SLC SSD - who has those ?

despite all the advancements of the MLC drives, I kind of still prefer SLC. So how many people have/use one(or more) of those ?

I'm only trying to figure out how to fit in 64Gb though...

 

Get an intel 710 SSD if you really want to be paranoid, it uses premium quality MLC rated for many more read/writes.

 

^ I just really dont like write amplification ..

 

Write amplification due to decreased performance or due to NAND cell life?

FWIW, performance problems will be present in both types of drives. You could minimally increase your MLC life by going with a larger drive, but the "write-lifetime" on SLC is still significantly better.

 

^nahh, I haven't really heard of performance problems from people running SLC drives ... All performance problems come from MLC drives

 

SLC drives still suffer from the same write amplification problem as MLC, but it is mitigated since the write-lifetime of SLC based NAND flash is so much more, the [FW] of SLC drives is more aggressive in moving stuff around in order to make sure cells are empty before a drive's next write.

W/ a TRIM enabled OS, it's hard to justify 3 to 4 times the price and 1/4 the disk space - as performance (at least in my use case) has been amazingly fast. If you find a 64GB SLC SSD for less than $500 USD, let me know.

 

Intel x25-e sell for 300-350 buy-it-now used, but on auction you can get those for less these days. And I think used really is not that big of a deal considering the endurance of the drives ..

 

Yeah. I was talking about new. Never been one for buying used components.

 

If you keep the 100GB drive with 20% spare area you can write 900TB to the drive before failure.

900TB!

If you go for the 200GB drive that goes up to 1500TB!

 

If you are absolutely dead-set on SLC SSD drives, MICRON has the P300 enterprise drive in SLC form.

You can read more about it here. Warning, 200GB is over $2k.

200GB @ ShopBLT
Same Product, Rebadged as a Crucial


Jason

 

yes that's the stuff right there ^ .... I'll just have to wait for it to loose one zero from the price tag and I'm all over it ... lol

but x25-e 64GB used just sold for 280 on ebay with free shipping ...

 

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SLC SSDs dont need TRIM, right ?

 

too many flakes on craiglist. they didn't show up or follow up on selling x25e 64gb drives. i could seriously use one, but my intel 320 is going to do that soon. all i have to say about slc is that is one serious thumb drive.

 

No SSD really "needs" TRIM if it has an adequate Garbage Collector, but since the GC still only runs when you have "idle" time regardless of SLC/MLC, by enabling TRIM in either case benefits the drive. TRIM's job is to mitigate write amplification.

The real difference in flash types besides cell write lifetime is that the GC in an SLC drive can be more aggressive freeing up "deleted" cells - as the NAND pages can just take more writes. But, as stated in my earlier post, with a TRIM enabled OS/SSD, that isn't as big as a problem any more, and the cost-benefit of SLC based SSDs can be hard to justify.

 

I'm on XP so no TRIM here. Besides, I'm not sure if the x25-e ever supported TRIM to begin with.

from my point of view, if I'm about to spend premium price for SSD then it better lasts like forever, heh.

I've heard some people having issues with the first drives from MTron after some 6 months to an year of use. Then nobody complained about the Samsung SLC drives, besides the fact that the drive itself could not saturate SATA 2. People still use those with great success. Yet the Intel SLC remains the fastest among this class (within somewhat reasonable price tag).

as far as I know Intel claims write amplification of 1.1 the lowest. I'm guessing with SLC the controller does not actually have to move the pages but rather just rewrite those at the same place, thus no speed degradation?

 

TRIM became common place on 2nd Gen on SSDs, so that may be the case.

For SLC, yes you will pay a premium. For MLC, not too bad. Some ppl are seeing prices just above $1 (USD)/GB.

No, SLC writes to 4K pages, just like MLC, but I couldn't tell you if that operation in itself is faster on SLC.

What does Intel claim about the "M" version of their SSDs on an OS/SSD that supports TRIM? Worse case, every so often, you just log out of XP or boot to a USB/Floppy, and wait for a while so the GC can do its work.

 

SLC is just faster by design and more durable.

But like I said there are high quality cherry picked MLC drives out there that due to their large size can be written to more than an X25-E.


But unless you are running some server/database operations on it then really you should just grab a pair of 512GB SSDs for the same price because you are not going to wear them on ANY kind of normal user workload. No matter how many times you re-install your steam games lol.

 

Do you happen to know a rough estimate by how much?

As we're both trying to explain to miro, the difference may not even matter. For example, if SLC writes data in .10 ms and MLC writes in .11 ms, an end user wouldn't even notice.

 

on a cluster server that's not enough. that's why they still use HDD's and just use SSD's for acceleration.

 

looking at the first generation of intel x25 E vs M, one can probably notice the write speeds differ by quite a bit - 170MB/s vs 70MB/s, so clearly the MLC controller has to perform additional tasks considering the same 50nm NAND and most likely the same controller (just configured to run MLC instead of SLC).

And I can see that time loss as the controller has to change the voltage additional time to write the second bit in the same cell.

that worst case would be like a big NO for me, lol.

I cant see a bigger MLC drive to allow for more writes than the SLC due to the fact that SLC is of magnitude difference on the writes from the MLC, so to compensate the MLC should be of magnitude bigger as well. So I guess a 640GB MLC would about equal 64GB SLC on writes, and 640GB is big for SSD nowadays.

used x25-e 64GB sells used for 200 to 300 USD. I missed 4 of those for 220 a piece the other day.

 

Weird numbers.

If the x25-E is 170MB/s on sequential or 512K writes, I think my C300 MLC does better -



And the 70MB/s is right around my Momentus XTs -

 

^ yes that C300 looks better on the bench. But it could and probably will drop significantly with the time/usage, whereas the x25-e would/should keep steady. I'm guessing to keep performance at that level the c300 would eat write cycles like bananas, lol.

I mean I'm not all for the fastest drive out there, as lots of todays SATA 3 MLC look faster. I'm more for long term speed, consistency, and reliability type of thing ... while trying to justify the price tag.

 

I doubt I'll see any performance problems with the SSD in my x7200. I've been running a Crucial C300 5+ days a week for over 15 months now. This is the ORIGINAL install - no re-installs, no Secure Erases, nothing except the original install. Still no performance problems to report, and if one were to come up, I'd think I'd seen some indication by now.

SSDLife reports drive health is still at 100% after 2339 work hours and booted 755 times.

And although the C300 is a SATA III drive, the x7200 has a SATA II connector, so the benches I'm reporting are at SATA II speeds. I mention this as the Intel drives you mention are SATA II as well.

 

Who knows, maybe the OP wants to run the NYSE's transaction system off of his laptop?

Personally, just as I'd rather get a new midrange laptop every year than spend $5000 on a laptop and be stuck with long after it's outdated, I'd rather upgrade to a new MLC SSD every year than spend $2000 on an SLC SSD and be stuck with it for the next decade.

Maybe it's because I have a 1st gen Samsung SLC SSD which I got secondhand that's slower than a Momentus XT or Caviar Black in many ways. I pity the original owner who paid $1000 for it thinking it would last forever, only to sell it for performance reasons.

 

Peon, I wish miro good luck with an OLTP on Windows XP (32-bit as well). Perhaps there is another explanation... miro, any chance you need the SLC drive because WOTAN or WOPR requires it?

 

I have no idea what you said, lol ...

I got software that doesn't run on 64-bit OS. So if not for that then why even bother upgrading, xp does everything I need it to do anyways and with less resources needed

the only inconvenience would be that I'll have to clone an XP install over that Intel SLC if I happen to buy one, as it runs only in AHCI mode and my XP setup CD doesn't have drivers for that.

 

Get a traditional SSD and a better notebook

 

Sorry 'bout that a bit of computer geek-dom.

OLTP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_transaction_processing

WOPR - Shall we play a game? - YouTube

WOTAN - War Machine vs WOTAN - Doctor Who: The War Machines - BBC - YouTube