SSD

[TheHarvester]

True to my life western digital had one on sale the next day 200$ for a 240gig one. But I'm to happy to care.

So you don't feel bad after the euphoric hi wears off.

I have a friend who works for W.D. and he said their SSds are crap and not holding up.

[waawaaweenie]

I have had a SSD 100 GB in my Mac Por for a couple of years and it has been great. boots in seconds.

got it from OWC who has their own brand and gets great reviews

I just got a new Mac book pro and am itching to replace the drive in it.

[meaty-btz]

A ton of SSD's are crap, even some intels. Buyer be ware. I have seen a higher failure rate on SSDs than quality platters. I should add the note, consumer SSDs are risky.

Why? Most of the quality SSD chips and chipsets end up one place.. in data center's Tier-1 Storage Arrays. Aka, in MY data center's, as we have two now. The high quality stuff still gets nearly completely eaten up in Data Center SSDs. The consumer lines are 2nd rate. We still pop drives! Our SSDs quality is reflected in the price. I would never trust a consumer end SSD who, in my experience (including intels and other quality brands, where in we have hundreds of these things at work) have had a failure rate of over 50% at a roughly 6 month cycle. Some drives for sale still are two low end, smaller drives ganged together. If half of the drive fails (likely) then the entire drive will fail out.

Good for an OS drive, but store no critical data on an SSD.

[JDay]

I have a friend who works for W.D. and he said their SSds are crap and not holding up.

That is what most people who have tried one say. If you want a top quality SSD you should stick with Crucial, Intel and Samsung.

[JDay]

I have had a SSD 100 GB in my Mac Por for a couple of years and it has been great. boots in seconds.

got it from OWC who has their own brand and gets great reviews

I just got a new Mac book pro and am itching to replace the drive in it.

Stay away from OWC, they overcharge for their drives. Their drives are just standard Sandforce based SSDs. Corsair makes comparable drives for much less.

[JDay]

A ton of SSD's are crap, even some intels. Buyer be ware. I have seen a higher failure rate on SSDs than quality platters. I should add the note, consumer SSDs are risky.

Citation needed. Tomshardware did an article last year about SSD reliability and found that there is almost no difference between consumer and enterprise SSD failure rates. They also found that Intel SSDs have around a 0.3% failure rate, a rate much lower than HDDs. However they were unable to get any hard RMA data on HDD and SSD RMA rates since manufactures do not release that information.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

[MadMax]

How could a SSD be less reliable then a spinning platter.

Answer: it can't be SSD are very reliable according to many study's like the toms hardware one above.

Personally I have had way more problems with hard drives then I have had with SSD and my two SSD 120 gb in a striped raid are smokin fast and absolutely raped the performance of my old velociraptors.

[ExtremeX]

There are plenty of crap SSDs out there. Higher end SSD drives have more generous over provisioning. Say 110% capacity or more, the additional space is used to replace/repair bad nand cells in flash memory. More reliable drives have more provisioning, and better algorithms to manage this. On top of that, the quality of the cell is also in question, along with the controller driving it.

Intel and Crucial drives have been a blessing in some of my arrays, and in mission critical environments, ioFusion (PCI-E) products are cream of the crop. People like Google, Facebook and heavy database users rely of this type of tech for enterprise applications. The fact that its OEM hardware in high end servers and also certified VMware product should speak for itself.

The main difference is enterprise labeled SSD drives is the use of SLC vs MLC. It has more to do with standing the test of time due to increased write cycles along with helping write speeds.

As a home user, you cant go wrong with Intel or Crucial products, and I'm sure a few others, but I tend to stick with those 2 brands since they have treated me well.

[sholling]

Price War Coming?

I'm all set with SSDs with 5 of them installed in everything but my server but it looks like there might be a price war on the horizon.

Link

Major SSD firms have initiated price reductions to reflect falling prices for NAND flash chips. The move is also aimed at triggering a price war in the market in an attempt to squeeze out smaller peers, according to industry sources in Taiwan.

A number of channel retailers, which usually sell commodity memory products including flash drives and memory cards, recently began to offer SSDs, the sources observed. Some of the leading SSD producers are concerned about inferior products that might disrupt development of the market, and therefore have resorted to price-cutting measures to force the retailers to leave the market, the sources indicated.

Kingston Technology, Intel, OCZ and Crucial are identified as the ones lowering SSD prices

How could a SSD be less reliable then a spinning platter.

Answer: it can't be SSD are very reliable according to many study's like the toms hardware one above.

Personally I have had way more problems with hard drives then I have had with SSD and my two SSD 120 gb in a striped raid are smokin fast and absolutely raped the performance of my old velociraptors.

Actually they haven't been as reliable as most of us had hopped. The problems have mainly been firmware and controller issues but the early euphoria has been tempered down a bit. My first Kingston died after just a few months due to bad firmware and I'm far from alone. Sanforce may be the performance king but lots industry insiders report persistent trouble with their controllers. I'd for sure stick with first tier vendors like Crucial, IBM, Samsung, and Kingston. Crucial and Samsung makes their own NANDs and are reported to reserve their best output for themselves and other top tier companies. IBM is supposed to be sourcing NANDs from a partnership with Crucial. I'm not sure where Kingston gets theirs. The bottom line is back up often and enjoy the speed.

BTW here is a glowing review of the new Intels that gets into some of the issues others have had.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-review-cherryville-brings-reliability-to-sandforce

I don't usually take Lifehacker very seriously but these are good tips.
Maximizing the life of an SSD

http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-maximize-the-life-of-your-ssd

Optimizing SSD performance

http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance

Migrating tips

http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid+state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows

[JDay]

I don't usually take Lifehacker very seriously but these are good tips.
Maximizing the life of an SSD

http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-maximize-the-life-of-your-ssd

Pointless under Windows 7. All you need to do is make sure you ran the WEI benchmark and Windows 7 will configure everything for you. In fact most of those "optimize your SSD for Windows" articles have incorrect information in them.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Frequently Asked QuestionsWill Windows 7 support Trim?

Yes. See the above section for details.

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.
The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?Is NTFS Compression of Files and Directories recommended on SSDs?Does the Windows Search Indexer operate differently on SSDs?

No.



Yes, on NTFS. When Bitlocker is first configured on a partition, the entire partition is read, encrypted and written back out. As this is done, the NTFS file system will issue Trim commands to help the SSD optimize its behavior.
We do encourage users concerned about their data privacy and protection to enable Bitlocker on their drives, including SSDs.

Does Media Center do anything special when configured on SSDs?

No. While SSDs do have advantages over traditional HDDs, SSDs are more costly per GB than their HDD counterparts. For most users, a HDD optimized for media recording is a better choice, as media recording and playback workloads are largely sequential in nature.

Does Write Caching make sense on SSDs and does Windows 7 do anything special if an SSD supports write caching?

Some SSD manufacturers including RAM in their devices for more than just their control logic; they are mimicking the behavior of traditional disks by caching writes, and possibly reads. For devices that do cache writes in volatile memory, Windows 7 expects flush commands and write-ordering to be preserved to at least the same degree as traditional rotating disks. Additionally, Windows 7 expects user settings that disable write caching to be honored by write caching SSDs just as they are on traditional disks.

Do RAID configurations make sense with SSDs?

Yes. The reliability and performance benefits one can obtain via HDD RAID configurations can be had with SSD RAID configurations.

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

• Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
• Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
• Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
• In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

Are there any concerns regarding the Hibernate file and SSDs?

No, hiberfile.sys is written to and read from sequentially and in large chunks, and thus can be placed on either HDDs or SSDs.

What Windows Experience Index changes were made to address SSD performance characteristics?

[MadMax]

There are plenty of crap SSDs out there. Higher end SSD drives have more generous over provisioning. Say 110% capacity or more, the additional space is used to replace/repair bad nand cells in flash memory. More reliable drives have more provisioning, and better algorithms to manage this. On top of that, the quality of the cell is also in question, along with the controller driving it.

Intel and Crucial drives have been a blessing in some of my arrays, and in mission critical environments, ioFusion (PCI-E) products are cream of the crop. People like Google, Facebook and heavy database users rely of this type of tech for enterprise applications. The fact that its OEM hardware in high end servers and also certified VMware product should speak for itself.

The main difference is enterprise labeled SSD drives is the use of SLC vs MLC. It has more to do with standing the test of time due to increased write cycles along with helping write speeds.

As a home user, you cant go wrong with Intel or Crucial products, and I'm sure a few others, but I tend to stick with those 2 brands since they have treated me well.

What's your point there is plenty of crap everything out there, in general SSD are the most reliable best performing product on the market right now and if you are using spinning hard drives instead thinking there is any positive you r tripping.

[ExtremeX]

What's your point there is plenty of crap everything out there, in general SSD are the most reliable best performing product on the market right now and if you are using spinning hard drives instead thinking there is any positive you r tripping.

My point is application. Storage Density... You are a trippin if you think spinning hard drives are a dead tech or provides no positives.

I use both, including SSD drives that cost more a typical car... If you don't know about ioFusion products, then you haven't experienced the ultimate SSD. IF you don't believe me, go get a quote for one.

Some of my customers storage requirements are so big that there is no other option other than traditional spinning disk. You mitigate crap buying enterprise SAS / SCSI drives.

D2D backup solutions always use enterprise drives like RE3 or RE4 7200 RPM spinning disk. When a customer tells you their storage server requirements are 10-15TB, then you propose a price using SSD, they will laugh you out the door.

Ive been around the block to know, I do this for a living.

[JDay]

What's your point there is plenty of crap everything out there, in general SSD are the most reliable best performing product on the market right now and if you are using spinning hard drives instead thinking there is any positive you r tripping.

I use platter drives for storage. There is no way I could afford or justify replacing my storage array with SSDs. Maybe in 3-5 years when the prices go way down and capacity increases.

[MadMax]

I was coming from a place of having your SSD dedicated to your OS so for multiple terabyte storage spinning drives are the only option but when SSD get closer to the large drives in terms of cost they will be obsolete.

[JDay]

I was coming from a place of having your SSD dedicated to your OS so for multiple terabyte storage spinning drives are the only option but when SSD get closer to the large drives in terms of cost they will be obsolete.

I dunno, tape is still king when it comes to archiving data.