Anyone running SSD's yet?

[Per Hansson]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I have no confidence that their controller can actually do lossless compression [of every kind of file] to factor of 10 to 20:1 at 100-200Mb/s
- which is basically what they are claiming.
.
They can claim it all they want - that doesn't make it true.
.
The processor on your MOTHERBOARD would probably have trouble achieving that.
.
[Unlike some of you what I'm smoking is perfectly legal.]
.

If the data can't be compressed (i.e. it already is compressed) then the Sandforce technology will not be any faster than a normal SSD.
That is reflected in the performance charts.
If you write compressible data to it, like a Windows installation.
Then it can achieve ca 550MB/sec sequential transfer speeds
But if you write JPG, h/x264 movies or other data which is impossible to compress.
Then the sequential transfer speed drops to that of normal SSD's.
That is around 200>300MB/sec

Oh, and note that only ONE SSD controller uses this tech, the Sandforce one.
And a small percentage DO have problems with random BSOD, other users have no problems.
They are very fast but I would not recommend them.
However incidentally Intel did release a SSD based on the Sandforce controller just weeks ago.
So probably they have worked most kinks out.
As it is OCZ did also release a firmware update that curbed most of those BSOD issues a few months ago (but not all)

But the other "normal" SSD's that uses Intel's own in-house controller, the Samsung controller or Marvell.
They don't use this technology with data compression at all.
And they are very very reliable.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

OMG, My Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 300GB 15K RPM drive connected to a LSI 8704ELP SAS RAID controller with 128MB cache gets slower the more I write too it.
Obviously mechanical HDD's sucks!!!



PCBONEZ; Incase this is before your morning coffee the above was meant as sarcasm.
And as I can't be bothered to write a whole book on how SSD's work again why don't you read that entire article over at Anandtech that you linked?
It's an absolutely incredible resource on SSD technology.
It's actually an anthology series and is a fantastic read for anyone interested in how SSD's really work...

Here are some numbers from two SSD's
The first is from my parents HTPC, it uses WinXP and thus does not have TRIM support.
It is a Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB SSD that is now 2 years and 2 months old.
It is connected to a Epox 8RDA3+ mainboard with a Silicon Image 3112 1.5Gbps SATA controller...


Note the yellow "access time" graph?
No?
It's because it's below 0.1ms so it can't be plotted, it's just a flat line!

Next up is my friends Intel X25-M G2 80GB SSD, it sits in his laptop which runs Win7 x64.
It's nVidia GPU failed so these numbers are with it connected to my own system with a 3.0Gbps ICH9R controller, using Windows AHCI drivers.


Note the yellow "access time" graph?
No?
It's because it's below 0.1ms so it can't be plotted, it's just a flat line!

Here is a Intel Solid State Drive Toolbox picture from it:



He uses it for everything, including saving x264 movies to it that are 4>8GB in size and watching those on his TV.
Since the laptop has HDMI (Well he did untill the nVidia GPU failed anyway)
Yup only 1.01TB host writes (E1). It actually increased to this from 920GB today.
Because I used "Intel Solid State Drive Toolbox" to run a "full diagnostics scan" to it which writes to all cells, no problems reported...

Since E4/60=2522 hours (same as "09") the counters have never been reset for the life of this drive.
Thus for the life of his drive it has been used to E2/1024 = 0.596%

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

@ Per Hansson: your screenshots show why I've linked to a newer (allthough already outdated) Pro version of HDTune, which has a seperate access time benchmark just like in this screenshot I posted earlier
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1330196689

That one only shows the access time and the speed at the given chunk size in a table, rather than having the access time indistinguishable at the bottom of the graph because it's getting dwarfed by the linear read speed graph.

Oh and as for the on-the-fly compression of the Sandforce (and only those!) controllers:
Imagine it as a little SoC hardware device in between the SATA controller and the SSD cells that does an on-the-fly ZIP compression on all the data to be written. It doesn't need much grunt to do at least some lossless compression. I'm willing to bet most SSD controllers are ARM based, even if they don't say it.
In fact, Samsung and Indilinx controllers openly show just that, as can be seen here (Samsung 830 Series) and here (OCZ Vertex series)

The compression can be very efficient for some kinds of data (uncompressed audio, like wav, big text files, etc.), boosting the read/write speeds to ridiculously high numbers, but at the same time it's almost completely useless for already compressed (like mp3, mp4, jpg, rar, zip, etc.) or incompressible (random) data

PS: I personally haven't had more problems with HDDs incorporating perpendicular recording than with those without it.

From my experience, new HDDs usually either fail within the first month in some way (bad sectors for example.. either after some use or out of the box), or they keep working for years without a problem if adequately cooled.
Only exception would be WD Green series drives where the head parking crap hasn't been turned off with the WDIDLE3 utility. Those usually only have a year or so to live before things go horribly wrong..

[tom66]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I've got two OCZ SATA II 120 GB SSDs... They get around 250 MB/s in raid 0 but are currently unused as they are sitting in the incomplete games computer which has had it's graphics card plundered for the HTPC.

I got them from my brother who upgraded to 6 x 64 GB Crucial SSDs.

He now gets around 1 GB/s read yet his computer takes longer to boot Windows 7 than Ubuntu on my Thinkpad X201... which was also his old work laptop. I've kind of figured out he's a bit of tech junkie but I don't mind because I get loads of free stuff which is only a year or so old. Having spent about £8,000 on his last computer (yes he is a well paid IT consultant) I'm sticking around for a spare GTX260 or three.

And yes they fast... but not really worth it. I'd be disappointed after spending £300 on them...

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

@tom: SSDs recently took quite a nosedive (cost-wise)..
Depending on the size, they can now be had for roughly 1eur/GB (less than 1gbp/GB)
Anything above 120GB still isn't really worth it though (IMHO).

Example price comparison for 60-120GB drives:

Sorted by price alone:
http://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hdssd&bp..._131072&sort=p

Sorted by price per GB:
http://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hdssd&bp..._131072&sort=r

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Having read through everything so far, I believe that there may be long term issues with these drives. However, I don't see reason to think that they are unusable for their intended purpose. There have been examples posted on here of successful use of SSD's. I've seen every component in a computer fail over the years, in various ways. I see nothing other than buggy firmware that could make a modern SSD inherently more or less reliable than a normal hard drive. It's just different modes of failure.

As such, I've decided to jump in and try one. What are everyone's thoughts on this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226236

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

It's a Sandforce based SSD, so it should do fine as long as the first thing you do is update the (quite massive) firmware.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I see nothing other than buggy firmware that could make a modern SSD inherently more or less reliable than a normal hard drive. It's just different modes of failure.

Exactly my thoughts, I wrote this in my previous wall of text on SSD's:

Now finally, to those of you that say that SSD's are unreliable I must ask you this, are not mechanical hard drives unreliable too?
I mean even if you have a mechanical hard drive you must do backups lest you are a fool, so would you rather have piss poor performance* and poor reliability or great performance* and poor reliability?
*For source please scroll up to my previous post

As such, I've decided to jump in and try one. What are everyone's thoughts on this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226236

It's a very nice drive, as Scenic said make sure it has the latest firmware.
The Sandforce drives also does very well even without TRIM support, but of course if your system has it it just makes things even better

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Ok I ordered one. I'll see how it does. My plan is to install Windows 7 and Fedora 16 to it, then use the 3TB Seagate for mass data storage.

Is 120GB going to be enough, or would I be better off getting another one so that I have one for each OS? Another $150 is a lot to spend for what I consider to be an experiment at this time, but if it will help that much I'll do it.

Thanks to all who commented. Per, yes, I saw your comment. That's what I based my thoughts on. I also respect Pcbonez opinion. I believe, however, that the manufacturers have mostly worked around the issues he outlines. Time will tell.

Oh, and I already have the new firmware downloaded. I had a doctors appointment where they have free high speed wi-fi. I just downloaded it to my netbook in the waiting room. So as soon as the drive arrives, the firmware gets updated.

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

As long as you don't fill the (well.. actually any) SSD up to the brim it shouldn't be a problem at all.

Then again.. you shouldn't do that with a HDD either.. lol

the awkward moment when an error pops up during a long youtube session telling you about the HDD being full.. 0 byte free of 100GB *oops*
damn browser cache..

[KeriJane]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I've been running an Intel X25 40gb drive in an older C2Duo Mac Mini for quite a long time now.
I don't have any benchmarks for you but it starts up really fast, even for a Mac and system updates go very quickly - like downloading, downloading...... then Pow! done.

The system is generally nice and "snappy" on OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard" even though this particular Mini was originally built for OSX 10.4 "Tiger", which would probably be ridiculously fast.

I haven't yet tried any of the SSD tuning tips. I'm going to enable Apple's built-in TRIM support though. Maybe I'll see if it's capable of running 10.7 first.

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

This should be able to display the raw SMART values (unlike OSX's own Disk Utility, which is so dumbed down it can basically only say "OK" or "Failed")

http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

Some of the SMART values should reveal interesting details, like total host writes or the like.
If you go by the ID's of this screenshot it should give you an idea of what means what (at least roughly)
The "raw" values are usually the most useful

There doesn't seem to be ANY SSD health tool for OSX out there. Heck.. even finding a tool capable of showing the raw SMART attributes instead of just "OK/Failed" was pretty hard..

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Well I went ahead and got one. It's the Mushkin Chronos 120GB that I linked earlier.

I went ahead and upgraded to Fedora 16 at the same time, also doing some tweaks to minimize writes to the SSD. Basically this consisted of moving /tmp and /var/log to a temporary ram filesystem, and the browser cache off to the mechanical hard drive. The bulk of my data is on the mechanical hard drive too. It did take some creative use of symbolic links to make it the way I wanted it though.

I just went ahead and made Fedora 16 the only OS on the SSD. I just don't use Windows enough to justify having it on the SSD.

I can tell you though, this thing is fast. I'm getting around 528MB/s average read speed, with an average access time of 0.2ms. Max read speed is 552.3MB/s, with a minimum of 204.8MB/s. I think the minimum is due to the fact that the OS is running on it at the time of the benchmark. It's around 550 for most of the graph with a few dips. You can imagine what that does to OS boot times and program load times.

So far I'm happy.

[shovenose]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I'm getting a Kingston 64GB is that a good choice?

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Which one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...hnology%20Corp.

[mariushm]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Tom's Hardware did a test of 10 60 GB SSD Drives, most Sandforce based but also Crucial M4 and Samsung 830:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...view,3137.html

Pretty good read, especially the part about read speeds where Sandforce controller encounters data that can't be compressed.

While a tad slower, the Samsung 830 and the Crucial M4 have much higher and constant speed in time compared to Sandforce based drives.

At 105$, I really don't see why you'd want to pick something else: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148441

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

You're right about the Sandforce and incompressible data.

However, if he were able to save up just a little more cash, he could get the same 120GB drive that I got, get all around faster speeds, and have lower cost per GB.

[Drack]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Man... You really need popcorns when you are reading this kind of posts lol.

[Topcat]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Man... You really need popcorns when you are reading this kind of posts lol.

especially to wake up a 6yr old thread!

[Drack]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Sorry been really bored lately and reading old threads is entertaining