Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html

by twampss • 17 years ago

149 118 17 years ago

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hugothefrog• 17 years ago

When I when from 7.2k RPM to 10k RPM the performance increase was very noticeable.

It'll be the next upgrade I do to my laptop when it starts feeling a bit sluggish.

Andys• 17 years ago

Linus' recommendation to buy the Intel X25-M still stands, because they have the fastest small-block random I/O performance.

Why would you buy an SSD only to do large sequential transfers with it? Just use a 1.5TB HDD to store your media files.

DannoHung2• 17 years ago

Why would your transfers have to be sequential?

DrJokepu3• 17 years ago

If you only access large media files (due to the very nature of media files, you want to read them sequentially from the beginning to the end) and your hard drive is not too fragmented, it is a reasonable assumption that you will mostly access the hard drive sequentially.

However, if you need a large hard drive for a database and not as a media storage, obviously random access is just as important as sequential access.

anigbrowl4• 17 years ago

Why would you buy an SSD only to do large sequential transfers with it?

Visual FX, video transcoding etc. Rendering times can often be disk-bound, and eat up a lot of time. It becomes aggravating once you start editing HD video, even on a quad-core. For that, the Crucial drive mentioned by Jeff is a win because of the price - the lower random-access performance compared to the Intel drive is not that big of an issue for this application, and even with that limitation it'll smoke my existing system drive too.

ScottWhigham• 17 years ago

Timely - I bought an X-25 80GB on Sunday. Can't wait for it to arrive

cschep• 17 years ago

Yeah, I just ordered a Corsair p128, should be here tomorrow or the next day. Cannnn't wait.

davidmathers9• 17 years ago

Jeff Atwood is wrong on the internet... again! Tell me you're surprised. There are too many mistakes in the post to bother correcting. Just read the anandtech.com article if you want accurate info.

For accurate price info you should know that the second generation 160 GB X-25Ms originally listed for $450 but shot up in price due to excessive demand. It's only in stock at stores that price gouge and MIA everywhere else. Amazon, not price-gouging, has the 80 GB for $260 and the kit version of the 160 GB for $500.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

The term "price gouge" is counterproductively pejorative. Being able to get it for some price is an improvement over not being able to get it at all, which, as you point out, is the alternative.

davidmathers9• 17 years ago

Ok, so what idiom should I use instead? I can't think of anything.

Is this the market-economics version of political correctness?

brown9-2• 17 years ago

There are too many mistakes in the post to bother correcting.

For those of us not as current on SSDs as you are, actually correcting his mistakes might be useful.

davidmathers9• 17 years ago

I learned everything I know from Anand:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

pavs• 17 years ago

Is there any estimated self-life comparison of SSD vs HDD for "average" computer usage? I wanted to migrate to SSD earlier this year - but I did some research the information wasn't very convincing. There seems to be a compromise in self-life and performance decrease (over time) for overall speed gain.

jerf• 17 years ago

The performance decrease is mitigated or eliminated with TRIM support. The idea that you can wear out your SSD appears to be little more than urban legend at this point, as even with absolutely absurd and obscene levels of load, they will still last longer than your magnetic drives.

Oh, yeah, BTW, you do realize that it's not a question of whether your magnetic drive will die but when, right? No fair comparing SSDs to a hypothetical magnetic drive that will "never" die. If you're actually worried about data integrity, I'd trust a well-manufactured SSD over a magnetic drive any day, though whether or not the current crop qualify as "well-manufactured" is something that is hard to determine. (I have no data either way.)

LogicHoleFlaw• 17 years ago

Either way, KEEP BACKUPS!

cpr• 17 years ago

I'm using one of the 120GB Samsung SSDs that Apple ships stock in the MacBook Pro. It's definitely faster for things like program startup, etc. (many things start in less than one dock "bounce"), but otherwise not so clear.

Sure wish Apple would ship the Intel drives. Perhaps they can't get a low enough price on them.

Or, alternately, that Samsung would get with the program and do the kind of controller work required to make these things go faster. (Whatever Intel's doing--see the anandtech.com massive article.)

Or, perhaps both Apple and Samsung could get together and implement the critical TRIM command (see http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=8).

pieter• 17 years ago

The first generation of the Intel SSD's contained halogens so Apple couldn't use them. The new ones are halogen-free, so it might be they show up in future revisions of the MBP.

jbellis2• 17 years ago

That's retarded. Stop kissing up to Greenpeace and give me my SSD, Apple. :(

Tuna-Fish2• 17 years ago

Why are you waiting for apple to ship it? Just go to a store, buy one, and install it to your laptop. It's not exactly hard, even if you are not a hw geek.

n-named• 17 years ago

$900(or so) vs. $300 I paid apple for theirs, which still gives me a significant benefit compared to a non ssd.

ahlatimer• 17 years ago

Replacing the HDD in a pre-unibody MBP isn't exactly easy, either. You have to take off the whole top case just to get at the drive. That one action voids the warranty, and if you don't do it properly, you can bend the case or damage components or connections.

rufo3• 17 years ago

I picked up a 160GB X-25M G2 for $450 on Newegg the minute they were posted - I have it installed in an otherwise-maxed 17" non-unibody MacBook Pro.

It's an amazing and surprising difference, one that reminds me of my first dual-processor machine. It's not that your system feels faster when doing one thing (although it does), but that no matter how much you throw at it, it just doesn't slow down - a tremendous difference from the chug I experienced on the 250GB drive that was previously installed.

Easily the best $450 I've spent on an upgrade in a long, long time - far more effective than replacing my MBP would'be been.

thismat3• 17 years ago

I have an OCZ SSD in my desktop machine and I can agree with you, the biggest noticeable difference to me is in moving and deleting large files.

I can't remember the last time I had to wait on a file to do the whole moving/copying/deleting dialog.

rufo3• 17 years ago

I almost grabbed an OCZ, but I'd seen enough reports in their forum of odd problems with Macs that I decided to stick with the Intel.

When I bought the G2, it was reasonably competitive with the other drives - I think the pricing on competitive drives has come down quite a bit since then, but the G2 is fast and stable - I have no complaints.

laut• 17 years ago

It's the best. Here's a chart showing how much faster it is than anything else at random reads: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/Intel/34nmSSD/Re...

I've put the same disk in my MacBook Pro. Strongly recommended.

aolnerd• 17 years ago

I signed up for a newegg.com alert and immediately purchased a 160GB X-25M g2 for ~$450 minutes after they announced they had stock. I put it in a late 2006 mac mini (1.8GHz Intel Core 1 duo) and it has transformed the feel of the computer. There are far fewer pauses. Big apps launch instantly. Extremely satisfying.

The only problem is that it started reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors.

martey• 17 years ago

Then get it replaced: http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029645.htm

gtuhl• 17 years ago

If shopping for an SSD at least consider the OCZ Vertex. I've been running one in my Santa Rosa MBP for 7 months with no issues and excellent performance.

See (http://blog.gtuhl.com/2009/03/26/ocz-vertex-ssd-in-a-17-sant...) for install and before/after xbench runs.

thismat3• 17 years ago

I think the Vertex is the one I put in my desktop machine. Absolutely love it. Need to upgrade my MBP to an SSD in the near future.

collinvandyck• 17 years ago

I have an OCZ Vertex in my MBP. Great performance, but has definitely gotten slower over time. The folks at OCZ have just released the non-beta 1.4 firmware release that has better garbage collection.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=634...

gohnjanotis2• 17 years ago

The day I got my 15" MacBook Pro it was obvious the hard drive is what was limiting the performance. I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks since I have it maxed out at 4GB.

For example, intense BitTorrent downloading (and uploading) on a RAM disk frees my hard disk from the constant reads and writes so I can have high speed downloads (and verification of d/led data) and still do disk intensive activities in other applications.

I can't wait for the day where my mass storage can have that kind of speed! (and it looks like it's closer than ever now)

gruseom• 17 years ago

I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks

Can you go into a bit of detail? How do you do that?

trin_• 17 years ago

you can mount portions of your ram and use them, but you should be aware that the files need to be put back on a disk before you turn the machine of ;)

blasdel2• 17 years ago

Don't use RAM disks -- it's not 1987, you have a grownup operating system with VM and everything.

As long as you have atimes disabled, the only thing RAM disks will speed up is writes -- recent FS operations are cached in memory automatically (and never paged to disk), so reading a 'warm' file doesn't hit the disk at all.

If you really need such a thing, tmpfs is vastly superior -- it operates directly at the VM page level, instead of idiotically mallocing a ton of address space up front (though I don't think anything like it is available for OS X).

Keyframe• 17 years ago

In other, somewhat related, news - has anyone noticed there are 256GB usb sticks around (namely, Kingston has one)? Sure, they are expensive - but come on, 256GB! I wonder what are read/write speeds of those monsters. I have 16GB stick and it takes a mini eternity to copy stuff onto it.

windsurfer• 17 years ago

The drive probably only has 32GB on it... and dies by the time you transfer that much data on to it :\

science4sail• 17 years ago

I'm under the impression that current USB connections can not move data as fast as SATA links.

boredguy8• 17 years ago

If you're interested in a comprehensive review and understanding why the early drives had some problems, visit the extensive review by Anand Lal Shimpi over at AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531. I liked their site before this review, but the detail and writing made me add their name to my 'weekly visit' list.

spudlyo2• 17 years ago

Their reporting on SSD technology has been excellent and comprehensive. They should win some kind of excellence in tech journalism award.

KWD• 17 years ago

Tekzilla just had a good interview with Anand on SSD. http://revision3.com/tekzilla/visback/is-it-time-to-go-ssd-a...

spudlyo2• 17 years ago

From the article:

"The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they're cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!"

This kind of hand waving irritates me to no end. There are a ton of different ways of measuring i/o performance, and I'm sure the author knows this. To say that the Indilinx based SSD drives are "just as fast" as the Intel SSDs is simply not true. Let's take my favorite way of measuring drive performance, 4KB random write speed.

Intel: 5923 IOPS (23.1 MB/s)

Indilinx: 1275 IOPS (6.47 MB/s)

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535&p=3

Granted this article is a few months old, perhaps the firmware for the Indilinx controller has gotten faster, or perhaps the Crucial 128GB drive uses a different Indilinx controller than the 'barefoot' model profiled in the article, but I doubt it.

invisible• 17 years ago

Are these the equivalent tests (he links to this review)? http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1651&pageID=7404

If so, the Crucial 128GB SSD doesn't look half bad versus the Intel SSD. If this isn't the tests, the rest of the tests in that particular review have the Crucial doing really good.

chadaustin• 17 years ago

When the Intel X25 SSDs first came out, IMVU bought them for every engineer in the company. From a cold boot, Visual Studio starts in half a second. Subversion got dramatically faster. Boot times are a fraction of what they were before.

Some of my computers are cpu-bound on disk operations now.

If you run an engineering team, make the investment.

TimothyFitz• 17 years ago

Specific numbers (that I used to push for their purchase at IMVU): Cold-disk grep of the entire codebase: HDD 110s, SSD 7s Cold-disk svn no-op update: HDD 140s, SSD 14s

KirinDave4• 17 years ago

If you'd like to see exactly how a macbook pro with an Intel X25-M feels like, I made a video to give you an idea: http://vimeo.com/7057850

callmeed• 17 years ago

I've never seen Aperture open so fast ... that was hot.

KirinDave4• 17 years ago

Yeah, that's a huge deal.

I'm moving to a workflow where I import to the SSD, do my work, then immediately move the raws to an external drive to save space.

crystalis• 17 years ago

What is the colorful circle?

dreish• 17 years ago

Looks like iPulse.

http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/09/ipulse-a-system-reso...

http://iconfactory.com/software/ipulse

m_eiman• 17 years ago

A similar video with a OCZ Vertex SSD.

http://vimeo.com/4057677

Executive summary: it doesn't have to be an Intel drive, just stay away from drives based on those old JMicron chipsets.

kentosi• 17 years ago

oh dear god .. i feel like i'm going to do an impulse purchse this evening.

drool

billswift• 17 years ago

Those complaints about the cost are hilarious. Either the person making them is a kid, or they have no "on-board" memory between their ears at all. The first 5 Gig HD I bought was a cheapo Maxtor at Staples and it set me back $500 about 10 years ago.

ajg1977• 17 years ago

Cost is and always will be relative.

sjs• 17 years ago

Especially when things move as fast as they do with memory and storage. Just 5 or 6 years ago I was buying a new 80gb SATA disk for just over CAD$100 (iirc). We've gone from around $1/gb then to almost exactly 10¢/gb. Probably cheaper for you guys south of the 49th.

edit: DirectCanada has disks cheaper than NCIX by almost 2¢/gb as well.

In comparison the average price for an SSD is CAD$375 for ~120gb, so let's call it $400 to make things easy, it's going to cost more with tax anyway. So it's around $3/gb or $3.50/gb which is 35x the cost.

However if you are building a new box and spending $1500+ anyway then an SSD is probably a very wise choice.

ramchip• 17 years ago

...how is this relevant to the fact that filling a server with SSDs is still much more expensive than with conventional HDs?

anigbrowl4• 17 years ago

Because you can expect that cost to plummet substantially in a fairly short timeframe, based on past history. Bang for the buck on storage media improves by about an order of magnitude every 5 years.

whye• 17 years ago

The first hard drive my father bought was 5mb. It connected to an Atari 800 through the Atari's 4 joystick ports. It's price was somewhere around $2000. That fact is utterly meaningless when comparing the price of HDs and SSDs (which are significantly more expensive than HDs) in the marketplace. Today.

MikeCapone• 17 years ago

That's probably cheap compared to all the monks you'd have to pay to write that down on parchment.

jpcx012• 17 years ago

5gb was just about enough 10 years. Different times, different size requirements. People do more with computers nowdays.

codexon• 17 years ago

I remember when desktops cost $5,000 about 20 years ago.

Call me a young whippersnapper if you like, but I am not paying anywhere near $1000 for one now. Same idea with SSDs.

misterbwong• 17 years ago

Does anyone know much about the lifetime of an SSD like this? I keep reading that with all SSD's, you only get a limited number of read/write cycles before they go bust. I can't seem to find out if this is something that should concern the average user or if it's just some FUD.

The speed benefits look enormous but I don't want to have to go through the trouble of replacing this in a year or two.

rufo3• 17 years ago

Intel claims you can write 100GB of data every day for five years before the flash burns out - I don't know what other companies provide as statistics.

proee• 17 years ago

Is there any speed improvement in have two SSD's setup in a raid configuration?

liamk• 17 years ago

Likely yes. Neat video with 24 SSDs in a raid configuration: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/24-samsung-ssds-get-strun...

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

OK, so.

A couple months ago I bought a new MacBook Pro and picked up the 256GB SSD option on it. The drive's Toshiba (Apple ships Toshiba and Samsung drives -- I don't know model numbers).

So far it's been wonderful. Everything in this machine (processor, RAM, etc.) is a significant bump up from what I'd had before, but the SSD performance boost is still easy to notice; even though it's not the fastest drive you can get, the impression I have from watching the various videos of people with Intel drives is that the difference -- for the sorts of things I do -- is basically negligible (in order to notice it I'd have to be regularly writing huge files and timing the process).

Typical time from turning the machine on to having a desktop in front of me is around 15 seconds; that goes up if I have lots of peripherals plugged in (as I often do at work, where I end up using every available port), but still makes my older laptop painful even to contemplate.

Of course, both boot time and cold launch of applications are really just for show (though it's all very fast). The real point, for me, is the sorts of mundane but read-intensive things I do all the time: grepping over big log files or large codebases, getting status and diffs out of local checkouts, etc. There's just no contest here; that stuff happens stupid fast, and by itself would make the SSD worth having.

It should be noted that I haven't really paid attention to or particularly cared about write performance; the only time it would be noticeable is when pulling lots of stuff from a remote repo (lots of small writes to a bunch of files), but any write-performance problems with that get drowned out by things like network latency.

I'm also not particularly worried about wearing the drive out or anything like that; Toshiba's estimates for the lifetime of their drives are almost certainly a bit optimistic, but a more conservative and realistic number (confirmed by various places where I've seen it discussed) is that I'd need to sustain a pattern of writing around 20GB/day to have a significant chance of wearing out the drive in five years.

ezy• 17 years ago

I'm still a little wary of the reliability of these drives. I think it's prudent to wait at least another half-year. It isn't the long-term lifetime of the memory itself, which is fine. It's the tendency of the drives to be dead within a couple months.

Go to newegg and sort the reviews by date on some of the most popular ones.

jpcx012• 17 years ago

Smart move. I got bit last Dec with my 80gb Intel X25m completely crapping out on me. The drive stopped being recognized and despite a week of troubleshooting, and trying to restore, it was completely lost.

However, the next drive I bought was an 80gb Intel X25m. The speed difference of these drives are truly amazing

Buy yeah, I now back up my drive to an external disk.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

Do you know how they're breaking down? Part of the great promise of SSDs is that they can degrade gradually, rather than suddenly failing like spinning-platter hard drives. Is there a fundamental problem with that vision, or are the early SSDs just a little flaky?

lpellis• 17 years ago

Does everybody here use laptops? Is a SSD still useful if you use a desktop? I cannot seem to find any 3.5' SSD's, can you connect the 2.5 to an desktop? Is there any performance penalty?

wmf2• 17 years ago

2.5" SSDs work fine in desktops; the benefit is just as large.

cdr• 17 years ago

I bought a G1 SSD for my desktop over a year ago; it was the best single upgrade I've ever made to a desktop machine.

When the G2s were released, I put a G2 in my desktop and the G1 in my laptop. Having a SSD in my laptop is great, but the improvement from the SSD in my desktop is actually much more noticeable.

scorpioxy2• 17 years ago

Does anyone know if that big performance effect is also noticeable while running a couple of VMs?

I have those dreaded pauses when my VMs(typically 2 at a time) are busy doing something and I decide to untar a file for example. Does anyone have a similar problem?

I still run on a 32bit environment so use only 3GB of ram.

mseebach• 17 years ago

It sounds a lot like you're out of CPUs (from the 3-GB limit I'm guessing you're on a Core Duo MacBook), not disk-IO.

scorpioxy2• 17 years ago

No, I'm on a desktop that i put together. The 32bit limitation is because I use Ubuntu and there were some reports of misbehaving apps under 64bits....

rmason• 17 years ago

Does anybody know which drive Apple uses on the Mac Book Pro? Is it the X25 if you order the 256 gb option?

Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

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