SSDs - State of the Product?

[LunarMist]

Greg is like a nervous soldier : post first, read later.

:rofl:

 

[Santilli]

X-25E was FAR too expensive. What's the warranty on the X-25M? 5 years. Considering
the cost, I might well be dead before the drive wears out.
If one breaks, I've kind of learned my lesson that even though you get huge through put,
there is a point where bench marks are the only thing that can tell. Seems most programs can't use enough of the components I already have, so why go faster?

It is sad that it's looking kind of bleak for decent SSD's at all.

 

[LunarMist]

When will it be safe to buy the new SandyForce-based drives? Prices are quite reasonable. I had a few in the Cart momentarily but then I rebooted.

 

[time]

Premature acquisition?

 

[LunarMist]

How long should I wait - June 16?

 

[time]

Is that your birthday?

 

[LunarMist]

No. It's the next opportunity after May 4.

 

[sechs]

When will the new Micron drives be available?

If anything, that should help to drive down prices.

 

[LunarMist]

When will the new Micron drives be available?

If anything, that should help to drive down prices.

You can buy the Crucial M4 now.

 

[time]

I have more faith in the Micron Crucial products than I do in the Intel alternatives.

 

[LunarMist]

Crucial/Micron SSDs had firmware too.

 

[CougTek]

They all have firmware. But it's true that Crucial's SSD had several firmware issues.

 

[LunarMist]

Yeah, that is what I meant. I'm not sure if the M4/C400 is really fast enough to be worth the price, given that the 256GB size is needed for the full write speeds.

 

[time]

It's not a problem specific to Crucial, remember that Intel had a similar situation crop up in its early X25-M days.

And there sure as hell have been Sandforce firmware issues.

I'm talking about things like the same chips coming out of Micron and Intel's joint venture, and Micron saying they're good for 3,000 erase cycles but Intel pulling a higher number out of their ass.

And a more conservative approach to the balance between speed and longevity - see what Mercutio's contact implied.

And the clearly greater emphasis on all-round performance rather than shooting for high sequential benchmark results at the expense of everything else.

I prefer a company that acknowledges problems and fixes them over one that ignores them and/or tries to spin their way out.

 

[time]

I'm not sure if the M4/C400 is really fast enough to be worth the price, given that the 256GB size is needed for the full write speeds.

That's the same for all SSDs. The effects are more obvious with higher throughputs and without the distortion of compressing files of zeroes.

 

[Stereodude]

No. It's the next opportunity after May 4.

Waiting for all the details about the Star Wars Blu-Ray's? ;-)

 

[LunarMist]

Waiting for all the details about the Star Wars Blu-Ray's? ;-)

Nope. I saw the first one a few times in the 70s and about the first 10 minutes of the second one perhaps in the early 80s. :tdown: After that I avoided the 3rd one and the three modern remakes like the plague.

 

[sechs]

As I've said before, the M4 is more evolutionary than revolutionary. I believe that the controller is little changed from the C300.

 

[LunarMist]

I'm not convinced it would be that much better than the ancient X25-E I have now.

 

[sechs]

Then don't upgrade.

 

[LunarMist]

You mean I should buy a new X25-E as the replacement?

 

[time]

Why don't you give the money to me instead? You would still see the same benefit while I would be wearing a big smile on my face. Win - win.

 

[Mercutio]

To answer a question that absolutely no one here was asking: the Seagate Momentus XL is a speed boost over a standard desktop drive but the value doesn't seem to be linear with the cost.

I found an excuse to expense a couple of them and stuck them into my desktop at work and the Thinkpad T61 I use work stuff. I've been using them for almost two weeks now. Both those machines previously had 500GB, 7200rpm drives is them.

On my desktop, the only place I really notice subjective differences is in starting MS Access and Paint.net, programs that I actually shut down occasionally. A quick stopwatch test says that machine starts up an inconsistent few seconds faster (between eight and 14 seconds versus a baseline of 1:05 from black screen to login prompt) but if other stuff I do (mostly web browsing and making graphics heavy documents with word processors) is actually any faster I can't tell.

The difference is subjectively noticeable, but only just. I think the difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm makes is subjectively more important, especially in notebook-land.

Supposedly, after the drive has been used a while, it gets tuned for your usage pattern and maybe I just haven't used the drives long enough, but it's tough to say that it's worth double the price over a regular 2.5" 500GB drive to get a PC that starts or wakes up 10 or 15% faster.

On my notebook I note that my battery does not last any longer when compared to the 7200rpm, 500GB Seagate drive that had been in there. The hybrid drive is subjectively quieter though.

At the risk of stating conclusions we came to when the product was announced, these drives are pretty unimpressive, but since I didn't actually have to pay for them I'm not complaining.

 

[Will Rickards]

I was looking at those but the newegg reviews made me second guess those drives.

In other ssd news, crucial released firmware 007 for the C300 drives which seems to have fixed the stuttering issues some experienced. Some mac users still report issues.

 

[Will Rickards]

Crucial C300 64GB for $100 with free shipping from newegg. Today only I think.
You need a coupon code.
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=923806&t=2915411

I'm highly tempted but my desktop machine is really fast enough as it is. And that isn't big enough for my laptop.

 

[LunarMist]

What about the Crucial P300? It looks like a quality SSD. Are they available?

 

[Buck]

The Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 and CT512M4SSD2 do seem to be viable alternatives to Intel SSDs. At $471 and $929 each, they would be good in for high-end systems.

 

[LunarMist]

Aren't those MLC? I was looking at the SLC micron/crucial SSDs. I think they are from older generation, but more recently available than other of that generation.

 

[time]

I just spoke to Crucial, and the 64GB M4 is on allocation (two per customer) and the 64GB C300 is out of stock. I made the inquiry because I see orders for 128GB M4s are being delayed by 7-10 days.

So if anyone sees them elsewhere, it may be your only hope.

Apparently, Crucial offers a 45 day exchange warranty if you buy direct from them. I wonder if that's the 'infant mortality' period?

 

[Will Rickards]

Newegg had the 64GB m4 for $80 this morning but is now sold out. boo.

 

[Buck]

I just spoke to Crucial, and the 64GB M4 is on allocation (two per customer) and the 64GB C300 is out of stock. I made the inquiry because I see orders for 128GB M4s are being delayed by 7-10 days.

So if anyone sees them elsewhere, it may be your only hope.

Apparently, Crucial offers a 45 day exchange warranty if you buy direct from them. I wonder if that's the 'infant mortality' period?

Currently, both 64GB models are available for me, but not at $80. That would be a great price.

 

[Handruin]

The new Corsair Force Series 3 drives were announced recently. Prices mentioned at Engadget.

Prices are $139 for 60GB, $219 for 120GB, and $499 for the 240GB version, so they still aren't cheap, but

 

[sechs]

Is there some overriding reason to buy this new generation of drives beyond the fact that they are designed to work with the smaller memory chips?

 

[Mercutio]

They're SSDs. They're legitimately faster. And they're what's available now.

 

[LunarMist]

Soon there will be little choice.

 

[time]

Despite Anand's tireless promotion of Sandforce and OCZ, I have zero confidence in their reliability. I won't be considering them at all for at least six months.

Consider, Intel and Crucial/Micron write their own firmware (based on the Marvell platform). Based on user feedback, they may update the firmware to accommodate a wider range of use cases. Same is true of Samsung except I have no idea how they get user feedback.

Corsair and OCZ don't write their own firmware. They are beholden to Sandforce for updates (for their SF platforms), none of which are guaranteed to match those for other customers. It's a godawful mess and failure rates are higher than either the Intel or Micron products. Personally, I'm concerned about how my Corsair Force failed. At no stage did the SMART data reveal anything amiss, yet the device progressively died over a couple of days with bizarre symptoms; almost as if the designers had no clue about HDD controllers and interfaces. The replacement is back with the customer, but there's simply no way I'll be wasting more days of effort trying to troubleshoot another one.

 

[Santilli]

Are they faster?

They are using ATTO for speed results, and, I wonder about that accuracy...

 

[Mercutio]

Does SMART actually monitor anything useful for SSDs?

 

[Bozo]

I think part of the problem is trying to apply spinning disk utilities, monitoring, and diagnoses routines to SSDs.

 

[time]

Compared to HDDs, SSDs have powerful controllers. They are more than capable of detecting and logging exceptions.

Example