Well, semen delivered vaginally does work as an anti-depressant. So you should shoot away.

You should also research on the SSD you want first. Some smaller capacity SSDs has severe performance degradation because there are less chips to store data in parallel.

You can take a look at my Excel attachment and filter the data for the information you want.

The entire OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Preview: The First SF-2500 SSD and all the comments from Anandtech.

As much as the performance is nice, the expected pricing for the upcoming Vertex 3 Pro with 25nm flash is terrible.

100GB = RM1,598.89 = RM15.99/GB
200GB = RM2,360.26 = RM11.80/GB
400GB = RM4,111.43 = RM10.29/GB

The cheapest OCZ Vertex 2 120GB available today is only RM839 for RM6.99/GB.

No way I'm going to pay for that and so much for 25nm flash bringing the price down.



On another point, the 3,000 program/erase cycle limit for 25nm flash can be worrying for some people. Here's one way you can view that limit to mitigate your worries. If you're looking for a 3 year lifespan:

3000 / (3 years * 365.25 days) = 2.74 writes/day

This means for a 100GB SSD, you may write about 274GB everyday for 3 years. 548GB/day for 200GB SSDs and 82.2GB/day for 30GB SSDs. Practically impossible for normal usage.

If you're looking at 10 year lifespan:

3000 / (10 years * 365.25 days) = 0.82 writes/day

This means for a 100GB SSD, you need to write 82GB everyday for 10 years. Also practically impossible for normal usage. Users with 5mbps broadband can hit at most 52GB of writes a day; and only need to worry about this if their SSDs are smaller than 64GB.

This post has been edited by everling: Feb 17 2011, 09:42 PM

Oh, that's nice. Looks like I'll need to go visit their respective sites for the latest updates.

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Added on February 18, 2011, 12:17 amI've updated my Excel sheet.

This post has been edited by everling: Feb 18 2011, 12:17 AM

You're welcome.

After installation, most games will find it difficult to exceed even 1GB of writes a day. I wouldn't worry about it.

Btw, where are you getting a 240GB for so cheap?

I believe the reviewed OCZ SSDs were the enterprise grade Vertex 3 Pro, and not the retail Vertex 3, hence the extra cost.

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Added on February 19, 2011, 8:43 amThanks for the info.

This post has been edited by everling: Feb 19 2011, 08:43 AM

If we use a 10W HDD 24/7/365, it will only cost us RM19.11 per year. Reducing that to a 0.1W SSD will only cost you RM0.19 per year. Not much of a saving considering how expensive SSDs can get.

And the biggest cost bottleneck is the cost of the flash memory. Assuming it is RM2.50/GB (cheapest known retail is above RM5.00/GB) that would still cost you RM2,500/terabyte. We're not going to see cheap 1TB SSDs any time soon.

It will last at least three years, unless you have an extraordinary usage.

Assuming that the V+100 is based on 25nm flash (3,000 program/erase cycles), you get:

3,000 * 120GB = 360,000GB of total writes over its lifetime

Let's assume that the super aggressive garbage collection is rather bad and consumes 2/3 of the writes, leaving you with only 120,000GB of writes to be used as you wish. You need to write 108GB every single day to exhaust the SSD by the end of its third year. I believe it is safe to say you don't need to worry about its lifespan at all and may expect much more than a three year lifespan without changing your normal usage behaviour.

On a side note and for reference, Anand (of AnandTech) observes that he used an average of 7GB of writes per day and that he was the heaviest writer within the people of AnandTech.

If Moore's Curves holds out for the next ten years and Flash's program/erase cycle count remains at a reasonable level, we will probably see a 1TB SSD going for less than RM200 before 2020.

This post has been edited by everling: Feb 21 2011, 01:33 AM

Anand's story is in here: The Unmentionables: NAND Mortality Rate

We have better alternatives in the works. Some are listed in Wikipedia: Flash scalability

For a lot of use cases, 1TB would be more than enough. There are a lot of computers with less than 1TB of capacity today and a lot of the users don't need more. Also, for archival needs, we can always buy HDDs when we need it or our broadband speeds may increase to the point where personal archives become significantly less important.

I'd go for larger capacity myself. Highly recommended for laptop users. It costs you nothing to wait a little longer, but it will cost you another SSD if you run out of capacity and still need or want the performance of an SSD.

If for gaming or other minor usage, I'd rather wait to see the impact of the next series of SSDs. Iianm, the upcoming Intel SSDs boast high performance but on the old 34nm flash. There is a small chance of a price drop. Otherwise, it depends on your needs.

Once you understand the problem, it's just primary school maths only, multiplication and division.

You get SSD performance for files on your SSD and HDD performance for files on your HDD. SSDs won't automagically improve performance of HDDs.

They don't really eat that much space.

SSDs are very suited for programmers. Particularly for programming projects with thousands of source files. Finding strings within files and compiling will be much more faster. If a project used to take an hour to compile on a HDD, you can expect great performance improvement with an SSD.

You probably don't want to use NTFS compression on SandForce-based SSDs. It will reduce the advantages of using those SSDs as most of their extreme performance is based on the ability to compress and decompress data on the fly.

Perhaps somebody ought to test if a Kingston SSD with NTFS compression will be comparable to a SandForce-based SSD w/o NTFS compression.

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Added on February 23, 2011, 3:33 pmCome to think of it, using encryption will also cause a similar problem, as encrypted data is not compressible.

This post has been edited by everling: Feb 23 2011, 03:33 PM

It actually affects the 120GB (OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G) editions as well.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ocz-ve...ssd,2867-2.html

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Added on February 25, 2011, 2:47 amSome data for the Vertex 3 (non-Pro) came out. Initial pricing will be around RM766.22 for a 120GB and around 1,532.47 for a 240GB. Hopefully there won't be much of a markup.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4186/ocz-ver...-focused-sf2200

This post has been edited by everling: Feb 25 2011, 02:47 AM

That sucks. Be sure to demand a 120GB 34nm drive instead of the new 115GB 25nm.

Here's an interesting question. How can I securely erase the data from my SSD drive?

I think I'll stick with Kingston drives. Not having over-provisioning means that I get every single yummy byte at my disposal and I actually get to encrypt the whole drive. The downer is that even when encrypting, there is still a vulnerability at the passkey storage. But if you have a strong password, your encrypted partition can still stand up to some serious hacking.

I don't use multimedia creation apps myself, so I can't say whether you'll be able to leverage SSD's strengths enough to justify the cost.

But I can say that SSDs will not help with CPU bottlenecks. And SSDs excel when doing thousands of little reads/writes and only just a step faster than HDDs when doing sequential reads/writes. And for some people, just faster loading time for both the OS and applications and increased system responsiveness is enough to justify the cost, as it can help them to keep their focus on the work instead of having their train of thought hitting every little speed bumps.

This post has been edited by everling: Mar 5 2011, 02:17 AM

It's good enough.

Take a look at the following graphs:



It may have slower raw write speeds, but for the "average" workload, it has more than good enough performance.

The only downside is that the Intel G3 is coming out in the next few months. It is hoped that their cost/GB is even lower and they will have somewhat better performance than the G2. Read/write: G2's 250/100 vs G3's 250/170. They'll lose to current generation performance SSDs which can hit past 500MB/s, but if Intel can drive their prices down, their G3s can still be made into bargain buys for 80% of the market.

Unless the traders can give you an idea on when to expect OEM versions, don't expect to buy a G3 for ~RM700 shortly after release. It really depends on your situation. If you want an SSD now, buy. If you can afford to wait, be prepared to wait up to six months.

In terms of effectively using the raw power, you are correct.


http://www.anandtech.com/show/4186/ocz-ver...ocused-sf2200/9

Vertex 3, faster than the G2 by 2x, but only 20% better scores.


http://www.anandtech.com/show/4186/ocz-ver...cused-sf2200/10

Vertex 3, faster than the G2 by 2x, but only 5% better scores and just 9% faster than a Velociraptor.

These two are the general use benchmarks. The other benchmarks used are mostly focused on HDD-bounded tasks to show better results, all on a desktop. With a laptop, you are more likely to be bounded by the CPU, so you are better served by buying the largest capacity for the cheapest price that you budget for. There are exceptions of course, like a programmer that compiles huge programs, which can be 100% faster because of the massive random reads and writes.

As for hoping for a 50% price cut, it has happened once before with the transition from the G1 to the G2. However, I don't know how long the transition took.

The MTBF isn't really meaningful for SSDs. Two million hours is 228 years.

This doesn't take into account of the fact that there is at least a 1-4% RMA rate for SSDs today.

This also doesn't take into account of the fact that data stored on SSDs will be lost after roughly ten years due to charge degradation. You'll need to "refresh" the stored data by rewriting it if you wish to keep the data beyond ten years. (Of course, by ten years, there should be much superior and cheaper SSD products to replace your creaking old SSD.)

This also doesn't take into account of the fact that there is a closer usage limit, the number of times you can write to an SSD. 10,000 times for the first generation, ~5,000 times for the 3x nm Flash, and ~3,000 times for the 2x nm flash. (Although it really isn't a concern for consumers at this time. Practically no one should hit that limit with normal usage.)

This post has been edited by everling: Mar 15 2011, 09:46 AM

I had to rephrase my earlier statement about failure rates. I think they're more of RMA rates and not actual failure rates. People can RMA if they think the SSD is underperforming or for other reasons that has little to do with actual failure.

I had experienced one of the reasons before, when HD Tune reported my SSD to be underperforming, but tests on another machine shows it to be performing as expected. Then I did the file benchmarks on my own machine and it performed as expected, but it is still slow on the main read benchmark. I have no idea why it is like that.



For laptop use, my standing recommendation is to prioritise capacity over performance. 500MB/s read/write isn't going to help you if you run out of space on your 64GB. The situation is better if your laptop has a Thunderbolt, e-SATA, USB 3.0 or Firewire port that you can use. Otherwise working over a USB 2.0 connection is just pure pain.

Unfortunately there aren't any high capacity SSDs in the RM400-RM500 range, but there are some options in the RM500-RM600 range. Listed below are some SSDs in the current RM400-RM600 range, ordered by cost/GB.

There were never serious lifespan issues. Just a lot of over-reaction over the 10,000, the 5,000 and then the 3,000 write limit.

You can easily calculate the expected lifespan and how hard you can use your SSD yourself.