High-perf SSD's getting in range of desktop?

Geo

Mostly Harmless
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http://www.marketwatch.com/news/sto...1F37-10E4-43B4-B823-53DE282CE70E}&dist=msr_20

Core series SSD drives are available in capacities of 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB and deliver incredible 120-143Mbs/ 80-93Mbs read/write speeds and seek times of less than 0.35ms, making the Core series up to 10x as fast on a seek-time basis and up to 40% faster on a R/W basis that the best performing 2.5" HDDs on the market, all while consuming 50% less power. MSRPs at time of launch are USD $169, $259 and $479 for 32GB, 64GB and 128GB models respectively.

If I'm not mistaken, that read performance is in Velociraptor class, and of course the access times are an order of magnitude better.

I could live quite comfortably with a 128GB boot drive on my desktop. I could probably get by with 64GB, tho I'd feel a little less comfortable.

Tho I'd like to see benchmarks start showing some real-world improvements over traditional HDD with these things. At these theoreticals I think they might. . .
 
I'd still rather be able to get a cheap PCIe memory expansion card though ... even 0.1 msec is a substantial access time, and not one they can lower without making custom flash chips. Why isn't anyone making them? I see a lot of applications which could benefit from cheap memory expansion outside the main memory bus.

PS. I predict OCZ will be sued by multiple parties for patent infringement.
 
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I want one of these for my carputer. They need to release them ASAP so I can get them b4 they get sued if Mfa is correct ;)
 
I think this is the kind of product that could indeed get the lawsuits flying. If the HDD makers don't feel threatened by this product and price they certainly should be.
 
I think this is the kind of product that could indeed get the lawsuits flying. If the HDD makers don't feel threatened by this product and price they certainly should be.

What about the free market and all that stuff? I thought it would be the SSD folks doing the suing not the HDD folks.

Whatever though I need something that will work when it is below freezing and HDD simply won't do it.
 
cant you get your gpu to heat your hdd's :D

It is in the car and has IGP so that would not work real well.

Actually though it does work fine if it could start b/c CPU and IGP both keep puter warm enough, but at start the drive is frozen and wont spin up.
 
I think this is the kind of product that could indeed get the lawsuits flying. If the HDD makers don't feel threatened by this product and price they certainly should be.

Seagate will start SSD production really soon.
 
If those prices are right and it's the correct size format to fit my Inspiron laptop, I'll be picking one up as soon as they're available.
 
First review.

Kind of curious it has to come from an end user and that there were no review samples send out.

Read throughput is good, write output is bearable (the low spikes don't really concern me, it's the average which matters). Latency is a bit ho-hum, but given that it uses MLC it's to be expected (still an order of magnitude improvement over HDs). Read latency for flash is tied to page size, and these chips have very large pages.
 
I think SSDs will come in to their own by mid next year. That is probably when I would look to replacing my Raptors and stringing together a few of these SSD badboys.
 
I saw one Asus small notebook (1GHz cpu, 256MB ram, 4GB SSD) boot an unoptimized WinXP-SP2 in less than 10 seconds :oops:
The low seek latency is really the key to this outstanding performance.
 
Regarding ASUS EeePC SSDs, as I'm assuming that's what you are referring to Pascal, the EeePC SSDs have abysmal write performance that really eats into the advantages of the drives. For some writes, it feels like I'm working with a floppy (Eee 900). Causes weird delays during XP's boot process during login. Whenever an app does some writes, the whole storage IO process can grind to a halt. And, because both the 4GB and 16GB SSDs are on the primary channel together, if one is choking on writes, the other is inaccessible too. On the other hand, if you're working with almost entirely reads of largish files, the speed is very nice.

Write performance and working with small file sizes are the Achilles' heel of overall SSD (flash) performance. Solve these and SSDs become infinitely awesome. :)

Here's an Atto HD bench test I did on the 16GB SSD in my Eee900. It shows you read/write rates per file size with a test length of 4MB. Interesting and distressing results. Interestingly, although the SSD uses a UDMA66 interface, it performs about like a UDMA33 drive on the reads.
eee90016g4kntfsth6.jpg

Compare it to a lowly 5400RPM notebook HDD running in a USB enclosure. Seagate Momentus 5400.2, I believe.
seagatemomentus60g5400uis0.jpg

And a OCZ Rally 2 4GB USB flash stick
oczrally24gio1.jpg
 
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Yes, it was a Asus Eee PC. One friend has it and I only know it has a 7" LCD, 1GHz CPU, 256MB and 4GB SSD. I did a few tests like boot WinXP-SP2, open and close some Office apps and in general it was fast. The write performance was not apparent to me during the quick test.

Just dreaming about a cheap ultraportable, 12" with SSDs to work anywhere :smile:
 
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