OCZ gets to the core of SSD cost problem
Bites into the Solid State apple
OCZ HAS ENLIVENED the SSD market with the release of its Core SATA II series of 2.5-inch solid state drives, which now come with the added benefit of a tad more affordability.
According to OCZ Technology, these alternatives to HDDs arrive at "50 per cent less price per gigabyte than other high-speed offerings on the market". With an aim to put the Core range firmly in reach of the average consumers wallet, purse or piggy bank.
The marketing blurb would have you believe that, "SSDs offer higher performance, reliability, and energy efficiency than conventional HDDs but the cost variance has limited adoption of vastly superior SSD technology."
OCZ Core SATA II SSD
Just as with every other solid state drive on the planet these are being touted for notebook users. Claiming to be ideal for fast access and seek times, plus offering energy efficiency in extending battery life – despite recent claims to dispute this over at tomshardware.
The Core series rock up in a durable, lightweight alloy housing with a quoted 1.5 million hours mean time before failure (MTBF) or 171 years, backed only by a two-year warranty leaving those other 169 uncovered.
They arrive on the scene boasting of 10x faster on a seek-time and up to 40% faster on a R/W basis than the best performing 2.5-inch HDDs around, while consuming 50% less power – so say them.
OCZ Core series are available in three flavours; 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities at $169, $259 and $479 respectively. We’ve seen these around in Blighty for £117.99, £179.99, £319.99 over at Play.com.
Despite the series name there’s no mention of a tie-in with Apple; #283 of moments lost in marketing. µ
Comments
I wonder
what the mean time to "can't write any more" would be: high quality flash chips can live through about a million rewrites to the same cells. Cheaper flash chips can sustain about 100,000 rewrites. Now, if the disk is fairly full, no re-mapping algorithm can save you from realizing bad areas after several says of intensive work - e.g OS cache.Toms Review
Toms review is complete bullshit (like much of what they do), their testing methodology is beyond flawed.Simply put they carried on running HDD test until the battery ran out, so the nice fast SSD's completed more tests than the HDD, these tests would also have been using CPU power as well, is it any surprise that they came to the wrong conclusion by using wrong testing.
The OCZ SSD's are just re-badged Samsung SSD's, so the price point will be very similar.
Andy
SLC or not SLC that is the question
Come Inquirer. Is this suppose to be a IT site or not?Is this a SLC or MLC device?
Makes a huge difference.
RE: I wonder
> Now, if the disk is fairly full, no re-mapping> algorithm can save you from realizing bad areas
That isn't true. The trick is to move existing data around, so basically writing a little bit more to avoid exhausting one area. Writing only to free space would be a recipe for disaster, writes need to be spread around the whole disks.
That said, I don't know what wear leveling algorithms are actually used, and it's not written on the box.
Not as fast as they seem
If you read the fine print on these, they are nowhere near as fast as the other OCZ SATAII SSD's that are for sale: they specifcally mention transfer rates in Mb/s instead of MB/s.yes it can.
jacob : actually a algorithm can save you then.what it can do it move data that is hardly ever changed to sectors that have seen heavy write traffic, and use the newly freed up sector for heavy writing for a while.
intel Has 32/64 GB fo $45.
Recently in: theInquirersters' article about Intel bundling SSD Card with Atom appeared & Cost Was Low. i ask, Is Above products Price as Good as Manufacturer State? its mere ~100 mb/s unit, yet it is nicely done in metal. However, Intels' LOSS Leader to Sell Atom Means You'd Get Atom Almost FREE, with SSD Card.drashek
A little math...
A little math shows that the worries about wearing out flash is pretty silly.Take the smallest 32GB device and assume it uses the cheap parts that last for "only" 100,000 writes. The wear levelling insures that even if you wrote the same block over and over again it will move that block around. It will move other data out of the way into blocks that are more "worn" as necessary to even out the wear. You tell the drive to write block 234 but internally it remaps the block numbers you tell it to its own representation, so it can move data around with you knowing or caring.
With a little math, you can show that if you wrote 10MB/sec every second for a year on that 32GB device, you'd have an average of 10,000 writes per block. So if the wear levelling works as advertised (and its a simple principle, I don't see why not) then it would last 10 years at that rate.
And who the hell is going to write 10MB/sec every second for 10 years on a laptop? If you raise your hand and say "me", then maybe you should stick with hard drives for now. The other 99.9999% of us can make good use of an SSD.
MLC, But Fast MLC
"Is this a SLC or MLC device?"OCZ aren't saying. Has to be MLC at that price, though.
"If you read the fine print on these, they are nowhere near as fast as the other OCZ SATAII SSD's that are for sale: they specifcally mention transfer rates in Mb/s instead of MB/s."
You're putting way too much faith in the ability of marketing to know the difference between "b" and "B".
Anyway, from the press release:
"Core series SSD drives are available in capacities of 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB and deliver incredible 120-143 MB/s 80-93 MB/s 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."
Clearly they mean megabytes, not megabits, otherwise it would be slower than a HDD, not faster.
MTBF
One thing that erks me is half these articles including many professional tech news websites... is they get the failure rate completely wrong.The SSD failure rate is one of the so called 'fad talks' about why not to get an SSD drive for an OS.
As if these tech news ppl were brilliant at math, they take the MTBF or mean time before failure, quoted to be 2 million for some core SSD or 1.5million... they divide by 24 hours and 365 days and go "OH it will last 150-200 years" then proceed to crack about the 2 year warranty compared to the uncovered other 198 years...
The MTBF is in a sense a failure rate, or ratio for failure. It has almost nothing to do with direct time before failure.
So, although I'm ranting.. it is for the greater good of people understanding what the MTBF means...
the MTBF is actually the reciprocal of the time before a part in the device fails. so it'd be 1/(% of part a part failing).
For a 2 million offering, function of % non failure is
% chance that someone will work in T hours is
P(T) = e^(-T/MTBF)
Percentage the SSD will last for 5 years with a MTBF of 2mil is = e^(-5*24*365/2,000,000) = 97.83%