]

SSD's are much, MUCH faster as there is no mechanical process to slow it down.  Basically it works at the speed of memory.

EXTERNAL SSD's... such as USB controlled external drives tend to be quite a bit slower as their speed is limited due to the USB bandwidth.

I'm not much familiar with these drives (I think I want one now), but.. and correct me if I'm wrong.. but I'm assuming it installs internally.. possible through the SATA connection?

[Vulcan]

SSD's are much, MUCH faster as there is no mechanical process to slow it down.  Basically it works at the speed of memory.

Flash based memory is slower on large writes/erases than HDD's though.

[Chalenge]

Point being to install the OS on an SSD and all programs on a typical HD. I think you can see the advantages there. Once the design Skuzzy mentioned is available and affordable then HDs might be a thing of the past. Might!

[NHawk]

Point being to install the OS on an SSD and all programs on a typical HD. I think you can see the advantages there. Once the design Skuzzy mentioned is available and affordable then HDs might be a thing of the past. Might!

Yep, install OS and anything that doesn't write to the drive on the SSD. Make sure you put all writeables on an HD. That eliminates or limits the write life problem Skuzzy mentioned.

And right now they are limited in size and unlimited in price. So be prepared to whip out some cash.

[Ghastly]

In the past, when devices were a few megabytes and write limits were on the order of a few to at most a few 10's of thousands of cycles, the write limits were a primary design consideration.   A poorly designed or implemented process could destroy an SDD in a few 10s to hundreds of hours of use. But on most current SSD's, capacities are in the gigabytes and write limits are at the 100's of thousands of writes or beyond, and they utilize algorithms to spread the writes evenly across the device (i.e. wear leveling), such that you'd have write to the device CONSTANTLY for several YEARS to begin to approach the limits of the device.

The constraining factor today is not the write limit as it once was, but the cost/benefit ratio.  A RAID array can easily outperform an SSD on read throughput (and even a typical single HD implementation on write throughput) and yet will cost (literally) pennies on the dollar in comparison. 

And I would have to disagree with Skuzzy - the primary benefit of an SSD over the typical hard disk IS reliability and decreased environmental sensitivity.  I once read somewhere a maxim that there are only two kinds of hard disks - those that are dead and those that are in the process of dying. With current SSD devices (because of the wear leveling feature) you DO get warning that the device is approaching end of life - the wear leveling algorithms dynamically allocate storage space so that when you rewrite "the same block over and over" it's actually written to a different area of the device each time.  And when the write fails, the bad block map is incremented to indicate that some part of the device is going south (although the location is by nature arbitrary, since the entire device is dynamically allocated to begin with), and the data is rewritten somewhere else. And as more of the device fails the number of "bad sectors" reported begins to increase. 

And of course, just like a hard disk, "wearing out" is not the only possible failure - there is always the possibility of catastrophic component failure.  But catastrophic failure is greatly minimized on a device that contains no moving parts, and has a greatly decreased environmental sensitivity.

But.... unless you truly need such and can justify 10 to 15 times the cost for it, it's (IMO) premature to use them as general purpose devices.

All IMhO, of course.

<S>

[Skuzzy]

Ghastly, in theory you are correct.  I said "in theory" as the real world has already proven the current crop of SSD's should not be trusted for any critical data due to abrupt failure modes occurring quite frequently.

All SSD's have limited amounts of 'spares' to handle the write failure modes.  Once used up, the next failure is a hard failure.  In some cases the EEC (particularly in MLC devices) will also fail at the same time.

Again, I am not against SSD.  They keep getting better.  They just have not reached the reliability of hard drives. I have run drives for over 9 years without a single failure.  No one has been able to show that an SSD will last 9 years running 24/7 in a server environment.  Matter of fact, in the last 9 years, I have never had a hard drive fail and I have a pretty fair number of them being used in pretty hostile conditions.  When SSD's are that good, then I will happily admit your are 100% correct.  Currently, I do not believe they have reached that level yet.

[Krusty]

How expensive are we talking here? In general?

Also, isn't there a major flaw where XP has to write swap files to the same drive that it was installed on? Wouldn't that negate putting all programs on a normal HD, because the swap file is constantly being written to, regardless of the program directory?

[Fulmar]

Well for non-Intell SSD.  The cheapest I've seen in the 2.5" form factor is $100 for 8gb.  32Gb runs about $150.  128gb runs about $400+

[Ghastly]

I wasn't aware of an exorbitantly high catastrophic failure rate.  The ones we used have worked well enough, although admittedly we aren't yet even close to the one year mark - let alone 10. 

And while hard drives have certainly gotten far more reliable than they once were in years past, we still regularly (several times a year, at best) see failures on every brand we have in use.  Admittedly, we see 2 to 4 times as many failures as we might otherwise because everything that can be goes in in a mirrored configuration at a minimum (unless we use RAID 5, which we mostly don't anymore).  What drives are you using that you see regularly last as long as 9 years without a failure - and how large is your install base? 

In short though, I think SSD's mostly disqualify themselves as general purpose devices at this time purely on a price/performance basis.  I can get a 1 TB drive (~ 150 or so) for less than a single 64 GB SSD (~ $250) - and if I need better than 1 disk performance I can put 4 of them on an Adaptec controller in a RAID 10 configuration (mirrored and striped pairs), get even better performance than an SSD for little more than the cost of 2 SSD's and get about 25 times the capacity - fully redundant.

SSD's - other than as a curiosity or where a hard disk won't tolerate vibration or acceleration - don't make sense.

<S>