OWC Intros Meaty 960GB 2.5-inch SSD

[exfileme]

The hefty storage capacity in this SSD comes with a hefty price.

OWC Intros Meaty 960GB 2.5-inch SSD : Read more

 

[Shin-san]

Definitely better for servers in the case they are making. Media files on a desktop don't need that speed and you are better off using a magnetic drive

 

[bdizzle11]

Sata II? How would they not make something this expensive sata III?

 

[A Bad Day]

Santa, I've been a good boy. Can I have one?...

 

[nukemaster]

[citation][nom]bdizzle11[/nom]Sata II? How would they not make something this expensive sata III?[/citation]
With OWC being very Mac friendly(the main market they target), I would almost guess this is because the latest sandforce drives seem to fall back to sata 1.5gbps when used in Nvidia based Mac computers(I would guess Windows computers with the same chipset are affected the same way).

This may be a smarter move then one would guess for anyone with an older Mac

 

[kracker]

Price?

 

[nukemaster]

[citation][nom]kracker[/nom]Price?[/citation]
$1,269.99 as per link

 

[Guest]

kracker, read the first line of the aritcle

Got an extra $1,299.99 collecting dust on your desktop specifically set aside for storage?

that seems like a reasonable price for it.

 

[Guest]

bdizzle11

Sata II? How would they not make something this expensive sata III?

see

With sustained reads up to 254MB/s and writes up to 250MB/s, up to 100X

the drive's advertise speeds dont even saturate sataII.

 

[kracker]

[citation][nom]nukemaster[/nom]$1,269.99 as per link[/citation]

Ha. What an expensive toy.

 

[dgingeri]

Desktop users wanting to use the SSD can choose from one of five adapters OWC offers starting at $3 for utilizing 2.5-inch drives in 3.5-inch bays.

$1300 for a SSD, and they wouldn't spring for an adapter. Wow, that's just douchbaggery to a whole new level.

 

[power2233]

ohhh good plz just throw it from sky i am ready to catch it

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]nignog13[/nom]bdizzle11see the drive's advertise speeds dont even saturate sataII.[/citation]

They don't saturate it because doing so would be pretty much impossible. You can put a SATA3 SSD on a SATA2 port and it won't quite saturate it in 300MB/s either. If OCZ wanted to, they could have made it faster.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]dgingeri[/nom]$1300 for a SSD, and they wouldn't spring for an adapter. Wow, that's just douchbaggery to a whole new level.[/citation]

It reminds me of my dad buying a $500 printer, and it had no ink cartridge. The ink cartridge for the printer was $60.

I think the cartridge had unicorns' tears in it or something. Or he got ripped off.

 

[amuffin]

It might be a better deal to buy a SAS drive.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]amuffin[/nom]It might be a better deal to buy a SAS drive.[/citation]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227788

Almost twice as expensive despite it being on sale for $350 off. It's also just about twice as fast for some workloads (maybe even better for others), so either drive can be argued as justified in this scenario, depending on rather or not capacity per dollar or pure performance is most important between the two drives.

 

[amuffin]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820227788Almost twice as expensive despite it being on sale for $350 off. It's also just about twice as fast for some workloads (maybe even better for others), so either drive can be argued as justified in this scenario, depending on rather or not capacity per dollar or pure performance is most important between the two drives.[/citation]
Not a SAS SSD.

 

[JOSHSKORN]

I'm a first-day buyer...when it falls under $400.

 

[master_chen]

Now THAT is one UGLY MF (insert obligatory Yautja voice-over here) of an SSD! :\

 

[dreadlokz]

At this price, better get 4x 240GB and raid them! -.-'''' Also, wth is this brand?

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]dreadlokz[/nom]At this price, better get 4x 240GB and raid them! -.-'''' Also, wth is this brand?[/citation]

I guess you don't know how well many SSDs and RAID mix, especially RAID that involves parity instead of very wasteful redundancy... You also ignore the fact that this is a high-reliability drive and a RAID system of four lower reliability drives would be orders of magnitude less reliable if these numbers in the article are accurate. Performance isn't everything. Also, what level of RAID did you have in mind? RAID 0 would be suicide and RAID 1 would be wasteful, leaving RAID 5 as the most likely and probably the best such option, but still meaning less capacity and less capacity per dollar in most cases.

 

[stoatwblr]

Nice, but....

As someone who has to herd several Petabytes of data, here's my wishlist:

1: low power
2: low price
3: reliable (proper internal raid as well as decent ECC and sparing)
4: 5-10k IOPS
5: write speed no lower than 40Mb/s
6: read speed no lower than 80Mb/s
7: 1k write cycle endurance (95% of what we store is write once)
8: 5+ year data durability
9: 3.5" form factor

The same specs would satisfy most home media servers

There's no need for large drives to be blazing fast unless they're being used in applications that actually need it.

If I could have drives like that in 2-4+ Tb range and $250 each I'd take 400 tomorrow and stuff them into our existing data drawers in place of the enterprise sata drives we use already (they cost about the same when new). The power savings and lack of disk errors caused by vibration would pay for the drives in 12 months.


Blazing fast stuff can go on smaller, cheaper storage. 1 drive doesn't have to fit all purposes and shouldn't have to - trying to make it do that will result in a camel.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]stoatwblr[/nom]Nice, but....As someone who has to herd several Petabytes of data, here's my wishlist:1: low power2: low price3: reliable (proper internal raid as well as decent ECC and sparing)4: 5-10k IOPS5: write speed no lower than 40Mb/s6: read speed no lower than 80Mb/s7: 1k write cycle endurance (95% of what we store is write once)8: 5+ year data durability9: 3.5" form factorThe same specs would satisfy most home media serversThere's no need for large drives to be blazing fast unless they're being used in applications that actually need it.If I could have drives like that in 2-4+ Tb range and $250 each I'd take 400 tomorrow and stuff them into our existing data drawers in place of the enterprise sata drives we use already (they cost about the same when new). The power savings and lack of disk errors caused by vibration would pay for the drives in 12 months.Blazing fast stuff can go on smaller, cheaper storage. 1 drive doesn't have to fit all purposes and shouldn't have to - trying to make it do that will result in a camel.[/citation]

This drive isn't blazing fast. Heck, for an SSD of these days, it's actually quite slow. Besides, the performance of these drives is not the only reason for the price. Making them faster or not has little effect on the NAND flash memory. Sure, some is cheaper than some somewhat faster NAND, but the prices can only be so different. $250 for 2TB is not really even close to reasonable right now regardless of the performance.

 

[stoatwblr]

$250 for 2Tb is 20% above what I pay for enterprise sata drives certified for the RAID arrays I'm using.

What I'm saying is if that can be price matched then I'd change virtually everything out in a heartbeat.

For the kind of workload I have (and most large data stores have), the performance specs are complete overkill and I'm more than willing to trade them off against price.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]stoatwblr[/nom]$250 for 2Tb is 20% above what I pay for enterprise sata drives certified for the RAID arrays I'm using. What I'm saying is if that can be price matched then I'd change virtually everything out in a heartbeat. For the kind of workload I have (and most large data stores have), the performance specs are complete overkill and I'm more than willing to trade them off against price.[/citation]

You're not paying for SSDs with that kind of money and I thought that is was kinda obvious that I was talking about SSDs. If your workload doesn't even need a slower SSD, then HDDs seem to be the best choice and if not, then maybe hybrid HDD/SSD devices or SSD cached HDDs or some other such solution. SSDs are a waste of money if you don't make use of their huge performance advantage. Also, if you're worried about power consumption, then you could look at the Samsung 830 SSDs.

They use almost zero power (maximum power consumption is something like 0.15w and idle is below 0.1w) despite being one of the fastest SSDs for read operations. Since their performance is far from what you're looking for, a caching solution that lets them simply help out the hard drives might be considerable. However, despite being one of if not the most reliable consumer SSD, they aren't enterprise SSDs and I don't know how badly that would effect their usage by you nearly as well as I think you would. Maybe there are enterprise versions or Samsung might beat least considering making enterprise versions.

Regardless, surely you realize that there is a huge difference in cost between 2TB of HDD storage and 2TB of SSD storage regardless of the performance of the SSD. It simply isn't as cheap to make an SSD as it is to make an HDD and profit margins are even higher to compensate for that and then some.