Solid-State Disk Drives - Sandforce Controller
 

I recently got a Kingston SSD for my desktop system, running Fedora 13. It flies. But a new controller is out, from a company called Sandforce.

These are a new breed. Same prices as those with older controllers, but amazing speeds.

285/270GB/s sequential read/write. But more amazing is 50K IOPS writing random 4K (aligned) bytes. That's 200M/second for random writes. Very amazing. My current SSDD is under 40 for that test.

The prices keep coming down. 120G are now about $200. That's just a bit more than I paid for the 64G Kingston just six months or so ago.

Anybody else getting on the SSDD bandwagon? Pretty neat to see your computer boot in 10 seconds, instead of well over a minute. Application starts are also blindingly fast.

If I am not mistaken, a outfit named Intel was the first to introduce solid state drives.

Intel was an early player. Might be the first, I didn't look. I think the Kingston has an Intel controller, but frankly, I don't know or really care. That thing is now slow by current standards (6 months old, after all) but is still very, very fast. It is faster than advertised for continuous reads or writes. It made my machine noticeably faster, and it's already very powerful with Core i7 CPU and 8G of RAM.

I'm probably going to get a new SSDD for Fedora 14 when it comes out 10 days from now, and it will probably be with a Sandforce controller. OCZ Vertex 2 is one example.

someone told me that if a solid state drive fails, all data is gone FOREVER. in which case, a solid back up plan is necessary when using solid state drives.

When I can buy a 500GB laptop drive for a reasonable price, I will probably get one.

Good backups are necessary for any type of drive.

I can't justify the added bucks for a SSD, although when I think what I paid to UPGRADE to a 212 meg HD about 20 years ago.

Many of the reports I have read don't really put them that much faster than a good 7200 SATA. Several comparisons have shown how after time the wear leveling software / alogrythm will begin to slow down the drive.

And can you really notice the speed difference.
Like defragging, with the older drives you could notice the difference, with todays high speed drives can you 'really' notice a difference.

I don't really worry about the wear issue, I don't see most home users every coming close.

But the prices are high compared to regular HDs when comparing size.

Although I got a 500 gig hd (7200 Sata) with this laptop, with the recovery partition, tons of stuff stored here just to store it here and I still have 350+ gig free.
They keep coming out with bigger and bigger drives, I think we are aproaching the point of too much storage.
Much like CPUs, do people realize that Windows, Mac AND Linux don't make good use of multiple CPUs. Particularly past 2 or 3 AND very little software multi-threads to take advantage of multi cores.

One reason that I may eventually put one in my MacBook Pro is the lower power requirement, resulting in longer battery life and less heat. Depending on price, I may end up replacing the entire computer before the drive.

With a platter, data recovery may be possible on a failed drive. But since this costs several thousand dollars, it is really not an option for most people. Backups are cheaper.

Any disk will eventually fail, so all data must be redundant.

SSD's are an order of magnitude faster than rotating disks for non-sequential access, and that's what matters most. If you install one, you will see.

Two years ago, they were not very impressive. But SSDs are evolving fast. In six months, mine is still usable, but much slower than the newest offerings. Slower by a factor of 5 for non-sequential writes. But it's still five times faster than your Velociraptor.

I have a 64G disk as my boot drive now. My data resides on other disks, which I insert when the need arises. One 1T 7200rpm disk contains my home directories for Fedora, which is there with the 64G SSD. Others come and go as needed.

A good 7200 RPM SATA disk is pretty fast, but mine will only take about 117MB/sec in a sequential write. The SSD does over 200, and it's not even the latest technology.

Prices are high, but it's not bad if you only need one in a system. I could have saved more money by going AMD instead of Core i7. Or by not having external bays for my disks. Or by not having a liquid cooler on the CPU. Or by not buying the best acoustically-insulated case that I could find. You make your choices, and you get the performance that you pay for.

The new Seagate Hybrid drives are very interesting.
They claim SSD performance and high capacity at low cost.

Rob

These may be promising, because they "automatically" determine what should be in flash, v. on the platter.

But the price doesn't bear this out:

Two 500G's cost more than one 1T 7200 RPM drive plus one 128G flash. The two 500G's will contain a total of only 8G of flash. That's assuming that they sell for full price, which of course won't be true for long. But SSDs are coming down in price very quickly.

For a 2.5" disk they are not expensive.

Rob

I was thinking that they were 3.5". Yes, that does make them sound more attractive. I'm sure that they'll be out in 3.5" for less money.

It would be even better if the OS would do the job of splitting the storage between platters and flash. But that would require a major shift in storage technology, as it is implemented in current OS kernels.