Are SSD's really ready for prime time?

So I've just ordered an Asus G73, and for months have planned on an SSD "C:" Drive, but after making it an hour or so into the 781 page SSD sticky, I wonder if I really want to deal with the isuues involved.
I mean there's: TRIM, making sure I have a Sandforce control, performance degradation, tweaking this and that, proper alignment (W'everTF that is) iffy reliability, and a bunch of other issues that honestly don't sound like all that much fun. I even read that re-imaging a backup of W7 can be a nightmare - On the other hand, with trusty old Acronis, and mechanical drives, I haven't lost data in years.

I understand the snappiness everyone raves about, but frankly IMHO you need to have at least a 120gb (or 128 depending how it's marketed) to make use of data transfer speeds for your most used programs, because heaven forbid you go over 70% of the drives capacity. For the price of a 128, I can have a 640 installed and "configured" in 10 minutes.
I can handle waiting for a minute for my computer to boot, and 15 seconds for Firefox to wake up, but I'm having a hard time justifying the touchiness of this new technology just to get an Excel doc to load in 10 seconds instead of 15 or 20.
Photoshop, and heavy multimedia guys I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and concede the advantages there.

Will they get a handle on the control of these things, get better OS integration, maybe even standardize the firmware a bit - or are we just looking at the next Betamax (oops, aged myself), I mean HD DVD?

 

I think that thread started a while ago so some information is outdated. Pretty much all SSD's have TRIM now although only Windows 7 supports it. So you don't have to worry about performance degradation. I have also heard that imaging onto the SSD can lead to problems but I always do a clean install anyway so it's no problem for me. I do agree that you should have at least 120gb because the 64gb usually have lower performance (read/write speeds). IMO, there are only 3 major SSD's out there that are top in performance, which are the Intel X-25m, the Crucial SSD (forgot the model) and the samsung 470. That should help you a little. The only downside is price which is dropping every day so it all depends on how long you can play the waiting game. Theres also the fact that you can't restore lost files with recovery software (as far as I know)

 

What would be your definition of prime time? Being sold in laptops on retail? Then that time has long been past, the original EEEPC shipped out with 2-4-8-16 GB SSD as the main drive since 2007. And various other high end notebook models come with SSDs (mainly high end Z series Sony bleh).

TRIM or not you just need GC, which you can manually do or certain SSD's have good GC (Samsung) built into the SSD. The good thing about SandForce is the Durawrite which allows for the use of lower quality flash NAND chips making it possible to drive down SSD prices.

Though I cannot tell you about Intel SSD (I plan on buying a G3 for my Latitude 13) I can tell you about SandForce and Indilinx controller as I own an Agility 2 and Vertex SSD. In terms of responsiveness, both are equally as good. Benchmarks wise of course the Agility 2 beats down the Vertex but in terms of real life performance I don't really see a huge huge difference. In my i7 desktop the 30 GB Vertex is my boot drive, after Windows and drivers I had about 13 GB free, and some programs drove it down to 10 GB. In my Vostro 1500 the Agility 2 is the primary drive (no other HDD space or I would have added a second drive).

As a boot drive it is fantastic, plus you get the added benefits of no noise, lower heat, lower power consumption in most cases and the reliability over a mechanical drive. For the main drive overall Windows is more responsive, which is to be expected.

I believe the minimum should be 60 GB (I bought my 30 GB for 60 after MIR) as typical Windows installations are 10-20 GB (depends which version) plus you want some of your most used programs on it.

And if you are buying a G73, I would format the drive as ASUS does a stupid sized partition if you have the G73-JW model, your OS drive is 150 GB, 2nd partition of 1st 500 GB is 350 GB and it splits the 2nd 500 GB into 238/238 which frankly is retarded.

The real bottleneck on those uber high machines is the HDD really. The days of i7 quad cores, high end discreet graphics and 8 GB RAM, the manufacturers left out the HDD but I guess they automatically assume the end user will go to an SSD. Hope this helps out.

 

Airplane black boxes use solid state drives so reliability shouldn't worry you too much

 

If you are getting a G73, then that long SSD thread shouldn't have even come close to getting you scared. The G73 itself has had it's share of problems, especially if you're getting a JH one from Best Buy or any of the recent refurb ones in the past days.

You have a ton of work in front of you anyways with a G73 to get it stable (bios, vbios reflash, update drivers,etc) so starting fresh with a new SSD as a boot drive makes sense on that G73. That's what I dd with my G73. I have one of the new Intel 120gb SSDs and did a fresh install of Win7 on the G73 with the SSD. A fresh install will automatically align the drive correctly. Just make sure after one installs Win7 on an SSD that the defrag is turned off, do the JJB tweak and you're set to go. There really is not much to do with an SSD.

I have all flavors of SSDs from an Indilinx (my Crucial), to a Sandforce (Microcomputer relabeled A-Data), to a few Intels and all have performed great. My Crucial is approaching one year in use and works great. As Tsunade also experienced, there is little to no difference in daily use between all the different drives, but they all work great, especially in a gaming machine like the G73.

So I think you're worrying too much about the SSD, and really need to focus instead in getting your G73 setup correctly. Just get an SSD and you won't look back especially with that monster G73. Good luck!

 

thanks for the valuable post and replies...sometimes i feel there was more FAQ and cheat sheets available...for rooks like myself, i do feel intimidated at looking through a 781 page thread...but thanks for the info guys

 

Despite the potential issues...I found that after a flash to the current firmware, a clean install of Windows 7 and a few settings changes (disable hibernation etc) it worked right out of the box.

 

Ok, you know it's true what they say about the long threads like the one concerning the SSD, it's only the people having problems that seem to post.
Thanks everyone, some good points here, and so true that I'll have my hands full if I get a "troubled" G73. So I'm going to give it a shot. First I'm going to try to catch the G73 on fire with Furmark and OCCT, and if it lives, I've got a brand new copy of W7 Ultimate 64 that I'll build from the ground up on an SSD.
What are the thoughts on backup and imaging? I like to spend a full day getting my OS set up exactly the way I like it, the browser, the power scheme, all updates done, etc. - and then Image the drive. Is it just as painless with an SSD as it is with a "spinner"?

Yep dlai, you got me!
Just crossing my fingers that the guy doing the refurb was having a good day!

 

Well first I would do when you get your G73 aside from oogling at it for long periods of time is created the ASUS recovery discs in case you hose the OS. I know ASUS has a ton of bloatware installed but it's the easiest way to restore your OS pain free. I would then reformat and delete all partitions except the 1 ASUS recovery partition. You could always CC cleaner or PC Decrapifier but I recommend clean installs.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...et-upgrades/537292-ssd-endurance-big-lie.html

also check this tread out.

 

I've used Clonezilla to image and restore my SSD. Painless process.

 

Lol... not at the quality level we buy at.

Besides, an airplane black box might write one millionth less data than one of our SSD's is expected to write.

 

that's why he should read the thread i posted ^^ I never knew how much wear is really being done on a drive. That's why i refuse to buy one until SLC becomes affordable.

 

Well, you won't be buying any SSD then. The market is moving away from SLC. In fact, I believe in a few years time, there will no longer be any SLC other than specific device where cost is not an issue.

 

why? MLC sucks. SLC is way better in so many ways. It has 10 times the reliability. 10k or 100k....i'll go with 100k rewrites.

EDIT: Not best source but basic reason why MLC sucks and i refuse to buy it
http://www.buffalotech.com/technology/standards/slc-v-mlc/
http://www.supertalent.com/datasheets/SLC_vs_MLC whitepaper.pdf

not sure how old these are but it hits the point

 

The market doesn't want it(price). Intel's new G3 enterprise line will be using eMLC, not SLC. When the supposed to be most heavily banged usage(enterprise, 24/7 server like SQL) is moving away from SLC, its day is numbered.

Beside, do you really need 100k write. Have you measured how many writes you have done to your HDD ?

I have and my average write is around 2-3G per day. My Intel x25m(80G, 160G would double that) is kind of guranteed for 7TB or so. At this rate, it would be 2000 days or so before I would start to worry and Intel is known to be conservative about these numbers. 2000 days is 5-6 years and Moore's law said that in 6 years, I would have 8x the size by then, at the same price.

 

Did you apply this guys math? That will big far bigger.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...et-upgrades/537292-ssd-endurance-big-lie.html

Also SLC is not just more reliable its faster too. It's also more in the area of 20x or more reliable after you apply that guy's math.

EDIT:side note Moore's law can only be kept up for the next 10 years i think. That's what intel was saying for their processors. Than it'll start to slow down.

 

no. it is not as simple as that 'maths'.

SLC may be faster than MLC at the cell level but we are talking about drive level, show me some SLC figure that is faster.

10 seems to be larger than 6 so that is not my concern at the moment

 

Only reason why a MLC drive is so fast is because they have added like 10+ channels...that can easily be done with a SLC drives too. They just haven't. Intel has a SLC thats 270MBps read and 170MBps right. But if you add the lower latency than that'll stomp an MLC in boot times even if an MLC may have a 300MBps+ speed. Anyways SLC is far more reliable and should become the standard but they make these cheap crappy MLC drives.

EDIT: what program do you use to see your writes? i am trying the procmon thing now

 

Not yet.

$/GiB = Too High.

They will be Prime Time when the the ROI is prime and they are given maturation time.

 

Not necessarily. Chimpanzee has an Intel drive, and there's a tool in the Intel SSD toolbox that lists "Host Writes". This should be the total data written on the drive since it's tracked from the drive itself (basically like a S.M.A.R.T. value). Tilleroftheearth used a program called SSDLife for his Inferno as referenced in this post, which seems to be similar. Note that tilleroftheearth is someone we might classify as an "extreme" user.

Except that the same issues that account for the write amplification with MLC drives also applies to SLC drives. The only difference is that SLC inherently has more write cycles than MLC. Also, the fact that MLC loses write cycles as the process shrinks more than likely also extends to SLC, meaning SLC will also proportionately lose write endurance as it miniaturizes as well (we just haven't noticed because I don't think anyone is bothering to miniaturize SLC anymore).

So at a similar process level (theoretically) SLC has probably about 10 times the write cycles of MLC, at about 3-4 times the price (on the chip level). Add in the comparatively limited market for SLC now as compared to MLC, and the price difference climbs even more...

 

This summarize it well. For the same drive size and if the write is massive(that calls for the cycle for SLC), SLC drive is actually cheaper, in terms of $/write. However, economy of scale(in MLC and lack of in SLC) has completely destroyed this and why there is eMLC that is something in between MLC and SLC.

 

SLC has has smaller blocks so it also boosts the endurance above MLC so its not just "10x" better its more than that "theoretically". Anyways MLC still sucks compared to SLC no matter what you say. Maybe eMLC might be worth it but MLC will never be worth it in my eyes.


EDIT: side note. I do use my drives excessively. I also do a month wipe of my drives with CCleaner. Don't ask em why i do this Also if that guy is right how Mozilla does that many writes...i have skype and Mozilla up and use them excessively. I usually have around 10-20tabs(just for Mozilla) open and use opera for other things as well. Also if i owned a SSD i would use it like crazy because it would be so much faster. I would probably move games back and forth to play them and other programs and software(since i can't fit everything on it). Also I used to..not now but have 3 IM programs open at once. Which i am sure those do wonders lol. And this is just daily use not whatever i would come up with since i would have an SSD to use ^^

 

I don't think your described activity is more excessive than mine. They are relatively light weight.

I keep on building large visual studio solutions during my day of work.

I just want to say that very few usage needs SLC for write cycle. And eMLC is not designed for consumer usage, it has very short retention period.

 

blah than i am screwed. Maybe i'll try an SSD in a year or two but we will see...still too expensive for my budget

 

For all the crazy stuff you on post on the forums, a SSD is out of your budget?

 

i barely make 20g a year...and i got to save my money so when i get out i can survive All my crazy stuff is budget or free lol. Starting to drill my laptop today ^^

 

How much RAM do you have? I completely disable disk caching on Firefox because I have 6GB of RAM. No need to write to the SSD. Just go to about:config and set browser.cache.disk.enable to false, make sure browser.cache.memory.enable is true and set browser.cache.memory.capacity to something sane. Mine's 512MB since I have 6GB of RAM. That kills a lot of writes. Disable virtual memory and other disk caches in Windows and you end up with very few writes with no loss of functionality, and all the speedy goodness of an SSD.

I also like an SSD because the failure mode is "stop writing". Short of physically breaking it, you will always be able to retrieve your information. Can't say the same about a head crash for a spinning drive.

 

you do have a great point on that one pita. Though does that affect how firefox can restore itself if the program/system crashes?

 

Actually for most drive failures the drive ups and disappears. The whole "it'll still be able to read" was entirely based on theory and most of the time doesn't actually work that way when a SSD fails. And with the raid systems in place in the controllers, your ability to "read" the drive, even should you get it attached to something and working is basically slim to none.

I'd agree the durability issue gets hyped somewhat more than is real, but by the same token some of the fallback to it failing to a read only state doesn't work either. It is also possible for cells to catostrophically lose their charge as well which can create an unreadable drive.

It is also not impossible to create cells that lengthen the insulation layer in the cells, creating more durable cells while still shrinking them. This would mean the "shrink" wasn't done to the whole chip and thus the cost savings and density increase wouldn't go as fast over the years ahead, but there are ways to address some of the durability. I doubt companies are going to talk much about how they approach this. And only testing and time will tell how successful they are.

 

I'm by no means an expert on SSD's, but I have one in my work laptop and its been great! It's a 64GB model that has the OS and programs installed on it (Office, Adobe, a few others), and for all the other crap I need I have a HDD in an optical bay hard drive. I can easily swap that out for the optical drive if needed, but I honestly can't remember the last time I used it. This setup has worked great for me for a little over a year now.

Before I got the SSD I had a standard HDD, and in the 2 years before I got the SSD I had to replace the HDD 3 times. Granted I bring my work laptop into some rough environments, (hot, cold, dusty, construction areas, etc...), but since I got the SSD I haven't had an issue. As far as I can tell, the performance has not dropped off at all.

Maybe the SSD won't last me 5+ years, but it sure has been more reliable than the HDD's I've had!

 

BTW: I started to read the 700+ page SSD forum because I want to install an SSD in my personal laptop, and seriously don't let them scare you from buying one! Seems like they're 'mostly' power users who 'mostly' argue over what the absolute best technology is and why this is better than that. I feel like I got a good idea of what drives are 'better' from reading the SSD forum and will purchase whichever one of those drives comes down to my price range first!

Based on my experience with my work laptop I believe SSD's are ready for prime time, assuming you can afford one large enough for your needs.

 

SLC doesn't have smaller blocks, at least not the way Intel does/did it. In fact, Intel used the same transistors for SLC and MLC, it's just that MLC has more voltage levels than SLC. Keep in mind that the article I just cited is from 2 years ago, with 50 nm flash. From a (review of a) more recent Toshiba study, they assumed that their MLC NAND pages had only 1,400(!) cycles, and that with that endurance, one of their 64 GB SSDs would last for 40 TB worth of writes. Note that their figures for an equal sized SLC drive (with 50,000 write/erase cycles) only allow for an increase of about 11-12 times... (from the graphic) even though SLC is listed as having over 30 times the w/e cycles. Unfortunately, they don't list the actual SLC drives being tested, so we don't know what other factors may be involved in their comparative lack of performance.

As for MLC "sucking", well, yes, in terms of write endurance, it does compare unfavorably with SLC. However, SLC is just too expensive to attract substantial further development in the mass space. An interesting analogy might be the electric car market; solar cars are "obviously" the best solution (representing SLC), but for mass acceptance, they've had to use hybrids and plug-ins (MLC). Sure, hybrids and plug-ins "suck" compared to solar cars (since they still use petroleum resources, either directly or indirectly through power generation), but the "best" just isn't really acceptable for the mass market.

And in terms of your usages... Maybe you just need to exercise a little discipline? An SSD won't usually make your games run faster, just load levels faster, so unless that's important to you (competitive FPS gaming to spawn faster and get to point faster maybe?), you should probably just install them to a secondary drive. Unless you need Mozilla or Skype to start "instantly", maybe you should install them on a secondary hard drive as well (assuming you can; I am admittedly assuming a dual-drive system here). It's unfortunate that we don't really have a way to track your actual write usage on, say, a monthly basis. If we did, we could take it, and then either double it or add 50% to "account" for write amplification, and then get an idea of how well or poorly your usage would stack up to available drives.

 

Nope.

10 char

 

MLC is actually supposed to have 10k writes and SLC is 100k writes...your article you quote makes it even worse in my eyes :/

Buffalo Technology - Technology Center - Standard Technology

Also this says it has smaller blocks. Not sure what sizes or how it has changed

 

The 100K and 10K w/e cycles was for 50 nm flash. As the flash process reduces size, the w/e cycles go down for physics reasons. I don't know why Toshiba is assuming only 1.4K cycles, the last ones I heard about (25 nm Intel/Micron) are supposed to be 3K cycles, still, so maybe Toshiba was just being very conservative. Then again, Toshiba also makes its own flash, so maybe theirs just isn't up to the same standard as Intel's (for whatever nm process Toshiba happens to be at). Don't forget that flash is not truly standardized; there are different manufacturers of flash, and they use different processes and will end up with different w/e cycles as a result. My point in the article is that even with a supposed 30x advantage in w/e cycles... the actual added life is less than 10 times. Really, what it comes down to is running the numbers. Try to find the rated maximum writes for the drives you're interested in, and then try to find out what kind of writes you go through on a regular basis. This should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of write endurance (at least through NAND cells wearing out). Don't forget that the Toshiba article has the 5 year warranty based on writing 22 GB of data to the drive every single day. Their mobile study has "heavy" users writing a bit less than 10 GB a day. So assuming that you fit under their "heavy" category, you'd have to be uninstalling and reinstalling an average sized game (10GB) every single day to reach the 22 GB of data a day. Oh, and note that even with all the horror stories about how fast SSDs might wear out, I don't think _anyone_ in the consumer sector has yet to hit said w/e cycle limit. All current SSD issues revolve around loss of performance, and controller failures, not flash.

Those specs give some funny numbers... 0.12um translates out to 120 nm, and 0.16um would be 160 nm... maybe those are numbers for the size of the flash itself as opposed to the process being used, in which case it isn't just the transistors, you'll also have to include the peripheral interfacing required... which is admittedly greater for MLC vs SLC.

 

interesting that sucks that the wear gets worse the smaller it is....shesh. I might buy one in a year or two.

 

You can't use that as a selling point. I'm certain those SSD's are SLC, and aren't off the shelf items. I'm sure they're manufactured with the tightest tolerances and have very expensive packaging to ensure their survivability, and most likely there's redundancy also.

People keep confusing reliability and durability. SSD's are more durable mainly because they don't contain any moving parts. But reliability is an entirely different beast.

Right. I've had two SSD's "die" on me. Most likely the controller but either way, my data wasn't readable. It would still require some voodoo to swap out the drive with another controller to retrieve any data which would still require skilled labor to do so. Obviously, this goes back to the preaching of backup, backup, backup.

Now that I've used a handful of SSD's I still find it's not really near value for the $ yet. For my desktop it's nice because I bought 60GB SSD's as boot drives and for most used apps, but have 2TB's of fast desktop hard drive storage and other programs on top of that. For a laptop with a single drive bay, unless you don't have a lot of storage space need, or have lots of money to spend, it doesn't make sense. Biggest advantage for me is vibration and battery life, but hard to justify even then.

I'm debating that very issue right now. Get a 120GB Intel G2 SSD for $200 or a 250GB Momentus XT for $95. Twice the storage for half the price. I am very impressed with the battery life the 80GB SSD gave my netbook, but now that I'm replacing that netbook with an M11x, I know I'll need/want more storage (mainly games) and not sure I can justify the extra cost, when the battery life will be almost as good with the 250GB XT....

 

For me they are not. The cost is still too high compared to standard HDD's. Maybe in a couple of years the cost, performance, and durability will really be at the point where I would seriously consider equipping my laptop with an SSD.