Anyone Getting excited about SSD

S

Sunin

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - August 2008
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I just read an article about a week ago about Ridata and others that are coming out with some very fast SSD's

170mb/s read and 100+mb/s writes. These are sustained speeds not burst! Thus two of them in raid-0 :eek:

Right now they are damned expensive but the article I was reading talked about the price dropping in half this year!

http://gizmodo.com/351470/ultrafast-nand-memory-reads-200mb-per-second

http://gizmodo.com/341055/ridata-intros-128gb-sata-ssds-speeds-past-competition

If these could get down for 32 gig versions in the 650-750 range (and not the other versions which are much slower) I could see three in my next system. 1 operating system, 2 in raid-0 for games... wow load times and hitches would be non-existant!

/drool
 
340MB/s would be entirely overkill for WoW.

But that said, yes, I'm getting excited for SSDs.

The speeds you quote were more likely achieved using high quality SLC and a pretty spiffy controller. But let's not forget that there was a recent breakthrough in speed for SLC. You'll be able to see some pretty fast SLC SSDs eventually even without RAID.

But I'm less excited for that as I am excited about the recent news about higher density MLC NAND. With nice cheap MLC we will finally start seeing 64-128GB SSDs costing a lot less. Think $5/GB and lower. With a good enough controller and layout they should be reasonably fast too, although still way behind SLC.

But the best news of all this week is that Intel and STM are finally delivering prototype Phase Change Memory products to customers, just after mentioning that they've found a way to create MLCs for PCM also.
 
I would use them for Vanguard, that game is about 10x better graphics and really beats the piss out of my GTX, 30-80fps and SLI'd 45-120fps, in a raid I drop down to 15-30fps with a single card and 20-40fps with SLI. So I would love to see these drives get lower in price... I wonder if I beg ridata if they would let me test market them, hehehe

Yeah I saw that about phase change memory... I am praying that it quickly adapts to mobo's cuz DDR3 I just don't see the performance!
 
I am excited about SSDs, however I think that we need an OS that is smart enough to make good use of them: they ought to be cache for the stuff that is frequently accessed and not in RAM. I don't want to install a 4GiB game on a 32GiB SSD, when 3GiB of the game get rarely accessed.
 
I'm pretty pessimistic on the price front. I haven't seen anything that I'd call logical pricing and purchasing decisions on these drives yet. All of the drives that have come out after the Mtron drives, have been selling for more than the Mtron drives, which are better.

For example, you can buy an Mtron drive that does 100R/80W for ~$725, but if you go to Newegg, you'll find all kinds of jokers paying $700+ for drives from RiData and Super Talent that do ~70R/50W. If the manufacturers can get people to keep paying these outrageous prices, for substandard products, then there is no reason for them to lower their prices.

I hope I'm wrong, because I'd really like to pickup a few more SSDs. BTW, I already own an Mtron 100R/80W 32GB drive.
 
I understand the cost issue (I would love to buy one but can't justify the cost) but this is the way it's going. Maybe this time next year we'll have 32-64GB running 200-300MB/second and next to nothing in access times.

Referring to $5 that the prior poster mentioned, if it gets to that price per gig, I'm in. Also, since I've been in this industry since the PC first got a hard drive, I bet the capacities of SSD will increase faster and costs will be driver lower faster than that of hard drives. Multiple times faster.
 
Seated said:
I understand the cost issue (I would love to buy one but can't justify the cost) but this is the way it's going. Maybe this time next year we'll have 32-64GB running 200-300MB/second and next to nothing in access times.

Referring to $5 that the prior poster mentioned, if it gets to that price per gig, I'm in. Also, since I've been in this industry since the PC first got a hard drive, I bet the capacities of SSD will increase faster and costs will be driver lower faster than that of hard drives. Multiple times faster.
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This is from not very long ago: STEC announces MLC SSDs
They say in the article to expect prices starting at $5/GB going down to $2/GB "within two years". Now those are most likely wholesale prices, so it might be a while before we actually see them at $5/GB. The article might be a bit misleading because SuperTalent has a 32GB MLC SSD already, but it's exceptionally slow (but cheap). If STEC has got a controller for MLC that keeps reads up around 100MB/s then I would be okay with the compromise.

SanDisk's 3-bit MLC sounds promising in terms of reducing cost, but we don't know how 8-state NAND will perform with regards to speed and write endurance. Going from 2 states to 4 already slows things down quite a bit. It will be interesting to see once it comes out.

PCM is so much more exciting to me. If you think Flash has low access times, PCM is even faster. It can also scale to higher densities because its cells are intrinsically smaller. As a new technology they will undoubtedly be ridiculously expensive for years to come, but the sooner they come out the better. Hearing that Intel and STM have finally started sampling to customers makes me think we might see flash replaced sooner than I had thought. I'm quite curious to see how the first samples perform.
 
Truthfully that STEC product only = a raptor but in SSD form.

The one I was looking at is actually 2x the performance of the raptor and SSD.

But if they have doubled the speed of MLC then that means they might be able to continue to mature that product upward of 120Mb/s and that would be getting close to my desired speed.

I really want 160/100 read/write sustained or higher. I'd love for burst speeds to be non-existant because nearly 300mb/s is realized sustained. I know in reality we won't ever see the full 300, but if it gets to 250-275 I'd be overjoyed. I mean at those levels your talking 4x performance of raptors today. I would think that even would beat scsi.
 
I dream of having drives fast enough and storage big enough that each computer would have a compact flash sized drive in a carrier slot. You walk over to your computer, slip it in, hit a button, wait about a minute and you've got all YOUR data (not system files or infrastructure) copied to the optical drive and ready to take with you. I think that would require SLC speeds though. GB/s. :) I know, I am dreaming, but why not?
 
havand said:
I dream of having drives fast enough and storage big enough that each computer would have a compact flash sized drive in a carrier slot. You walk over to your computer, slip it in, hit a button, wait about a minute and you've got all YOUR data (not system files or infrastructure) copied to the optical drive and ready to take with you. I think that would require SLC speeds though. GB/s. :) I know, I am dreaming, but why not?
Click to expand...

We've had that for years and years now. It's called a floppy disk :p The problem is that personal data takes up a little more than 2MB now.
 
Of course I'm excited to see SSDs coming to the market. The problem I still have is the price. Even at $2/GB that's still a touch high when you consider that a normal drive is about $.30/GB (give or take).

And yes, I know the advantages of SSD and that does justify a price premium since I'll be reducing the power required for my HDs. Perhaps for me the best solution is a somewhat smaller drive to store all my games/OS to decrease load times.

*sigh* I had my hopes up on grabbing a SSD drive or two for a HTPC system and store all my DVDs on it. Perhaps in a few more years.
 
I'll be excited when there is a product on the market that is found to beat all other drives soundly for a competitive price.
And I don't see that happening for at least a year.
 
Well say a Raptor150 is 200, an equal capacity but twice the speed, SSD I would think should be at least double if not more... that seems fair to me. Thus at about $600ish I'd think of jumping.
 
Sunin said:
Well say a Raptor150 is 200, an equal capacity but twice the speed, SSD I would think should be at least double if not more... that seems fair to me. Thus at about $600ish I'd think of jumping.
Click to expand...
I would in a second if it was really twice as fast, but I have a feeling you're referring to something like transfer rates that mean next nothing.
 
Read some specs of the chips coming out and the link I provided. It was sequential reads.. .not just theoretical transfer rates. Or at least that is how I read it... maybe I missed something.... Hoping not...

"It is NAND technology that provides the drive's data transfer rates of up to 170MB per second for maximum sequential read."
 
I can't wait, especially for a Carputer that I have planned. ;)
 
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