Originally posted by omegaman7:

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I did say that raid has their uses. And I wouldn't mind doing it, JUST to say I did it. And you're right. SSD's are still a little too cutting edge for me.
The green drives are excellent storage drives. I don't require anything BUT storage from them :p Fact of the matter is, I wouldn't mind configuring a Raid 0 with 2 of my WD1001FALS drives. Don't have enough backup space for their files just yet.

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Originally posted by shaffaaf:

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well anadtech stated that they used an SSD pretty damn heavily for 8 months, and apparently only used 1/300th of the cycles.

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Quote:

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A 50nm MLC NAND cell can be programmed/erased 10,000 times before it's dead. The reality is good MLC NAND will probably last longer than that, but 10,000 program/erase cycles was the spec. Update: Just to clarify, once you exceed the program/erase cycles you don't lose your data, you just stop being able to write to the NAND. On standard MLC NAND your data should be intact for a full year after you hit the maximum number of p/e cycles.

When we transitioned to 34nm, the NAND makers forgot to mention one key fact. MLC NAND no longer lasts 10,000 cycles at 34nm - the number is now down to 5,000 program/erase cycles. The smaller you make these NAND structures, the harder it is to maintain their integrity over thousands of program/erase cycles. While I haven't seen datasheets for the new 25nm IMFT NAND, I've heard the consumer SSD grade stuff is expected to last somewhere between 3000 - 5000 cycles. This sounds like a very big problem.

Thankfully, it's not.

My personal desktop sees about 7GB of writes per day. That can be pretty typical for a power user and a bit high for a mainstream user but it's nothing insane.

Here's some math I did not too long ago:

My SSD
NAND Flash Capacity 256 GB
Formatted Capacity in the OS 238.15 GB
Available Space After OS and Apps 185.55 GB
Spare Area 17.85 GB

If I never install another application and just go about my business, my drive has 203.4GB of space to spread out those 7GB of writes per day. That means in roughly 29 days my SSD, if it wear levels perfectly, I will have written to every single available flash block on my drive. Tack on another 7 days if the drive is smart enough to move my static data around to wear level even more properly. So we're at approximately 36 days before I exhaust one out of my ~10,000 write cycles. Multiply that out and it would take 360,000 days of using my machine for all of my NAND to wear out; once again, assuming perfect wear leveling. That's 986 years. Your NAND flash cells will actually lose their charge well before that time comes, in about 10 years.

Now that calculation is based on 50nm 10,000 p/e cycle NAND. What about 34nm NAND with only 5,000 program/erase cycles? Cut the time in half - 180,000 days. If we're talking about 25nm with only 3,000 p/e cycles the number drops to 108,000 days.

Now this assumes perfect wear leveling and no write amplification. Now the best SSDs don't average more than 10x for write amplification, in fact they're considerably less. But even if you are writing 10x to the NAND what you're writing to the host, even the worst 25nm compute NAND will last you well throughout your drive's warranty.

For a desktop user running a desktop (non-server) workload, the chances of your drive dying within its warranty period due to you wearing out all of the NAND are basically nothing. Note that this doesn't mean that your drive won't die for other reasons before then (e.g. poor manufacturing, controller/firmware issues, etc...), but you don't really have to worry about your NAND wearing out.

This is all in theory, but what about in practice?

Thankfully one of the unwritten policies at AnandTech is to actually use anything we recommend. If we're going to suggest you spend your money on something, we're going to use it ourselves. Not in testbeds, but in primary systems. Within the company we have 5 SandForce drives deployed in real, every day systems. The longest of which has been running, without TRIM, for the past eight months at between 90 and 100% of its capacity.

SandForce, like some other vendors, expose a method of actually measuring write amplification and remaining p/e cycles on their drives. Unfortunately the method of doing so for SandForce is undocumented and under strict NDA. I wish I could share how it's done, but all I'm allowed to share are the results.

Remember that write amplification is the ratio of NAND writes to host writes. On all non-SF architectures that number should be greater than 1 (e.g. you go to write 4KB but you end up writing 128KB). Due to SF's real time compression/dedupe engine, it's possible for SF drives to have write amplification below 1.

So how did our drives fare?

The worst write amplification we saw was around 0.6x. Actually, most of the drives we've deployed in house came in at 0.6x. In this particular drive the user (who happened to be me) wrote 1900GB to the drive (roughly 7.7GB per day over 8 months) and the SF-1200 controller in turn threw away 800GB and only wrote 1100GB to the flash. This includes garbage collection and all of the internal management stuff the controller does.

Over this period of time I used only 10 cycles of flash (it was a 120GB drive) out of a minimum of 3000 available p/e cycles. In eight months I only used 1/300th of the lifespan of the drive.

The other drives we had deployed internally are even healthier. It turns out I'm a bit of a write hog.

Paired with a decent SSD controller, write lifespan is a non-issue. Note that I only fold Intel, Crucial/Micron/Marvell and SandForce into this category. Write amplification goes up by up to an order of magnitude with the cheaper controllers. Characterizing this is what I've been spending much of the past six months doing. I'm still not ready to present my findings but as long as you stick with one of these aforementioned controllers you'll be safe, at least as far as NAND wear is concerned.

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Originally posted by omegaman7:

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Clearly i'm being too harsh :p Time to get my feet wet.

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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SSD's are not fast they are slow, but what makes them seem fast is when you turn off redundancy and error checking so Windows 7 boots very quickly due to that. SSD's are expensive and wear out fast.

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Originally posted by Deadrum33:

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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SSD's are not fast they are slow, but what makes them seem fast is when you turn off redundancy and error checking so Windows 7 boots very quickly due to that. SSD's are expensive and wear out fast.

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Please state only facts that can be backed up, not personal opinion. Being an early adopter of SSD tech, i find flaws with this statement.

I agree about the expensive part, but EVERYTHING runs faster not just the boot process. Mechinical drives only surpasses the low end of the first generation of SSD, it takes raid 0 to get even remotely close to a SSD 200mb+ reads. SSD read speeds were always faster, write speeds have become just as good if not better, and any deficiencies there once was were hidden by an SSD's random access times, again much faster than a mech drive. All these statements can be easily verified google-ing. Here you go, I'll even do the work for you. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=SSD+vs+velociraptor+benchmark

An SSD paired with an OS that supports TRIM performs better and faster than a mechanical drive. Whether you can afford one or not is a different story.

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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Put XP on your SSD and see what you get!
Kids!!

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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It's only faster because you turn off all of the redundancy and checking in the OS

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Originally posted by omegaman7:

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I generally already do save important files to my storage drives. So nothing will change there. But I do have photoshop and all my apps on the C:\

I'll likely install GTA IV and all other games to the veloci, even when I convert to SSD. But I would like to keep my primary apps on the ssd.

No skype here. Only plugins are Java, Shockwave, silverlight, NVIDIA 3D vision, quicktime plugin. I only run steam when I need it.

Windows 7 here :D

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Originally posted by Deadrum33:

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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Put XP on your SSD and see what you get!
Kids!!

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1. XP takes an extra step, running the diskpart command-line utility to align the partition. Not difficult, but definitely something a noob would be comfortable with. Also, since it has no TRIM support you have to use a utility manually. Works fine with XP after these steps are implemented.
2. I'm pretty sure I'm older than most everyone on this forum except TheOneJrs.
Using the term Kids!!! as an attempted insult, shows your lack of knowledge about the people around you, is rivaled only by your lack of knowledge concerning SSD technology.
Nothing wrong with that, but if you can poke a hole in any statement i made please do.

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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It's only faster because you turn off all of the redundancy and checking in the OS

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Faster read speeds, faster write speeds, faster random access, but yet an SSD only SEEMS faster. Interesting, please explain further.

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Originally posted by shaffaaf:

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i still dont get why people insist on using stonge age OS's. move with the times. :p

all the reviews on SSDs and any new tech will be focusing on win7, not XP.

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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Originally posted by omegaman7:

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In my opinion, RAID is almost unnecessary anymore. Velociraptor drives are an excellent single mechanical drive solution. SSD's are insane fast. So RAID 0 is out. Unless you like living on the edge :S I suppose if I had two of them, I'd be pretty happy with the bandwidth gain though. But if one were to fail... devastating. I can see the need for the industry to employ Redundant arrays. But for people like me, a sata docking bay is an excellent means for cloning data.

So far the green drives have been near perfect for me. Can't wait to play with a 3Tb+ drive. Depending on my needs, I may wait for the 3tb drives to come down, or wait for something larger to be released. I'd really like to see a 10Tb drive released. That'll probably be SSD though. Or perhaps some new cutting edge technology. I'm sure it'll cost 2 arms and 2 legs LOL

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SSD's are not fast they are slow, but what makes them seem fast is when you turn off redundancy and error checking so Windows 7 boots very quickly due to that. SSD's are expensive and wear out fast. Because of that I personally wouldn't use them unless the environment requires it. Any ROM based OS will boot fast but writing to them is very slow and again you don't get many write cycles. Windows can be hard on hard drives because they hammer certain areas of your hard drive so this wouldn?t bold well for SSD?s.

RAID is still very strong and required for mass storage and performance, just because you don't have need for it is none the less in the needs of others.

If Green drives work for you knock yourself out, I prefer performance, the little bit of energy you save verses the hit in performance isn't worth it for me, I don't want my drive sleeping on me just like I don't allow my OS to sleep either. There is only about $10's difference so I see no reason to buy a Green drive and be limited with what I can do with it.

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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SSD's are not fast they are slow, but what makes them seem fast is when you turn off redundancy and error checking so Windows 7 boots very quickly due to that. SSD's are expensive and wear out fast.

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