Be Excellent To Each Other

And now I see stuff like this.



If 128Gb isn't too cripplingly small to put in my Macbook, I am going to be seriously, seriously tempted by this.

Hmmm.

I think my next next computer will have one of these.

They are still bleeding edge, and will be twice the size for half the price in 12 monthish I bet.

Very cool though.

Oh you swine, I'd tried not to think about SSDs, but now you've planted the seed of "want"...

The Toms Hardware review has most of the latest SSDs as being around as fast as each other... overview rating:


The main review is a little more in-depth.

God knows if they have the same SSD as you mention Doc but looking at this review the next gen will be affordable and 100% awesome and and and we can all afford to raid them together for an extra boost. Sick man!

My skinny reading around suggests they are all very similar internally. The Crucial unit is an OEM rebrand of, umm, I've forgotten the name of the company. I imagine all the other ones at the top of that chart are the same drive, internally.

I think, that's pretty much what they said. They all use the memory supplier like SAMSUNG or something and then decide how they put it together and what type of cache they want to keep costs down and stuff.

They do sound like amazingness in a box.

I'm currently using about 70Gb in my Macbook, so I could get a 128Gb one and have some headroom for growth -- although not a huge amount. Although not carrying tons of files around on a laptop is a good discipline to get into, I think.

Crucial are Micron, basically. Lexar Media are another brand name they use.

Yes, but not for the SSDs. http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1651&pageID=7399So Indilinx are the OEM I was thinking of.

Is the lifespan of these things decent enough now, with wear levelling?

Surely there's no real wear to speak of?

[edit]Durr, wear levelling

Yes, by a long way - they say you can rewrite every byte for like a bazillion years. Apparently the ones the dinosaurs used still work, or something.

Trouble is, with numbers like 300,000 floating around, and no actual concept of how many times I'm likely to write to sections on a hard drive, it's difficult for me to fathom how long these things would last with moderate use. I honestly have no idea whether 300,000 is a big or small number in this scenario.

Either way, it looks ace, but not something I'm going to rip a hole in my wallet for just yet.

I think I'll wait 18 months or so to let Moore's law take effect in the SSD market.

But I am dangerously impatient.

Not big enough and I suspect not reliable enough. I'll pass thanks.

Thanks for planting the seed of doubt. It's a good point - I think I'll wait until they're not only cheaper (and bigger) but have also been around a bit longer.

Solid Disk you say?

(clicky)

DK'Tronics used to sell a 256k Silicon Disc for the CPC. No idea how it worked as I never saw one in action.

They've totally solved reliability for these drives. The flash-based SSDs I load tested 18 months ago would sustain their full transaction speed (about 0.5 gb/sec I think) on a constant read-write cycle for a few thousand years before wearing out. That's almost infinitely more reliable than mechanical hard disks with spinning platters and tolerences measured in nanometres.

STOP IT!

It's true though. I used all the trappings of SCIENCE to determine this.

I believe you. That's the problem.

Really not convinced. They still have a finite amount of writes and capacity is a major issue. I'm not seeing the video community using them and until I do I won't be swayed.

Holy shit -- someone on the Crucial customer comments has made a RAID-0 of these bastards that shifts a sustained half-gig-per-second. I've never seen transfer rates like that outside of 6U of SAN array.

Who was it that was talking about the performance of these things, and that they could copy a DVD ISO from one drive to the other quicker than it would take the DVD to hit the ground if they threw it out their window while simultaneously pushing 'copy'?

That sounds like something I'd say, but it wasn't me.

Measured in the hyper-billions or something, though.


Certainly. You'd have your programs, "normal" documents and OS on a SSD, and store large files on a conventional hard drive.

Your large files would be your video files though, from Chinny's perspective, and they're the ones you're going to want on the SSD.

Probably not, actually. Chinny is probably happy with his transfer rates on his media at the moment -- as he doesn't run RAID (I think). Plus, SSDs are merely "very fast" at linear streams of data; they only achieve "fuck me fast" on lots of random read/writes. As happens on an OS boot drive.

Granted, but he'll still see performance benefits.

Presumably they do a sort of internal RAID across the chips anyway, to alleviate the write bottleneck. That'll be why the 256GB ones are quicker than 128GB ones* - more buses to scatter the data around.

*Imagining that it'll be cheaper to use half the number of chips than the same number of half-capacity ones. Economies of scale and progress, and that.

So am I, but £280 for 128gb is pretty manic.

Mind you, to be fair I do run a desktop so could get away with 36gb easy for a boot drive, 'cos I did with my Raptor (split it in half).

It does involve disabling Windows Restore, but that's about as much use as a chocolate fucking teapot any way.

I suspect you're right, Bik. That was the case on the ones I tested in work (which were made by... ummm.... Forgotten the vendor name.)

The wear levelling controller is a free RAID, essentially.

The 64Gb one is £160.

I had my (030) A600 booting off a 2MB PCMCIA memory card, which was actually battery-backed Sram. It literally booted in about 2 seconds.

I did some serious looking into this before the price ramp (after the credit crunch) because a 36gb crucial/OCZ was about £70.

Apparently yes, the read speeds are super awesome but the write speeds weren't up to par. Infact, a striped Raid array with a couple of fast SATA300 drives could pelt the SSDS.

Last time I looked Intel had gone back to the drawing board and designed their own controllers, improving write times ('cos everyone else was apparently using a Samsung unit that had it's flaws) and were selling SSDs for insane ammounts of cash.

That was about oo, 6 months ago? not been keeping an eye on it since. It seems the main thing it improves is your boot time. But once you're in doing general tasks they're not quite so revolutionary. Definitely not something I want until it becomes completely mainstream tbh. It's a big investment.

Which is still utterly insane for the improvements you get as a whole.

The last time storage drives cost that much per gb was about 8 years ago.

For £25 I just got a Barracuda 250gb SATA300 drive. Which, is apparently among the fastest there is (barring the enormous Samsungs). Striped it gives a very good performance.. I can't justify dropping £160 onto a 64gb device when I could get another 280 GTX and SLI. Madness

John, the SSD has mad dope colour-changing lighting on it though!

It's still too expensive dude. I mean, there's flash and there's too expensive. I don't have a problem distinguishing between the two thankfully

Alienware was actually very cheap for the spec I have and the quality/ammount of nice luxuries. SSD is a luxury for sure, but they can't be had on the sneaky cheap.

Trust me I have already tried

LOL completely forgot I had an Asus EEE which was SSD.

And, yes, boot times were phenomenal (Win2k in about 6 seconds) but performance in the OS didn't seem so good.

Different if it had an Alienware badge on it though?

Nah. The new Alienwares have an Alienware badge on them but I don't particularly find them very arousing (well, apart from the vents thing but it's stupid and pointless seeing as the other lower models don't have them and work fine with a mesh top).

Really bloody glad I got my AW when I did tbh. They're going to become super hard to get now (esp the older ALX chassis).

I do RAID, but only mirroring.

You need to see this graph again:


You were ranting on and on about your 10k Raptor drives, and here's a RAID-0 of them, being destroyed by the SSD. I'd consider this to be money much better spent on upgrades than stupidly high end graphics cards. YMMV of course.

Totally different tech. Only these most recent generation of SSDs have started to offer serious performance gains.

I saw it. But, it's selective and doesn't show the entire spectrum. Sure, it reads alarmingly fast which was what almost made me get one. Sadly when I spent the evening swotting on it you tend to find out that it's not quite as good as it seems, and then you are faced with the price.

I mean as an example I could post tests/benchmarks of my 280GTX seemingly slaughtering a 4890 1gb. However, if one was to dig deeper into it you come to find that there are also pitfalls to the 280GTX where the 4890 gives it a whacking.



But again that's one picture, one benchmark, set on read times. Not write times, transfer rates and so on. It really could well be that good as a broader picture. And, I should bloody well hope so for the price lol. You said those drives were £280 a pop.Sadly the test doesn't specify which Velociraptors, but let's assume they're the 150gb models. Those cost £105 a piece and are 25gb pre formatted bigger. Infact, I'm sure on the VR's they actually give the full formatted stated size. That's £210, less than the price of one of your SSDs. So price to performance? Well, the OCZ reads at 213.2 on that test, the VR's read at 122.9. You also get double the ammount of storage space on those striped VR's.

And, that's without the write times. As I say, not looked at it for 6 months, but I bet on write it doesn't perform anywhere near as well.



It was still very fast at reading. On boot you would never have guessed it was only a lowly Celeron in there.

I know you're talking about a laptop here, so hey, TBH that might be the only way you can get that level of performance. However, for the kinds of cash you can spend on those SSDs you then enter SAS 15,000 Cheetah territory. Which would be a whole different set of benchmarks.

Would definitely be interested to see the write times and more in depth bench marks though

Hnyarr. The Cheetah.

http://www.kikatek.com/product_info.php ... ce=froogle

£226 for 300gb.

180MB/s average.
Or ZOMG as it's technically called.

Someone who lies a lot?

Well if they're that good then hey, they're fast. Cheetahs deliver up to 160.