3.5 SSD's

[300D]

Not only sequential datawrites, but overwriting files millions of times over.

Clearly you haven't been looking at the SSD market very well.

why are these still so expensive? the components are bigger then the 1.8"/2.5" SSD brothers, i thought it would therefore be cheaper to make?

They use the exact same hardware, just in a bigger case.

 

[DoFoT9]

They use the exact same hardware, just in a bigger case.

apart from being able to hold a bigger capacity (and therefore draw more power and create more heat), what advantages are there of having the bigger case?

 

[300D]

Capacity is all.

 

[DoFoT9]

Capacity is all.

hmm. there are now 1TB SSD drives but, and they arent $3k (i dont think). so atm they would seem a massive disadvantage to purchase right?

The chips themselves are actually cheaper/capacity than their larger die counterparts. The controllers I don't think are inexpensive (not the Samsung or Indilinx parts anyway).

But in the case of the 1TB Colossus, it's essentially multiple drives running as a stripe, with control in the drive's controller chip/s. You need multiple controllers I would think, as well as a lot of Flash chips. But as the MSRP is $2200, there's plenty of profit margin in that price. What we're seeing on the street ATM, is gouging.

as a stripe you say? what an interesting concept. the controller onboard would have to be quite extensive i guess. do you know how many drives are in there? two?

Get real.

haha i know. worth a try!

Seriously, no idea. I think it's going to be awhile, as gouging will slow the progress down, as the current enthusiast market won't be able to pay for the R&D that quickly at current pricing, and the enterprise market is going to continue to wait for the most part IMO.

give it 5 years eh?

 

[Infrared]

I prefer the 2.5" form factor and I would like to see a continuous transition from 3.5 to 2.5".

I agree. But I'd like to see SSDs come with decent adapters
during the period of transition.

 

[gotzero]

Clearly you haven't been looking at the SSD market very well.

The SSDs will not last right now if you are writing over them constantly. I want the speed for the boot drive, but there is no reason to pay for SSD to constantly modify huge files, especially if the rest of the system cannot offload them fast enough to justify SSD. What am I misunderstanding?

 

[nanofrog]

hmm. there are now 1TB SSD drives but, and they arent $3k (i dont think). so atm they would seem a massive disadvantage to purchase right?

The Colossus is the only 1TB model available. Though the MSRP is $2200USD, the street price someone located was ~$3600USD. Quite a bit more than MSRP, and really expensive. More than a base '09 Octad!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAIDas a stripe you say? what an interesting concept. the controller onboard would have to be quite extensive i guess. do you know how many drives are in there? two?

The controller chips use mulitple channels, and in the case of the 1TB Colossus, it uses 2x controllers (so 2x drives in one case run to a single SATA port). Parallelism combined with more parallelism. Flash memory itself is rather slow, so that's how they managed to get the improved performance out of SSDs. Otherwise, it's the same as a USB thumb drive.

give it 5 years eh?

I don't know. Many have thought it's going to be faster than that, but I'm not as convinced. Taking into account greed and development time for new tech (newer flash chips that solve the issues currently experienced with SLC/MLC chips), it could be 3 - 5 before SSDs are cheap enough to hit mainstream systems. It's just a guess though, as we really don't know.

The SSDs will not last right now if you are writing over them constantly. I want the speed for the boot drive, but there is no reason to pay for SSD to constantly modify huge files, especially if the rest of the system cannot offload them fast enough to justify SSD. What am I misunderstanding?

SSD's fine for read useage, but I'd agree with high write environments, it's too immature right now, and too expensive for the capacity anyway.

If there's a need for high writes, users are better off going with a mechanical array IMO. It's cheaper, and the reliability has been proven.

 

[300D]

The SSDs will not last right now if you are writing over them constantly.

Right, they will only last a few decades of average use.

Intel's X25-M SSD claims a lifetime of 5 years even if you average writing 20GB a day.

By that time, $/GB will have more than halved and reliability will be even better than it is today. Write lifespan is not a limiting factor.