The State Of Solid State: Computex 2015

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Spinning catastrophe? My hdd doesn't perform much slower than my ssd for 90% of tasks, the biggest improvement was installing windows. For that I was impressed. An hdd shouldn't be a catastrophe, if it is I'd strongly suggest a better brand/model. Installed an ssd on a workstation and of all the upgrades it was the component I was least happy with. The new cpu and ram upgrade were by far more impressive. Not that I'm 'unhappy' with it, it is a little snappier though not enough to make me rush right out to buy another one for my other rig. If another 240gb ssd goes on sale for $60 like the first one I bought I might consider it. Pcie m.2 look appealing and great on paper but I suppose it would be of greater benefit to someone who is suffering a bottlenecked system due to storage in the first place.
 
So have they fixed the data loss if not connected to electricity for more than a week thing?
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Yes, about 5 years ago.
SSDs are still no archival media, and they will corrupt after a year or two without power. But if you are the sort of person who travels a lot and unplugs your PC for 2-3 months at a time then it is not a real concern anymore.
 
So have they fixed the data loss if not connected to electricity for more than a week thing?
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Yes, about 5 years ago.
SSDs are still no archival media, and they will corrupt after a year or two without power. But if you are the sort of person who travels a lot and unplugs your PC for 2-3 months at a time then it is not a real concern anymore.
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Really? 5 years ago? Because I've gone on vacation for about a month and my Windows wont even start anymore. And that was about a year ago. Heard a rumor that the 3D stacking technology thing managed to eliminate this problem and i was waiting for some more good news about that before buying a new SSD.
 
Spinning catastrophe? My hdd doesn't perform much slower than my ssd for 90% of tasks, the biggest improvement was installing windows. For that I was impressed. An hdd shouldn't be a catastrophe, if it is I'd strongly suggest a better brand/model. Installed an ssd on a workstation and of all the upgrades it was the component I was least happy with. The new cpu and ram upgrade were by far more impressive. Not that I'm 'unhappy' with it, it is a little snappier though not enough to make me rush right out to buy another one for my other rig. If another 240gb ssd goes on sale for $60 like the first one I bought I might consider it. Pcie m.2 look appealing and great on paper but I suppose it would be of greater benefit to someone who is suffering a bottlenecked system due to storage in the first place.
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A $60 240GB SSD is the reason why you don't feel a big performance increase over your HDD.
 
"Really? 5 years ago? Because I've gone on vacation for about a month and my Windows wont even start anymore. And that was about a year ago."

But how old was the SSD? The model, not the particular one that you own.
 
It was on sale. At the time, ocz vector 150's were going for $180. It stays neck and neck with the samsung 840 evo (850's weren't even available yet) and the two trade blows a bit. The vector 150 has slightly slower random reads and the samsung has slightly slower write speeds. It was chosen for a workstation doing content creation with larger files where write speed was preferred. Maybe people feel such a huge difference over their hdd's because they're using junk hdd's? My wd re4 gives me no issues. The only time aside from bootup that ssd's seem to have a huge performance gain is during testing where a longer sustained data transfer is occurring. Something most people won't encounter under normal use of a pc, instead it will more than likely operate in small bursts. So technically, it was a $180 ssd using the newer 19nm toshiba nand. Hardly a junk ssd.
 
Spinning catastrophe? My hdd doesn't perform much slower than my ssd for 90% of tasks, the biggest improvement was installing windows. For that I was impressed. An hdd shouldn't be a catastrophe, if it is I'd strongly suggest a better brand/model. Installed an ssd on a workstation and of all the upgrades it was the component I was least happy with. The new cpu and ram upgrade were by far more impressive. Not that I'm 'unhappy' with it, it is a little snappier though not enough to make me rush right out to buy another one for my other rig. If another 240gb ssd goes on sale for $60 like the first one I bought I might consider it. Pcie m.2 look appealing and great on paper but I suppose it would be of greater benefit to someone who is suffering a bottlenecked system due to storage in the first place.
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SSD's perform faster than HDD's for literally every task, even if you're using them on gen 1 sata.
 
Yes they do, according to benchmarks. In real world every day use for most tasks there is little noticeable difference is all I'm saying. My point being a 9mm firearm can have a muzzle velocity of 1250fps while a .357 can have a muzzle velocity of 1700-1800fps. Science says the .357 is faster, can you tell if a target is shot 'slower' with a 9mm? Doubtful. If we could sustain those seconds out to minutes or even an hour steady with maintained speed (obviously a bullet wouldn't continue to fly for an hour) the difference would be substantial. In short bursts common with real life and the real world, the speed differences mean very little. It's not as if because a 9mm is slower someone could dodge it like the matrix.

Where it would make a larger difference is under larger sustained transfers. For example in this tom's comparison, 16gb files transferred faster, much faster. A dvd is less than 5gb. Not saying there aren't people who work with large files like this, but how many 'average' people are doing sustained 16gb file transfers on a regular basis? In a way it makes sense since ssd's can be a major bump for laptop users between the shock resistance, lower power consumption and much faster speed - but in these particular tests, the ssd's are pitted against the wd scorpio which is a 2.5" mobile hdd with dismal 5400rpm speeds that were often found in a lot of laptops at the time of testing. Let's take the fastest drives out there and put them against the slowest to see how good they are. Even then backing up a steam game is much more likely scenario and despite the major difference between ssd and hdd the real world results were much less fantastic. Keeping in mind it's a 2.5" 5400rpm with both reduced platter size and lower rpm working against it. Same for boot times. My desktop with a 7200rpm hdd takes nowhere near a full minute to boot even on a cold boot.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sata-6gbps-performance-sata-3gbps,3110-7.html

There are very few real world, real usage scenario type tests to show the comparison of hdd vs ssd, I wish there were more honestly. The ones that do exist are often pitting an ssd against a small 5400rpm hdd which feels like molasses even to an old 7200rpm hdd. I don't wait forever and a day to save files, the biggest bottleneck is my slow internet. Opening apps, I click and they're open. How much faster can they open, I'd miss it if I so much as blinked or sneezed as it is. The human body is the biggest bottleneck in reality. We can only react and interact so fast with machines.

The vast majority of benchmarks are synthetic which is unfortunate because synthetics aren't the real world. We've seen it before, where dual channel ram on paper is vastly superior yet in the real world, pretty much no discerning difference between single vs dual channel. Or a cpu bench where one competitor has an extra '1000' worth of arbitrary points according to the measurement scale yet their games run 0-1 fps faster and the user is going where is all this extra performance? Similar to someone upgrading from say a 3rd gen i5 to a similar 4th gen i5 - they won't be bowled over by the performance like it's 'night and day' yet on paper it shows an improvement exists.
 


I have a test rig with two Samsung Pro SSDs, two 7200 rpm SSDs and one 7200 rpm HD. Here's the Windows Boot Time Results.

SSD - 15.6 seconds
SSD RAID 0 - 15.9 seconds
SSHD - 16.5 seconds
HD - 21.2 seconds

I also had two laptops at the office, 1st had an 120 GB SSD + 750 GB 72000 rpm HD, 2nd had an 750 GB 7200 rpm SSHD. No one could really tell the difference except for one thing.... every once and a while I had to clean the junk off the SSD due to the drive getting up past the recommended 85% full point (94 GB).

Unfortunately 2.5" 72000 rpm SSHDs are rare now .... there's a video comparison here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA67S2GV4849


 
Outside of very specialized applications, I have never been able to achieve a speed increase with RAID 0 on the desktop..... this has been the case for a very long time. If you use those types of apps, it's a good investment.... if you don't .... not so. In gaming, "Fuhgedaboudeet"

Samsung does not recommend and does not support RAID on SSDs

Here's an 8 - 10 year old (maybe more) THG post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

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. That's just the cold hard truth."

http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."

http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."

http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."

Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/
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Nothing's changed .... "Great for Benchmarks, not so much in the Real World"

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

 
People used to say that back when I was really into RAID for my OS. Then they would wonder how I was already loaded in game, destroyed the enemy jets and reloaded back on the carrier before anyone else was even fully loaded in game.

The thing about RAID is you have to work to get the most out of it. There are several ways to tune the array but one wrong setting can negate any performance increase.

I started running RAID for the boot drives back in the SCSI days with the early 10K and eventually 15K RPM Seagate drives attached to Adaptec cards. Just like back then, some combinations work better than others. A proper review of an add-in-RAID card takes several weeks just to test. There is a lot of trial and error. Once the settings are right you can get a nice performance increase in the real world but it needs to be tuned for the workload you want to accelerate.
 
I added the comment before I was finished.

With modern SSDs the performance is so high it really doesn't matter if you RAID or not. Most of us don't run a workload that can take advantage of the additional performance. If I spend time to tune an array now it's because the storage serves more than one VM. My current project is setting up storage that will hold 400 VMs over IB. It's an all-flash array with 40 SSDs. Two are for the OS, two are for cache and 36 are in storage arrays.
 
The Hyperion uses either Eldora or Eldora Lite from Marvell. Mushkin doesn't display at Computex so we didn't get to see anything specifically Mushkin branded.
 
The real benefit from SSD's are the access times and random 4k reads (applications and OS).

Most people don't see any other benefit because you need to have another SSD just to enjoy the better sequential speed. You can have a 400-500MB/s transfer rate but if you copy an archive to or from an HDD you will do it at an average of @100MB/s.

OS snappiness if the thing everyone sees with the change. Cheap low capacity SSD's can transfer pretty much at the same speed of an HDD the longer the filesize is (thats the reason for "SLC cache" with the drives from Samsung/Crucial" on their 128/256GB models).
 


So any idea on when ANY retail nvme m.2 drives (that's not intel 750) will be out? Actually any idea if the 750 will come in a 240/256 version?
 
The time is ripe to change your old spinning catastrophe and embrace the now of SSD.
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The most cost effective solution is to have an SSD boot drive with Windows, Office, and some other stuff, and an HDD for storing your pictures, music, videos, documents, and large programs. I imagine it will remain that way for some time.
 
Yes they do, according to benchmarks. In real world every day use for most tasks there is little noticeable difference is all I'm saying.
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Well yes, if all you do is browse the web then you probably wouldn't notice any difference other than boot time and application load times. However, for power users there is a huge difference between mechanical and solid state, and that isn't even accounting for the significantly higher failure rate of a hard drive.

Playing digital media off a hard drive that can't be loaded completely into memory? You can forget about doing anything else on that drive. Regular torrent user? Again, the disk reads and writes makes doing anything else on the drive at the same time virtually impossible.

For anyone who does multitasking at even the minimal level a SSD is a significant time saver over a mechanical drive. But yes, you are correct, I wouldn't install a SSD for my parents who browse the web, use Word, and open the occasional PDF.
 
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