Worth The Wait

[netguyjoel]

Demand for NAND has skyrocketed imo ...car stereos now are fitted w/ USB jacks in them, for playing MP3s and MP4s...and it seems to be the preferred medium for portable storage right now. I used to drag around a huge 100 CD holder w/ warez...and now it fits in the change pocket in my jeans! I left it in there, one day...my wife washed my jeans, and said to me..."you left this in you pocket, genius" I plugged it in...and it WORKED! 16 GB for $25...I remember 1 GB SCSI drives goin for a grand!

[valis]

I happily pronounced towards the end of last year we were at least 12-18 months away (or did I say 1-2 years?) from SSD's truly being a viable option for those who don't invest in SCSI/SAS RAID currently (ie, are willing to bear the cost burden & need to fiddle to get performance smooth.)

Aside from just TRIM support, we also need a few improvements in the hardware:firmware:OS awareness of some of the alignment issues. If you do a single partition using the erase utilities provided by most makers you're relatively safe, but it gets a bit more complicated for RAID & advanced partitioning. At least the OCZ stuff is price:performance competitive against RAID right now (when used for RAID that is), so that's some progress vs. a year ago.

[netguyjoel]

SCSI/SAS is still imo insanely expensive....great performance, speed and durability...I guess you get what you pay for

The thought of doing a SATA RAID 5, sounded good to me too...but the noise.... and the HEAT...therefore needing to pack the case with more cooling fans...generating more noise...it's a vicious cycle. Not to mention the way MS writes data to the drive...a little over here...a little over there... SSDD....I think you timeline is pretty accurate, yet still a little steep, for my wallet.

[valis]

I'm a fan of SCSI myself (SAS being the current incarnation) and actually am sad I don't have an SAS2 capable controller card in my current PC. I've got 5 SATA drives all rather well arranged, and I can *still* feel the 'hitching' that occurs when I've got the drives that have OS & Swap on them (2 different ones) being hit hard, certain processes will start 'hitching' or just hang entirely until they can do whatever it was they were waiting to do.

My last 3-4 main machines (spanning about 12-14 years) have all had SCSI, and there's always a noticeable difference in how the machine 'holds up' under a heavy disk access load versus IDE and now SATA. My last box (Xeon with onboard dual u160) has 15k u320 SCSI drives in it which are old enough to be markedly slower than the SATA drives in this machine (the new one with 5 drives), but that machine has a constant 'speed' to interacting with it, and it NEVER shows a process (or processes) 'hitching' and 'hanging'. This is *without* raid even, it's by virtue of the intelligence built into the SCSI controller & command set. I tried RAID on it a few times and did find things zippier, but the overhead in managing the RAID set (versus just duplicating data across my network for redundancy there) and especially the noise, heat (as you say) & power draw were too much to bother with, so I agree with you there. Only when there's a need that current tech isn't up to...

Now SSD's on the other hand, when they arrive, are EXTREMELY good candidates for RAID imo both for performance & heat/power/noise. Once the low-level issues are sorted out in all major OS's & SATA/SAS raid controllers and drive firmware(s) of course. There are people on other forums I frequent using the OCZ Vertex stuff in Raid 5 & 10 and getting completely blistering speeds. I add this just as anecdotal information as I suspect that RAID is still unnecessary for most, especially with the potential performance gains that SSD's are starting to live up to.

[netguyjoel]

64 tracks of audio without SCSI or RAID might be a problem. Not to mention 64 stereo tracks. SSDD should laugh at it, and say "Can I have some more?" So the question remains for me...SCSI or SATA RAID5 w/ noise & heat I know I'm whining at this point..

I just got an Adaptec U320 card (inherited from work) and a Supermicro 742 case
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chas ... 2T-465.cfm
I'm thinkin' on switching it to SATA and running RAID5 with that, (kill the SCSI thought) but I can't get shit from Supermicro as far as what I need. Will the SATA backplane mount the same...will it fit....will I need a different fan unit...etc etc

They offer a SATA hot swap case...but $400?? for another case?

[valis]

I have 3 supermicro based machines running atm, 1 of them (the older Xeon-based Scope box) is in an older SM case. SM doesn't price parts for the end-user, nor does it really build hardware or offer support for end users like mainstream companies (Asus, Foxconn etc) do. I see quite a few BIOS updates that have 0 info publicly available, you often have to sign an NDA just to know what's in them. When you realize that SM is really a vendor for VARs and specific niches in the industry it makes more sense though (the NDA is usually because there will be a feature or two in the BIOS added or changed for one of their partners). By no means do I think SM actually has *poor* support, it's just that they tend to respond more quickly to issues that are truly serious, and may take a while to respond to casual emails or questions that seem more obvious to them.

If you'd like to figure out your hot swap issue or anything else, I highly recommend 2cpu.com. Ask your drive cage & backplane question in the storage forum (or just use the search) and I'm sure you'll turn up info quickly enough. Also if you watch the for-sale forum you'll see quite a few useful bits show up over time.

[valis]

Another Tech Report update:

A look at SSD performance in Windows Vista

For those who just want the skinny, he runs the tests under Vista which eliminates Xp's 63-sector partition offset (which potentially aggravates the micro-fragmentation issue) and posts up results. Some improvement, but the overall conclusions aren't that different from what we have seen before...

[dawman]

Here's another reason to wait...........

7/14 Update - After discussing the Marvell problems with various manufacturers, it is confirmed that everyone will be pulling the Marvell 88SE9123 6Gb/s SATA chipset off their motherboards. This means the white and dark blue SATA ports on the left edge of the board will be missing on the retail version of this board. Also, we have confirmation from Marvell that the 88SE9123 will undergo a a major revision to address PATA compatibility problems (the chipset offers PATA and 6Gb/s SATA functionality). However, we still understand from several sources that 6Gb/s SATA performance was not completely up to speed. In fact, we never could get it working correctly during internal testing.

How many new i7's and even the new AMD's w/ 790GX based boards have been sold to the public...?
I still say that these corporations will never cut their R & D budget very much, so they probably have cut back on the Quality Control........
That's is why we are seeing certain boards w/ poor 32bit PCI performance, and guys who bought SSD's are probably blaming the manufacturer when the whole time the 6GB SATA chips from Marvell were the culprit.

As much as I would love the newest fastest rig, I will never use that kind of throughput, but when Intel mobo's are getting a bad rap, and the top tier guys are shoving new boards down out throats you'd think they test their products out before shipping..............

[siriusbliss]

I avoid Marvell - especially after having worked at rival Broadcom, who is a rival to Intel - so go figure...all roads lead to Inhel.

Yes, all these companies are cutting corners building crap in China, who is now outsourcing to Vietnam and Indonesia. There is NO quality control in mass manufacturing of chips much these days. It's a numbers game.

The industry is an illusion.

Greg

[dawman]

On my Supermicro P4SCT+II I had the Marvel chip w/ the Adaptec Zero RAID low profile card.
It's actually when I learned RAID wasn't necessary...........
But the Marvell w/ the Supermicro works flawlessley still.
I was very close to getting the Supermicro Dual Opteron w/ Serverworks chipset years ago.
Broadcom had the best server chipsets back then. The HT1000.......
After seeing a couple of AMD MP's & Tyan Tigers years ago I became feverish.
Thankfully Scope cards rescued me from a Giga mistake.

[johndunn]

I just installed a SSD as my main drive, and I love it. The speed is great, multiple times faster than a hard drive. But the reason I sprung for one is that I do a lot of sofware development, which means I crash a lot - and loosing the data on the HD can sometimes be a serious problem. I back up frequently of course, but in the heat of a programming marathon, I sometimes forget. Same deal with studio work - it's hard to remember to stop and back up when the muses are giving you a ride.

But with a SSD, a disk crash does not mean you've lost the data. It only means you can't write to it anymore. So to recover you just put in a different boot drive, and read off the SSD data. It's a whole new ball game.

There are issues, of course. A lot of the low priced SSDs use a sub par controller, which causes stuttering - disk write times of a half second or so. There is a general problem in that they all read and write in small (usually 4K) blocks, but to erase they have to do a 512k page. So writes slow down after a while in all of them. The Intel SSDs, and the later Samsung based SSDs like the Corsair P128 (the one I got) have an processor and lots of buffer and do smart "erase-defrag" which greatly minimizes the problem. So far my Corsair P128 is doing fine.

[dawman]

Coolness........does it use the Intellilink..?

Those are impressive reads. I have been told for live work I won't use more than 50-65 MB's per second, but I know when I start packing on VSTi sample playing instruments for seqeuncing and recording this will skyrocket. 280MB's per second seem like a dozen powerful romplers.

[valis]

Jimmy if you're only loading your sample data onto the drive and then using it for purely playback, I think there are several models that will handle that with aplomb. Intel, Corsair & OCZ's better stuff should do fine. OCZ is about to release updated Vertex models with the onboard mem cache 'overclocked' a tad:

OCZ Speeds Up Solid-State Drives by Overclocking Memory Buffer.

It's just for mixed read/write/multitasking solutions that the SSD's are still needing to mature--which is where I would use them. I can't afford to spend 10x the cost of an SATA drive (dollars per gigabyte) just for samples when I really don't have issues with my current ES.2's. But! TRIM in Win7 + larger on-SDD caches should improve matters a lot, after that I'm just waiting for the costs to come down a bit (they've risen again this month.)

[dawman]

We tried one for streaming and although the benches looked good there was little difference in polyphony which is what the extra MB's per second were suppose to be for, but it isn't a newer model like JD has shown above, it was from last year as he is always grabbing new tech. But he actually knew it would be fine for the O.S. if streaming didn't work.
I am in no hurry unless I start having to record large templates in one take.
But I am definately seeing these drives improve as time goes by, and the prices are fairly reasonable too.
I remember the SSD got really hot from the ridiculous amount of reads streamers need.
The ideal set up would be to span the content over 3 x SSD's. They would only need to be 150GB's each, but the MB's per second of these newer models is awesome compared to my WD's.
OCZ also has a RAID controller for really sick stuff on the biggest Vertex.
Overclocked RAM and RAID>..........Dayamn.

[valis]

Intel's new 34nm SSDs cut prices by 60 percent, boost speed

Intel Launches 34nm NAND SSDs, Claims 60% Price Cut Possible

80GB & 160GB models, double the read throughput & reduced read latency. No mention of write performance and those 60% price cuts are on the bulk pricing for retailers, hopefully the savings are passed along to us at the end.

[netguyjoel]

This trend was expected, in order to spur implementation in the mainstream marketplace.
I say we pool our money together, and place an order for 1,000, so when they fry...we can use them as coasters....

Besides...the article does mention that the primary slowdown, is not, the fault of the drive, but the system it is used in, and even at the OS level.
There are headways being made in the custom OS front, to create a VERY stripped down XP, specifically to be used in audio apps, and the work is continuing to be replicated in the Win7 arena as well...never mind the fluff...just a solid, thin OS, that doesn't need mp3, video, internet, email, business apps etc etc...man...the list gets pretty long, when you think about how much crap is shoved into an OS....imho...

[johndunn]

I say we go back to CP/M. That was an OS where you knew everything that was going on.

[netguyjoel]

That is beyond my skill set...all in all...Unix/Linux is as well, one that can be monitored, and know what processes are doing what too.....your chops squash mine like a grape...

My ATARI 1040, & Mega 4 had some of the most rock solid midi timing I have EVER used. Not for audio...but the most killer MIDI timing ever... I know you understand (mr dunn) probably better than most.....

[valis]

I had forgot to post it until now, but Intel Confirms SSD Data Corruption Issue, Suspends Shipments Pending Firmware Update for their latest X25-M "G2" (34nm) due to a corruption issue when a user sets a BIOS password. The drives do solve the Fragmentation Issues (before TRIM is even in Win7) and offer faster performance and reduced prices to the first Generation X-25M...

[netguyjoel]

http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/569 ... /217033/0/

Intels Braidwood flash memory modules comming to market...