[Edwood]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lan /img/forum/go_quote.gif Indeed the 10 pack got cheaper. Next year is only Jan 1 anyway if you don't want to stick with your "this year" thing.

 

[Edwood]

OK, I couldn't help myself.

I pulled the trigger on this Mtron 1.8" 32GB SSD drive for my Fujitsu P1610.

A little extra storage space and a lot faster at 100MB/s Read and Write speeds.

Apparently there is an unused PCI-E port in my P1610 where I can solder in a USB connection. When the price of a decent speed 64GB USB thumb drive is right, I'll be adding that as well. Should be decent storage. 32GB SSD, 32GB CF Card, and 64GB USB Thumb Drive = 128GB of pure solid state storage.

So this is the last SSD drive of 2008 that I will buy.

Seriously.





I mean it this time.







Really.

-Ed

 

[krmathis]

...oh just one more. You know you want to..

 

[lan]

Ed, how much and where did you get it?

I got a cheap HP 2133 small notebook I may want to add SSD to. Although that is 2.5" SATA.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

I just stuck a 64GB Samsung SLC drive into my main workstation as the boot drive. Whew, what a change! Vista now boots in under 15 seconds (haven't timed it exactly). Instant app launching is also great. And of course, the noise has decreased greatly, removing the only 7200 RPM drive from my system (Samsung HD501LJ), now I'm down to just a 5400 RPM 1TB drive sitting on a foam bed.

 

[Ad Rock]

The speed of SSD's is finally starting to approach a normal HDD. Eventually I would like to see speeds approach a RAMdisk...

 

[tennisplyr3]

Apparently SSD sales are expected to grow 6x by next year.

Source: Report: Hard drive shipments slumping

 

[Edwood]

Just got that Mtron 1.8" 32GB SSD drive. It's a lot smaller than the drive it's replacing. I'll have to put some foam shims or something to get it to fit well, as it's loose in the drive bay in my Fujitsu P1610 now.

Wow, it's fast. About 22 second boot up time from flicking the power switch. Haven't benchmarked it yet. Just did the initial Windows install, which went really fast. Gotta love that 80-100MB/sec write speed.

-Ed

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Nice! Nothing beats this SSD business.

Speaking of which, I recently completed the upgrades to my iRiver iHP-120. It now houses an "SSD" of sorts:

Success!

 

[mattcalf]

Very nice ID, I can't wait to put my H340 back together.

 

[Nebby]

I'm waiting for Intel to do their announced price slashing on the X-25E to pick it up later next year for my desktop, and will probably pick up an X-25M for my laptop around the same time.

Quote:

Intel also hasn't forgotten about its other businesses when it comes to price cuts. Intel's multi-level cell (MLC) X25-E solid state drives (SSDs) have been burning up the benchmark charts thanks to its highly optimized memory controller. The street price for the 2.5" 80GB X25-M -- and its 80GB 1.8" X18-M counterpart -- will drop from $600 to $525 on November 30. 160GB variants of the X25-M/X18-M will show up in the first half of 2009 and will initially be priced at $990.

ref: http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?76457

btw, tom's hardware put out a retraction for their SSD power hoax article:

Flash SSD Update: More Results, Answers : An Apology First – And One New SSD To Prove Us Right - Tom's Hardware

Basically, the old first gen ssd's use about the same or more power than regular hard drives, while the newer ssd's generally speaking sip much less power.

 

[lan]

Iron_Dreamer, looks good, how much was the compactflash to 1.8" adapter?

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

'bout $20 on the 'bay.

 

[hawat]

I heard ocz is coming out with a new version of their cheap ssd but with cache to help writing speed. Performance should be close to the intel one but cheaper.

 

[majid]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aevum /img/forum/go_quote.gif remember to get MLC drives, not SLC, SLC might be faster, buy MLC has less sector density, so it will have lower failiure rates,

Wrong! multi-level cells have 2 (soon 4) bits per cell for higher density but you pay the price in speed and reliability. single-level cells are rated at 100,000 write cycles, MLC only 10,000 or so.

The drives have fairly complex circuitry inside to remap failed cells (NAND flash has really weird failure modes), and headroom. According to an Intel rep I talked with last week, the X25-E has 64MB of internal flash, but 50% of that is reserved so it can provide 32MB of usable capacity for the expected 5 year lifetime of an enterprise drive. Like all MLC drives, the X25-M is a laptop HDD replacement drive and has lower redundancy and duty cycles.

Be careful about cheap SSD drives. Some controllers have poor implementation and are quite unreliable in extended use.

Intel is currently the leader in SATA SSDs - the X25-E can sustain 4,000 iops with a read and write latency of 100 microseconds, 200MBps read and 170MBps write. There is no spinning rust drive out there that comes even close.

The absolute performance champ is FusionIO, though. Their drives post 600+ MBps because they sit directly on the PCIe bus and don't go through the bottleneck of SATA and drivers optimized for devices with rotational latency. The flip side is that they need drivers as they are not recognized as a standard device (they don't have Solaris drivers yet, for instance, although they are reportedly working on them).

I picked up a 32GB X25-E to benchmark databases on, and am looking forward to using it as the boot drive on my Nehalem Mac Pro when I receive it later this month. I don't know if Snow Leopard will include Sun's recent ZIL and L2ARC enhancements to ZFS. They allow you to get the speed benefits of SSD with the price per TB of HDD. For more details, check out the OpenSolaris Storage Summit slides.

A tip: most SSDs come in 2.5" form factors. If you need an adapter for 3.5" slots, consider the IcyDock adapter ($20 at NewEgg), as it is the only one that has the connectors in the right place for drive carriers like the one on Mac Pros.