OCZ, Indilinx Firmware Makes SSDs Faster

[Marcus Yam]

This new SSD firmware collects garbage. What does your HDD do for you?

OCZ, Indilinx Firmware Makes SSDs Faster : Read more

 

[Hanin33]

amen! firmware that lowers prices FTW!

 

[eodeo]

firmware about the price tags 😀

i'll drink to that!

 

[gwolfman]

Any news on full TRIM support? This sounds like a hardware-based wiper instead of the software one made available.

 

[simplyderp]

What's this difference between this and the TRIM utility that has been available for months on OCZ forums and takes less than 10 seconds to complete?

 

[simplyderp]

What's this difference between this and the TRIM utility that has been available for months on OCZ forums and takes less than 10 seconds to complete?

 

[Hellbound]

Yes, the only thing keeping me from purchasing one is the price tag.

 

[lifelesspoet]

Price and capacity are the most obvious issues with ssd's, however I would buy one today despite the GB/$ if the technology didn't seem so unrefined. Every week I hear of new advancements in ssd tech. Data rot, read/write cycles, write perfomance, performance degration are the biggest issues to me.
I still think they make decent alternatives when used for boot drives and low power computers.

 

[Guest]

People need to stop complaining about SSD prices. It has to do with NAND production cost.
Upgrading your 7200rpm C: drive to an SSD is probably the most cost effective hardware upgrade for a lot of people right now.

 

[duckmanx88]

welp the only bad thing i ever heard about SSD's was their degrading performance but soon that'll go away it seems. and I can see why people are upset about the price/GB but one SSD's are hardly mainstream yet and 2) getting a smaller 64GB would be fine for a lot of people and all other media files could just be place on another internal/external hard drive.

 

[Mr_Man]

A dozen Linux coders probably just lost their pet project. Oh well, firmware fixes are almost always better than OS workarounds.

 

[doomtomb]

OCZ is certainly driving the innovation behind SSDs and I applaud them for that. Now if only the price could come down...

 

[zehpavora]

Apart from the prices of those things, the wear level of the cells was the only thing holding me back. But let´s be serious: SSDs got to be better. We have a significant performance level, however, to get the good SSDs for gaming, for example (1 gb), you still have to have 2000 bucks or something in this range. I want more than a faster OS, I want that loading screens for offline games cease to exist. Even so, I´m not rich to pay for this kind of performance nowadays.

 

[Gin Fushicho]

Damn , thats nice , but now I need money, or just to wait.

 

[ubernoobie]

if only it can collect my garbage too 🙁

 

[redgarl]

Again? Dear God, OCZ are in fire with their SSDs...

 

[randomizer]

I know what I will do as soon as my Vertex arrives.

 

[anamaniac]

Still looking at Intel SSDs myself.

 

[Guest]

How does this work? For the SSD to know which sectors aren't in use it would have to contain a file system implementation in firmware. Does it only work with ntfs and fat32?

Also, this seems unnecessary once trim is supported.

 

[back_by_demand]

What is the virtue of saving up the large amount of money required to buy an SSD?

End user sees SSD on website, thinks "thats pretty sweet", but needs 2 months to put cash aside.
2 months pass and user looks back on website and sees that SSD technology has leapt up to higher standards, making the drive he saw seem old.
User now is stuck in no-mans land. Does he buy the old drive knowing there is one much better for only a few dollars more? Does he wait another 2 months because SSDs will be even better again?

Computer users have been formed into a level of acceptance when it come to performance updates, increases in CPU speed and performance for example, when SSD technology moves so much faster it confuses the customer. Link this with prohibitive pricing, even at entry level, makes users want to stay away.

Drop prices, not just a small amount but significantly, within cost per GB levels near HDD prices and users will flock to the technology en-masse. Halve the cost right now and see sales more than double.

 

[randomizer]

Double the sales isn't much good if you're not covering your costs.

 

[back_by_demand]

They are making a wedge on every drive, production costs aren't THAT high

 

[back_by_demand]

From a parts store in the UK I use all the time, the cheapest 250Gb Sata HDD
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Serial+ATA/250GB+Hitachi+DeskStar+SATA-2+Hard+Drive+7K1000.B+?productId=35792
From the same store, the cheapest 250Gb SSD
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Solid+State/Corsair+P256+Solid+State+Drive+256GB+SSD+?productId=36025

£30 versus £540, don't get me wrong, but if you think that the increased transfer speed, is worth spending 18 times the money, you are insane.

 

[back_by_demand]

I think I have just convinced myself, I will get an RAID5 array.
4 x 250Gb drives, maximum 60Mb each but together the speed will be over 200Mb, above some of the highest speeds for SSD. 3 drives will get me 750Gb of storage and the 4th drive for parity in case of disk failure.

My Gigabyte motherboard has a sweet RAID controller already, my case is big enough to hold the drives, my power supply can deal with the load.

I get 3 times the storage, more performance and spend less than a quarter of the money. I may use the spare cash to up my RAM from 8Gb to 12Gb and switch off my swap file.

 

[randomizer]

That won't come close to the random read/write performance of any decent SSD. Sequential, yes, but not random. Obviously if you're using the array for storing large files then sequential is more important, but SSDs will only ever be useful as OS drives or for storing applications that do alot of reads and writes as long as the HDD exists.