The hows and whys of SSDs

ThraxThrax 🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
edited December 2010 in Science & Tech
Solid State Disks are poised blow the doors off of traditional storage media. As the inevitable end-game of the great bet on flash memory, they are coming in strengthening numbers to obliterate benchmarks, make or break companies, and free-fall in price. The revolution this nascent market is set to unleash will leave few questions as it makes a staggering rise to preeminence.


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Comments

  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    edited September 2008
    Exceptional article as always, Thrax. Excellent coverage and breadth.
  • BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of Propaganda OKC Icrontian
    edited September 2008
    The width and girth of this treatise are exorbitant!
  • WinfreyWinfrey waddafuh Missouri Icrontian
    edited September 2008
    These drives can really help out laptop performance IMO. Laptops have those really slow rotational speeds (usually 5400RPM) which cuts into performance more than you would think, especially high end ones.
  • ZuntarZuntar North Carolina Icrontian
    edited September 2008
    SSD have a long way to go before I'll even consider one.
  • Mario
    edited November 2008
    Recently, I started seriously looking at getting a solid state drive (SSD) as my primary boot drive. After careful consideration, I have concluded that they still are not ready for prime time from the enthusiast gamer's point of view. The two biggest deterrent factors are the cost of SSD's and their life expectancy. As of today, an Intel X25-M SATA Solid-State Drive costs $US595 in quantities of 1000. Another very disturbing issue is the fact that regular defragmentation of a solid state drive would dramatically decrease it's life expectancy. As it stands, the earliest I see myself having an SSD is sometime around 2010.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    Fragmentation is not an issue. SSDs intentionally fragment files across the drive in a process called "wear leveling." Wear leveling assures that no one flash cell gets more work than others, thereby extending the life of the drive. If a file were stored in 100,000 places or in one contiguous block, an SSD would be able to load that file at the same speed.

    Defragmentation is a cheap hack to sweep the performance limitations of mechanical drives under the rug. Defragging exists because there are performance penalties if the mechanical drive head needs to see files all over the disk.

    Secondly, the longevity (MTBF) of the newest generation of Intel SSDs is as long or longer than traditional drives. Reliability has reached parity, it's not really a concern any more.

    I do, however, agree that the price needs to come down.
  • james braselton
    edited February 2009
    HI THERE I KNOW WHY FLASH IS BETTER THEN A HARD DRIVE I STILL HAVE A FULLY WORKING COMADORE 64 I BET NO ONE ELSE HAS A COMADORE 64 AND GAMES FOR IT AND A BAUD 2400 MODEM OPTINAL AT THAT TIME SO 64 KB KILOBYETS VERSES A 64 GB SOLID STATE FLASH DRIVE USEING FLASH CHIPS
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited February 2009
    Actually our friend Tim is looking for Commodore 64 stuff. I think you guys would get along well.
  • Celcho
    edited March 2009
    Thrax, you should be a research analyst on wall street... A shame there barely is one anymore. Excellent work, though, as always.
  • pigflipperpigflipper The Forgotten Coast Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    Hey Ryan, forget your log in password?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    Sup, Celcho! :D
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    Celcho! :D
  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    Bump for an awesome article!!!
  • David
    edited April 2009
    What is 100GiB?

    The article states you could write 100GiB per day for 5 years before approaching failure.
  • BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of Propaganda OKC Icrontian
    edited April 2009
    Hi David. Here ya go:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited April 2009
    The article links to this wikipedia entry on one of the pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiB

    Basically, the SI units kilo-, mega-, giga- all refer to powers of 1000. The word "gigabyte" suggests that it's composed of 1000 megabytes. But that's not how storage works, because storage is ACTUALLY based on powers of 1024. A gigabyte is ACTUALLY 1024 megabytes.

    I wanted to be very clear about how much data the drive can write.

    8 bits = 1 byte
    1024 bytes = 1 kibibyte (1KiB)
    1024 kibibytes = 1 mibibyte (1MiB)
    1024 mibibytes = 1 gibibyte (1GiB)

    This discrepancy is why a "250GB" hard drive (Which you would think is 250,000 megabytes) is actually 244,000 mibibytes, because the computer judges values in powers of 1024. So 250,000/1024 = 244,000.

    It's confusing and stupid.
  • rexrivera
    edited February 2010
    dude, you'r the man! hands down..!
  • zew
    edited May 2010
    Is there an explanation on why erase can only be done on the whole block? And why can't a page be overwritten?
  • DWatt
    edited November 2010
    So in practical terms, what does "partition alignment" really mean, its a comcept that is getting a lot of play on the SSD forums - is it necessary to get best performance from an SSD. Seems like not way to ensure that you have partition alignment in XP. Can you clone a previous OS partition to an SSD in windows XP and get good performance. What about ideal cluster size?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2010
    Aligning partitions is a complicated process on Windows XP, but it's absolutely essential to get good performance. Of course, XP doesn't support the ATA TRIM command, so SSD performance on XP is pretty much doomed to decay unless the mfgr offers a garbage collection program.

    Windows 7 is easily the best OS for SSDs at this time.

    Cluster size should match the block size of the drive, usually 512k or 1MB.
  • jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
    edited December 2010
    It appears that I've added to my already software challanged self by winning a 32GB SSD frin Zalman (who know who really builds them!! :rolleyes2) the SSD0032S1 (http://www.zalman.com/ENG/product/Product_view.asp?idx=421).

    So from what I've just read here if I plan to jump from XP to Win7 now is the time if I plan to use this thing? So if using as my primary is 32GB enough room for "everything"......meaning OS, apps, etc?

    Figures, as I have a 300GB V'Raptor that was supposed to be my primary in the build.........;D
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2010
    There's nothing that goes on C: that can't be installed or moved somewhere else: swap file, My Documents, the temp directory, applications, etc. 20GB is perfectly sufficient for Windows 7.
  • GargGarg Purveyor of Lincoln Nightmares Icrontian
    edited December 2010
    Thrax wrote:
    There's nothing that goes on C: that can't be installed or moved somewhere else: swap file, My Documents, the temp directory, applications, etc. 20GB is perfectly sufficient for Windows 7.

    I ran into issues with a 20GB partition for Win 7 x64 on my laptop, and eventually had to expand it. I'm not sure what I could have overlooked, but I moved everything I could think of (and all of the things listed above). My 4GB hibernate file was stuck on C, as far as I could tell.

    I finally expanded the partition into a neighboring partition I had been using for Linux when I realized that Visual Studio insists on being installed onto the C drive, and I didn't have enough room left for it. Programming software made by programmers can't be run from the D drive, for reasons I won't ever understand.

    At any rate, 32GB should be enough. 20 was just cutting it close after Windows kept accumulating bloat/updates.
  • jedihobbitjedihobbit Central Virginia, USA New
    edited December 2010
    Thrax wrote:
    There's nothing that goes on C: that can't be installed or moved somewhere else: swap file, My Documents, the temp directory, applications, etc. 20GB is perfectly sufficient for Windows 7.

    Another noob question(s)

    1. If the SSD is C: should I use the V'Rator for the misc stuff as the 2 x 1TBs are for mirror??

    2. OR??
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2010
    Gargoyle wrote:
    I ran into issues with a 20GB partition for Win 7 x64 on my laptop, and eventually had to expand it. I'm not sure what I could have overlooked, but I moved everything I could think of (and all of the things listed above). My 4GB hibernate file was stuck on C, as far as I could tell.

    I finally expanded the partition into a neighboring partition I had been using for Linux when I realized that Visual Studio insists on being installed onto the C drive, and I didn't have enough room left for it. Programming software made by programmers can't be run from the D drive, for reasons I won't ever understand.

    At any rate, 32GB should be enough. 20 was just cutting it close after Windows kept accumulating bloat/updates.

    Hibernate:
    open administrative command prompt and issue this command: powercfg -h off

    I have otherwise been able to dodge bloat since I installed this copy of Windows 7 in March.

    idmhWu.png
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2010
    jedihobbit wrote:
    Another noob question(s)

    1. If the SSD is C: should I use the V'Rator for the misc stuff as the 2 x 1TBs are for mirror??

    2. OR??

    Yes, use the raptor for mass storage, and applications you don't need super speedy loading on.
  • RichDRichD Essex, UK
    edited December 2010
    I think I kind of got the jist of the article although I have to confess some of the more complex technical stuff did loose me.

    Is there a market for a hybrid drive which has a small amount of traditional drive storage thatcan be used to store small files and then a larger SSD for storing the large data files? I guess you would need to have a clever controller that looks at the file sizes and distributes accordingly? You would also need to have some sort of study into the total file size for small files and the total file size for large files so that you can gauge the ratio of traditional storage vs SSD.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2010
    Hybrid HDDs were attempted in 2007 with the release of Windows Vista, but they flopped spectacularly. There's some technical merit for it (Seagate Momentus XT), but it's unlikely to ever hit the desktop.
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited December 2010
    RichD:

    We were just talking about Seagate Momentus XT drives the other day. It's an interesting technology.
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