SSD disks and NAND memory price watch

goanna

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Looks good.

System drive must be SSD without question.

endotoxic

This is good thing since motherboads are coming with embed SSD. Asus is giving 65GB SSD on their top line flagship models. System boot now is a reality on board.

peternap

Damn! I saw that and started the "That's great dance" but then I saw it was in Pounds, not Dollars.

fatpig

I assume, it's not a problem to connect these to a desktop PC which has sata2, too? I have not looked at a 2,5" Drives connectors for a long time :)

eatstoomuchjam

"SSD Drive" is redundant. :)

And @fatpig, yes. A 2.5" SATA drive has the same connector as a 3.5" SATA drive. You might want a sled if your case only has 3.5" bays, though.

pvjames

Have you guys done any extensive tests with recording/editing video/audio files & projects onto SSD drives?

LPowell

On my Windows workstation, I have a pair of 60GB SSD's accessed as a 120GB RAID drive. I use it primarily as a virtual memory cache disk for Windows and Adobe CS5.5, and sometimes as a target for large video renders. The reason I don't use it as my system drive is because it's not 100% reliable. On rare occasions, the SSD will fail to mount on bootup, and Windows then complains about the lack of a VM cache. Rebooting has always fixed the problem, but this is not something I'd want to risk my OS on.

My understanding is that SSD sectors will start to fail after a relatively small number of erase cycles, and for that reason, the drive's firmware uses sector-wide randomization and erase algorithms to minimize the number of erase cycles per sector. If this remains the case, I can't really consider SSD's viable for intensive random access purposes.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

@LPowell

Making RAID from SSD is not best idea until you want some very specific thing, as internally SSD controllers are very smart. It is better to just get larger SSD and modern ones, as controllers progress was very fast.

Second, SSD as system drive make largest sense, as for reliability. It is really good for for modern PC life time. It is easy as hell. USE DAILY BACKUP :-) I just use WHS backup and even if system drive fails, install new one, insert boot CD and it'll restore exact PC state from the server.

LPowell

@Vitaliy_Kiselev Yes, at this point, a single large SSD is probably a better choice than dual RAID SSD's. At the time I bought them, dual 60GB SSD's were the most cost-effective solution, and my HP workstation had RAID support built into the motherboard. The RAID configuration does theoretically double the throughput speed of the SSD's, but I don't really see it in practice.

goanna

@LPowell

Has it occurred to you to set up your RAID in mirror mode to cover the possibility of one of the two failing?

And yes, there have been recent inroads into the historical problems of slowdown and failure.

LPowell

@goanna The only issue I've seen with the SSD's is at bootup. Once they're mounted, they work without error. The 120GB combined size is just barely large enough to be useful, I wouldn't want to mirror them down to a 60GB drive.

goanna

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/25738/rumor_tt_toshiba_cuts_nand_prices_20_to_25_today/index.html

With the massive price drop, we can only assume that Toshiba is backing off their reduced output strategy. This is good news for consumers looking for even lower priced SSDs. How good is this for consumers? Well, this is a quote from one

stoney

@LPowell If the RAID is software based, I wouldn't bet on the theoretical speed. I guess the bottleneck of SSD is the write speed, and it's improving fast. Yes one big drive is less headache.

My only complaint is the lack of TRIM support from Apple bastards on 3rd party SSD drives. There's TRIM Enabler App http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322 but I'm not sure if it works.

LPowell

@stonebat The RAID firmware is on the HP's motherboard and works at the BIOS level. Win7 sees it only as a single disk volume. It does appear to speed up the R/W access to the SSD's.

zigizigi

I recently upgraded my system drive to SSD - well I agree that it's quite redundant. What's the real benefit? Few seconds less boot-up time? I power my PC once a day and really don't care if takes slightly less. Few seconds less of start-up screens of heavy applications? Again, if I spend hours editing in Vegas then hours rendering, do I really care? Can't find a real advantage I couldn't live without, but 120Gb drives are cheap these days, so why not indulge in perfectionism a little?

The only sound idea that occurs to me is to have a 512 Gb drive as temporary medium for multicam projects instead of conventional RAID. That would be a valuable boost in NLE preview performance. But they're not cheap yet, but still affordable if you do enough of paid job of a kind that benefits from it and covers expenses. I don't, I only do few such projects a year.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

@zigizigi

Benefit is easy to spot if you work many hours, use various software and do it everyday.
HDDs are unsuitable for accessing many small chunks of information (and this is that your system HDD is doing).
They are also slow for big chunks.
And SSDs, with more channels and better controllers became very good.

And yes, it is very easy to feel computer with HDD as system drive, I tried many times :-)

stoney

@zigizigi SSD has no moving parts. That means I can just pack my laptop with SSD and use it like a supersized iPad.

I have only 8GB in my laptop. So I gotta swap apps frequently. Kill one. Launch another. SSD helps tremendously.

goanna

I have recently re-cloned my mechanical hard drive to SSD and the speed difference you notice is, yes, on boot-up.

But it's astonishing to see applications launch instantly. FFMBC Turns .mts into Prores faster, limited only by the processor. Deeper down, virtual RAM is speed-indistinguishable from real RAM and I think the whole VR thing could be undergoing a re-think for OSes.

But, like perhaps, @zigizigi, lots of us, for lots of the time, just surf the net. The only perceivable change is less noise.

thepalalias

@zigizigi If you are going to compare SSD to HDD, you want to compare them one-to-one to get a fair comparison. So if you are talking about using an HDD RAID, then compare that to an SSD RAID. :)

The benefits depend slightly on how performance the drive is vs your HDD. The highest end SSDs completely outperform the highest end HDDs in terms of both random access and sustained transfers.

If you are running your files off a single high performance HDD vs a single high performance SSD, the difference is very apparent in Vegas. How many layers of video are you typically running concurrently?

Here are a few of the things that are fairly intensive on your drives.

Creating file indexes/searching without an index.
Playing back high bitrate files.
Playing multiple files at once.
Opening/closing programs.

Of course, it all depends on to what extent your workflow is IO limited vs CPU or GPU limited.

Not all SSDs are created equal - some of the high performance options have sustained transfer rates well over twice that of some budget offerings, etc.

goanna

As much as I'm right with @LPowell when it comes to an SSD RAID (as in "dude! just imagine what these mothers could do RAIDed!"), they're fast enough on their own.

In fact, they're so light you think you've bought an empty box, so quiet you mistake a screen time-out for a shutdown, so fast you wouldn't ever go back and so cheap to produce you might want to keep just one mechanical hard-drive in a museum case for posterity.

When the first manufacturer of mechanical hard drives ceases production, I'll post it here.

goanna

Intel ships SSD 335 as its first drive with 20nm flash

Don't panic, SSD 330 owners: your drive hasn't been immediately rendered obsolete. Intel's new SSD 335 is just the first shipping drive using the company's 20-nanometer flash memory. The shrink down from 25nm is primarily a technological showcase that proves the more scalable, hi-K/metal gate borrowed from processors can fly in NAND-based storage. Buyers will still get the same 500MB/s read speeds and 450MB/s writes in a 2.5-inch, SATA 6Gbps drive that will stuff neatly into many desktops and laptops. Intel is shy about pricing for the lone 240GB variant on offer, although a quick scan finds it selling for a slight premium over its ancestor, at $210. While that's still frugal in this day and age, we're guessing that Intel's vow to "pass along the savings" with the SSD 335 won't truly be realized without a reseller price drop or two.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/30/intel-ships-ssd-335-as-its-first-drive-with-20nm-flash/