Newtun
Storage is nice, especially if it doesn't rotate
Anand Intel SSD 750 PCIe SSD Review: "Intel SSD 750 PCIe SSD Review: NVMe for the Client"
Yes, I NV U.
Yes, I NV U.
SSDs - State of the Product?
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Now I know which drive I'll use in my next personal system build. The PCI-E version.
I might buy one too. 1.2TB is not that much space though.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
It's more than enough for OS, your apps and your live data. You won't store your movies, your music and your pictures on an SSD. That's more the job of a bunch of multi-terabytes LFF drives, ideally in some form of RAID (a stripe is not RAID!) to insure redundancy.
I suppose some people do that with the Thunderbowls or internal RIAD, but it is useful for me to have a couple TB of fast storage for a work in progress. Even 1TB is not enough for a large project.
Once the work is substantially finished, then it can be moved to normal hard drives. I haven't finished anything since the first medical incident in 2009, but that's another story.
I like the simplicity of the Samsung SM951 in a 256GB or so drive for the OS/apps.
ddrueding
Fixture
Stripe a couple for local data and boot off the SM951.
ddrueding
Fixture
Stripe them in the OS, but that doesn't matter if they are only temp data. Boot to an SM951 and leave the 2x 750 for data.
Stereodude
Not really a
Since when are you ordinary?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
It's an Intel device, so it's possible that it actually WILL work in RAID0, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that there's a configuration other than an Intel Rapid Storage RAID0 on Windows that's functional and supported by drive, OS and storage controller. Sure, you could try it, but it might not be the wisest way to use $1500+ worth of drives.
Maybe someone will get a bright idea and build a 4x M.2 bridge device for a 16xPCIe slot.
Maybe someone will get a bright idea and build a 4x M.2 bridge device for a 16xPCIe slot.
I was about to write normal, but I knew that would not fly.
In hindsight, I should have asked when it would be available to consumers.
According to the Amazon a store has it listed for May 3, 2015.
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
I don't know if anyone here with Samsung Evo 840s experienced a performance drop but I did. HDtune showed STRs under 40 MB/sec in some portions of the drive. Apparently, this is a known issue with these drives. Samsung issued a fix, although there may be a need for another fix down the road. In any case, it seems for now their performance restoration software worked for me.
Attachments
I do have a Samsung 840 EVO and I ran the restore utility a few months back. I've not retested the performance in a while but I was aware they were working on a second fix for the issues. I'll give it a try and see. I should note that I did a full secure erase on mine after rebuilding my system a few months back. I use mine as a scratch drive for ripping/processing media so it gets a fair amount of read/write IO. I'll check and see how it's doing later this week.
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
I think writing to the drive a lot is key to not losing performance. I cloned my drive as a copy of the three partitions I had on my old XP install. As such, I generally only write to the two data parititions occasionally. I've noted over time performance drops. It jumps up when I defrag a partition, at least on the part of the drive which that partition occupies. Indeed, this could make the case for defragging SSDs at least a few times a year, using a defrag algorithm which does something like putting the files in order by name to ensure the entire partition gets rewritten.
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
I have a friend who runs mapping software with huge datasets which trash hard drives. He's been using cheap consumer SSDs for his boot drive (storage on big rust drives, SSD just for boot and temp files) and this works well for him from a performance point of view, but he keeps blowing them up every year or so. I don't think they can handle the read-write thrashing. I have suggested that he needs an SSD designed to stand up to his workloads. He only needs 128GB or so. Can some kind soul suggest an appropriate model?
Edit: he understands that it will cost more.
Edit: he understands that it will cost more.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
There's also the newer model : Intel DC S3710 (part #SSDSC2BA200G401).
And the one I've put into our file server, the Samsung 845DC Pro, although it's only available in 400GB (MZ-7WD400EW) and 800GB (MZ-7WD800EW) sizes. The Samsung is significantly cheaper than the Intel, but it's a lot harder to find.
Cheaper than the DC S3710, but about the same price as the Samsung for a similar capacity, there's the Intel DC S3610 (part #SSDSC2BX200G401). It's only rated at 3 drive writes per day (against 10 DWPD for the DC S3710), but it's half the price and it's still significantly more robust than about any consumer drive.
And the one I've put into our file server, the Samsung 845DC Pro, although it's only available in 400GB (MZ-7WD400EW) and 800GB (MZ-7WD800EW) sizes. The Samsung is significantly cheaper than the Intel, but it's a lot harder to find.
Cheaper than the DC S3710, but about the same price as the Samsung for a similar capacity, there's the Intel DC S3610 (part #SSDSC2BX200G401). It's only rated at 3 drive writes per day (against 10 DWPD for the DC S3710), but it's half the price and it's still significantly more robust than about any consumer drive.
time
Storage? I am Storage!
Assuming the drives are blowing up because of excessive writes rather than just because they're cheap, all you need is a bigger drive.
Pick a brand where you can actually monitor the life expectancy, such as Intel, Samsung or SanDisk. The premium models claim greater endurance; I think the current champion is the Samsung 850 Pro?
Pick a brand where you can actually monitor the life expectancy, such as Intel, Samsung or SanDisk. The premium models claim greater endurance; I think the current champion is the Samsung 850 Pro?
ddrueding
Fixture
I'm with Time on this one. The 850 Pro is a great unit and a commodity part so easy to find. Just get a 1TB unit and you'll effectively get huge over-provisioning.
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Brilliant! Thanks guys.
Will Rickards
Storage Is My Life
Read this today: https://blog.algolia.com/when-solid-state-drives-are-not-that-solid/
Not sure what to make of it.
Seems there is some confirmation of an actual issue here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fstrim/+bug/1449005
Not sure what to make of it.
Seems there is some confirmation of an actual issue here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fstrim/+bug/1449005
Last edited:
Stereodude
Not really a
Is it a Linux only issue?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
The Linux kernel code does indeed have a long list of misbehaving drives. The article mentions Samsung models as bad actors and IIRC Crucial drives are known to behave poorly on Linux. Not to be that guy, but we really can't have any idea what other OSes are doing for this stuff because we just don't have access to source code. My guess is that it's probably a crappy firmware implementation or a deliberate decision to make the drive work better for a particular workload at the expense of standard conforming behavior but it's not like anyone from Microsoft or Apple is going to pop in to a tech forum to talk about how crappy SSD firmware and/or storage driver support might be on their respective platforms.
Stereodude
Not really a
But no one is reporting similar data loss issues in Windows are they? I haven't seen or heard of that.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
Pretty much this.... firmware only tested against certain OSes and workloads... Basically Win32 and BSDs (including Mac since it's ATA subsystem is BSD derived) do this with queued commands:
Code:
Data, Data, Flush, Wait for flush to complete, TRIM, Data, Data, Data.Linux on the other hand just does:
Code:
Data, Data, TRIM, Data, Data, Data.As the spec says the way Linux does it is valid for devices that report they support Queued TRIM. (that is, it's safe to issue TRIM commands intermixed with other queued data commands). Speculation is that other OSes whilst they support TRIM, don't support Queued TRIM..
Now, the buggy device firmware either reports Queued TRIM support (but is broken), doesn't do implied flush of the queue before TRIM, or doesn't treat queued operations as atomic (in the caches/presentation/FTL), which leads to sectors being trimmed that actually have data in them. (remember there is a translation layer between what the OS sees and how the data is stored in the actual NAND). Basically, in programming terms, there appears to be a race-condition between updates of the FTL (flash translation layer) and the state of FTL when TRIM is invoked in response to queued commands.
The kernel does maintain a blacklist of known bad devices and operates around them, (as recent Samsung 800 series have been added to that list)... but for some users it's a little late after the fact...
All this SSD stuff reminds me of the issues Linux had with ACPI back years ago, when many BIOS vendors only worked the Microsoft way (was played very loose and hard with what the ACPI spec meant), and not in accordance with the actual ACPI specification... which lead to specific kernel parameters that let the user lie about which OS they were...
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Interesting post, Chewy.
sdbardwick
Storage is cool
For Lunar: Samsung releases 2TB SSDs
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Sell them to me.
Stereodude
Not really a
He can't do that. The shipment would reveal his name and address.
I'll send you a PM then, but when do you think they will be out?
It looks like the Pro version uses much less power which may be sufficient for a Nexto. Why would the E|V|O use more power than a Pro?
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
If my assumptions are correct, this should mean Samsung increased the number of layers in their V-NAND. That should mean large price drops in their smaller size SSDs. I'm hoping 1 TB drops under $200.
Stereodude
Not really a
The Controller has to do more processing and the NAND probably has more circuitry on the dies so it can distinguish between the additional voltage levels.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Knowing Samsung, probably soon. It's definitely not a company I associate with paper launches.
Affordable 1TB SSDs would make the collection of servers I manage vastly better.
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
From what I have found so far, the difference for the 850 PRO versions are:
NEW GEN 2TB: 128Gbit 40nm MLC V-NAND 32-layers
OLD GEN 1TB: 86Gbit 40nm MLC V-NAND 32-layers
Both use the same 7mm 2.5” SSD enclosure. Warranty on the drive is the same (10 years), but endurance for the 850 Pro doubles (from 150TB to 300TB) and DRAM doubles (from 1GB to 2GB).
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
That's interesting. I'll be really curious as to the retail price. My longstanding theory here is the market for SSDs peters out once they start costing more than maybe $500 (and that's for the highest capacity "flagship" model). My reasoning then is the 2TB drive will probably need to come in around that. However, once you can get 2TB for ~$500 you can't really justify retailing 1TB for only $100 less. Most likely I would say any given size will be priced roughly half what it is now, perhaps a little above half.
If the above doesn't happen this would imply ~$800 and over for 2TB. The market at that price will be pretty slim, probably mostly enterprise customers.
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
The impression this launch gives me is to claim the current 'capacity crown'. While the truly reasonable (there will be a small drop in price come Q4) pricing structure will follow in 6+ months as Samsung transitions V-NAND dies away from 40nm.