why are there no SLC flash drives?

why are there so few and super expensive SLC flash drives? I personally refuse to buy a MLC flash drive due to the low write cycles....with how i use my hardrives i will burn out a MLC drive in a matter of months. Is SLC still that expensive? I can burn out a hitachi or seagate drive in a matter of a year or 2....MLC drive....plz

 

There is:

Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA Solid State Drive

They are pricey though. The process to make SLC costs more per cell.

 

i looked at newegg and all SLC are like 400-600 bucks...what the heck lol...they haven't dropped in price since my senior year in high school and that was 4 years ago lol and they sizes haven't grown at all either....why has SLC been so stagnate and MLC been advancing? Even though SLC is far better

 

If you are sure that you can out run the life cycle of MLC(I assume you have already experienced that), get a SLC. Actually, SLC is cheaper in terms of $/write. It is just that for most people, the calendar life(you don't want to use it in 3 years time even though it can last for another 10) is shorter than the NAND life.

Beside, a heavily OP MLC can extend the NAND life.

 

SLC has definitely increased in capacity and dropped in price quite a bit since 4 years ago, though not as quickly as MLC. The problem is that majority of consumers don't buy SLC and the business market that does buy SLC SSDs are willing to pay the price.

 

Same way Concorde failed. Too expensive to make, not enough people willing to pay the price of admission even if it is (or rather was) the pinnacle of passenger airliners.

 

sucks man...i can't use a MLC. The thing will die in a matter of months with me. Oh well i guess it'll be years before i get a SSD hardrive lol...still not reliable enough....or they are reliable but cost half a grand lol

 

Curious to know what kind of usage it is that you are so sure it will die in a matter of months.

It is not an easy task to measure the true life of an SSD, it depends heavily on usage(not just how many bytes to be written but how they are written as well). What the vendor publish(for example Intel), is using the worst case scenario.

 

RAID maybe? And many RAID controllers don't pass long TRIM.

Newegg used to have alot of OCZ SLC SSD's. Though the cheapest ones started at like 550, I'm assuming they never bothered to stock them as they weren't selling (amazing). I figure Newegg was like if you are in the market for an SLC drive you would go out and find them yourself.

 

Many people use SandForce drive in RAID setup and there are ways to mitigate the need of TRIM, primarily via OP.

 

I constantly download and install lots of stuff. I do tons of peer to peer and hosting. I don't do as much as i used to but in the past there was never a moment when my hardrives weren't flashing like a banshee. Like i said over the last 8-10 years my hardrives have not lasted more than 2 years. 2 years in my main computer. in my server/spare pc those hardrives are 5-10 years old lol. I just do everything on my main computer.

ImageShack Album - 2 images

these are my laptop hardrives...i have not done a single bit of peer2peer on them and i even put all my movies and games on a 1TB eSATA 7200rpm hitachi external. And these drives are only 12 months old lol. If i did p2p on them they would be a lot worse off

what is OP?

 

over provisioning. Basically use say half of the drive. That would of course increase the $/GB but it is a very effective way to reduce Write Amplification factor(and extend the life of the drive).

 

If you are hosting a file you are not writing data, it's only writes that wear down the drive.

To me you are overestimating how much data you write, you have two options.

Intel drives just lower write amplification right down, they will just keep going as long as possible.

Sandforce drives will last longer if you write a lot of compressable data (which it does on the fly).

Intel recons you can write 100GB of data to its first gen drives a DAY for FIVE years.

So you reckon that you are writing 2TB of data each day to each your hard drives?

 

That doesn't sound like heavy write situation as your slowest link in this case is the network which limits your rate of write. However, without any hard figure, I cannot comment further.

 

I have to agree, we have a couple of laptops here with 2nd gen Intels and we would do alot more writing to disk doing Autocad, Maya and CS5 ( PS & Premier ) then p2p etc as that by my experience is 85% read to 15% writes. and SSD's dont give a darn on reads. even at heavy use for a year I have little wear on my SSD units so I cant see an issue. I cant see why your hard drives are burning out so fast uness you let them run warm all the time, s that will sure shorten their lifespan ... I again have old hard drives in a NAS unit that write in excess of 15T/Day and still going strong 8 mos later that are used as remote data backups for businesses.

 

You will be doing a lot of reading, it makes little difference to a mech HDD if its writing or reading both induce wear.

Also only 2 years for mech drives? That sounds a bit off. You must have a high temperature working environment something that SSDs will not only not care about so much but also help to reduce.

 

also they had a fatal engine failure problem lmao

 

my desktop doesn't run hot. My room temp is 65 degrees Fahrenheit and my case has a throughput of 250-300cfms lol My hardrives run at like 30c tops. My cool little external in my barracks doesn't get hotter than 31c and my barrack room is like 75degrees Fahrenheit

EDIT:also my computer was only turned off about once every 20-30 days ussually when my overclocks caused thee pc to crash lol

Also the p2p was d/l all the time and i had raid0 and moved files around all the time.


EDIT h and i also had 4 hardrives. i moved alot back and fourth depending what i was doing. raid had OS and games and heavy used files. 2 others were non raid and storage...this was my last 2 P4 computers

Dates are averaged....cant remember the last decade that well lol give or take 6 months
last 10 years explained lol
oh and yea they really died every 2 years.
first computer(P3 or 4 i think year 2000) was about 2 years old
rebuilt(to AMD XP ~2002)...than hardrives crashed. Got new ones and those lasted til new machine(these never died still work lol)
(P4 2.4GHz~2004) these lasted 2 years in raid 0 and died and got new hardrives with upgraded machine to P4 3.0 GHz E Edition ^^
Those in raid 0 died after a year and a half and i was pissed lol This was my senior year of high school in 2007 ^^ I had like 400 gigs of flac music!!!!! Not including all the anime i d/led lol. I had every episode of DBZ DBGT and most of DB lol....yea yea yea I loved that show so whats it to you! lol Oh and all sorts of memories of great screenies of planetside raids and CS beta 5.2 screenies lol.

Got new ones and those are still alive....because i hardly use the computer anymore...never home ^^

 

strange, I have drives running mid 30'sC for years on end with thousands of TB worth of transfer with very few failures. OK the only mechanical drives ive had fail in the last 2 years was a bad batch from Seagate and a bunch of Hitachi's from Apple Time Capsule units. the Seagates were a defect and the hitachi's cooked due to crappy cooling.

If your blowing drives in a desktop look at your power supply and make sure it is giving voltages within a very tight tolerance. in a laptop its normally heat

 

At that time with the P4s i had the Antec true blue 480 ^^ that was the back than lol.

EDIT: advantually though like right before i joined the amrine corps in late 2007 i had to start rebuilting it....i had a P4 3.0E edtion overclocked like a mofo where it look 115 watts on its own lol and 4 hardrives and my cpu fan was the antec tornado which used 1 amp lol. 92mm fan that put out 119.2CFM plus a 5 80mm fans that put out 60cfms (totaled 300CFMs throughput in case ^^) and a 9500pro lol....the motherboard i think overloaded....got a new psu and that didn't fix it so i replaced the board and that worked


sidenote all my old pcs that i rebuilt with spare parts...they all have working hardrives....those never failed. They all use IDE still lol. It's just my main desktop i burn through drives.