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#11
Thanks JG. Very informative.
Gary
Thank You,the article was very interesting,well done.
Interesting read. Interesting to read about the incident OCZ.
Also doesn't make SSDs shine as much with being "the best upgrade" when to keep the performance fast you need to full format every so often.
its expensive yea .. but be patient they will lower down the prices ..
everything new and good is expensive ..
patience is the medicine !
Hopefully they'll get that all figured out in the next year±. That should help out on the price too. :)
Gary
Here's the single most important part of the whole article; the more that's written to it the "slower" it'll get.
SourceThe Recap
I told you I’d mention this again because it’s hugely important, so here it is:
A single NAND flash die is subdivided into blocks. The typical case these days is that each block is 512KB in size. Each block is further subdivided into pages, with the typical page size these days being 4KB.
Now you can read and write to individual pages, so long as they are empty. However once a page has been written, it can’t be overwritten, it must be erased first before you can write to it again. And therein lies the problem, the smallest structure you can erase in a NAND flash device today is a block. Once more, you can read/write 4KB at a time, but you can only erase 512KB at a time.
It gets worse. Every time you erase a block, you reduce the lifespan of the flash. Standard MLC NAND flash can only be erased 10,000 times before it goes bad and stops storing data.
Based on what I’ve just told you there are two things you don’t want to do when writing to flash: 1) you don’t want to overwrite data, and 2) you don’t want to erase data. If flash were used as a replacement for DVD-Rs then we wouldn’t have a problem, but it’s being used as a replacement for conventional HDDs. Who thought that would be a good idea?
It turns out that the benefits are more than worth the inconvenience of dealing with these pesky rules; so we work around them.
Most people don’t fill up their drives, so SSD controller makers get around the problem by writing to every page on the drive before ever erasing a single block.
If you go about using all available pages to write to and never erasing anything from the drive, you’ll eventually run out of available pages. I’m sure there’s a fossil fuel analogy somewhere in there. While your drive won’t technically be full (you may have been diligently deleting files along the way and only using a fraction of your drive’s capacity), eventually every single block on your drive will be full of both valid and invalid pages.
In other words, even if you’re using only 60% of your drive, chances are that 100% of your drive will get written to simply by day to day creation/deletion of files.
Later Ted
Next part is out: AnandTech: The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved
Most important thing to me, since I'll probably never be in the market for Intel's overpriced offering is http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/o...0937/18688.png
This new Indilinx controller promises not only good performance on paper but an apparently high degree of programability -- recent firmware updates have nearly doubled key performance metrics. And now Super Talent is using the controllers too so it shouldn't be long before I can get a mini pcie version for my eeePC!