new ssd

Kinda neat - up to x5 my transfer speeds over platters and my fastest
USB flashdrive reads (hi-spec'd class 10 mem). No support whatsoever
- my OS is too old for their maintenance software, so I had to look
around to check it out generically instead.

New SSDs have better controllers, so the GC (garbage can) algorithm
for time stored on deletions isn't as much an issue without XP native
TRIM support. I put it in largely a read, least write capacity for
calls to program as links outside from where the OS is located.

Formatted it with EASEUS with 20% of a single FAT32 primary partition
left unallocated after reading about an IBM paper and added efficiency
derived from the free space by the controllers. Seems they'd just
give it that and sell the drive for 20% less storage capacity.

Not exactly Seagate's 7200 1T on sale this week for the same price,
but, hey, it's new for flat and black.

Cycled read/write degradation failure -- I don't see the deal there.
Buy a HD and let it spin for one or three years and if the warrantee
is out that's just your tough luck. Run a CPU with poor cooling or
massively over-clocked, what do you expect. Same deal here, except
it's the SSD manufacturers raising the issue. I got the warrantee, I
know the brand, and if I was afraid of easily burning up memory gates
prematurely I wouldn't have bought it.

On 15/11/2012 5:37 AM, Flasherly wrote:
Kinda neat - up to x5 my transfer speeds over platters and my fastest
USB flashdrive reads (hi-spec'd class 10 mem). No support whatsoever
- my OS is too old for their maintenance software, so I had to look
around to check it out generically instead.

New SSDs have better controllers, so the GC (garbage can) algorithm
for time stored on deletions isn't as much an issue without XP native
TRIM support. I put it in largely a read, least write capacity for
calls to program as links outside from where the OS is located.

TRIM just hints to the SSD controller that it's safe to begin a garbage
collection run at that moment. However, garbage collection happens
regardless.

Formatted it with EASEUS with 20% of a single FAT32 primary partition
left unallocated after reading about an IBM paper and added efficiency
derived from the free space by the controllers. Seems they'd just
give it that and sell the drive for 20% less storage capacity.

Sandforce controllers typically leave a large amount of memory reserved
for this very same reason. That's why you can always tell an SSD has a
Sandforce controller, because they typically have weird capacities, like
60/120/240 GB, instead of 64/128/256 GB. They reserve about 6%.

Not exactly Seagate's 7200 1T on sale this week for the same price,
but, hey, it's new for flat and black.

Cycled read/write degradation failure -- I don't see the deal there.
Buy a HD and let it spin for one or three years and if the warrantee
is out that's just your tough luck. Run a CPU with poor cooling or
massively over-clocked, what do you expect. Same deal here, except
it's the SSD manufacturers raising the issue. I got the warrantee, I
know the brand, and if I was afraid of easily burning up memory gates
prematurely I wouldn't have bought it.

I was pretty concerned about this previously too, before buying it. But
after buying it, it seemed like people are being a little overcautious
about this.

Yousuf Khan

On Nov 15, 9:39 am, Yousuf Khan wrote:


Yousuf Khan

thanks, yo - all pretty new and tempting, very, to move it up into for
regular placement and usage. As it is, though, it's pretty cool, too,
for a "test box" considerations to explore new territory. Runs like a
top, quick and responsive for various software platform trials.
Usually don't have that caliber around, as I keep them pretty much
clean and dedicated to necessary routines that don't lend a lot to
experimentation. Either that or I get caught talking and some
swinging joe buys it, plops down a wad of cash I can't refuse.
Building's that way, also, semi-addictive once on roll up the road for
researching and implementing better, more expensive gear.

On Thursday, November 15, 2012 12:37:54 PM UTC+2, Flasherly wrote:
Kinda neat - up to x5 my transfer speeds over platters and my fastest


I wish I could see a real-life benchmark to see what this solid state drive and fast uP system would do in compiling a complex program in Visual Studio, compared to my antiquated Core 2 Duo system (which scores about 2000 units on http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html for the cpu, and my traditional HD is about 75 MB/s average transfer speed). Instead of waiting a minute, would you wait 5 seconds? That sort of thing. The raw benchmarks of 5x better are misleading IMO.

RL

On Nov 29, 4:26 am, RayLopez99 wrote:

I wish I could see a real-life benchmark to see what this solid state drive and fast uP system would do in compiling a complex program in Visual Studio, compared to my antiquated Core 2 Duo system (which scores about 2000 units onhttp://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.htmlfor the cpu, and my traditional HD is about 75 MB/s average transfer speed). Instead of waiting a minute, would you wait 5 seconds? That sort of thing. The raw benchmarks of 5x better are misleading IMO.

RL

You know it seems more and more of a stretch for me to have said that,
now that I've used it a little longer. I don't really ever get 75MB/
s ... 60 would actually be a stretch over 50MB/s, tops. Whereas,
worst case, I can say I'll see as low as 12MB/s, with perhaps 20-30MB/
s being more the norm. I've since added another HD and another OS for
three OS boot choices -- two, though, being the same, XP, with
different service packs to get at some newer software stuff that runs
audio gear remotely through a USB connection (basic editing on EPROM
effect settings for guitar Fx and amplifier loops). Might put another
OS, something else or newer on there, as well.

That's two relatively ancient 200GByte HDs and a SDD from a 4-drive MB
SATA jumper block. If I get around to swapping in the next up, newer
4-year old 600Gbyte HD I may see discernible speed increases over
them.

We're talking the usual XP transfer rates, say as opposed to a DOS7
boot to Ghost a 700MByte compressed binary file, native MB
effectiveness, into an reserved 2Gbyte XP partition, from one HD to
another, at something approaching 2 minutes. Socket Intel 478.

Not so fast. On a dual-core AMD machine with a couple of my newest
HDs, nothing smaller than a terabyte, I've seen the same thing clock
in at 45 seconds. MB is dated roughly same circa, though.

But this is a 64GByte SDD, small enough on size alone to fit in with
what platters were a decade ago. So, it's a specialty drive, like you
say, for experimenting with. Then, as their designers like to say -
'It'll wear out, sooner or later, according to how often you write to
it.' I've set it up for a program-linked drive to the OS. I install
no programs to C: drive, never have, so it was a matter of
transferring something less than a couple hundred programs in named
program directories, from a drive with a named PRG directory in the
root, containing those programs, to that SDD. Two icons representing
folders in the XP TaskBar, containing icons for those two-hundred
programs. (Those two icons are also outside of C: Windows). My
desktop is otherwise totally black.

I could go a step further and separate any programs which I cannot
stop from writing back to themselves (logs, quarantines, or other
dynamic program entries), and then the SDD will effectively never be
written to, as a matter of routine or practical course, but only read.

As it is and so described, yes, there's benefit to be seen. Once the
Windows OS comes up from platters and hits quite a few AutoStart add-
ons linked to the SDD, they all happen at once. It's pretty.
Prettier yet, probably, just to dump Windows onto the SSD and just be
done with it. But for now the added speed for some reason isn't so
pressing. I'm for the most a bigger is better, than faster is smaller
type. Perhaps apart from program compilations, at some point, other
future uses will likely arise. I used to do quite a bit of video
editing and encodes, but hardly even that these days. I do have some
hellacious indices to databases for tracking various entities,
although indices since efficient database designs were updated by
TELCO's a decade ago, are lightening fast in themselves by design
proficiency, already.

On 29/11/2012 4:26 AM, RayLopez99 wrote:
On Thursday, November 15, 2012 12:37:54 PM UTC+2, Flasherly wrote:
Kinda neat - up to x5 my transfer speeds over platters and my fastest


I wish I could see a real-life benchmark to see what this solid state drive and fast uP system would do in compiling a complex program in Visual Studio, compared to my antiquated Core 2 Duo system (which scores about 2000 units on http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html for the cpu, and my traditional HD is about 75 MB/s average transfer speed). Instead of waiting a minute, would you wait 5 seconds? That sort of thing. The raw benchmarks of 5x better are misleading IMO.

RL

In my own personal life, I've seen huge increases in performance using
an SSD. Real world scenarios such as OS boot, OS patch, all go much
faster, I'm talking seconds on an SSD vs. minutes on an HDD: i.e. highly
noticeable. Smaller scale writes are not as huge of a boost as the
larger scale writes, but they are still a huge boost. All round, I would
say that the SSD has been the single most important performance boost
I've had in over 20 years with PC's! The previous biggest boost I had
gotten was from an upgrade from an 8088 XT processor to a 386DX
processor.

Yousuf Khan

On Nov 29, 1:31 pm, Yousuf Khan wrote:

The previous biggest boost I had gotten was from an upgrade from an 8088 XT processor to a 386DX processor.

Yo - when once upon a time it would take all night to convert 15meg of
rarzip to format with a NEC V20, 2meg EMS 3.2 slotted Rampage Boards,
with Michael Bolton to explain for Desqview/EMS386 support swapping on
RIME relaynets, or how to setup modems to call out to Egypt from
within a Canadian blizzard.

On Thursday, November 29, 2012 8:31:17 PM UTC+2, Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 29/11/2012 4:26 AM, RayLopez99 wrote:

On Thursday, November 15, 2012 12:37:54 PM UTC+2, Flasherly wrote:

Kinda neat - up to x5 my transfer speeds over platters and my fastest





I wish I could see a real-life benchmark to see what this solid state drive and fast uP system would do in compiling a complex program in Visual Studio, compared to my antiquated Core 2 Duo system (which scores about 2000 units on http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html for the cpu, and my traditional HD is about 75 MB/s average transfer speed). Instead of waiting a minute, would you wait 5 seconds? That sort of thing. The raw benchmarks of 5x better are misleading IMO.



RL



In my own personal life, I've seen huge increases in performance using

an SSD. Real world scenarios such as OS boot, OS patch, all go much

faster, I'm talking seconds on an SSD vs. minutes on an HDD: i.e. highly

noticeable. Smaller scale writes are not as huge of a boost as the

larger scale writes, but they are still a huge boost. All round, I would

say that the SSD has been the single most important performance boost

I've had in over 20 years with PC's! The previous biggest boost I had

gotten was from an upgrade from an 8088 XT processor to a 386DX

processor.



Yousuf Khan

Thanks YK, that's interesting. I'm curious as to the 'state of the art' or maybe 'mainstream' ssd today: do they 'wear out' (read / write hysteresis) in a couple of years, as was rumored to be the case around 10 years ago or so? That's why I was not an early adopter--don't want my ssd to not work after five years or so, even though I think that's about the average time for mean HD failure for mechanical platters (though I've had traditional HDs that last 10 years + no problem, luck of the draw I guess)

RL

On Dec 1, 5:46 am, RayLopez99 wrote:

Thanks YK, that's interesting. I'm curious as to the 'state of the art' or maybe 'mainstream' ssd today: do they 'wear out' (read / write hysteresis) in a couple of years, as was rumored to be the case around 10 years ago or so? That's why I was not an early adopter--don't want my ssd to not work after five years or so, even though I think that's about the average time for mean HD failure for mechanical platters (though I've had traditional HDs that last 10 years + no problem, luck of the draw I guess)

RL

They're cheap -- $50US on average sales, $40 or a little less
rebated, under $30 possible if less likely -- not a lot, anyway, for a
ticket to see the game at 64G. What's nailing it is IBM and Samsung -
among heavyweights names when considering quality, backing it up the
longest 3-yr warranties while mixing it up with low-ball competitive
pricing.

RayLopez99 wrote:


Thanks YK, that's interesting. I'm curious as to the 'state of the art' or maybe 'mainstream' ssd today: do they 'wear out' (read / write hysteresis) in a couple of years, as was rumored to be the case around 10 years ago or so? That's why I was not an early adopter--don't want my ssd to not work after five years or so, even though I think that's about the average time for mean HD failure for mechanical platters (though I've had traditional HDs that last 10 years + no problem, luck of the draw I guess)

RL

SSDs and other kinds of flash drives, use wear leveling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

Say you have a 32GB SSD, and the flash type used (MLC)
is rated for 1000 writes. It means basically, you
can do 32TB of writes to the drive, before it's exhausted
from a wear perspective. Without wear leveling, you
could "burn a hole in it", say, where the page file
is located. So wear leveling, is a big deal. There is
one level of indirection, between where you think the
data is stored, and where it is actually stored.

So I decide to write a program, which writes at 100MB/sec.
Perhaps it's a benchmark I wrote. I leave it running,
and forget about it. I come back later. I come back in

32x10**12 / 10**8 = 32x10**4 seconds or 320,000 seconds
[bytes] [b/sec] or very roughly 100 hours or about
four days depending on when I wake up

OK, now my SSD is ruined. I wore it out, even with wear
leveling. Such an accident, if it happens to a hard drive,
you'd never notice.

On the other hand, I can use the SSD for every day activities.
Perhaps reading email, Firefox cache, System Restore and a
few other things, cause 1GB of writes in a single day. I
can do that for about 32000 days before hitting 32TB. My
SSD will last for 32000/365 = 88 years.

A hard drive on the other hand, can run for at least a
year, doing random writes, at 100MB/sec say, with no obvious
wear. That's because the heads don't touch the disk. So rather
than last 4 days, like my first calculation, the hard drive
can last for a year of pretty heavy (server) usage. It
lasts for a few more years, just based on the motor wearing out.
If the motor had a good lubrication system, it might last
a lot longer than they currently do.

If you use the SSD in the very light fashion suggested in
the second calculation, it exceeds the mechanically related
failure of the hard drive by a fair bit. 88 years versus
4 years (motor failure).

It's all a matter of extremes, one way or another.

S.M.A.R.T for SSDs, includes a wear indicator, but
it's pretty hard to say how useful it is.

On each generation of flash, the endurance, or number
of writes per flash cell, is decreasing. The density is
increasing. Some day, the SSD will be as big as your
current hard drive, but will be about as reliable
as a sheet of toilet paper.

While SLC NAND has much greater endurance than MLC NAND,
all NAND types will go through density improvement, and
as such, the SLC NAND is also going to have reduced
wear properties, as time goes by. The difference would
be, if a consumer MLC has a joke value for endurance,
an enterprise SLC drive might still be useful. The SLC will
also be "behind" by a fair bit, in terms of capacity. And for
me at least, there's no way of knowing whether SLC will
stick around (since it means extra work to keep two kinds
of parts in production). If it's enough of a nuisance
financially, they could easily just stick to pure MLC.

Paul