Comments Locked

68 Comments

Back to Article

  • Lifted - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    If you're going to wear a t-shirt without a jacket, at least have something geeky/nerdy on it. ;)
  • METALMORPHASIS - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    After buying one of these drives all you can wear is just a plain t-shirt.
  • EJ257 - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Yeah like a t-shirt that say "I Void Warranties"

    http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/techies/8f52/
  • michal1980 - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    PM your addy, and I'll send you a tee shirt that has a new collar. yours is stretched out.
  • ph0masta - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    I'm not in the IT biz, yet as a computer tech enthusiast I still find it interesting. I'd to learn more about the high performance warez that are required to run enterprise class computing.
  • dananski - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link

    Stop going off topic, this is clearly about T-Shirts. :P
  • Linkpl4y - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link

    I wonder if you could fry an egg on an SSD.

    http://www.foodrepublic.com/2011/10/14/how-fry-egg...
  • AdamK47 - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    This is a good review, but are SSD reviews going to be the only interesting thing for the PC builder/overclocking community to view? You know, the foundation of which AnandTech was build on. I remember all of the great reviews for 7+ years ago. If it weren't for the forums, I really wouldn't be here still. Where are the Sandybridge-E previews or the Bulldozer previews? How about some good old fashioned overclocking analysis? Throw in some good gaming benchmarks while you're at it. I couldn't care less about business IT hardware, efficient HTPC, or Apple related reviews. Is this where your analysis team has deemed the direction the site should go in?
  • dac7nco - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    In all fairness, IT hardware is interesting to quite a few people. There are a few places here and there that benchmark games. I agree about the Apple reviews; I couldn't care less, and neither would most sane people.
  • B3an - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    I also couldn't care less for anything Apple related. But sadly Apple articles seem to get quite a lot of attention so i doubt they'll be going away. It's like everything that does well... after a while things start to get more mainstream and you cant get more mainstream than Apples useless toys. I have no problem with this review at all though, i just hope these kinda detailed reviews dont disappear.
  • inplainview - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Useless toys? Is this coming from someone that can't afford Apple's offerings or someone who hasn't figured out that Apple is in the mainstream of consumer offerings and mentioning them is this consumer space is quite appropriate considering Apple's influence. You have proven yourself to be myopic and petty.
  • Stas - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    umadbro? Everything Apple sucks :D
  • gevorg - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    At least there is no Top 100 iPhone apps here. :)
  • web2dot0 - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    Unfortunately, that's what people want to read nowdays. Anand is just targeting the mainstream. Otherwise, how will he get all the pageviews? It's a business afterall. Let's not be naive. He doesn't choose his articles to write about by random. There's always a reason to the madness. He's just trying to stay (slightly) ahead of the curve. Too hard out, and it'll become irrelevant.

    Just wish the team stops writing so many editorial news reporting and focuses more on technical analysis like the ones above. The site is slowly becoming more and more corporate and with time, it will lose it's edge.

    Anyways, it's not like other sites are that much better. There's always room for improvement ....
  • taltamir - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Apple has single digit market-share. This is as far from mainstream as possible.
  • B3an - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    ....Yeah in computers but thats it. Apple are the largest consumer tech company on the planet, they now make more money than Microsoft. Apple pretty much have a monopoly on MP3 players and online music. They have the single best selling phone, the best selling tablet, and are gaining PC market share. For tech stuff you cant get more mainstream than Apple. There useless devices dont belong on serious sites like this IMO, they belong on dumbed down crap like Engadget.
  • inplainview - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    How many of you would be willing to financially support this site so that you can get your truckload of geek? Most likely zero to none. This site is supported via page hits which means that the authors have to write about stuff that most of the basement dwellers here aren't interested in. However, as someone who actually goes out into the sun, knows what women look like, smell like, taste like (figure it out), and realize that there is a world outside of sitting in front of a keyboard and bitching about how this site is not this and that, I can appreciate the work put in. Some of you people are simply whiners and pathetic.
  • Stas - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    Apple unofficially owns Engadget
  • KPOM - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    In the US, Apple has the third largest share of the PC market.

    http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/07/apple-no...

    It's lower worldwide, but Apple is definitely a mainstream PC manufacturer.

    http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/18/mac-market-share-ar...
  • Penti - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Anandtech is far from and far more then just a gadget site. Times change and you have to keep up with that to. So of course the focus changes, it's not all about the baddest mainstream overclocking mainboards and high-end gamer gpus any more, things have changed and people come here because it's not just fluff but also digs through down in the hardware/product. You will have more smartphones, notebooks and so on the gpu wars itself won't get you a lot of readers. You will have more enterprise topics and so on. Computing has changed. It's not really about gaming any more and that market has changed.
  • Stas - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    Makes you wonder: how did Anandtech survive in the olden days?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    I didn't preview Bulldozer because it would've been a disservice to the community. The performance levels of chips we had access to prior to going under NDA with AMD just wasn't representative of anything.

    Don't worry, you'll get to hear about Bulldozer soon enough :) AMD said shipping in Q4...

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Voidman - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    I actually would have agreed with this comment a lot more a year ago, or even 6 months ago. I am starting to see a few actual PC builder related reviews in recent months, and am happy about it. (Of course consumer SSD's are of interest to home builders, but that was about the only thing here that was). I was pleasntly surprised to see several reviews on cases/enclosures, something I have not seen here for a long time. And a PSU and monitor review here and there also. All of this came too late for my last build, but it is nice to see anyway.

    It does seem that there was a decision a couple of years ago to concentrate on smart phones and tablets and home theater gear, with SSD and enterprise IT articles filling in the gaps. I hope the recent trend of more PC builder related articles and reviews continues.
  • kevith - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Apples products are interesting because they show the way. Tablets, phones and OS, they have the best. (And most expensive and hyped and with a congregation that's gross). But when Apple launches a product, EVERYONE else will try to copy it within months, whether you like it or not. Thats why its interesting reading.

    Enterprise hardware is interesting to read about because it shows what a new piece of hardware are ACTUALLY capable of. In this case it shows, that if you want a real reliable SSD, the "nickels and dimes", that a consumer-SSD costs is simply not enough.
  • THizzle7XU - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    "Apples products are interesting because they show the way."

    I actually feel like the media at this point puts Apple in a position to create a self fulfilling prophecy in this regard. The iPad is the greatest example of this. Before the iPad came out there were rumors for years, pretty much since the iPhone debut, that Apple was working on a tablet and how it would be the greatest thing ever. I feel like after the rumors went on for a while, Apple was like, "Ya, this thing sounds cool! Maybe we should build a tablet!". And then all the other manufactures sat on their hands while the obvious was happening waiting for Apple to release the design template when the blueprint was crystal clear for tablets (i.e. just their phone OS on a bigger screen with slight modifications to the apps to take advantage of the screen res).

    It's like Apple pays its competitors not to compete with its ideas until they have released their product. And they everyone else becomes a copy cat of ideas that were so painfully obvious in the first place because they inexplicably waited until Apple released their version.
  • Stas - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    How dare you?! Steve Jobs created the universe. zOMG I'm getting wet dreaming about iPhone 5 !!!11!11!111
  • inplainview - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    I must suck being you....
  • Hulk - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    I've been here from day one and Anand keeps getting better. In my opinion he has always been the best tech writer on the internet and now I see his thoughts are as clear an organized when doing a video review. Bravo!

    Kudos to all of the guys on the Anandtech site. The flavor of all of the reviews flows down to everyone here. Anand is still the best but luckily he is rubbing off on all his guys.
  • wxrkny - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    "Anand is still the best but luckily he is rubbing off on all his guys."

    I hope not, that's gross

    sorry I had to
  • TommyAU - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    Haha
  • cdillon - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    I must be missing some important detail behind their decision to use MLC. MLC holds exactly twice as much information per cell as SLC, which means you can get twice the storage with the same number of chips. However, they are reserving up to 60% of the MLC NAND as spare area while still achieving a LOWER write-life than the SLC-based X25-E which only needs 20% spare. Why not continue to use lower-density SLC with a smaller spare area? The total capacity would only be slightly lower while achieving at least another 500GB of write life, if not more, and would probably also bring the 4KB Random Write numbers back up to X25-E levels.
  • cdillon - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    Oops, I meant to say "at least another 500TB of write life" instead of 500GB.
  • Stahn Aileron - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    More than likely it has to do with production yields. Anand mentions SLC and MLC are physically identical, it's just how you address them. SLC seems to be very high quality NAND while MLC is the low end. MLC-HET (or eMLC) seems to be the middle of the pack in terms of overall quality.

    Unless you can get SLC yields that consistently outpace MLC-HET yields by a factor of 2, it's not very economical in the long run for the same capacity.

    Also, chip manufacturing is a pretty fixed cost at the wafer level from my understanding (at least once you hit mass production on a mature process). For SLC vs MLC, you can either use double the SLC chips to match MLC capacities (higher cost) or use the same number of chips and sacrifice capacity. Intel seems to be trying to get the best of both worlds (higher capacity at the same or lower costs). (All that while maximizing their production capacity and ability to meet demand as needed as a side benefit.)

    Obviously I could be wrong. That's all conjecture based on what little I know of the industry as a consumer.
  • ckryan - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    Anand, thanks for the awesome Intel SMART data tip.

    I've joined in the XtremeSystems SSD endurance test. By writing a simulated desktop workload to the drive over and over, for months on end, eventually a drive will become read only. So far, only one drive has become RO, and that was a Samsung 470 with an apparent write amplification of 5+(this was the only SSD I've ever heard of that this has happened to outside of a lab). Another drive (a 64GB Crucial M4) has gone through almost 10,000 PE cycles, and still doesn't have any reallocated sectors -- but all of the drives have performed well, and many have hundreds of TBs on them. I chose a SF 2281 with Toshiba toggle NAND, but I'm having some issues with it (like it won't stop dropping out/or BSOD if it's the system drive). Though it takes months and months of 24/7 writing, I think the process is both interesting and likely to put many users at ease concerning drive longevity. I don't think consumers should be worrying about the endurance of 25nm NAND, but I do start wondering what will happen with the advent of next generation flash. If you want to worry about NAND, worry about sync vs async or toggle, but don't sweat the conservative PE ratings -- it seems like the controller itself plays a super important role in the preservation of NAND in addition to the NAND itself and spare area. Obviously, increasing spare area is always a good idea if you have a particularly brutal workload, but it's not a terrible idea in many other settings... it's not just for RAID0 you know.

    The only real SSD endurance test takes place in a user's machine (or server), and I have no doubts that any modern SSD will last anything less than the better part of a decade -- at least as far as the flash is concerned (and probably much, much longer). You'll get mad at your SF's BSoDs and throw it out the window before you ever make a dent in the flash's lifespan. The only exception is if your drive isn't aligned (and especially without trim). Under these conditions don't expect your drive to last very long as WA jumps by double digit factors.

    http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
  • Movieman420 - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    Yup. And you can expect the current SF bsod problem to vanish when intel fixes it's drivers and oroms. What coincidence eh?

    http://thessdreview.com/latest-buzz/sandforce-driv...
  • JarredWalton - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Ha! An educated guess in this case feels more like a pipe dream. If Intel is willing to jump on the SF controller bandwagon, I will be amazed. Then again, they've got the 510 using a non-Intel controller, so anything is possible.
  • ckryan - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    It kinda makes sense though. Intel using a Sandforce controller (or possibly "Sandforce-eque") but with their firmware and NAND would be tough to stop. The SF controller (when it works -- In my case not always that often) yields benefits to consumer and enterprise workloads alike. Further, it could help bridge Intel into smaller process NAND with about the same overall TBW due to compression (My 60GB has about 85TB host to ~65TB nand writes). That's not a small amount over the lifespan of a drive. Along with additional overprovisioning, Intel could conceivably make a drive with sub-25nm NAND last as long as the 34nm stuff with those two advantages.

    There's nothing really stopping SF now except for the not-so little stability issues. I thought it was much rarer that it actually is (it's rare when it happens to someone else and an epidemic when it happens to you). With that heinous hose-beast no longer lurking in the closet, SandForce could end up being the only contender. Until such time as they get the problems resolved, whether or not you have problems is just a crapshoot... no seeming rhyme or reason, almost -- but not quite -- completely random. If Intel could bring that missing link to SF it would be a boon to consumers, but Intel could just as well buy SandForce to get rid of them. Either is just as likely, and conspiracy theorists would say that Intel is purposely causing issues with SF drives so they don't have to buy them (or don't have to pay as much). In the end, most consumers would just be happy if the 2281 powered drives they already have worked like the drive it was always mean to be.
  • Movieman420 - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Guess you didn't follow the story over to VR Zone either. It's a done deal. Cherryville is SandForce 2200. It should be announced before long imo.
  • rishidev - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

    Why even bother to make a 200gb drive at this point of time.
    AMD fanboys get abused for masturbating .
    So What ?? im supposed to buy a $1300 Intel ""WOOOW" ssd drive.
  • TheSSDReview - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Because Intel wants to hit the enthusiast market. The new drives wont be anywhere near the price of these 710 series drives and will demand product confidence as Intel has always had such. It is a win-win for SF since many have taken comfort in speculation of controller troubles rather than examining other such causes.

    The question then becomes one of SF purchase we think.
  • igf1 - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    My God, how did the vertex 3 get so far ahead of the pac?
  • Broheim - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    how could a SATA 6GB/s drive possibly be faster than a bunch 3GB/s drives? oh wait...
  • floam - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    How well should this drive do without TRIM? I imagine this is somewhat important to those doing RAIDs. Or in my case, just holding one big giant VHD file.
  • inplainview - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Anand,

    Start charging for access to your site and see how many of the hardcore keyboard banging, momma's basement dwellers will actually fork over cash to keep things here uber-techie. I can appreciate the work that you're doing even if it not as nuts and bolts as some would like. I've gleaned valuable info that has helped me to make some informed purchases that I am quite happy with. For that I think you.
  • mmrezaie - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    What I really like to see in these SSDs is the impact of encryption. Not just hardware level, but software solutions from both windows, and Linux. it seems that they are getting more and more important these days.
  • Ushio01 - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Anand since you now have an enterprise storage bench will you be reviewing the Micron RealSSD P300 and P400e SSD's especially the P300 as it uses SLC nand with a 6.0 Gb/s controller.
  • tipoo - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    What kind of mic that is.
  • geok1ng - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    is thesse drive have 40%+ spare area, then cost per GB is actually $3 to $4, Inline with premium market.
    And there is already a ssd that uses 50% spare area, the cache oriented OCZ Nocti, that i would like to see a review, compared with 20gb 311 series, 40g Corsair F40 and Crucial m4 64GB.
  • sheh - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    200GB != 200,000,000,000,000 bits
    200GB == 200,000,000,000 bytes

    ---

    Data retention always worried me. Is that 1 year retention for consumer drives only once it's exhausted its writable days or also for brand new?

    Do drives refresh themselves or is there a need to do a read-rewrite everything once in a while?
  • freespace303 - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Where are the Crucial drives on here? I have one and would love to see how they stack up against these new Intel drives.
  • Juri_SSD - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Anand, I have read your previous articles and there where all somehow good. But this one misses one important thing and therefore there are many comparisons, that aren´t correct. When I saw the video, I just thought what is wrong with you.

    First of all: How dare you to compare a 50nm Flash-SSD with a 25 nm Flash-SSD and say that there is only a saving of cost because of use the cheaper MLC instead of SLC? That is so wrong! You can just shrink the 50nm SLC to 35nm SLC and you have lowered the price to half, then you go on and shrink it to 25nm and you have a further reduction in price and end up at a 1/4 price of an 50nm SLC-NAND just by shrinking the Cells.

    Secondly: How dare you compare a 50nm FLASH-SSD with a 25nm Flash-SSD and then say that you have now more than 64 GB just because Intel wisely uses MLC? Hello? What about shrinking again? Your video is so wrong… 64 GB 50nm SLC -> shrinking -> 128 GB 34nm SLC -> shrinking -> 256 GB 25 nm SLC!

    What do we have? Intel could make a 256 GB SLC-drive just by shrinking. Instead of pointing this out, you told the people how “good” Intel does his job by sorting out good MLC-NAND to compete against an very very very old, really old SSD. The only winner on this “good” job is Intel itself. The enterprise-consumer waits for a competitor who actually shrinks the SLC-Nand to 25nm.

    Then again: You compare GB/Dollar. That is nice. And then you do a long speech about servers that really need all this p/e-cycles. But, if the servers really need all this p/e-cycles, why do you not compare p/e-cycles/Dollar? Perhaps, because the new 710-SSD really sucks on that comparison, also against an really old SLC-SSD like the Intel X25-E?

    Then again, you can say: “All right, you are right Juri, but there are no 34nm SLC-Flash” Ups, this is also untrue, there are 34nm SLC-Flash-drives, so why you don’t compare GB/Dollar with these drives? You don’t know what I mean? How about Intel SSD 311? If you compare that 20 GB SLC 34nm NAnd-Flash drive, you see that the price of an 710-SSD you could easily make with a simple shrinking of SLC-NAND, just like I told in the first point.

    I am really disappointed by your review.

    PS: If you think my english is bad, you can try reading in german: http://hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=3946
  • lemonadesoda - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    I disagree with the statement that the SSD market is a race to the bottom. I think this is a lazy catchphrase that demonstrates a company's unwillingness to innovate. It is like saying the CPU or GPU or TFT or mobile handset business is a race to the bottom. Clearly, this is not true!

    There is plenty of room for Intel to innovate, differentiate, and gain margin on consumer SSD.

    What SSD "technologies" would be interesting for the consumer? Encryption; Response-to-theft management; Wear leveling; SMART 2; Thunderbolt, etc. that would allow Intel to lead and to charge a premium on the consumer product.

    Intel owns the Light Peak/Thunderbolt technology. Intel should get Thunderbolt onto it's PC chipset and get a range of SSDs onto Thunderbolt. Why are we using (e)SATA as a slow intermediary layering protocol when thunderbolt could do this and do it better? With Intel thunderbolt on the Intel mainboard, and compatible Intel SSD, we would no longer find PCIe based SSD or RAID0 SATA interesting. Intel could claim the enthusiast (not just enterprise) market in one swoop. And enthusiast drives consumer branding and perception.

    There's still a lot of room for Intel in the SSD market. Or perhaps the current team has run out of ideas and motivation?
  • Friendly0Fire - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Actually, no, there's a point you're missing. At the moment the biggest barrier to adoption with SSDs is... price. Specifically cost/GB. CPUs, GPUs and mobile handsets can be had for all price ranges, thus you see a good amount of spread between low and high end. CPUs and GPUs also have the advantage of being bundled in prefab computers, while mobiles get heavy price cuts through mobile plans.

    SSDs, however, are still restricted to a niche market, only seen as an optional component on high-end computers or bought directly as a separate piece. Sadly, most people still consider "performance" to be summarized by how many GHz and GBs your computer has. SSDs can improve performance tremendously, but good luck explaining what IOPS or bandwidth mean. Until prices are closer to that of magnetic drives, most people won't even be interested in learning about them.

    So yeah, for the time being SSDs are a race to the bottom in the customer market. Performance is what I'd call good enough for 99.95% of computer users, even when you consider 3Gbps last-generation drives. What matters now is price drops.
  • EddyKilowatt - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - link

    I agree that price is the #1 barrier in the minds of potential adopters, but right after that comes reliability, and I think this looms equally large once people get used to the price and understand the performance benefit.

    Many are waiting for all the myriad 'issues' to get sorted out... until they do, it won't truly be a price-driven commodity market. And until they do, Intel can offer added value -- if they're careful about reliability themselves -- that justifies the price premium they'd like to charge.

    Perhaps SSDs aren't as architecture and innovation driven as CPUs, but there's way more to them than just bulk memory mass produced at sweatshop wages.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link

    Synthetic hard drive comparisons are not reality.
  • Luke212 - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    Anand, Businesses do not run SSDs as single drives or raid 0. Failures being 1-2% it is too disruptive to business (unless they are read only). Can you consider testing these drives in Raid 1, which is how they are used in real life?
  • Iketh - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link

    That would depend on the raid controller's performance, not the drive.
  • ClagMaster - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    "It wouldn't be untrue to say that Intel accomplished its mission."

    Means after the reader deciphers this ...

    "It would be true to say that Intel accomplished its mission."

    Do not do this. I have skinned engineers alive for making this kind of double-negative grammatical error in their reports I often have to shovel through. I hate teaching engineers English. Do make the change.

    Your comments about Intel's leadership in the consumer SSD and enterprise SSD development pretty much hit the nail on the head.

    Intel essentially created the consumer market for these SSDs. Not OCZ, Marvel and Sandforce. They are the dogs eating the crumbs.

    Intel does some serious prototype testing before these products hit the shelves. Far more than its competitors.

    This is another well balanced, high quality SSD.
  • ClagMaster - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    When I mean well balanced, I mean this is not a SSD for the obscessive-compulsive speed free with money to burn.

    This SSD is a good balance of cost, performance and reliability for the enterprise space. Its optimized for cost and reliability which limits performance somewhat.

    Althoug slow compared to a Vertex 3, the SSD710 would still provide fine performance for consumer PC's as a boot drive.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    "slow compared to a Vertex 3, the SSD710 would still provide fine performance"

    Wouldn't it be nice to have quantified results??? Like Windows boot time, time to launch programs, and time to open big files.

    Synthetic benchmarks are both inaccurate, and provide no relative information. And synthetic benchmarks have been known to be inaccurate, on Anand's own site!
    ____________
    http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg

    In IOPS, RAID0 was 20-38% faster; then the loading *time* comparison had RAID0 giving equal and slightly worse performance! Anand concluded, "Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance."
    ____________

    Anand stays stubborn to his flawed SSD performance test methods. If anyone is deciding between a Vertex 3 or an Intel, the single most important data would be the quantified time differences in doing different operation. You'll have to go to another website to find that out.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link

    Use a CD; that's mechanical storage.

    Flash is definitely a poor choice, since charge is slowly lost. I'm not sure about magnetic hard drives.
  • ggathagan - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link

    If you use optical media, better have it a manufactured ROM disk, as opposed to writable media.
    Even the best consumer optical media is only good for around 10 years.
  • James5mith - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link

    One thing intel and the rest of the SSD crowd by far have failed to address is the limitations of SATA for enterprise workloads. Doesn't matter how fast your drive is, on a SATA interface it will tank in truly heavy mixed I/O environments. Native SAS SSD's are needed to move the hdd form factor SSD's forward in the industry.

    That being said, in my research for an in-house project, I discovered Smart Modular. Their Optimus SAS SSD's are up to 1.6TB/drive, and at that capacity are still below $3/GB.

    To be fair, I have not gotten any of them in house to test yet, so I can't say how well they will do. But knowing the difference moving from SATA to SAS drives make in an array, I would have to imagine it will be significant when I do.

    Not to mention, from a pure density standpoint, 1.6TB 2.5" SSDs can pack more density per rack unit than 3TB 3.5" drives. Once you get to the 4TB 3.5" drives, the crown returns to slow spinning media though.
  • jhh - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link

    A conventional HDD wouldn't fare much better. The typical service life of an enterprise HDD is 5 years after a storage period of no more than 6 months. Beyond that point, the MTBF numbers aren't valid. That doesn't mean the drive will immediately fail. But, conventional HDDs aren't meant to be stored for a long period of time. The lubricating medium (grease or oil) will start moving away from where it is supposed to be, so that parts which were supposed to be lubricated won't be lubricated. The lubricant may also start oxidizing, becoming less of a lubricant. I'm not sure that a drive sitting around for 5 years will be any worse than a drive which was operating for 5 years, but I wouldn't count on either to be around for 20 years, let alone 50.

    If you want to be sure those baby pictures will still be around to show their grandkids, best to print the pictures, as we have never developed a better archival storage device. Better yet, paint it in some obscure cave in France. If you want the time capsule information to be available, print it on archival paper with archival inks.
  • rikmorgan - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link

    I see an article in EE Times saying Samsung is producing flash NAND on their new 20nm FAB now and expects to begin running it at 10nm next year. Just passing it on, don't know how newsworthy it is. ET Times 10/10/2011 edition.
  • Linkpl4y - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link

    Well you've made it this far. Hopefully you've learned something on the way.

    Here's the next path on your journey. http://bit.ly/nqPUwd
  • Iketh - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link

    LOL
  • mayaw - Saturday, November 5, 2011 - link

    Because I do video graphics and its really the only thing that slows my system down for any type of reference # on tests. Even with a 10,000 RPM drive I have 12gb of mem and I upgrade my processor every 3-4 years when I can but I really never think of the hard drive. But now I am seriously thinking about getting one of these.
    Oh and by the way guys I think that the collar of his shirt is stretched out because his head is so big and it has to stretch itself out cause of the big brain he has in it unlike ppl who are arguing about someone that is wearing a t-shirt on a hard drive review.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now