SSDs - State of the Product?

Yeah, I just hope it will perform with more consistency than the Plextor M5 Pro which uses the same controller, otherwise it will be close to useless in a server.
 
The under $600 price is very competitive on a per GB basis to smaller drives. I'm also thinking SSDs may eventually align themselves both for performance and bulk storage markets, with the latter being much less expensive because absolute speed isn't a priority. Even if access times are 100 us instead of 10 us, that's still two orders of magnitude faster then mechanical drives, not to mention you also have lower power consumption, plus zero noise. What's interesting also is if we can make 1 TB SSDs in a 2.5" form factor, then we could probably make put 5 or 6 GB in a 3.5" form factor if only the market was there (and the flash chips were cheap enough).
 
jtr1962 said:
The under $600 price is very competitive on a per GB basis to smaller drives. I'm also thinking SSDs may eventually align themselves both for performance and bulk storage markets, with the latter being much less expensive because absolute speed isn't a priority. Even if access times are 100 us instead of 10 us, that's still two orders of magnitude faster then mechanical drives, not to mention you also have lower power consumption, plus zero noise. What's interesting also is if we can make 1 TB SSDs in a 2.5" form factor, then we could probably make put 5 or 6 GB in a 3.5" form factor if only the market was there (and the flash chips were cheap enough).
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8x the capacity should be easy.
 
Is there any news on the SSD front? I could really use a 1 TB so another drive can be switched around.
 
LunarMist said:
Is there any news on the SSD front? I could really use a 1 TB so another drive can be switched around.
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Nothing exciting from what I can see. Prices seem to have stopped dropping, at least for the time being. I'm patiently waiting until terabyte class SSDs hit the $100 mark but I suspect that won't be for a few years at least.
 
I've seen a few 500GB SSDs at $250 - $260 with rebates. Prices are moving for the higher capacity drives now. Surely that's a good sign.
 
Mercutio said:
I've seen a few 500GB SSDs at $250 - $260 with rebates. Prices are moving for the higher capacity drives now. Surely that's a good sign.
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I hope so. Cost is not really the issue, but I understand it drives the market capacity. I'll no longer have the 1TB drive requirement by the time the unit cost is $100 as JTR wants.
 
I just looked at the endurance. According to the spec sheet the total writes are 72TB regardless of capacity! Only could only fill the 960GB drive ~75 times and it would wear out. :(
That might last me a few months, but not worth the cost. Is that figure a mistake?
 
I looked at the spec sheet and it appears to be correct. That number is repeated several times and they even do an endurance calculation with it saying that that produces 40GB/day for 5 years. However, my calc. of 40GBx365x5 produces 73PB. PetaBytes endurance is a much more normal number for a large SSD.
 
P5-133XL said:
I looked at the spec sheet and it appears to be correct. That number is repeated several times and they even do an endurance calculation with it saying that that produces 40GB/day for 5 years. However, my calc. of 40GBx365x5 produces 73PB. PetaBytes endurance is a much more normal number for a large SSD.
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After the GB comes the TB. 40GBx365x5 gives 73,000...GB, so 73TB. 73PB would be 73,000,000GB. I've only seen enterprise-SSD be advertised with PB endurance.
 
No. I just wanted to make the calculation clearer instead of bluntly writing "YOU'RE WRONG", like Stereodude would have done. It wasn't meant to be an attack (and still isn't). Written communication often is a poor way to transmit intentions.
 
Well I'm not questioning the math, but the 40GB/day should be tied to a certain drive capacity unless the controller self destructs after a preprogrammed amount of writes. Of course it is a micron SSD. :lol:
I'd feel better with an Intel or a Samsung, but they have not announced anything yet. June 1 would be a good time to have a 1TB SSD, and August 20 is mandatory.
 
They seem to confuse GB and TB. Maybe the costs will drop eventually, but we will suffer if the demand is high now.
 
+100!

Expect the unexpected.

Most important, buy an infant seat well ahead of time, or they won't let you take your child home. I was working 9 days a week and kept promising my wife we'd do the last bit of shopping the last weekend we thought we had. Friday morning we visited the doc, and he assured us the wife would go full term and we still had about 8 days left. Wifey went into labor that night. The hospital demanded to see a "certified" infant seat in the car before they would discharge wife & kid. As luck would have it, most stores were out of it for some odd reason. I had to call around and drive 50 miles before I found one.

Most of the time, they come early, not late or on time.

Best Wishes!
 
I'm a bit concerned about the limitations of a 529. I suspect that standard university educations will be supplanted significantly in the next 20 years for many fields. Not sure where else to go and still keep some of those benefits, but my accountant is a very clever guy.
 
I just found out why my fresh Win7 pro x64 install (w/1 game 16.5GB) is 95GB...

pagefile.PNG

WTH is Windows doing setting up a page file that frekkin HUGE when I have 32 GB of physical ram? And the hibernation file too? I think Windows should know it's installing onto a SSD and be a little more frugal on using that expensive "disc" space. Or at least ask if you'd like a retardedly huge sized virtual memory file and hibernation file.

/rant off
 
I noticed that too when I first installed Win7. I immediately disabled hibernation and turned the page file off. Windows generally sets the page file to equal the amount of physical RAM. This may make sense on a machine with 2GB or 4GB, but not 16GB like I have. Assuming there's some esoteric reason why there needs to be a page file, when you have huge amounts of RAM Windows should just set to to 512 MB or 1 GB. Is anyone seriously ever going to actually hit the page file with 32GB of RAM? Unless I'm running VMs, I'm hard-pressed to use much over maybe 8GB.
 
If you have a desktop with an SSD, you NEED to have a traditional drive as well. Use it for backups, use it for your pagefile. Use it for hibernation. If you're using Windows 7 or anything *nix, put your home directory on it as well.
 
I disagree. The PC I'm typing this response on has no spinning disk.

However, my preferred home PC configuration includes a 2TB HDD to complement (and backup) the 250GB SSD. Rather than switch the entire user tree to the spinning disk, I just move the user libraries (Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos) and the Downloads directory.

Although I always disable hibernation and usually the swap file, I leave the hibernation file in place so that when the user runs out of space, I can immediately recover several gigabytes of SSD space.
 
The problem with not having a MHD is that SSDs die without any warning at all. One day they work and the next day they don't. In a managed environment with shared resources and such, that might not be a big deal, but for home users and typical laptop systems, that's a huge, huge problem. Windows 7+ has libraries now specifically to address the need to move or split special folders (why "Downloads" is not a library by default I have no idea. Particularly since they move the location of the option around with different versions of IE), and it does actually have a fairly robust backup tool now, but almost no one knows how to use that stuff. Many IT guys I know aren't even aware what libraries on Windows 7 are for, let alone end users.

Anyway, an SSD dies and there's just no recovery from that. So user data needs to be elsewhere. And that's the main reason why the magnetic drive needs to be there.
 
Mercutio said:
The problem with not having a MHD is that SSDs die without any warning at all. One day they work and the next day they don't. In a managed environment with shared resources and such, that might not be a big deal, but for home users and typical laptop systems, that's a huge, huge problem. Windows 7+ has libraries now specifically to address the need to move or split special folders (why "Downloads" is not a library by default I have no idea. Particularly since they move the location of the option around with different versions of IE), and it does actually have a fairly robust backup tool now, but almost no one knows how to use that stuff. Many IT guys I know aren't even aware what libraries on Windows 7 are for, let alone end users.

Anyway, an SSD dies and there's just no recovery from that. So user data needs to be elsewhere. And that's the main reason why the magnetic drive needs to be there.
Click to expand...


I don't recall having a MHD give warning before dieing. It just died and that was the end. I treat the risk the same between SSD and MHD. Nothing replaces proper backups so why create a complicated drive setup when it's always a matter of when a drive will die and not if it will die.
 
MHDs often have issues well before they finally shuffle off. SMART errors, changes in characteristic noises etc. All of those things are something more than nothing, which is the totality of what an SSD will do. I'm not arguing against backups or against SSDs. I just don't think they're an appropriate place for important user data that isn't being properly administered.
 
Mercutio said:
MHDs often have issues well before they finally shuffle off. SMART errors, changes in characteristic noises etc. All of those things are something more than nothing, which is the totality of what an SSD will do. I'm not arguing against backups or against SSDs. I just don't think they're an appropriate place for important user data that isn't being properly administered.
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I dunno man. I see so many drives fail and there weren't any warnings. My point was not that you were against backups or anything like that...I was just saying it's my personal opinion to not fuss with building an atypical Win7 config with respect to placing libraries, documents, etc onto a different drive. Just run it like normal and rely on the backups that you should be having regardless of SSD or MHD.
 
It's really not a big deal at all to add some folders to the standard libraries. It takes maybe a minute to add the standard four. I'd prefer to move the whole \Users directory structure, but THAT is a lot of work since Windows still doesn't do symlinks quite right for system directories.

It's not quite apropos to talk about here, but for machines that I care about, mine or other people's, I also create "Downloaded Photos" (vs. personal ones), "Downloads" and "Backups" as libraries.
 
jtr1962 said:
I noticed that too when I first installed Win7. I immediately disabled hibernation and turned the page file off. Windows generally sets the page file to equal the amount of physical RAM.
Click to expand...

I turned off hibernation and set the page file up on my MHD to a static size of 2048MB. Hopefully Windows won't rely on or use the page file, but for some goofy reason if it needs it, it'll be there.

Mercutio said:
If you have a desktop with an SSD, you NEED to have a traditional drive as well. Use it for backups, use it for your pagefile. Use it for hibernation. If you're using Windows 7 or anything *nix, put your home directory on it as well.
Click to expand...

Check. Check. Check. Turned hib off. I'm storing all my data on the MHD as well as a 1TB Samgsung external MHD and burning a few DVDs as needed. Plus I have my ancient Athlon XP machine I can dump stuff onto as well.

If the Windows backup tool under properties/tools/backup decent enough? I used that plus let it create/burn a bootable "system repair disc" as well.

Sorry for the off topic discussion.
 
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