SSD: is 1.8" ok?

I'm looking around for ssd drives.
I've dealt with pcmcia, cf, and a few ide ssd's, but that was ages ago.

I was curious, is there anything wrong with using a 1.8" sata ssd in a CF-29 It will require an adapter(s), of course, but that is not the issue I need to know about, in particular. I'm more interested in electrical, physical, and speed performance.

Thoughts?

 

I've toyed with the idea myself, since a 1.8" should fit well even with an adapter.

Anyone tried it yet?

 

I can't comment on the electrical and physical aspects, but they are every bit as fast as their 2.5" counterparts, and I can provide benchmarks if someone here has a comparable Intel 2.5". They are pricier than their counterparts as well though, since they are not a very widely used form factor.

 

I have a Intel 320 600Gb, what kind of benchmark would you like to do?
Intel SSDSA2CW600G3

Intel® SSD 320 Series (600GB, 2.5in SATA 3Gb/s, 25nm, MLC))

I tought I read somewhere the 1.8" and 2.5" SSD's sometimes have the same innards, just a bit different layout and a bit more cramped. Apple made even their own "shape" with the blade SSD's in their Macbook Air's.

Edit: Hmm, I'm not that good with paint and in a hurry, but the main thing is that MAA83's disk is a bit faster at reading and mine is quite a bit faster at writing. That is to be expected when I have used 15% of 600Gb and MAA 91% of 80Gb

 

You're correct they are the same innards, so the speeds should be comparable between sizes. You're drive will get much better random and sequential writes however because your NAND array is much larger than mine. But a 600 1.8 and a 600 2.5, or a 80 1.8 and a 80 2.5 should perform similarly. However it would be interesting to see the read speeds, as those should still be close.

I usually benchmark SSD's with CrystalDisk, AS SSD, or ATTO. Crystal would probably be the easiest, and even if not the most accurate it would give a good relative comparison between our drives since they're the same brand.

I'm using Intel RST 10.8.0.1003 drivers, under win 7 64. I do have software FDE with TrueCrypt running but that shouldn't add too much overhead. I'll be using CrystalDiskMark 3.01b, the Installer / non-portable edition, with default test data settings, I'll select "ALL" tests with the default 1000MB size. I'll edit the post with results once complete.

EDIT: Note these aren't ideal testing conditions. I still have my AV and HIPS on with torrents running in the background and my drive is at 91% capacity due to a single 48GB torrent file in progress. However, the seq. reads are only slightly lower than claimed, and the seq. writes are spot on. I've found Intel random small read/writes to be better than other drives (at the time I bought it at least).
http://ark.intel.com/products/56571/Intel-SSD-320-Series-(80GB-2_5in-SATA-3Gbs-25nm-MLC

 

Just curious, how old is your drive, mine is days old so that could make a difference perhaps?

 

I bought my drive in late August. It could make a small difference due to wear levels and such, but since these are comparisons in different machines I doubt any of our benchmark results will be scientific - but a good estimate none the less. The only way to properly do this would be to load the same system image on both drives and try it on the same machine back to back. I can't afford two SSD's at a time though

FYI SSD Toolbox says I have a little over a TB in reads and writes.

 

how does one rate the life expectancy of an ssd? what is the exectancy?
I know I have few hdd's from early 90s still spinning away...

 

From an operational perspective, it's still MTBF. The MTBF for most of the 320 series drives are 1,200,000 hours. From a NAND wear perspective measured in 'Write Endurance' - it's harder to say because few people have reached the wear limits of their SSD's. It's safe to say for avg. desktop usage the life of the SSD won't be reach unless you do heavy writes. There's a good Intel paper that details the the performance, power, and reliability of these drives when used in an enterprise server/storage application - it might have some of the power specs you're looking for as well.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewsroom.intel.com%2Fservlet%2FJiveServlet%2Fdownload%2F38-4332%2FIntel_SSD_320_Series_Enterprise_Product_Specification.pdf&rct=j&q=intel%20320%20Write%20Endurance%20Specifications&ei=1IpjTqbsKpCO4gSMqe2NCg&usg=AFQjCNHyA8GpiGYOWncCXJuoNpb-Iimf7w&sig2=F0esMN7h3Fe8E_ocvxgIZg&cad=rja

The Write Endurance for my 80GB drive is 15TB. The Write Endurance for Alecgold's 600GB SSD is 60TB. It's not an unreachable number, but it does mean you're doing heavy writes and should probably invest in a mechanical or SLC SSD instead.

The way Intel SSD Toolbox shows wear: The "Estimated Life Remaining" graph is based on the E9 SMART attribute and is based on avg. applied workload and isn't valid if the workload changes drastically constantly. The E9 SMART attribute is "Media Wearout Indicator"

Even though I've written 1TB to my drive so far, my E9 value is still 100.
I'm not an expert on wear leveling though.

 

@MAA83 1TB isn't much, I'm in a few days already at 277,50Gb Host Writes. But that included writing all the data twice as the first clone didn't work out.
Just being curious, what kind of laptop did you use for the test? I have a CF-19 Mk5 that is a good month old. intel i5-2420M processor, 4Gb memory, runing AV and not to much other things.

@ Interestingfellow.
Anandtech has some nice article's on that.
AnandTech - OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Preview: The First SF-2500 SSD
it comes down to a few factors; how much you write to it, how big it is, the quality of the NAND (memory) and the quality of the controler/wear leveling.
E.g. if you write 7Gb a day (a lot) to a 80Gb drive (a bit small) with disputable quality NAND and a controler that doesnt level the wear evenly and not enough spare memory, it might be a 5 or 6 years.
OTOH if you write 7Gb (still a lot) to a 600Gb drive (a bit big) with good quality NAND and a good controler and enough spare memory, it might last a theoreticly 987 years. It will never last that long because after 10 years the NAND will start to show degradation so will start to stop function properly. But that's a bit unknown yet. SSD is still a relative new technology.

If you want the best, because you have a server running or you have mission critical data, choose an Intel SLC SSD. That will set you back some serious money btw.
If not, choose wise and find a decent SSD with MLC that has a good controler. If you are a gamer, you go for maximum performance and choose something like a Corsair M4 for super-performance, if you are more a regular user that likes the speed of a SSD and the shock resitance combined with a good reliability, choose something like an Intel 320.
If you are a business user that needs a bit more certainty and reasurance of past performance choose something like an Intel 520. They are based on previous generation NAND but have a better controlled production process and proven fault rate.

 

@MAA, your Unsafe Shutdown count is 3, mine is 645, what is that doing?

 

It looks like unsafe shutdown count is a reporting of SMART value CO:

Has it been increasing since you purchased the drive? Or have you only now noticed the value? It looks as if you're not the only person with this problem when I search google. However it seems hard to track down, anything from the BIOS, Controller/driver, or the drive firmware - so it would be difficult to track down the problem by comparing our machines. What kind of laptop do you have yours installed in by the way?

I would check the controller driver/RST version, ssd firmware, and the bios settings for your SMART. Try pulling SMART values from another program like CrystalDiskInfo or something else.

If it's any consolation, it seems to be an informational value and has no bearing on drive degradation, but I understand how it can be disconcerting.. that's very high and probably being misreported due to a bug somewhere. Since your drive is new and recently purchased I doubt you've gotten 600+ BSOD's or hard reboots.

Some people report that changing the write cache policy settings fixed it, but I can't explain how.

 

Mine is in a Panasonic CF-19A (mk5) and I only noticed it when I made the print screen and compared it to yours. I'll keep an eye out for it, as it's quite high. I couldn't find additional info at Intel, so if it doesnt run higher, I'm oke with it. The drive is working perfectly after all and there seem to be no other warning orso.
I bought the SSD NIB for a price that was to good to be true (600Gb for €300). So I hope that it keeps hanging in there.
I'm pretty sure the drive was new as it reported back that it had 260gb of host writes. I had the first clone that failed, (it wouldn't boot) so that was a copy of 120Gb (I copied the recovery partitions as well) and then a second time 120Gb.

I'll just keep an eye out on that value.

I noticed my battery life improved quite a lot. I would get anything between 4,5 hours and 9,5 hours of estimated battery life, now I get anything between 4,5 and 14 hours of battery life.
Watching video still gives me 4,5 hours, but just typing here and browsing a bit, screen on the second lowest brightness and the energy settings on saving as much as it can, it reports back 11min43. The maximum I got before was 9h28.

 

Yeah I would just watch the count for a while. As long as they don't go up each time you shut down, I wouldn't let it bother me. Like you said, it should function perfectly and have no bearing on it's longevity. That's an excellent price for the 600GB model! Those are a rare sight to see in person especially.

I also noticed a decent improvement in idle/standby battery life. It uses 2-3 watts depending on model when active, which is comparable to mech drives I believe, but it idles much lower and I didn't miss the spin-up and spin-down of mech drives.

 

Jesus....nothing is ever smple.

So, in short, a low end drive could be expect to last 5ish years.
But not longer than 10, cauase the nand chips break down?

Obviously there are different levels of quality (and cost) which will greatly affect perfomance and life.

Generally, a Chevrolet is good for 200k miles
Generally, a human will live 50-100years
Generally it takes 4-9 minutes to smoke a cigarette
and generally, a mid grade ssd will last 5 years?

 

Life isn't ment to be easy, it's ment to be fun!

I think a lot of the more serious manufacturers are carefull when estimating SSD lifes. It's a bit like your old HDD. If it spins up and start's writing and you drop it juuuust a bit wrong, it doesn't have to be that hard to send it to the scrap-heap. But with a good drop sensor you might also have 10-20 years of fun with it. OTOH if your laptops drop-sensor and the HDD dropsensor are bot active and working against each other, you might have a world of trouble finding out why the darn thing won't do anything.

To make it even more difficult, some cheaper drives are much faster than my Intel drive. But I have a SATA300 IIRC so a SATA600 is just a waste of money and speed for me. Instead I opted for more reliability.

My gutfeeling is that the drive I had in my old Macbook Pro 13", a Samsung Gen1/2, would last 5-10 years. About the Blade in my MBA11", I can't tell you anything. The intel 320 Gen3 drive I have now might last 10-20 years.

@MAA83, I haven't measured the real performance before, so it's just the idea I have. And placebo-effects can be quite strong, so I'm happy to hear you have the same feeling about it.

 

Ahhhh, whatever....
I'm gonna keep backups of backups of the primary anyway.

SSD=faster than ide...anything....so ssd it will be.

 

One more thing spang to my mind, what is the maximum speed of your IDE connection? 133Mb/s? But that is the theoretical speed? If the real life speed is anything like 20-30Mb/s I'm not sure a SSD is going to help. OTOH it's a lot faster at searching, write/read first block etc.

 

I can't comment much on other brand SSD's, I've owned 2 intel's (the current one and a G2 80GB) and my very first was an OCZ Vertex that I didn't keep very long because it wouldn't play nice with XP on my EEEpc.

However I would expect any Intel SSD to last at least 5 years with general usage, and their warranties are 5 years for retail version. OEM versions get 1 year warranties.

To put it in perspective, the MTBF if you just leave the drive in, on, and barely use it is about 130 something years.

If you somehow max out the write endurance before the 5 year window, that means you're writing more than 5.4 gigs daily to you're drive, which is pretty heavy usage. And that's for the 10TB write endurance threshold for the smaller drives. For a larger drive like Alecgold's, you would have to be writing more than 32 gig's a day to reach that within 5 years. And those specs are derived form testing in a harsh enterprise environment, measuring random 4k writes spanning 100% of the drive (completely filling it up over and over again). For comparison, I've written 1TB in about 4-5 months. While that averages out to more than the 5.4 GB/day limit, you have to remember this includes a lot of initial copying, multiple clean installs at the very beginning, etc. furthermore my drive is usually only 20 something GB full and these are large sequential writes (since I don't have a secondary drive in my laptop, I do kind of abuse this one by copying lots of movie/episode files to it weekly to watch from my external) so they don't increase the wear as heavily as the enterprise test levels indicated. It's also why my wear level is probably 0 percent even though I've written 1.17TB of data to it. Writing to a full drive causes more wear than writing to a half empty one, because the wear leveling algorithms have more empty space to work with so to speak.

I think drive longevity among desktop/laptop users has become a less critical issue since the controllers being used on SSD's these day's are third generation. Intel has good wear leveling algorithms, and as long as you aren't copying GB's upon GB's of tiny blocks of data to it 24/7 it should last just as long as a mech drive. If this wasn't a toughbook forum, I would say chances are the drive will outlive your machine.

EDIT: I just saw you'll be using this on a IDE/PATA connection. That shouldn't change anything regarding longevity, but from a quick glance the prices of PATA SSD's are higher than SATA SSD's, and like Alecgold said, it will be faster, but not 'intel speed demon' fast as Intel likes to call it. You'll have to decide weather the investment is worth it. I recommend you check out some brands that are known to make good PATA SSD's, like runcore and transcend. Others also, those are just the two I know of.

 

Not being rude, or short, but almost any ssd is going to remove the HDD bottleneck of my mk1. Whether you are talking about seek time, read write speed, cache, or....whatever, it's going to be faster than my HITACHI Travelstar 4K120 HTS421212H9AT00 (0A27469) 120GB 4200 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" IDE Ultra ATA100 / ATA-6 (even if it was 5200 or 7200).
And I could up to a 7200 but for a couple dollars more, I can get the lower power consumption, g shock rating, and overall speed of an SSD.

Thank you for all the input and advice, I've learned a great deal.

That was all IMHO, but I've been known to be wrong.

 

Ooh, its not rude. But I haven't worked with IDE in such a long time that I haven't got the faintest clue about the speed it operates at. And a quick google didn't help me either.
But you've got a point about the seek time,read write speed and cache.
Good luck finding a good priced 1.8" and I'm really curious how it all works out!

 

I was about to buy 2 of these

Samsung 128 GB 1.8" (MMCRE28G8MXP-0VBL1) (SSD) Solid State Drive PM800 Lenovo | eBay

to use with adapters in a 19 and a 29 because £89.95 looks cheap (at UK prices anyway) for 128GB.
Decided I really ought at least to google the model number first...
Turns out there's no TRIM support so not such a bargain after all.
Still looking though.

 

WEll,
I didn't want to go puttin it right out there, but yes, that is exactly why I asked. I saw a few of them go off in the US for about $100. good deal.

Thanks for all the advice, ya'll. I just scooped up a Gobook III for the kid, so I have to focus on that before I blow any more money on my 29 (I just did a kb/ts replacement, and a few other tidbits).

I'll report back, and keep an eye out round here...

 

Can't trim be avoided? I know Apple doesn't use trim, but has the controler do something alike. If the drive is used for only 65 out of 128 Gb, it's also possible to securely erase the free space every other week or once a month. that will make the use a lot heavier, but if it's a lot cheaper and you're not opposed to doing some regular maintenance?
I know I used it in my Samsung SSD that I put in a Macbook Pro. But the write degredation wasn't to bad, so I did it once every other month orso.

 

TRIM didn't hit a lot of drives until the second and third generations. If it doesn't have TRIM support in windows, chances are it will have it's own form of garbage collection that run when the disk is idle, kind of like the early sandforce controller drives.