The SSD thread (prices, news, benchmarks)

You think that 64 gig solid state hard drive will fit into a Macbook Pro?

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...oductdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&sku=341-5582

Because that would just.... be amazing.

 

If Mtron where wise, it would match Sandisk/Samsung prices (or close), have a superior product(I'd buy one) and with the competition behind but catching up, just might dominate, not to mention possible rebranding sales.

 

Yes it should pop right in.
I've seen Mac reviews with SSD don't remember which they tested.

The current samsung has write performance that is probably a bit lower than what you have today. Makes you think twice about dropping the cash. For me access time is most important, but still... it seems just a tad shy of "amazing"

 

Flamenko, does Mtron have a 1.8" part with a ZIF connector either now or in the works? Thanks,

 

Snowsurfer... This is still an encredibly new retail environment. Mtron cannot match Sandisk/Samsung prices as neither is available for sale to consumers given exception to paying an absolutely huge price. I don't think the 64Gb (with acceptable performance results) can be had for less than $1000 and the Sandisk, once only available through Ebay, may be had through Dell now.

Nobody has established consumer access as of yet and I believe its just about to happen. Once one or two have done it, the rest are forced to follow. Much of the reason is the fact that sales at the enterprise and business level for specific applications are huge. By dropping the consumer price, the subsequent drop at the higher levels must follow.

What is occurring is that Mtron, Memoright, Ridata and now Micro are trying to hit the consumer market while, at the same time, testing the business waters. This is why you have seen Mtron with two different SSDs.

As for Samsung, they are comfortable selling to manufacturers at a set price and allowing the resale through system purchase.

My guess is that much of this may occur around Christmas time. Mtron and Memoright are both in the process of negotiating North American distributor sales (not reseller which is significantly different).

Mtron wants their Mobi 3000 out at 650 US. They have suggested that. If you call them direct, you can probably get it at that price or close with some talking. Memoright is testing the waters with 7-800 but both companies have alot of pride and are waiting to see whos will prove the fastest. Im hoping to have my review out by weeks end for this.

With respect to rebranding, this is another issue of pride. When I first spoke with companies they rolled this idea around but, each realizes that the possibility of building on their own is absolutely there, especially with Mtron. I don't know of any company interested in rebranding given exception to the way it occurs at the enterprise level.

Monakh: Im not aware of the 1.8" but you can check it out at www.mtron.net and send them an email if you like. They may be testing such.

Sumisu:
Just a thought but you should experience an SSD to understand access time. Access time for a typical HD can run anywhere from 9-15ms where it is .2ms for an SSD. This is none shy of amazing and can only be understood once seen in real life. There are many times still that I press the button and wait for the command or application to execute only to see that it already has.

In short, its like the computer knowing what key you are about to press and beating you to it. The best example for this is with Word where there is absolutely no delay in its start. This is not to mention the immediate response for all Windows commands and operations; they are instant.

Access time cannot get any better than .1sec as has been shown in the Mtron. This is a characteristic of the SSD uncontroverted by anyone.

 

Hi, Im following this thread for a long time, its really great, that flamenko is doing so much research and tries to get review samples.
My problem is, that Im looking for a 1,8" mikro-ata drive. I know about http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147021&CMP=AFC-C8Junction
but there are a lot of rumours, that the 64gb version will be a lot faster. The problem is, that I cannot find it anywhere. I just ordered a toshiba R500 with an 64gb ssd drive - its a 1,8" ZIF samsung drive, so I will see the results then. http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe....p/productPage.do?service=EU&PRODUCT_ID=132409

Any ideas on the mikro-ata drive?

Thanks

 

And here come the Mtrons!

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167

 

"and here comes the Mtrons....."

just reinstalled and all.. heres my HD TUne of my MTron

 

Wow--unbelievable! I want one!

 

Newegg has lowered the price on the Ritek SSD. Nows it's at $699.99. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183090.

 

Why would you get that when you can get the Mtron Mobi for 639 from Neostore??? Prices are dropping!!! I will have a new review out once approved by the site.

 

Any notebook with a SATA interface can upgrade to SSD? I have a Sony SZ680, I'm really thinking about doing an upgrade.

 

Yes you can. A SATA SSD has the same interface as platter SATA hard drive.

 

You might want to do a little search before you jump into a conclusion too early...
As I know some of the VAIO's is not compatible with SSD.

 

The Sata 2.5" SSD replaces the hard drive exact with no additional hardware or software. There have been minor problems with Sony and it has something to do with the way AHCI is utilized. It was also specific to the Mtron if my guess is right.

Check with your manufacturer and they should give you a good idea as to whether there will be issues. I have run every manufacturers SSD through my Dell with not one problem.

The SATA SSD has exactly the same interface as the hardrive.

 

1 X Mtron = 114 MB/s 690 burst
2 X Mtron = 237 MB/s 720 burst

 

5xMtron 16GB RAID0
Areca 1231 (Areca 1220 was a bottleneck)



9xMtron 16GB RAID0
Areca 1231

 

Flamenko, when you boot your XPS, does it hover above the ground a bit? Because with those specs, it should fly

 

It does very well. With the new Mtron pro SSD I have been able to get a PCMark05 score of 6225 which Im pretty proud of.

For the most part though (and I work on alot of systems for friends in my spare time), alot of speed comes from tweaking as shown in my tweaking thread. I would never be able to touch the startup time I have now without that I don't think.

Thanx again MYK...Repped.

 

I'm a noob on HDs, so I have to ask, what are the major benefits over the regular hds? I know they are quieter, consume less electricity, and produce less heat, but are they faster or slower?

 

Dig back into my SSD reviews in my signature block. That should help you out a bit.

 

For the Mtron SSDs, I see there is higher performance from the PRO 7000, but cannot find any difference between the MOBI 3000 and MSD 6000, other than one is "consumer" and the other "professional." Since the 32GB version is $725 for the MOBI but $649 for the MSD on Neostore, is there any reason to pay more for the MOBI?

And separately, is there any word on when Intel will fix the performance bottleneck with the ICH8 and ICH9 chipsets (my desktop mobo has an ICH8R southbridge)?

 

The MSD and Mobi are the same drive rebadged as a newer version. Yes there is higher performance from the Pro as well.

 

Is the MSD 6000 better for continuous operation or MTF? The MOBI has voided warranty if used in a server.

 

I dont think there are tests that can veryify that as of yet.

 

I was on http://rocketdisk.com/product_info.php?products_id=44&osCsid=3ba912957ac0056ffffe5500970c4f66 last night and their prices are 599.99 for a 2.5 inch 32 GB SSD. The prices are coming down alright.

 

I contacted Sony about probable issues with the mtron SSD and SZ680; this is what they replied back.

I really want to upgrade to SSD, but I am just not getting the right answers.

 

Here's an interesting read: http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/.

 

I think you should not be deterred from upgrading. Sony has only given you a general disclaimer which is their right and in fact fair. How can they support what they do not sell? They do even encourage you with external so I think they are reasonable. Read between the lines, if you want to upgrade go for it but save your HDD if you have issues in the future if you want Sony service.

 

9 X Mtron 16GB SSD's in Raid 0
Those are insane numbers, wow!

 

If anyone is interested in buying a SSD immediately, pls pm me as I may be able to assist depending on what you are looking for,

 

So what is happening with the reliability of the SSD's? It seems that the numbers we were hearing initially (lasting for 40 years etc using advanced algorithms) are far from real. People using SSD's in server environents report high failure rates even within a couple of months.

 

Hi guys,
A 8Go SSD would be in my price range...(on a express card port)
Obviously I cannot fit an OS (i'm talking about vista here) in there...but i was wondering if i would see a major improve in my photoshop performance...(the SSD would be scratch disk)...anyone can tell me more about this?

 

i just bought a 32gb transcend ssd for around $250USD. the 64gb versions will be coming out late january

i can get 64gb SSDs (unbranded OEMs) for $450 a piece now.

both are 2.5" btw. can get both SATA and IDE

let me know if anyone would be interested.

 

you can access the harddrive of the SZ in under 5 minutes. all it takes is 4 screws, two push notches and unclipping the keyboard. same way sony says you cannot upgrade CPU.

 

Have been waiting weeks now for the 64 Meg Memoright.

Just today it is shipping from a couple different sites on the web.... along with an Xmas surprise: 128 SATA 2.5"

Haven't yet decided if I will splurge on it but I'll be ordering tomorrow and will post some benchmarks on power consumption, which is one area I haven't seen measured yet.

Although Mtron has faster read speeds, Memoright has the fastest writes by a good margin, and I am expecting it to be lower power/heat but I haven't been able to verify that yet. In my mind pretty equal products, but 128 megs wow I thought it would be a while before we saw these capacities. Good one by the boys in China.

 

Where are you located Sumisu? Also, they are coming out in January by STEC-Inc all the way up to 512Gb at r/wr speeds of 100mb/s

 

I am in London but travel back to the States frequently (orig. from CA)

Thanks for the pointer Flamenko. The products on the STEC site are pretty amazing. The Zeus IOPS model blows away any numbers I have seen and the mainstream models are impressive too. It's pretty clear going through their site that they are committed to making quality products (Bill of Material to ensure published specs, rigorous testing of individual units, ISO production environments, etc...)

I thought American manufacturers had totally missed the boat on SSD but it looks like they are making some really excellent products.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any pricing though...

Damn, I may have to hold off a bit longer. The other drives might be made to the same standards but someone at STEC has done a really fine job of marketing this aspect of their offering.

I might have to hold off a bit longer now

 

That's exactly what I said. I was skeptical in the beginning about these drives, and I got reemed for what I said.
Flash memory was never meant to be used in this way. But, it can only improve, and I'm sure someone will eventually find a way to make it reliable.
Till then, I'll be sticking with my slow magnetic HDD's.

 

I get your point and know SSD's do have drawbacks but also have advantages. But, might be me, what does a "server environment" have to do with SSD's on laptops. I have done the math for any "personal computing environment" and seems like limited writes not a very realistic real world concern in that regard. Am I missing something?

 

I mentioned in an old post, that the concern mostly lies with the pagefile (besides normal every day usage).
Once it's locked by windows, until you reboot the system, that pagefile (which gets cached quite a bit), writes and writes to the same area on the HDD (no wear leveling can fix that). Eventually the same sectors will get written to, over and over, and they will fail.
I read about that same issue using them in servers, and although that's an extreme case, it does I think, reflect the problem with using flash memory in a HDD.
Flash memory has been around for years yes, in motherboard BIOS and recently hand held devices, but it was never meant to be used in such an extreme environment as a HDD, of course there will be failures. That's my point (repeating myself again).

 

With respect to STEC-Inc, I have been contacted by them and am enthusiastic about being able to review their SSDs and provide sales information in the next few weeks. The thought of getting my hands on a 100mb/s read/write SSD at 512Gb capacity is pretty exciting.

Similarly, I am seeing all the major players (Memoright/Mtron) now also jumping into the mix with multilevel NAND SSDs and expect to be reviewing those shortly as well with each coming out with 64/128Gb SSDs respectively.

 

I'm sorry but you are wrong; wear levelling *can* fix these issues, that's exactly the idea behind it. Windows interacts with the SSD controller but what happens from there is up to the firmware running there.
This is why SSD manufacturers promote their own proprietary controllers and wear levelling algorithms. Although on the logical file system you have a single defined page file, on a good SSD the bits will be spread over the chips and moved around frequently. I *think* it was in Mtron materials that I was reading about active and passive wear levelling - basically the controller is constantly working to address these issues; running tests and moving stuff around for better performance and to extend life. It's hard to get details on how the systems are designed, but any SSD that would let a page file sit in one place is not worth buying. I'm guessing there are quite a few being sold without the advanced algorithms to do this, but this is the technical breakthrough that allowed SSDs to take off sooner than most people expected. In an SSD memory is a simple commodity and the real product being sold is the controller and the software it runs.

You should also note that on a platter-based hard drive you have location-based failures that the system is designed to accomodate. With redundancy and the right control algorithms you could theoretically design storage on media with a surprisingly high failure rate. (Just now happening with multi-level NAND vs. the more expensive single level) Of course the benefit of SSD is that it can deal with these issues without any moving parts, and random access allows designers to build parallelism into the controllers (again, the multi-level memory is also slower, but the complete device ultimately doesn't have to be)

Only when you put these pieces together does it make sense that STEC could have come up with a device built on slow and unreliable memory that has better performance and reliability specs than competing single-level devices (high speed cache is the other element at play it seems)

Anyways, it's worth reading up on, because from what I understand SSD has everything but price going for it. I think a lack of understanding about the wear issue may be behind some of the reports of early failure we are hearing. I can't verify this but I assume that partitioning most SSDs will restrict the controller's ability to do wear-levelling. Doing what this guy describes is a really bad idea IMO unless you can verify that partitions are virtual with respect to a particular SSD. I would bet that on many they are not, so putting a 4 gig swap file into a 4 gig partition is a *really* bad idea I think. Is this what the server admins are doing who have complained about multiple early failures? I have to wonder...

Anyways, buy from a company you trust and get a good warranty. I know little about the smaller companies, but Samsung wouldn't be shipping these if their engineers knew a massive recall was down the road. Promoting their reliability if the opposite were true would cost them billions in replacement and brand damage. Every week a new manufacturer is announcing SSD products so I don't believe there should be concern now about the technology (though I suspect we will see certain products or manufacturers be singled out and destroyed over the endurance issue)

 

Wow!!! Very Impressive Sumisu!!!

 

Alrighty, we can agree to disagree.

 

I guess he didn't explain clearly enough.

The SSD drive, just like regular hard drives, runs software on it ('firmware').

Let's say that the page file is using sectors 1000-2000 (yes, it's a 512k pagefile, shh). Now, these sectors are obviously getting a lot of wear. Every time Windows tries to write to them, the SSD firmware receives the data and the sector numbers, and it writes to them, and then keeps count of how many writes.

When the number of writes is getting too high, the SSD drive remaps the sectors to another place, swapping the data. So now, Windows still says "write this data to sectors 1000-2000!!!" but the SSD drive actually writes it to say, 93274-94274, which had previously only had a dozen writes, so the SSD firmware knew it was a good place.

 

Wow...best explanation I have read yet...gonna use that.

 

If I put 2 SSD drives in RAID on a laptop, will I get both a C: and D: drive or a single C: drive with the combined space of both drives?

Sorry I am still new to RAID

 

Assuming you are using RAID-0 (and you almost certianly would be), you will see one drive with the combined space of both drives.

 

Sweet thanks, now I just need to wait for the price of 256GB SSDs to go down by like 90%...you can buy a car (literally!) at the current prices