News Super Talent launches “affordable” 512GB SSD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/04/10/super-talent-launches-affordable-512gb-ssd/1

It still costs almost £1,000, but the new MasterDrive RX SSD offers some interesting features like an internal RAID system to boost performance.

 

OK manufacturers, enough now. Your drives are fast enough and larger enough, stop willy waving and start focussing all your efforts on making them affordable. It's a sound economic principle: Expensive and hardly any sold, compared to cheap and LOTS sold - the latter will almost always make more profit in the long term. Valve has proved this many times with its Steam sale weekends.

 

Sorry about my ignorance, but is there any real reason to choose SSD rather than a HD? I heard that SSD have a shorter life than HD, is that true?

The only reason to choose SSD in my mind is for space saving and it is more resistant to phisical shock.

 

Yemerich - Speed

 

20x the cost but for 20x performance? I very much doubt it.

 

Fact is that most of the effort towards making the drives affordable is on the consumer side. As those amongst us with way too much disposable income start throwing down the dough for SSD's the manufacturers will start ramping production. The larger the volume of sellable production the more attractive the market segment looks from a profit perspective. As more and more companies hop on the band wagon prices are driven through the floor due to extreme competition. Look at any number of pieces of modern technology, LCD TV's, Blu Ray players, computers, you name it, it happens with all of them. In this case we can see why newcomers like Corsair, and even Western Digital are moving into the market. They see the potential for big profits, because people are finally starting to purchase the product in a sizeable volume. Mind you I think that we'll see sales in the low capacity drives (30-60gb) skyrocket first, with high-cap drive sales coming up more slowly. But eventually I think we'll see prices drop and the cost delta between capacities drop as well.

So if everyone went out and bought one of those 30Gb OCZ Vertex drives to boot from, the combined action would reduce price, meaning that in the next few months you could probably pick up one of the monster drives like the one above for around $200

 

haven't been around tech sites much for the last few months?

SSDs offer a pretty substantial leap in performance over standard HDD performance. There is 0 seek time because its all instant addressing. There is no read head that has to search out the address on the disk. It just reads directly from the address.

The mean time between failure on OCZ Vertex drives is 1.5 million hours. that's right MILLION hours. One company reported that their drives could have 30gigs a day written and erased for 1400 years before the drive would fail because of the algorithms in place to prevent the drive from burning out.

There are still some bugs to work out. There are issues with stuttering being reported and the JBMicron controller chips are less then stellar. They stutter so much in some tests that 5400 RPM drives out perform them.

Look into the latest reviews into these drives and you will see exactly why they are as amazing as they sound.

 

Wow that's 127 years of continual use.

I'm very tempted to get a smallish SSD as a boot (and maybe game drive if I can afford a bigger one) when I get round to upgrading my PC again. Though that's gonna have to wait a while for a decent job.

 

I wonder what their sample size was for that mtbf test, 100,000? >> SSDs are nice but I still think by the time they are ready in price for mass market we'll have some better solid state storage tech blossoming than old nand flash. Regardless I'll keep dreaming of a computer using nothing but 100s of gigs of static ram. I still wonder what kind of computers Bill Gates has.

 

Don't look on MTBF, it doesn't mean anything basically. Well, IBM Deskstar 75GXP had an MTBF of a 1.5 milion hours and we know how it worked MTBF measure is weird and doesn't tell anything about real-life situations. With new SSDs you can expect 2-5 years of working as a boot drive, then they're just too unreliable. And buy only SSDs with buffer to use as a boot/extensive use drive, the ones without it are too annoying (they hang for a second during intensive write).

 

Wow. I personally have Prior Art on this, on these very forums!

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1463110&postcount=1

Yup, that's me, talking about RAIDing flash SSDs together, way back in April 2007.

So, erm, no patent here. Sorry.

 

his post is to long

as long as you ignore any Jmicron based SSDs or look for ones that have cache on them, as thay not be based on jmicron untill 4Q this year or next year 1Q

for ssd should last 10 years before they start to fail (bigger the SSD the longer should last as there are more Cells to use) but really depends what you do and how good the Wear levelling is in the SSD (intel dedicate 64mb for it to monitor and make sure it last as long as it can)

only way i can think to kill SSD short time is most likely Not going happen in norm use of an SSD or an harddisk, is filling an SSD to the point it has little space (talking like less then 10MB or maybe smaller) and doing lots of writes 512KB writes is an good way to kill off some of the cells as it can only wipe 512KB cells (think its that) around 10,000 times, But can write 4KB blocks into that cell once it has been wiped so 10k can be alot

basic way to work out how long an cell will take to die is divide disk size in KB by the amount the Cell size that is 512KB, then times that By 10,000 thats how many Writes it would take to make an cell die (about any way) and if you work that out it is alot (64gb is about 25,600,000,000 Cell wipes (thay have to be 512KB per write But if its smaller writes like 4k then your starting to mess with number of writes that would be alot of writes) i recommend you to look at this first http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=5 and page 6 as it explanes how it works blocks and cells
but that is the wear levelling working perfectly you could half that and still alot of writes most users do not Write 30gb per day to there hard drives so 10 years for ssd should be good, intel in this case is likey to last for an very long time as whats what the 64mb part is for not cache like what is been used on indix vertex drive)

 

What a joke! Supertalent should get their facts straight before bragging.

The OCZ Vertex uses an internal RAID 0. I have a 30gb OCZ Vertex which has 128gb internal mem structure which is divided by 4 (4 disk internal raid 0) to give 32gb of very fast storage. My 30gb ocz vertex scores as follows on HDTune 3.00

Minimum: 149.4mb/sec
Maximum: 217.6mb/sec
Average: 204.8mb/sec
Access time: 0.1ms
Burst rate: 183.5mb/s

So the supertalent isn't much faster. 512gb capacity is great though but not at that price.

 

Except for small file write speed where they collapse and can't even get above single digit write speeds....

 

Neither can a conventional HDD, for random small writes anyway.