New SSD with unlimited write?!

[Hypernova]

http://www.dailytech.com/Startup+Dr...k+IOPS+500320+MBs+ReadWrites/article16249.htm

Founded in 2006 Pliant Technologies describes itself as a proprietor of "Green IT" solutions. With a management team composed of former Fujitsu, IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Quantum, and Conner executives, the company has veteran experience for such a young firm.

If that's not enough to sate the appetite of even the most die-hard flash drive enthusiast, this will be -- the drives also offer 500MB/sec and 320 MB/sec reads and 420MB/sec read and 220MB/sec write rates for the 3.5" and 2.5", respectively. This compares favorably to leading competitors, such as the OCZ Vertex Turbo, an overclocked SSD which offers 270 MB/sec reads and 210 MB/sec writes.
The 3.5" is available in 300 GB and 150 GB varieties, while the 2.5" is exclusively available in 150 GB form.
Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing at Pliant says the drives are also extremely hardy. He brags, "Put it on a log application and write to it as hard as you want for five years -- it will run 24/7 for at least that long."
He claims the drives have no write limits, and will experience no performance degradation even when used continuously for up to five years. He says his company is working with EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Data Systems and Sun Microsystems Inc. to offer the drives in integrated solutions for businesses.
Joseph Unsworth, research director for NAND flash semi-conductors at Gartner Inc. thinks that Pliant may indeed shake up the market. He states, "They're able to claim some pretty solid performance numbers on read and writes and they're also able to claim unlimited program and erase [write/erase] cycles. That's big. In an enterprise environment, that's one of the major concerns: The wear out of the SSD."

 

[spectrumbx]

Eager to buy one? Unfortunately for enthusiasts, the drives are enterprise only and will not be hitting consumer retail channels. The cost? Pliant remains mum, but it would comment that its drives would fall between the price of Intel X-25-E SSD 64GB SATA drive ($780) and the STECs Zeus SSD 73GB Fibre Channel drive ($6,000) -- so in theory one could conjecture electrifying drives might be had for around $3,000, if you're lucky.

They are just using the same SLC chips everyone else is using.
If you sell a drive large enough and only present a fraction of it to the user, it is easy to have the drive last "up to 5 years" with continuous write.

Just a marketing trick.

 

[Pyrolistical]

Its not unlimited writes. It says it right there "up to 5 years"

The best MLC from OCZ can do several gigabytes per day and still last over 15 years

 

[Surly73]

Its not unlimited writes. It says it right there "up to 5 years"

The best MLC from OCZ can do several gigabytes per day and still last over 15 years

...which is why I don't understand the paranoia of disabling page files, hibernation files, searches, this and that all to reduce the activity on the SSD. (and I'm not talking about thing like Superfetch that the speed of the SSD renders pointless)

 

[Lateralus]

...which is why I don't understand the paranoia of disabling page files, hibernation files, searches, this and that all to reduce the activity on the SSD. (and I'm not talking about thing like Superfetch that the speed of the SSD renders pointless)

I know what you mean. Disabling hibernation does nothing to increase the lifespan of an SSD, it just frees up disk space which can be valuable since most people are buying 64/80/128GB drives.

I could see being a bit cautious with writes if you plan on keeping the drive 10 or more years, but I doubt many people will own the same SSD for that length of time. It has been stated by OCZ and Intel that you can write X amount of GB per day and the drives will still last a LOOONG time. The more knowledgeable reviewers know that most home users will not kill a drive with excessive writes, so it shouldn't be an issue.

I say do whatever makes you feel comfortable. I seriously doubt I'll be using my SSDs 5 years from now because there will be lots of bigger, faster, and cheaper drives that are introduced between now and then. I'm more concerned with what I can do to save valuable space than what I can do to avoid writing to them. The paranoia exists now because it's relatively new tech and people made too big of a deal out of the finite number of write cycles when the mainstream SSDs first hit the market. I think that a few years from now we'll see exactly what to expect from these drives in terms of life expectancy, and it won't be nearly as big of a concern as it is now.

 

[aitoribarra]

Pliant also claim that their SSDs can do simultaneous reads and writes (SAS is full duplex). Can STEC's SAS drives do that? I've always felt the SAS full duplex feature was a bit pointless for mechanical drives, but in an SSD designed specifically for SAS it might be quite a boost.

As for price... if STEC can hit $6K for people who need IOPS above anything else except reliability, then I would expect Pliant to be closer to them than to Intel... but here's hoping...