Mtron SSD 32 GB: Sweeping Performance with a Catch

[odie3]

brundlefly76,

At my office we would like to get our hands one one (or two) of these drives to see if it will also help a road block on some of our MS SQL 2005 Queries - where did you order the drive (hopefully you are in the US).

Thanks (for anyone that may be able to give a US retailer information).

I originally bought this drive to evaluate for a problem MySQL slow database query that we could just not solve in SQL. On a 15k Fujitsu MAS, the query took 40s - on the MTRON it took 4s.

 

[odie3]

http://www.dvnation.com/
has the 32 GB version for 725 dollars.
hopefully they can crack the 500 dollar mark soon

Darn, someone posted already this information... completely missed it.

 

[jketzetera]

As someone who was bit on the ass by mtron SSD drives only a few months ago I'd like to point out that this claim is patently false. Out of 10 total 32gb mtron SSD drives we had a 30% failure rate when used as backing stores on a hi performance clustered mail server within the first 10 weeks.
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Edit: Just looked at the pictures in the article again and noticed that the SN on the drive pictures is not even 300 units higher than the ones I had. A look back through my emails had the first two drives we received failing after 7 weeks with aprox 70gb of daily write operations and the third failed after 6 days at a similar load. Their own white paper and the engineers advised that I should have expected an MTBF of a million hours and a write life 120years with 50gb daily writes (that last bit is from memory and be a bit off.)

Was it determined that the drive failures were due to memory cells being worn out by repetative re-writes or could there have been other issues at play i.e. faulty controller chips that finally cringed under the heave use patterns?

In the case of the third drive that failed within six days, it would imply that the MTRON 32GB drive would handle approx 14 complete re-writes before failing (assuming even spatial continous re-writes) which seems very low. Also, for the drives failing within 7 weeks it would imply a re-writeability factor of approx 100. While this is a gross simplification it still seems odd as NAND chips themselves should have standalone re-writeability that is much higher than that.

Did you ever get an technical explanation to the drive failures from your supplier/MTRON?

 

[Das_Capitolin]

It looks like there are a few more reviews on SSD's out. Pretty soon they will be commonplace, but hopefully only because the price drops.

There's also a much faster SSD now that beats the Raptor in read and write bandwidth: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=3&Itemid=60

 

[chunkymonster]

http://www.dvnation.com/
has the 32 GB version for 725 dollars.
hopefully they can crack the 500 dollar mark soon

$725 is just way too much money. You can build a top end gaming machine with raptors in RAID0 for that money.

SSD's won't be worth buying until you can get a 128GB drive for less than $150.

 

[enovikoff]

We also installed two 64GB Mtron 3.5" 7000 series units - the enterprise grade ones - in lightly used servers. One failed after 3 months, the other after 4. The failures are random, and resetting the drive seems to bring it back to life for a few weeks, so it's not a memory chip rewrite problem, but a design problem with the drive. Unfortunately, to get a RMA, you have to send it back to Korea, or to your reseller - and my reseller, Neo-Geo, doesn't even answer the phone when I call for service (they do take more orders though!)

 

[enovikoff]

An update on my SSD saga:

When I tried to use the 5-year MTRON warrantee, I discovered that it involved taking the units out of service, sending them to Korea, where MTRON would then decide if they needed replacement, and then waiting for them to return them - all the while with no SSD drives in my virtualization controller.

Instead I RMAed them to my vendor, NeoStore, which acknowledged their receipt last June 2009 and then I never heard from them again. Nearly $2000 worth of flash drives gone, with no refund or repaired units, and NeoStore not answering the phone or emails.

Avoid MTRON and NeoStore, and read your warrantees carefully because what exactly the manufacturer will do for you is as important as the length of the warrantee.