The SSD revolution is moving along as we speak, a sort of slow revolution that will take many years to replace our trusty mechanical hard drives. Cost is one issue, but that’s changing, and the other is the idea of SSD wear and tear. You may have heard that consumer SSD drives have memory cells (which hold the 1s and 0s in SSDs) that wear out after 10,000 discharges. This leads to a sort of data fragmentation which can be damaging to both capacity and speed. In practice, that can be many years, but how the cells wear down, when, and how to minimize it is a serious area of research. Configuring the drive controller differently can lead to huge increases in performance, major lengthening of mean time before failure, and all that. Anand covers a lot of these issues in detail in this monster of a post.

I’m still working through it, but it’s an easy recommendation for those of you at all interested in the nuts and bolts of the devices we use every day. He’s collected some ideas, and proposes some, for lengthening SSD life expectancy as well as speeding up read/write operations. It’s interesting to see this kind of theorizing in the public arena; you’d expect to hear it in the break room at Intel while engineers woolgather and brainstorm, but to have it all laid out for you to read like this is a treat. Well, for some.

Price is $299 for 128GB, so it’s still quite a luxury item, but the multiple-non-high-end-drives-in-RAID approach seems to be gaining traction. Of course, for that price, you can get a regular high-end SSD, but if you want to maintain that 260MB/s all the way up to a a terabyte, the Colossus is probably your best bet (though it will be expensive as hell).

There is a band-aid solution, one that is in reality already being applied: multi-layer cell arrays. You just stack one one array on top of the other and boom, double the size. Trouble is you end up with a lot of heat being trapped in there. And even stacking the arrays has its limits. So what’s next? Don’t ask me. Just don’t expect to keep being able to store twice as much stuff in your laptop every year from now till eternity. And the next time you see a hard drive or memory architecture engineer, give them a big hug from me.

The benefits of SSD over HDD are certainly well-known, but between SSDs the differences are still microscopic when compared with the former. Unless you’re planning on getting one of these insane >$1000 PCI-mounted arrays, you’re getting a lot of sameness between drives. Doubtless some manufacturers will start making real advancements that put them ahead of the pack, but as it stands it seems that no one drive (or type of SSD drive) is king of the hill. Check out this solid state roundup over at Hot Hardware, where they do in fact find one better than the others (no spoilers), but all recommendations with drives like this come with a lot of qualifications.

I can’t wait to get my first SSD and load up some games on it, but I think I’ll wait another six months or a year.

These brand new 256GB SSDs are yet to be fully tested, but a quick eval shows extremely promising results. In fact, the Intel drives get punished in write and burst speed, although read speed is comparable. Now, they’re likely to be more expensive, so it’s not a total KO or anything, but if you’re putting together an SSD-based server or workstation, you might want to wait for the results on this one to come back before you place your order.

Keep in mind that the name will be P256 instead of S256 when they go to production.

[image credit: Hot Hardware]

SSDs are fast, enduring and expensive. The G Drive mini is no exception; 120GB of solid state storage built into an all-aluminum enclosure priced at $599. Let us see what else can be expected from this small and reliable storage device.

There are two versions of the G Drive mini; a double interface and a triple interface. I’ve got the triple one with FW800, FW400 and USB 2.0 ports. The package (above cables and CD) includes a leather carrying case that you can hook up to your belt or something, although I wonder who would actually do that.

The drive is about twice as thick as a 2.5” HDD and it’s equipped with a heat sink on the bottom. Passive cooling lets the drive operate without noise. Being sturdy and well-built, I can imagine the mini to endure medium-height drops and bumps. It’s a nice-looking kit, however the edges of the cover are sharp. If you’re not careful, you could cut yourself. Considering how little effort it would take to round those edges, it’s odd that it hasn’t been done.

SSD is faster than HDD, although I didn’t notice any serious speed differences while I was copying to and from the mini. But that’s not the point. This device is for people who need portable and reliable storage — professionals who travel a lot and don’t mind spending a small fortune for an SSD. With the mini you don’t have to worry about moving around while copying files or be afraid that a single drop to the ground will kill your storage.

Pros:

- Small, reliable, silent, sturdy

- Faster than USB enclosures

- Sexy

- Leather case

Cons:

- Expensive

- Edges are sharp

Price: $599

So we all know that SSD drives are fast, but how do those numbers translate into the real world? And what would happen if you had unlimited funds and wanted to build a 24-unit SSD RAID array to see exactly what they can do?

Samsung did exactly that, and came up with some astounding numbers:

• Microsoft Office opens in 0.5 seconds.
• 53 programs take 18 seconds to start
• Entire system can be defragged in about 3 seconds

Now of course, the price to build something like this is prohibitive, but the important thing is that Samsung has proven that it’s possible, and pretty damn cool if you can set it. Bye-bye mechanical drives.

It’s kind of technical at times, but here are a couple points I thought were particularly interesting:

• SSD makers could do a 3.5″ form factor, but at current prices the components are barely filling out a 2.5″ enclosure. Fortunately rail adapters are cheap.
• Despite showing performance gains over HDDs when using SSDs, most filesystems are totally unoptimized for SSD use. Data placement is handled by the firmware, and although the drives could be “defragmented,” it’s not in the same way HDDs are. Apparently Windows 7 is ahead of the pack on SSD integration.
• Your little 1GB thumb drive uses some of the same tech, and it would be possible to make a full-size hard drive out of that quality of cell and driver. It would be really cheap, but it would be extremely slow and unreliable. So keep using the major brands as a yardstick for pricing and watch out for unrealistic deals.

Miniaturization is one of the driving forces in the tech world, not just in the size of your media player or whatnot, but in the size of the nano-scale components that make it up. Processors, for example, are approaching the barrier of quantum effects on their transistor units, and are having to work around it. Similarly, flash memory makers are going to be hitting a wall a few years down the line and are looking for the tech that will take them over it. Graphene may be the answer they’re searching for — or not.

As solid state memory technology advances, it gets smaller and smaller. IBM and AMD recently created a 22nm SRAM cell, though Intel pooh-poohed the achievement. The next generation will prove even more difficult, as the physical limitations of the material (silicon) will make arrays of the current design ineffective. So either they have to find a way to work around the problem with silicon (via multi-level cell arrays, for instance), introduce a new material like graphene, or try something completely different.

Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, which exhibits properties favorable to SSD engineers: when used to store a charge, it leaks little voltage, produces little heat, and works in a large range of temperatures, unlike my laptop (the battery got so cold that it thinks it isn’t there). It also will work down to a much smaller cell size — 10nm — which means more density and more storage space.

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as just switching out the materials; years of research will have to be done, but it’s one of those things that you’d better start on early or when the time comes, you’ll have beeen outflanked by more forward-thinking research teams.

The 1.8″ form factor drives have been bumped to up to 256GB, which means you may be seeing some seriously spacious media players soon (likely expensive as well). I’ll be checking this out personally at CES in January.

[via Akihabara News]

Tweaktown, bless their hearts, compared the thing to a single $600 high-performance Intel SSD and to a 8-platter RAID array of 15,000RPM Seagate HDDs. The results of the test confirmed that the ioDrive is the fastest option by a mile — it set a new record in one of their storage speed testing suites, beating the previous record by a good 30 percent. While the single SSD performed well under some conditions, the read speed was way better on the ioDrive and read access time was reduced to a hundredth of a millisecond in some cases. Hot damn!

Of course, this crazy thing isn’t for everyday use; the hardware is designed for servers that need the lowest possible lag time combined with the largest amount of storage available. The ioDrive comes in flavors up to 320GB, but that’ll set you back nearly 15 grand. However, for businesses and services where speed is all-important, any price is worth that extra bump in performance.

Tiger Direct has the 32GB OCZ SATA II 2.5-inch solid state drive for $89.99 with a $60 mail-in rebate. The rebate deal is good until 11/30 – that’s tomorrow — so you’ll have to be relatively nimble if you want to see that $60 ever again.

The rebate applies to higher capacity OCZ SSDs as well, but it’s $60 across the board so the 32GB drive is the best deal.

OCZ Core Series 32GB SATA II 2.5" Solid State Drive [Tiger Direct via dealspl.us]

Like Seagate, Western Digital doesn’t see a market to enter in the form of SSDs right now. They’re open to it, and eventually will make their mark, but at the moment it’s not compelling to them. I love this quote from one of their head marketing guys that makes it sound like the company runs on clockwork:

Western Digital enters markets that exist, announces products when they are available, and runs a tight model with opportunities greater than resources such that we take a controlled, methodical, sequential, incremental approach to product portfolio expansion.

Mr. Rutledge then rakishly added, “In bed.”

Seriously, though, it looks as if spinning hard drives are going to be around for a good long time yet for certain price points; although we think of them as being volatile and archaic, they’re really unbelievable little machines and I don’t blame companies like WD and Seagate for wanting to protect their investments.

Expect to see these all over the place soon.

Wait, did I read that correctly? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this entire “technology” just a bigger cache? The write speed is not improved at all, it’s just tricking the OS into thinking it’s writing onto the SSD as fast as it is writing onto RAM. I guess that kind of makes sense, but it’s a bit misleading, and seems like it would be pretty taxing on the RAM.[I stand corrected] The technology does have some other benefits, however (NAND channel independence is good), and it doesn’t appear to harm anything, so I guess this is good news.

Update: I believe I misinterpreted this! It decouples the physical and logical location of a piece of information, so that when data is physically written, it is written to the location that is fastest and easiest for the SSD — based on free blocks and anti-wear-and-tear algorithms — and the information on the physical location is kept in “virtual storage,” and the OS can’t tell the difference because the shuffling is done at the controller level.

The full PR:
SanDisk Introduces ExtremeFFS – New Flash Management System for Improving SSD Performance and Reliability

SanDisk Also Proposes Two Metrics for End-Users to Measure Performance and Endurance: virtualRPM (vRPM) and Long-Term Data Endurance (LDE)

* ExtremeFFS™ greatly accelerates SSD random write speeds and endurance
* vRPM allows consumers to measure and compare SSD and hard disk drive performance
* Industry encouraged to adopt a simple endurance metric to determine the lifespan of an SSD

WinHEC 2008

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SanDisk® Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives (SSDs) that yields dramatic improvement in performance and reliability for computing applications. Called ExtremeFFS™, this next-generation patented flash management system – which has the potential to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems – will ship in SanDisk products during 2009.

Speaking in Los Angeles at WinHEC 2008, Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk’s Solid-State Drive (SSD) Business Unit, presented ExtremeFFS along with two metrics – vRPM and LDE – that can help end-users evaluate SSDs. vRPM enables comparisons in performance between an SSD and a hard disk drive (HDD) or another SSD, and LDE calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive.

For SSDs to perform optimally in Windows Vista, and thus replicate or surpass the functionality of hard disk drives, a new flash management technology is needed to accelerate SSD write speed and endurance, he said. “SSDs will revolutionize client storage, but we need new benchmarks that allow them to be treated differently than HDDs.”

In 1994 SanDisk introduced TrueFFS™, which has been the leading flash file system for major mobile handset vendors. TrueFFS was incorporated into one previous version of Windows, as the PCMCIA FTL of choice for its performance, scalability and low overhead. When using an SSD under Windows Vista, the demands on the SSD require a large quantity of random writes, as opposed to sequential access. “The mismatch to block size is significant,” said Heye.

Enter Extreme FFS

To maximize random write performance, SanDisk developed the ExtremeFFS flash file management system. This operates on a page-based algorithm, which means there is no fixed coupling between physical and logical location. When a sector of data is written, the SSD puts it where it is most convenient and efficient. The result is an improvement in random write performance – by up to 100 times – as well as in overall endurance.

ExtremeFFS incorporates a fully non-blocking architecture in which all of the NAND channels can behave independently, with some reading while others are writing and garbage collecting. Another key element of ExtremeFFS is usage-based content localization, which allows the advanced flash management system to “learn” user patterns and over time localize data to maximize the product’s performance and endurance. “This feature might not show up in benchmarks, but we believe it is the right thing to do for end-users,” Heye said.

New Performance and Endurance Metrics Proposed

Since hard drive performance is measured in RPMs (revolutions per minute), SSDs need a simple performance metric for comparisons, he said. virtual RPM (vRPM) accurately and easily allows consumers to compare SSDs to HDDs and to each other when used in PCs, said Heye. “vRPM answers the question: How fast would you have to spin a virtual HDD to achieve the level of performance seen by an SSD in a client PC?” Heye predicted that SSD net performance next year will be four times faster than the current generation of SSDs and nearly six times that of the latest 2.5-inch HDDs.

Commenting on vRPM, Joseph Unsworth, research director at Gartner, said, “There has been a deluge of SSD products with varying levels of quality that have created undeserved hype and confusion for consumers and corporations. Industry support behind a common metric that clearly articulates the value proposition of an SSD on a like for like basis to a HDD will be instrumental in driving end-user understanding and subsequent adoption as prices continue to fall.”

Apart from vRPM, SanDisk is proposing Long-Term Data Endurance (LDE), which simplifies endurance as a useful number, as the first industry metric of long-term data endurance. “This is a lot like measuring tread wear on a tire,” said Heye. Major PC OEMs and SSD competitors have reviewed and commented on SanDisk’s initial proposal, he added, and SanDisk has submitted a proposal and white paper to JEDEC, the leading developer of standards for the solid-state industry.

LDE represents the total amount of data writes allowed in the lifespan of an SSD. SanDisk will spec LDE on its future PC SSD products and “we strongly encourage others to follow SanDisk’s lead,” he added.

Regarding LDE’s impact on SSD adoption, Greg Wong of Forward Insights said, “LDE allows OEMs a simple way to compare SSDs and determine, based on the applications usage patterns, which drives are suitable for a particular application. The beauty of LDE is that it captures endurance in one single, understandable figure. A common metric is necessary to facilitate SSD adoption moving forward.”

(Note: The LDE proposal and white paper, along with a backgrounder on vRPM, is available on the SanDisk website at www.sandisk.com/SSD/Tech_and_metrics).

They’re introducing a line of low-capacity SSDs that are “highly cost-efficient to manufacture.” There’s a catch. They’re not very high performance, and in fact the lower capacity you go with, the lower the write speeds: 32GB, 70MB/s. 16GB, 45MB/s. 8GB, 25MB/s. Ew! Still, Samsung came out on top of the latest roundup, so at least we’re getting the worst from the best. No pricing was mentioned, which bodes ill for your wallet.

The guys from Tom’s Hardware have a lot of time and solid-state drives on their hands. They compiled a list of 14 SSDs and compared them. In the end, they feel (just like I do), that SSD isn’t really the best choice right now. The technology is still too new and expensive, so the benefits do not justify the cost — yet.

If you’re dying to know and really don’t want to read the whole thing, let me save you some time. All of them are pretty evenly matched. The only difference is that some of them are faster at reading/writing and others are more energy efficient — but never by that much.

The only one Tom’s Hardware thought was really worthwhile was Samsung’s 64 GB SSD SATA-2 drive, which was the complete package at a reasonable cost. I hope the 128GB ones perform as well.

It goes at 800,000 I/Os per second, has 12GB/s of bandwidth, and uses only 2.5KW of power – that’s about three high-end power supplies’ worth.

Don’t have quite that amount of scrilla? Well, you can always pick up the more budget solution, but it’s only 6.5TB of high-speed flash memory. Normally I’d flip my bit over something like that, but after seeing that RAM-SAN array, everything else seems to have gotten its volume turned down a bit.

Indilinx has been working on (and has finalized) a new controller specifically for SSDs. The new architecture, called Barefoot, has allowed them to reach speeds of 230MB/second, which is twice what a single unit could do last I checked, and getting on towards as much as four could do in RAID-0. Although Memoright and Texas Memory’s RAM-SANs are technically faster, it’s worth noting that both (especially RAM-SAN) are extremely expensive. The Barefoot modules should be more scalable and will get the best out of any SSDs you have lying around up to 512GB. Sounds good to me.

You like that graphic? I pulled out all the stops.

Of course, 512 gigs of memory (648 actually, with NAND memory making up the difference and providing backup and error correction) and the controllers to make all that happen are going to run you quite a bit of scratch. You have to go through a whole rigamarole to get a quote, and when you do, it’ll knock your teeth out. I don’t think they’d want me to reveal it, but let’s just say that just for the base unit price, you can’t count the figures on one hand. [via DailyTech and eWeek]

Update: Corrected the memory types — it’s DDR primary, flash secondary. (thanks to the RamSan folks for keeping me honest)