Computer Guru SSD drive question

[Jerry]

There are 2 styles of SSD drive construction: SLC and DLC. The first stands for Single Layer Cell and the later stands for Multiple-Layer Cell. Currently the SLC drives are the faster and have a life expectancy of about 25 percent longer than SATA drives that run at either 10,000 or 15,000 RPM. Samsung makes a number of SLC drives. SLC drives are generally considered to have a longer life expectancy than the MLC drives. This information is via VMWare and Cisco, who now offer SSD drives in their networking and storage equipment. They use SLC drives exclusively.

People who make the less expensive MLC drives are working to find ways to close the "how long does it last" gap, and my information will probably be out of date within months. However, as it stands today, SLC drives will outlast MLC drives by a considerable margin, and SLC drives will have an average life span greater than SATA drives.

Generally, the specs for an SSD drive should tell you if it is SLC or MLC. It will say something like "SLC flash memory" or "MLC flash memory."

Either style is likely to give your PC a performance boost, and the differences are largely academic for a home system. However, if you are looking at high-powered systems, systems for business, graphics-intensive or other higher-end applications, you may want to seek out SLC drives.

[79XS11F]

I put a 120gb SSD drive in my Win 7 Pro box a few months back. It does work find. However, SSD drives do require some specialized attention due to the way data is written and removed from them. Mechanical drives are rated MTBF, mean Time Between failure. SSD drives are rated for the number of read / writes they will perform before the memory starts to lose integrity. If you use a disk defragmentation program, make sure it is designed for SSD disks, such as Intel's SSD ToolBox software. You may also want to turn off Indexing and SuperFetch if you are running Win 7.

Using the right tools will extend the useful life of an SSD drive.

And where would I go to do that. I see in the C drives "properties" tab a box that says "allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties". This box is checked off. Should I unchecked this box? Where do I turn off "SuperFetch"

[3Phase]

And where would I go to do that. I see in the C drives "properties" tab a box that says "allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties". This box is checked off. Should I unchecked this box? Where do I turn off "SuperFetch"

Rob, Superfetch is a Windows 7 Service that you can turn off and disable:-
Disable Windows 7 SuperFetch.

For a little more about SSD and Windows 7:-
SSD and Windows 7.

If you take any type of SSD and stick it in a home computer then it may or may not last as long as a conventional drive but it will most definitely cost more. Just remember that no type of drive likes to be dropped so have fun with your new drive but don't drop it, eh.

You don't build or buy a computer to run an operating system, you buy or build a computer to run applications. Try not pay too much attention to what any operating system vendor claims that their OS does or does not do and how it takes care of its own routine tasks unless it affects the applications you intend to run on your computer. Applications can and often do bypass parts of the operating system so that they will do more or less what the author(s) intended or what their customer(s) wanted; sometimes both.

If you're just using your Win7 box for basic office and housekeeping tasks with some email, web browsing, the occasional video or MP3 and you don't really care about what's on the computer then you should be alright with a single SSD and some type of backup routine. Again, it's not the operating system you have to worry about. Windows loves to talk to itself but it can be convinced to keep its little I/O ports shut.



Jerry, I have a couple of Seagate ST 251 drives that might begin to fail sometime in the next couple of decades when their hours of operation finally exceed their 100,000 hour MTBF. I'm (mostly) kidding but they've been really good drives and they're not anywhere near dead, they're just totally obsolete and so is their controller.

The reason that large companies like Cisco and Vmware are switching to SSD technology is not because they're more reliable than spinny-clicky hard drives. By themselves SSDs are no more reliable than any of the electronics on a conventional drive controller board but they generally create less heat and have no internal mechanical wear. When SSDs are properly installed with the necessary temperature and power regulation in place they might be less expensive to operate, support and maintain, especially after a customer has installed a half dozen or a half million of them, but no one really knows how long a good SSD will actually last. Yet.

[Jerry]

but no one really knows how long a good SSD will actually last. Yet.

I had questions about this. I wrote my note after returning from a 4 hour seminar put on by VMWare touting their version 5 release. (I am on 4.2, and will get 5 as I am under a service contract.) I pressed both the presenter and their tech guy at break about the claims of 25 percent longer life than a high-speed SATA, and both gentlemen stood by their claims of 25 percent longer service life. This surprised me. The tech guy did say they use Samsung-built SLC drives, and have only tested those. It is not true of MLC drives, which have shorter life spans than SLC drives, at least at this point in time.

The other advantage of SSD drives is smaller size, taking up less space, or the ability to put more storage into a smaller enclosure. Since server rooms are generally air conditioned (both of mine at at 68 deg F) SSD drives would run under pretty optimal conditions. AC is provided by 5K watt APC brand uninteruptible power supplies, supplying clean power at all times.

Most home PCs don't operate under optimal conditions, so one would expect the drive life span to be shorter. Never the less, SSD drives give a big boost in performance for disk-intensive tasks, like loading software and saving files. Another statistic from the seminar is IOPS, which is a measure of input - output operations a drive can handle. 15K SATA drives top out at about 190 IOPS, SSD drives are approaching 3,000 IOPS. Again, for the home user this number is not so important, but for business use it can be important. And, as we have seen in the past, server room technologies eventually gravitate to home PCs, so disk-intensive programs like PhotoShop and Vegas Pro will perform faster, even at home, with this expanded capability.

This stuff is still pretty much in the future, and with technology changing at a rapid rate, the acutal numbers and such will change pretty quickly. However, SSD drives will take over more and more of the market in the next couple years as prices drop and capacities go up.

The only reason I tried one out is because I built my own computer for work, and work paid for it, so I decided to go SSD to learn something of the technolgy, its advantages, and its drawbacks. Advantage is better performance for applications that I use, drawback is higher cost and, since my drives are MLC, possibly shorter operating life than cheaper SATA drives. If I were going to build a system today I would find SLC drives and install those. You live and learn.

I'm running Win 7 Pro in 64 bit mode, FWIW.

[3Phase]

Rob, thanks for starting this thread and thank you, Jerry, I learned something!

Getting better all the time; sounds like an old Beatles tune! I'll have to take another look at SSD tech and see if they'd make sense for me.

I looked at SSDs when I built my computer a few years ago for doing photo, sound and video editing, conversion and storage but SSDs were too small and way too expensive. I don't just do email, web browsing, YouTube and MP3s with my computer so I need terabytes, not gigabytes.

Drive read speed isn't really a problem for me but I'd have to build at least one expensive SSD RAID cluster to get roughly the same performance and storage capacity as a few inexpensive multi-terabyte SATA drives. As much fun as that would have been it just wasn't in the cards at the time.

[Jerry]

For anyone interested, I have a link to a Samsung SSD brochure. This was given to me by the VMWare tech guy I mentioned in an earlier post. Link is:

http://www.appleattic.net/jfmedia/gr...chure_0411.pdf

This will download and open the brochure if you have Acrobat Reader installed, and who doesn't?

Samsung addresses longevity, ROI, and other aspects of SSD drives. Take a look. Even though this is advertising literature, it will give you some idea of where SSD technology is today.

[3Phase]

RAIN vs RAID

Okay, I looked around and here's the one I want. It hasn't been actually been released but it'll be available in 350 and 700 GB. Of course there is no price tag yet so you know you can't afford one!



A PCIe v2 SSD that uses 25 watts at full power and can handle petabytes of writes in its two-million-hour lifetime with a 3 year (some say 5 year) warranty.

Internally the drive is set up like a RAID array and Micron calls it RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND). From looking at the tech sheet it looks like it at least does parity SECDED along with some proprietary bells and whistles:-

[PDF]P320h Full-Height, Half-Length PCIe NAND SSD

See! SEE! Now I want an engineering sample to play with!