So, an update on the world of hard drives, on the occasion of placing an order for my first SSD.
First up, what I got. I got the Samsung 840 Pro 512GB drive for $468 off of Amazon US, which appears to be universally accepted as the top performing and possibly also the most reliable SSD on the market (enterprise-level drives are more reliable, but worse performing, so they are no good for gaming, on top of being far more expensive.)
- c26-SS840SSDPRO-512hero-l.jpg (30.74 KiB) Viewed 32499 times
Note that it's a 2.5" drive like most (all?) SSDs, so I also got a 3.5"-to-2.5" bay converter to fit it in my case. Since my case is a Thermaltake, I went for this:
Thermaltake 3.5 Inch to 2.5 Inch SSD HDD Bay Drives Converter Kit AC0014 (Black)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003WO ... UTF8&psc=1(I wonder if newer cases have 2.5" bays in them, considering SSDs are getting so prevalent...)
And here's a ranking of SSDs, with the Samsung Pro at the top spot:
http://www.fastestssd.com/featured/ssd- ... te-drives/512GB seems to be the maximum capacity at this time for most companies. Indeed, some companies only go up to 480GB, which makes me glad Samsung is among those who give you the extra 32, because at that capacity range you really can use every extra GB you can get. How much space does Windows 7 take? That extra 32 probably covers the size of the operating system.
Having said that, AnandTech had a review last month of the Crucial/Micron M500 range which goes up to 960GB lol:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6884/cruc ... 40gb-120gbThe dude was ecstatic to see an SSD at that capacity, and especially for the ridiculously low price of $599 (there WERE a few other 960GB-1TB drives before this, but they cost upwards of $1,000), and for a while I considered going for this one. Unfortunately, the only one I could see on Amazon was going for $750 from a scalper:
http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch- ... 709&sr=8-1on top of the fact that the AnandTech review says the drive sacrifices performance to achieve the higher capacity:
Anand Lal Shimpi wrote:For SSDs to become more cost effective they need to implement higher density NAND, which is often at odds with performance, endurance or both. Samsung chose the endurance side of the equation, but kept performance largely intact with the vanilla 840. Given that most client workloads aren't write heavy, the tradeoff made a lot of sense. With the M500, Crucial came at the problem from the performance angle. Keep endurance the same, but sacrifice performance in order to hit the right cost target. In the long run I suspect it'll need to be a combination of both approaches, but for now that leaves us in a unique position with the M500.
The M500's performance is by no means bad, but it's definitely slower than the competition. Crucial targeted Samsung's SSD 840, but in most cases the TLC based 840 is faster than the M500. There's probably some room for improvement in the M500's firmware, but there's no escaping the fact that read, program and erase latencies are all higher as a result of the move to larger pages/blocks with the drive's 128Gbit NAND die. The benefit to all of this should be cost, but we'll have to wait and see just how competitive the smaller capacities of the M500 are on cost.
Worth noting also is that what tackywoolhat mentions in his OP still applies: top performance requires leaving 20% of the drive free:
Anand Lal Shimpi wrote:If you have the luxury of keeping around 20% of your drive free, Samsung maintains its performance advantage. If, on the other hand, you plan on using almost all of your drive's capacity - the M500 does have better behavior than even the 840 Pro.
Another thing to note for this update is the recent appearance of PCIe SSDs. Apparently, these are now the fastest storage solution available (though I wonder how they fare against RAM disks...) Here's a short article from 2010 that explains the basics:
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/P ... can-use-itDanny Bradbury wrote:The biggest benefit of PCIe-based SSD drives is increased performance. With other server-based SSD types, customers were able to forego the mechanical considerations of conventional hard disk drives (HDDs) -- suddenly rpm measurements became irrelevant because there were no moving parts. But with those types of SSD, the SATA-based interface limits the capacity of the bus that transfers data from the SSDs to the processor.
Prices for these have been apparently coming down recently, and they are now becoming competitive against regular SSDs. However, I am not going to look further into them at this time, because I only have two PCIe x16 slots on my motherboard, and they are both taken by my GTX 690 graphics cards. I do have two free x8 slots, but wouldn't those bottleneck the SSD, making the whole investment pointless? That's one thing I haven't been able to ascertain after a quick Google search: what's the maximum bus speed these SSDs can utilize? Do they go up to PCIe 3.0? In which case again I am not interested in them at the moment, since my motherboard is PCIe 2.0. (Another consideration is that, since my graphics subsystem puts out A LOT of heat, I am not sure I'd want the hard drive that carries my operating system right in the middle of it...)
And a final note for this update as regards mechanical drives: prices continue to fall, with a 4TB Seagate drive going for $183.43 on Amazon, for example:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B99 ... PDKIKX0DERNo idea how fast/reliable/etc. this one in particular is, I am just giving an example. Eventually I'll want to get a few drives of this capacity, but I am currently once more constrained by my motherboard, which it seems can only take two SATA 3.0 drives, one of which will be the SSD I just ordered. So I'll have to wait until I build a new computer for the 4x4TB RAID array that I am dreaming. Damn motherboard! It was the best thing on the market when I bought it, and the thing
has lasted for almost three years now, so I can't really complain, but it's getting on now and dragging my system choices down with it. But anyway, enough of my whining: these are the latest news from the hard drive world, and if you know anything of significance I missed, feel free to let me know about it.