Solid State Drives

[guest3110]

Solid State Drives (SSD)

I've been watching these for some time. The capacities keep increasing (of course), and the prices continue to drop.

They run cooler, because there are no moving parts (less heat for your computer case), and they are, quite simply, FAST, with sustained Write speeds of at least 200MB per second. Put that next to a conventional hard drive; there is no contest. There is also less power consumption than convention hard drives.


Like USB, Solid State Drives will become all-pervasive.

Most of them have SATA inferfaces. Though, more recently, they're appearing in PCI-E form:

Here is one from OCZ...
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_z_drive_pci_express_ssd

Here are a bunch of singular (non-card types) at Amazon, in varying capacities and prices...
http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1241295551/ref=sr_nr_i_0?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=Solid%20State%20Drives&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3ASolid%20State%20Drives%2Ci%3Aelectronics

They are now coming into range of affordability for the average PC user.

A demo of one, compared to a WD Velociraptor (side by side), booting and running Windows Vista Ultimate (64-Bit)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlB8r_0dDlI

Intel IT explains SSD drives, and does demo...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnYj9fHCNvc

[X-ray]

Thanks, looks cool, I want the price to come down so I can try one!

[Karlos]

My one worry about SSD is the long term reliability of flash memory. Admittedly, modern hard drives don't last forever either, but I've had flash based devices malfunction in under 2 years.

[Oliver]

Hmm, I've been waiting for this technology to mature as well. I would ideally like a fast solid state dirve for my OS and main programs.

Flash really wasn't intended for this use, so I'm hoping another contender will take its place for a more appropriate implementation. Battery backed RAM may be OK. Also, some kind of redundancy would be good.

I need to buy a new computer this year, and am putting it off until I feel the tech is tempting enough.

My current computer is actually so old that the hard disk drives are failing.

Also, there are true RAM drives available now (de ja vu?). Populate a PCIe card with high speed RAM, and use for Windows cache. They appear as hard drives to the machine.

[Karlos]

My old A1200T creates a RAD disk just big enough to install a working copy of the OS into and then reboots from that. Does that count as SSD?

[bloodline]

Oliver wrote:
Hmm, I've been waiting for this technology to mature as well. I would ideally like a fast solid state dirve for my OS and main programs.

Flash really wasn't intended for this use, so I'm hoping another contender will take its place for a more appropriate implementation. Battery backed RAM may be OK. Also, some kind of redundancy would be good.

MRAM :-)

[Karlos]

Agreed, I think MRAM has huge potential. All of the benefits of static memory combined with the density of DRAM. Can't be bad.

[bloodline]

Karlos wrote:
Agreed, I think MRAM has huge potential. All of the benefits of static memory combined with the density of DRAM. Can't be bad.

If Freescale can make the stuff in large quantities... but like most really good technologies, this will probably only take off once the patents expire :-(

[Oliver]

bloodline wrote:
...this will probably only take off once the patents expire :-(

Hell yeah. More business than science, of course. I remember seeing demos of this stuff in the physics basement of my uni when I enrolled in 1995. I was eagerly asking about when we could buy it... The response was less than enthusiastic.

[pyrre]

@ EyeAm
I feel the need to correct you a little bit.

The first link you gave. is a link to a OCZ RAID device intended to put multiple SSD disks inside. and it uses the PCIe standard. (no use in any amiga... so far)

This is one of OCZ most affordable SSDs...
And it can perform:
Read: up to 155 MB/sec/ Write: up to 90 MB/sec
Which is more likely for a single SDD.
Raiding multiple SSDs will increase the read and write speeds of SSDs. and for that matter any normal hard drives as well...

However, speed set aside. The quiet and cool running of a SSD is tempting. and will soon find its way inside my laptop.

Life cycle of a SSD is significantly increased, and "can" surpass normal HDDs... somewhere around 2 million read/write cycles. (on the most expensive ones, though...)

[ChuckT]

Karlos wrote:
My one worry about SSD is the long term reliability of flash memory. Admittedly, modern hard drives don't last forever either, but I've had flash based devices malfunction in under 2 years.

I think SSD give me more to worry about than Hard Drives.

I own several flash drives.  The early ones were poorly housed with the chip just sitting on top of the board and it was making a connection that way.  

I have several flash drives and the only one that doesn't work is because I touched an electrical display at a science museum.  I have had the others for several years and they've been in the washer and they still work.

You probably want to keep them away from magents.

They are more reliable than floppies unless you consider long term (20 years).

[pyrre]

ChuckT wrote:

Karlos wrote:
My one worry about SSD is the long term reliability of flash memory. Admittedly, modern hard drives don't last forever either, but I've had flash based devices malfunction in under 2 years.

I think SSD give me more to worry about than Hard Drives.

I own several flash drives.  The early ones were poorly housed with the chip just sitting on top of the board and it was making a connection that way.  

I have several flash drives and the only one that doesn't work is because I touched an electrical display at a science museum.  I have had the others for several years and they've been in the washer and they still work.

You probably want to keep them away from magents.

They are more reliable than floppies unless you consider long term (20 years).

What SSD disks and flash devices are you talking about?

Dedicated SSD disks will endure any shock you ever (under normal circumstances) will put a harddrive trough.

SD and CF cards cannot in any way be compared to SSD...

[guest3110]

by pyrre:

@ EyeAm
I feel the need to correct you a little bit.

The first link you gave. is a link to a OCZ RAID device intended to put multiple SSD disks inside. and it uses the PCIe standard. (no use in any amiga... so far)

pyrre, respectfully, the first link was intended to show a Solid State Drive on a card, using an interface other than SATA. In this case, PCI-E.

I see no evidence at OCZ's website that a user can put his own Solid State Drives onto that card--let alone multiple ones. I understood their site to show a single product series giving the option of one out of several different offered capacities (up to 1 Terabyte). One SSD per card, sealed-up at factory, but with cache and RAID control onboard (presumably, making it so easy to assign one drive to another, for RAID purposes, when another card|SSD combo is present in the same machine).

Regarding any new Amiga OS or Amiga-related hardware, these are the kinds of standards that I would expect them to support out of the box.

[pyrre]

No problem in linking to the z-drive. Was not aware of it until you linked to it. Definitely a cool device.

Not to make a big deal about it.... :-)

According to this
OCZ is using a Highpoint RocketRAID 3520 PCI Express RAID card.

The largest commercially available SSD disks are 250GB. And 512GB disks is arriving soon.
Four 250GB SSD disks will provide you with 1TB of storage space.

Link 1

However, yes, OCZ is offering them as a single device with 250GB, 500GB or 1TB of capacity. And a 4TB one planned.
And unless OCZ has done something to the hardware of the Z-drive i cannot see a reason why not you should be able to expand or replace the disks of a smaller version into 1TB, or more when available...

But honestly when it comes to speed the hyperdrive 5 is way more interesting (all though limited to only 64GB)...
And taking the price of FAST SSD disks into consideration, id rather build a RAID 5 consisting of normal SATA disks for maximum storage space. Most bang for buck...
For the price of the z-drive i can build a very large raid 5 array...

EDIT: removed some fact errors...

[guest3110]

Thanks for the link to that article, pyrre.

by pyrre:

And a 4TB one planned.

Things are definitely going to get interesting.  :-D