I for one am more interested in this epic SSD round-up I hear you've been working on, anyway!

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Me too!

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I would love too, but...can you do a wittle favor ?

You can mix to them if you have the time or......
You can test this all by itself. Imagine this fer a laptop. Ussully 2.5" lappy HDDs are dam slow.

PhotoFast CR-9000
http://www.amazon.com/PHOTOFAST-CR-9000...ctronics&qid=1236704708&sr=1-3

or the CR-9300 with 8 SD cards. 8 SD Cards in Raid.

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You think your 2.5" drive is slow?
Try a 1.8" like in my Dell D420... it reboots boots faster than it can hibernate/resume.


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You think your 1.8" drive is slow?
Try a 5.25" like in my Commodore 64 Plus4... it boots an order of magnitude faster than it can... um, do pretty much anything. It sounds pretty sweet, though.

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You think your 5.25" floppy is slow?
Try my punch cards when you accidentally drop them on the floor.

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That was my idea, I had like 4 years ago. But I would have used microSD cards, cause then you could put like 16+ of 'em in there.

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Only problem being that MicroSD cards are going to be, for the most part, slower than SD variants, especially when you're dealing with more larger capacity pieces. The extra slots would be nice for giving you more space, yeah, but the speed would be no better than a WD Black drive, though it would come in at several times the cost and still hold less data.

I'd like to see how that adapter would perform with SanDisk Extreme III cards in it. Fairly expensive, yeah, but interesting to see the results, what with the RAID action it's got going on...

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Well, this picked my interest and it wasn't hard to find "deleted" article using google and I gotta say the test has been somewhat short and not through, so sounds like reviewer didn't setup something correctly.

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http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:Mg...p;cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

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Unfortunately it's not. Just the first page of descriptions. There is nothing with the actual benchmarking.

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I read it too, and I could not put my finger on anything.

Besides... This stuff should be fool-proof. If it is hard to engage nVidia's hardware accelerator, then it is worthless IMO.

I believe PureVideo HD is married with Cyberlink's awfully buggy PowerDVD software as far as Blu-ray playback is concerned.

And that my friends, is an intolerable situation. nVidia's decoder should be made freely available to everyone.

Next time I buy a GPU, I will buy the one with a proper decoder freely available. No worries -- I can certainly wait with my upgrade!

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PureVideo HD can be accessed by other players too. I believe WinDVD also accelerates via PureVideo HD now.

It is kinda lame that you have to go buy a third party codec but that's because of the licensing involved.

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Yes! SSD's are much more exciting! HDD's are slowly going the way of AGP. The only thing HDD's have going for them is that they are cheaper per Gigabyte. SSD's already destroy HDD's in speed, now I'm waiting for SSD's to go down in price and increased capacity.

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You're clueless, really.

HDDs have a lot of advantages, some of them in speed. They did an article on another website involving short-stroking hard disks, and the speed improvement was dramatic, and in many benchmarks left the SSDs in the dust. Yes, even in speed. A lot depends on the application, and what speed you're talking about. Access times will always favor the SSDs, or should, but that's only part of the equation.

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In all fairness he did say "slowly" which I agree. In, hopefuly, a few more years memory would be quicker and the capacity larger so the decision between storage would be easier to make. There's already announcements for terabyte flash cards (SD, Compact, Memorystick, etc.)

Looking at the trend however, this will take a few more years to catch up on price/performance/capacity...that is unless someone really wants to be #1 and push/release ahead :)

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Is this "other website" Tom's Hardware, by any chance?

In that case, that was a comparison using a RAID array of FOUR hard drives, with a whopping total capacity of 20-40GB, compared to only two outdated 64GB SLC drives.

Just typical TH sensationalist BS, and not even remotely conclusive. All it really said was that, in certain instances, a setup like that might be more cost effective for IT use than an unrealistically expensive SLC drive. NOTHING else can be concluded from their "tests."

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[Quote]\They did an article on another website involving short-stroking hard disks, and the speed improvement was dramatic, and in many benchmarks left the SSDs in the dust.[/quote]

If I remember correctly, Anand did a similar article to investigate the pauses that sometimes occur with SSD's. All the SSD's were slower than traditional HDD's in that particular case, except for Intel's, which didn't seem to be affected at all.

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arghhhhhhhhhh


how do I use the quote tags?? the quote button and the other editing buttons don't work.

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use [quote] then [/quote]

see?

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Well, it should work that way...

Never works right in FF in Linux it seems, at least here...

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wait, use <> instead of []



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[Quote] Use then

See [/Quote]

Doesn't seem to be working!

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Actually I tried it and I get the stupid WebMaster Error. If I don't put it in, it works.

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I'm clueless? Time to keep up with current events. HDD's are YESTERDAYS technology:

http://i.gizmodo.com/5168424/fusion+io-iodrive-duo-is-the-worlds-fastest-ssd

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HDD are Sooooo yesterday, but SSDs are, like, Soooo fashion victim.

For 80 euros, I can either get a 1 To HDD or a 30 Go SSD. Not much to hesitate about for me.

Both have advantages and drawbacks. I for one don't care about speed or power requirements (and on both counts, it seems there is no clear answer on which is better, HDDs are "good enough" for me, and any difference is minimal anyway), but care a lot about price, capacity, and reliability.



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Ever seen a storage-cell data-retention-time vs number of write-cycles chart for any SSD? If you have, please post the URL. And have you ever seen a SSD warranty for 5 years?

For a high-tech website, I am highly disappointed in the "follow the crowd" drooling by Anandtech over SSDs. Time for Anand to dig deep into the storage technology of high-density SSD flash-memory with a thorough TECHNICAL analysis of where SSDs can safely be used LONG-TERM and where they should be avoided and hard-disks given preference.

Two essential key components of this analysis will be:-

(a) the extraction of the CELL data-retention-time vs number-of-write-cycles profile from the manufacturers of the flash-storage components in any SSD. Best of luck !!!

(b) the attributes of the wear-leveling algorithms used and how they
match the intended applications and prior storage profile of the SSD. Plus their impact on access times. (For example, imagine a SSD >85% full of 'static data', the remaining <15% handling rapidly changing data (c.f: Windows virtual memory) and where the "static data" still has to be shuffled to even out the "wear". Moving around that static data every time the dynamic data changes accelerates the overall wear-out... ).

Failing the acquisition of such data, I suggest to Anand the following crude test:- Take a SSD and fill it, say, to 95% with static data. Bang on the remaining 5% with AT LEAST 10 million write-cycles of changing data. That should give the wear leveling algorithms a good workout. At the end of the test, image all the data and store elsewhere. Now leave the SSD statically-powered and check the data-integrity against the stored record every day for at least 3 months. Do not write to the SSD at all at any time during this integrity test. Im sure that the Anandtech crew can come up with a far more vicious test than I. At least, maybe I have prodded the Anandtech elephant to sit up and take notice of the fact that there has not been any technically-critical analysis of data-retention capabilities of the storage elements of SSDs.

Remember, that a SSD with flaky storage due to a single cell with wear-related cell-leakage will have exactly the same symptoms in a PC as flaky memory. And unlike a hard-disk, there is no way to verify sector integrity by a read-write test. (When a hard-disk fails it is generally a one-way street, either a permament sector error or a spin-failure.) A write to the SSD will immediately hide a flaky cell in the wear-leveling process and the SSD will again look perfect, plus depending on the leakage it may take anything between a few days and few weeks for the cell to fail again.... if that cell is not written again in the meantime. Of course, the more times a cell is written, the worse its read-integrity becomes....

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If you're looking for a real technical article, 99% of the tech websites can't give it to you. I don't think many of them are trained or experienced enough to write a technical document properly. Therefore, you can either live with what they are providing in their service or go somewhere else...that 1% in nowhere land.

Seriously, as an engineer, if I wanted tech specs I go get the datasheet and specification documents. If I don't trust what I'm reading I'll review articles on websites such as these or do the tests myself if I have the tools available.

Just my 2cents.

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"Do it yourself" is a lame response to someone. If you think more technical specificity is unnecessary, make that case. But, telling someone to become their own review site is rather silly.

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Not so lame, you can't cater anything to everyone, if someone insists they alone need to know something, then they should do the work. If they don't care enough to do it themselves it wasn't really very important was it?

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There's a difference between extremes "catering to everyone" and having superficial benchmarks that drive people to erroneously buy SSDs when they shouldn't. Simply putting out exciting benchmarks on R/Ws to empty SSDs is the blind leading the blind.

"If they don't care enough to do it themselves it wasn't really very important was it? "

Or, they don't have the budget, network, and technical access to vendors do properly bench and report on multiple SSDs?

The OP had a very valid point. The bashing just seems like website fanboyism. Some people can't even take constructive criticism...

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What would be the point of all that? It's already established that SSD are less failure prone than HDD. It would make more sense to exhaustively test HDD today. If data loss is such a concern, as always a redundant backup is prudent no matter what medium you're storing the primary copy on.

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What is the point of such a test? You are asking for a test that no normal system will ever reproduce.

All systems write constantly. Even when you are reading a file the system updates the "last access" date, writing the disk.

I don't care if a cell loses it's data in 2 weeks, as long as the wear level algorithm knows this and rewrites the data before that time.

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[quote]Ever seen a storage-cell data-retention-time vs number of write-cycles chart for any SSD? If you have, please post the URL. And have you ever seen a SSD warranty for 5 years? [/quote]
You have a reasonably good point. Most SSD's do have a nasty write tolerance issue. Of course, most flash has a nasty write tolerance issue, which is where wear-leveling comes from.

[quote]Remember, that a SSD with flaky storage due to a single cell with wear-related cell-leakage will have exactly the same symptoms in a PC as flaky memory. And unlike a hard-disk, there is no way to verify sector integrity by a read-write test. (When a hard-disk fails it is generally a one-way street, either a permament sector error or a spin-failure.) A write to the SSD will immediately hide a flaky cell in the wear-leveling process and the SSD will again look perfect, plus depending on the leakage it may take anything between a few days and few weeks for the cell to fail again.... if that cell is not written again in the meantime. Of course, the more times a cell is written, the worse its read-integrity becomes.... [/quote]
You're assuming that the drive has no error checking built in. I don't think that's a good assumption. It's reasonably straightforward to embed CRC on a per-sector basis into a drive like this. That would immediately show up if there were a failure.

While I admit that a lot of the SSD's out there aren't as great as people think, there is one line that appears to be worthwhile. Which is why they cost so much. Anand recognizes the issues with SSDs. Have a look through this page:
[url=http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4]Intel X25-M Review[/url]

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The Anand article in your reference just swallows Intel's data and extrapolates from that. I expect far more from Anandtech !! When Anandtech takes a SERIOUS look at SSDs and comes up with a suite of INDEPENDENT black-box tests that truly stress the devices in the worst possible way, with the same test patterns being submitted to a reference set of hard-disks, then I might become a believer. The tests would obviously require inclusion of data-latency evaluation under worst-case conditions - for SSDs this would require being at the maximum spec temperature and with power applied, but zero write-data activity --- so the full battery of tests might only be completed after 2-3 months.

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My porn collection says no.

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They have been saying that for at least 15 years, and probably longer than that. It only now looks like it may actually happen. Even so, rotating media could still come up with a few tricks up its sleeve, just like it has done for years now. Either way, I am happy that the biggest bottleneck in the system is really getting much better.

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SSD are the way of the future but give me a 500GB SSD thats only at around a $50 premium to an equal size HD, than I'll buy one and herald the age of SSD, until then..., an interesting expensive toy.

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Anand should have left the article online with an update indicating that Nvidia is studying the issue. Enough of always being so nice to the big four.


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The original article also had some criticism in the comments from AT users regarding the test setup, so I think it's understandable.

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Just to know, What was the criticism?

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Anand's review utilized a USB BluRay drive (and possibly also a USB HDD, not sure). At least a few posters felt that the high CPU utilization associated with USB unfairly handicapped the Atom, which made the article's conclusion that Atom CPUs are inadequate for BluRay playback questionable.

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In a realistic usage scenario, atom PC's are in netbooks, and they never have internal optical drives.

So testing blu-ray on a netbook requires the use of an external optical drive. Unless a netbook comes with an eSATA port, you're stuck with USB 2.0.

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The article wasn't about netbooks, though, it was about possible HTPC applications for the Ion platform, which is what NVIDIA has been hyping.

BluRay on netbooks is already pointless, slow processor or not. 1080p video on a 7-10" low resolution screen? Why would you?

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Please see the pictures here http://www.anandtech.com/GalleryImage.aspx?id=4813

Regardless of whether this is about netbooks or the ion, there is no built in drive. To use a Blue-ray drive with the Ion platform, you would have to use USB or an e-sata drive. Trying to find a pre-built Blue-ray drive with an e-sata interface is quite difficult at best. The test was done with currently available hardware and what at least 90% of the people using this device for Blue-ray playback would probably use to play their movies.

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The only way pulling the article would be justified if Ion can't handle Blu-Ray via USB-2 is if all USB-2 Blu-Ray players were to ship to big stickers on the front that say "not for use with the Atom processor", and even then it would be worthwhile to put up an article showing why those stickers exist.

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"BluRay on netbooks is already pointless, slow processor or not. 1080p video on a 7-10" low resolution screen? Why would you?"

So you can take it to a friends/family members house and show them how good their large 1080p screen can look with the right source material? Netbooks do have a video out feature...

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If a netbook has all the same attributes of other netbooks but a 12" screen and enough room for an optical drive, is it still a netbook? It will be good to know if Atom can handle Blu-Ray, even if it seems unlikely that a system with a low-cost Atom would have a high-cost Blu-Ray drive.

Also remember, many might want to stream video instead of directly reading off a disc. I don't carry discs around when there's a lan or sufficient internal HDD storage for a rip, and more and more people are feeling the same way.

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Network activity also has a CPU overhead, it would be a neat addition to the article to test that.

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Still, unless the article itself is really really bad it should have remain active until proven otherwise. Pulling because someone or a company thinks it's inaccurate is not the right decision. Heck, I don't even erase what I write but instead place a strikethrough mark over it.

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