New generation of SSDs?

mikeo said:
A bit "fly-by-night". Folks like Crucial and OCZ have been around for the best part of a decade (or more) producing top quality memory based products (amongst other things).

There have been teething problems with the roll out of SSD's. But that applies to pretty much every manufacturer. Even the much vaunted Intel released at least one firmware upgrade that "bricked" quite a few peoples SSD's for them!
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Again, I may well be irrational but for SSDs I can't shake the impression that most firms other than Intel are more interested in punting out new SKUs and big-numbers/benchmarkability than doing solid products.

Not trying to sway anyone, just posting my plan :)
 
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Spyhop said:
Again, I may well be irrational but for SSDs I can't shake the impression that most firms other than Intel are more interested in punting out new SKUs and big-numbers/benchmarkability than doing solid products.

Not trying to sway anyone, just posting my plan :)
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No problem. I hear where you are coming from.

IMHO I still think that SSD's in general have a fair way to come yet. Pretty much still new tech in the scheme of things. Though I do very much applaud Intel's idea of producing a drive that performs well under any circumstances, regardless of what data and how much is being thrown at it. Though it remains to be seen if this is yet achievable.

SSD's not quite yet mainstream, very much still for those interested in being at the edge, so to speak. Though moving the right way in my opinion. Need bigger capacities, lower prices (much lower) and reliable performance that does not drop off / degrade over time.
 
mikeo said:
No problem. I hear where you are coming from.

SSD's not quite yet mainstream, very much still for those interested in being at the edge, so to speak. Though moving the right way in my opinion. Need bigger capacities, lower prices (much lower) and reliable performance that does not drop off / degrade over time.
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tbh any HD, be it platter based or SSD will have performance degradation over time. No amounts of defrags brings back that freshly formatted Platter HD speed. But SSD for the most part (with trim, and based on my Intel SSD experiences) the performance is just as good. I've not noticed any slow down, and can only notice a slight drop in benchmarking... but that maybe due to me upgrading in benchmarking software.

Whilst i do agree the £/mb needs to come down before it is truly mainstream, you do see some folks with SSDs in their top end laptops and netbooks so its slowly happening. Maybe a year or two... i hope so at least as once you go SSD, you CANNOT go back!
 
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Noto said:
tbh any HD, be it platter based or SSD will have performance degradation over time. No amounts of defrags brings back that freshly formatted Platter HD speed. But SSD for the most part (with trim, and based on my Intel SSD experiences) the performance is just as good. I've not noticed any slow down, and can only notice a slight drop in benchmarking... but that maybe due to me upgrading in benchmarking software.

Whilst i do agree the £/mb needs to come down before it is truly mainstream, you do see some folks with SSDs in their top end laptops and netbooks so its slowly happening. Maybe a year or two... i hope so at least as once you go SSD, you CANNOT go back!
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Think I would pretty much disagree with your first comment. Modern mechanical hard drives should continue to perform reliably and to new specifications for pretty much the usable life of the drive.
This is a pretty good read if you have an hour or two:
http://www.storagereview.com/hard_disk_drive_reference_guide

And as to SSD performance degradation. While accepting that in "normal use" they should hopefully continue to perform decently. Try telling that to someone with a Sandforce based SSD that has bombarded it with countless GB's of in-compressible data while benchmarking with tools like CDM and AS SSD and then notices that their sequential write performance has been throttled to a 1/4 or less of the original specification. And no amount of TRIMing, or idle time Garbage Collection (and yes, Sandforce SSD's do still has this.. Duraclass just calls it re-cycling) will return the SSD to factory spec. Have a read on the OCZ Sandforce forum, there are countless threads about this.

Not quite sure what you mean by " but that maybe due to me upgrading in benchmarking software". IMHO (and many others I suspect) there isn't really a decent SSD benchmarking tool out there yet.

While I agree that SSD's are "the way to go", I still thing they have "a way to go" yet.
 
I don't see prices reducing for these new 3rd generation SSD's or even for the current generation SSD's.
The cheapest Vertex II 60GB I could find at Xmas time was around £89, I don't imagine that come Q1
2011 they will be much cheaper than that.
 
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If folk are expecting the new Intel drives to be uber fast, you may be a little disappointed: Clicky

What they will bring however is affordability - Intel are expecting to be able to produce drives at half the price point of the current drives for the same capacity (so a £70 80GB drive theoretically). They are coming early Q1 2011 apparently - so maybe they'll be announced at the same time as Sandy Bridge?

Let's hope...
 
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Marvin said:
If folk are expecting the new Intel drives to be uber fast, you may be a little disappointed: Clicky

What they will bring however is affordability - Intel are expecting to be able to produce drives at half the price point of the current drives for the same capacity (so a £70 80GB drive theoretically). They are coming early Q1 2011 apparently - so maybe they'll be announced at the same time as Sandy Bridge?

Let's hope...
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Well if that's true ... less than £1 per GB for the next generation Intel SSDs, it's very good news and worth waiting for, thing is I just can't see them being priced that low ... time will tell
 
Marvin said:
If folk are expecting the new Intel drives to be uber fast, you may be a little disappointed: Clicky

What they will bring however is affordability - Intel are expecting to be able to produce drives at half the price point of the current drives for the same capacity (so a £70 80GB drive theoretically). They are coming early Q1 2011 apparently - so maybe they'll be announced at the same time as Sandy Bridge?

Let's hope...
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This is old news, what is still unknown is whether they support SATA3, and if so, what the performance is like under SATA3. It's quite possible that they do and are capable of competing with the Sandforce SF-2000 series (> 500MB/s sequential reads), but we won't know this until Sandy Bridge is officially launched and Intel has their own SATA3 chipset to show off.
 
Spyhop said:
I'm not too fussed. Reliability, capacity and price are what I'm watching for. All half decent SSDs are plenty fast unless you have unusual requirements IMO.
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This... and i would add longevity to that list. I don't mean nand cells wearing out either; thats a non issue that's been blown out of proportion. The big concern has always been the controllers failing over time.
 
I could only aford the x25 40Gb as my entry into ssd land at christmas. Loving it so far for my windows and a few games but hopefully when these new ones come out it will drive down the price of the bigger drives for us not so loaded folks :D
 
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