I don't think it's great value (yet) even though I seem to be part of a minority here. Yes, it will be cheaper in 1 year but then again everything is cheaper when it's just not top notch anymore. But I'm sorry I can't really join the 'Intel! Intel' chanting. Hell yeah, that speed is great! And woohoo I can load my games now 5-10 seconds faster! To me that's nice but spending 5-10 times the amount of money to get theoretical record speeds that end up in the above mentioned couple of seconds won... I know it's high-end and I know the higher the quality the lower the (performance/size) increase/£ but I am not willing to spend such an amount of money for that. Maybe I'm not geeky or gadget-enthusiastic enough but... nope, not for me, not now.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get my hands on 1 or 2 of those drives and have the world record performance. So if BT feels the need to get rid of those drives and nobody knows where to put them... I think I can make space in my case. ;) But paying for those? Thanks, but no.
I'd say in about 1-2 years they will take over the leaderboard for "high end" or gaming HDD's due to the stability I would also be less afraid of putting 2 of these in raid 0.
how come there has never been a drive that's a combination between volatile and standard? with the low price of RAM these days 1-2 gigs of DDR coupled to a normal HDD or SSD would offer huge performance gains by acting as a giant buffer. Realistically, for non server use more people don't read or write files larger than 2 gigs constanstly. An algorithm could be used to preload your most common files into half of the ram which gives you essentially instant on gaming or file editing. A very small intergrated battery would offload the data on power down or in case of powerfailure so there's no chance of loss due to powerfailure.
the only downfall is the added complexity and the fact that boot and large file read/writes would not be optimized. I remember hearing a while ago about a similar stratedgy for mobile disks which coupled a few gigs of flash memory to normal 2.5" drive. It saved power by writing to the flash until it was full then bulk dumping it to the HDD, so that it didn't ahve to spin up that much
metarinka, the drives you describe are hybrid hard drives. They have made a few, but they never really caught on; the last time I remember hearing about one was when Samsung released a 2.5" laptop drive with 256MB flash memory in addition to regular mechanical storage [I think it was 160GB].
I have a hybrid hard drive in my Sony SZ650 laptop I bought last year.
One of the main reasons I would buy a solid state drive for my PC that no one seems to have mentioned yet is the fact that they are completely silent. At the moment the noisiest thing in my case is my hard drives - I'd definitely pay a (reasonable) premium to have silent drives with the same performance. Although I think I may have to wait a while to replace my TB drive...
While SSD's are highly attractive for Notebooks, Desktop hdd's (and especially the velociraptors in a raid setup) are much faster than notebook harddrives and the speed difference to ssd's is much smaller on desktops.
But the price difference will certainly continue to shrink and ssd's will become the future.
Originally Posted by B1GBUD I'd like to see a comparison of 2 x 10k Raptor in RAID 0 (Striped), compaired with the SSD's
Me too - perhaps also with a couple of drives that add up to a similar cost as a SSD.
Arrayed disks seems like something that isn't beyond the technical knowledge of somebody who is considering a SSD.
As most reviews i see on the subject of SSDs, most of them don't consider the real world benefit of having a SSD for games.
Yes they are expensive and the MLC have no extreme benefit over normal HDs under normal windows use.
But they shine when it comes to games, because whit games its for 98% all about reads, and only some save's data that have low priority is written away the rest is all reads.
I got my self a X25-M and have to say games load a lot quicker then before, also games ware you have map loads during games are a lot smoother then before.
All in all, 600 euros was a lot of money, was it worth it, i don't know for me it was, but then i also have a car that go's in 5sec to 60, is it useful, no, but its nice to have.
The pricing of the SATA2 DDR2 HyperDrive5 doesn't look too bad. Does anyone have any experience of or know of any benchmarks for this kind of kit ?
Ooh, haven't seen those before.
I have to admit though; I am quite tempted. But at only 64Gb max ... well, I suppose for an OS only disk it would be cool. Yes, tempted. :D
ok, so the 2.5" SSDs can't match price and warranty of 3.5" desktop drives which can be raided, but how do they match in performance, price and warranty against 2.5" HDs?
I think people are forgetting the inherent stability with say running 2 raptors in raid compared to one SSD. I ran 2 35 gig raptors for about 2 years when they first came out and while the drives never died I did have the array get lost once, which required a reinstall of windows.
I think another year or so and this will be ready for primetime, also I think writes for a gamer and many other uses are not nearly as critical. you only install a game once and it's a long task on even the fastest of HDD's due to the decompression. BUt loading screens in the midst of a game can really ruin the action.
Several suggestions, collected from above and my own for improving this article and/or for future work.
2 x raid0 MLC SSD - same price as Intel MLC, would performance improve to match the Intel drive or not?
2 x raid0 traditional HDD - you mentioned in article, but does this really offer any performance advantage in real-world use?
Velociraptor versus older Raptor drive - I see your answer above, glad you will address this in future benchmarking.
Current generation SLC drives - priced like Intel MLC drive but use a different controller than the MLC drives, write issues or not?
As a general comment, I'm with several other people here. The Intel MLC gets us "there" in terms of performance - faster nearly across the board versus even the fastest traditional HDDs - but it's still ridiculously priced on a $/GB basis ($8/GB versus $0.70/GB for the 300GB VR). The JMicron controller removes the other MLC SSDs from serious consideration. But I believe within the next year, two at the most, these devices will be in very serious competition for general widespread use in desktops as prices fall and the issues are worked out.
Two final things. The new JMicron controller is supposed to be released sometime early 2009 and may bring the performance of the general MLC drives up to par on write speeds. Second, if you're interested in this article, there's an even more detailed write-up over at Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403). Has a lot more details concerning what's "inside" the hardware, design info, and more stuff on the poor MLC performance of most current drives.
Originally Posted by glaeken What's the expected lifetime of these drives? Has there been any long term tests of the 1st gen models? Erase-write cycles slowly degrade the memory over time. A quick wiki check tells me that nand flash memory can last for about 100K cycles. This doesn't seem like all that much if you have one of these drives as the main partition with the swap partition.
Use one of these as your main drive for Windows and some games.
And use a pair of mechanical drives, one for general file storage, and a small one for swap.
So, if I were planning to buy an SSD for my xmas for my new laptop, what should I get?
Are they all plagued by this wierd read patterns due to all having the same controller chip?
If so, is it just better to aim for the best GB/£ ratio?
Advice please?
Links to reviews also appreciated. :)
Comments 26 to 42 of 42
ReplyDon't get me wrong, I'd love to get my hands on 1 or 2 of those drives and have the world record performance. So if BT feels the need to get rid of those drives and nobody knows where to put them... I think I can make space in my case. ;) But paying for those? Thanks, but no.
how come there has never been a drive that's a combination between volatile and standard? with the low price of RAM these days 1-2 gigs of DDR coupled to a normal HDD or SSD would offer huge performance gains by acting as a giant buffer. Realistically, for non server use more people don't read or write files larger than 2 gigs constanstly. An algorithm could be used to preload your most common files into half of the ram which gives you essentially instant on gaming or file editing. A very small intergrated battery would offload the data on power down or in case of powerfailure so there's no chance of loss due to powerfailure.
the only downfall is the added complexity and the fact that boot and large file read/writes would not be optimized. I remember hearing a while ago about a similar stratedgy for mobile disks which coupled a few gigs of flash memory to normal 2.5" drive. It saved power by writing to the flash until it was full then bulk dumping it to the HDD, so that it didn't ahve to spin up that much
One of the main reasons I would buy a solid state drive for my PC that no one seems to have mentioned yet is the fact that they are completely silent. At the moment the noisiest thing in my case is my hard drives - I'd definitely pay a (reasonable) premium to have silent drives with the same performance. Although I think I may have to wait a while to replace my TB drive...
But the price difference will certainly continue to shrink and ssd's will become the future.
Me too - perhaps also with a couple of drives that add up to a similar cost as a SSD.
Arrayed disks seems like something that isn't beyond the technical knowledge of somebody who is considering a SSD.
Yes they are expensive and the MLC have no extreme benefit over normal HDs under normal windows use.
But they shine when it comes to games, because whit games its for 98% all about reads, and only some save's data that have low priority is written away the rest is all reads.
I got my self a X25-M and have to say games load a lot quicker then before, also games ware you have map loads during games are a lot smoother then before.
All in all, 600 euros was a lot of money, was it worth it, i don't know for me it was, but then i also have a car that go's in 5sec to 60, is it useful, no, but its nice to have.
Ooh, haven't seen those before.
I have to admit though; I am quite tempted. But at only 64Gb max ... well, I suppose for an OS only disk it would be cool. Yes, tempted. :D
What enables the price is the custom designed ASIC and it does look like you can put these things into arrays.
http://www.acard.com.tw/english/newstabpop.jsp?idno=86
I think another year or so and this will be ready for primetime, also I think writes for a gamer and many other uses are not nearly as critical. you only install a game once and it's a long task on even the fastest of HDD's due to the decompression. BUt loading screens in the midst of a game can really ruin the action.
2 x raid0 MLC SSD - same price as Intel MLC, would performance improve to match the Intel drive or not?
2 x raid0 traditional HDD - you mentioned in article, but does this really offer any performance advantage in real-world use?
Velociraptor versus older Raptor drive - I see your answer above, glad you will address this in future benchmarking.
Current generation SLC drives - priced like Intel MLC drive but use a different controller than the MLC drives, write issues or not?
As a general comment, I'm with several other people here. The Intel MLC gets us "there" in terms of performance - faster nearly across the board versus even the fastest traditional HDDs - but it's still ridiculously priced on a $/GB basis ($8/GB versus $0.70/GB for the 300GB VR). The JMicron controller removes the other MLC SSDs from serious consideration. But I believe within the next year, two at the most, these devices will be in very serious competition for general widespread use in desktops as prices fall and the issues are worked out.
Two final things. The new JMicron controller is supposed to be released sometime early 2009 and may bring the performance of the general MLC drives up to par on write speeds. Second, if you're interested in this article, there's an even more detailed write-up over at Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403). Has a lot more details concerning what's "inside" the hardware, design info, and more stuff on the poor MLC performance of most current drives.
Use one of these as your main drive for Windows and some games.
And use a pair of mechanical drives, one for general file storage, and a small one for swap.
Are they all plagued by this wierd read patterns due to all having the same controller chip?
If so, is it just better to aim for the best GB/£ ratio?
Advice please?
Links to reviews also appreciated. :)
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