Intel X25-E SSD is FAST

[Stabface]

But at 700$ for 32Gb I just can't justify buying one....
Anyone with more money than brains care to buy one and report back how well it handles multiboxing WoW ?

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15931

[keyclone]

i was talking with some hardware types and was told that the intel SSD is far superior to the others currently out (something to do with the on-board protocol stack and incompatibilities with the other drives).

i have been told the patriot drives, normally around $80 for 32g.. a rockin price... performs about the same as a normal hard drive due to the incompatibilities making it not worth the upgrade (if i were at patriot, i'd be pushing extra hard to fix those drives before i lost the lead to intel... which is about to happen)

btw... you can get the Intel X25-M 80G drive for $548, normally $740, at buy.com ( link )... slower write speeds (70Mbs instead of 170Mbps)... but for game playing, it's still fast enough

[emesis]

I went with SSD a couple of weeks ago (Samsung 32GB SLC) and was pretty disappointed. I didn't see a significant improvement, running 5 WoWs on one PC. Note that I already had symlinks done (huge benefit), a reasonably fast HD (Raptor 10K), and 8 gb RAM in a 64bit OS (some benefit). My box was already at the point of doing OK in Shat before the expansion, but Dal is just another level of overload. Even with these upgrades, I have wait 30 seconds or so after hearthing into Dal before things become playable.

Although the SSD I got is probably not quite as high a performer as the one you linked to, it should still be loads faster at multiple seeks that my previous HD. I interpret the lack of significant improvement to the SSD as suggesting this is no longer the rate-limiting step on my PC. In general you will see the biggest benefit with whatever happens to be the rate-limiting step in your PC. Telling what that is is not so straigh-forward. SSD can have a major impact in some systems, particularly if you are experiencing city lag with a lot of hard drive seeking.

But I would definitely set up symlinks/junctions as described in the Wiki first if you have not done so.

[pengwynman]

i saw a news article just a few days ago about intel teaming up with some other hard drive manufacturer (Hitachi i think) to develop new enterprise SSD's. hopefully we'll see some of their research trickle down to the consumer market :]

I am 100% convinced that SSD's are the future of data storage, they're already (mostly) faster, more reliable, and require less energy, there just needs to be some more improvements in capacity and a drop in price would be nice.

EDIT: here's the article i saw:
http://www.crn.com/storage/212201493

[Stabface]

Everything has a MTBF, even a pet rock.

[pengwynman]

I don't like devices that come with expiration dates.

So you can pass your hard drives down to your grandchildren's grandchildren? looking at the cheapo SSD's, their stated MTBF is 1,500,000 hours... over 171 years. :P

[oMek]

these use single-level cell NAND flash memory, ALOT faster than the MLC (multi-level) cheaper chips alot of the current SSDs use

[cepheus]

I don't like devices that come with expiration dates.

So you can pass your hard drives down to your grandchildren's grandchildren? looking at the cheapo SSD's, their stated MTBF is 1,500,000 hours... over 171 years. :P

SSDs use memory that has a limited number of writes. Eventually each sector will become unusable, just like flash memory. Basically, it wears out.

The current estimate for a desktop computer is 5 years I believe.

As far as i know, the firmware in the ssd drives will mark the areas that closing in on their write limit, and only use theese areas for long term storage. This will lead to a much longer lifespan on such drive, so it will last so long that this isnt a real problem any more.

[aboron]

"Eventually each sector will become unusable"

I'd say that applies to every form of storage humans have invented thus far.

<RANT>

Hard drives are certainly not any prize for usable life. My first personal raid5 array had 5 seagate 7200.9 160gig drives, all bought roughly 6 years ago, and currently I have 2 of them remaining that lived longer than their warranty period without failing. The specs say they have a 0.34% annual failure rate, but my personal stats are more like a 10% failure rate. And as far as MTBF, that's currently sitting at more like 10,500 hours. And to bring the mean up to the mfg. estimates, the remaining drives will have to be working for an astronomical length of time without failing.

And that was just a set of drives I happened to take an interest in, overall I've had brands and drives that are far worse, and very few that are better. Both my original 36G WD raptors have been replaced. I bought 2 80gig Maxtors once for a client's raid1 array and both of them failed within a month.

I'd say at least 2/3 of all the drives I have ever purchased (over the past 20+ years) have died and been RMA'd or tossed by now. I have a few exceptions to the rule, like an old 9 gig seagate ultra scsi 160 drive from my oldest server is still kicking, but mostly i have to think that drive manufacturer's life estimates are a complete pile of crap, without any legitimate statistical basis. Just like they invented a new way of counting bytes to make the drives seem larger, only instead of a few % of overestimation on drive life i think they went large by about a factor of 100X.

</RANT>

[Stabface]

SLC NAND flash is generally rated at 100,000 writes per cell. This drive has a 170MB/sec sustained write speed, so we could in theory reach the average 100,000 writes on 1700 bytes per second. This would use up the entire drive's write per cell in approximately 218 days of sustained 170MB/sec writes, assuming there is no performance degradation over the life of the drive as cells are used up. However, we would have written 32gb * 100,000 = 3.2 petabytes of data in doing so.

A petabyte is a staggeringly large amount of data. Wikipedia tells us :

The Internet Archive contains almost 2 petabytes of data. [1]
Google processes about 20 petabytes of data a day. [2]
The 4 experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year, which will be distributed over the LHC Computing Grid. [3]
Facebook has just over 1 petabyte of users' photos stored, translating into roughly 10 billion photos. [4]
Isohunt has about 1.1 petabyte of files contained in torrents indexed globally. [5]


I use the HDD's manufacturer 1000 bytes = 1 kb for my math, to be more correct you'd use the proper 1024, but I CBA to bother with it myself. It's close enough for gov't work.