Build your own SSD drive

[flexy]

found this:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/memory/506/

Guy is building a SSD with some normal CF cards and some el-cheapo CF --> IDE adapter from ebay. To improve speed he sets them up in Raid.

This is very interesting, i wonder how this would look with CF3.0 / CF4.0 standard cards. i found some 133x cards reaching 20MB/s....and CF 4.0 is supposed to reach UDMA 66MB/s speeds, but i have no idea where to get such fast cards and how much they would be.

66MB/s would definitly be HD speed!

I really, really see solid state drives (SSD) (or hybrids) becoming THE big thing in the next 3-5 years and totally phasing out HDs. If i had the money i would get one of the current 32/64 GB SSD drives, HAMA etc. But they're extremely, extremely expensive, still.

Other question is what their lifespan is actually, for the "normal" CF cards. I know USB sticks dont last long. How about CF?

Edit: I also wonder why he used SD Ultra, supposedly "only" 10MB/s while there are defintly CF cards around already doing 20MB/s sustained.

What about putting 4 of them 20MB/s cards in RAID? This sounds bitching!! 2 of the 8GB cards actually should already hold a OS fine...maybe even ONE.

Moved from General Hardware
General Hardware Moderator -- MarcVenice

 

[QuixoticOne]

It is a neat idea.

I think the main principle (if money is a factor) is to buy whatever CF cards are cheapest per the megabyte and which still have a reasonable speed.

Even a single CF/SD used as a read cache for frequently used data can be a substantial benefit over dealing with hard seek disc latency. That's basically what ReadyBoost under Vista sort of does.

However long the write durability of common flash memory is, the answer to your question about how long it'll last is "not long enough" if you're going to be frequently and indiscriminately writing to it. Typical filesystems will write back to certain hotspots of the filesystem very frequently for very trivial reasons such as for temporary files, changing the "this file was last read at xxxx time/date" stamp on EVERY file, et. al.

The right way to use SSD/flash discs are to have filesystems and software configurations that use them as mostly (in the great majority of times) read only devices. Allow no needless time/date stamp writing, no temporary files, et. al. only your most relevant commonly accessed data.

The whole benefit of flash SSDs of a "few gigabytes" capacity is really diminished by the current cheap (relatively) price of RAM. For $130 you can get 8GBy of decently fast DDR2 RAM that's compatible with most motherboards and CPUs. Using that and a 64 bit OS (Linux, Vista 64, whatever) will get you all the memory you typically need for applications to use (2GB-3GB) plus another 5GB-6GB of blazing fast disc cache memory that has no write lifetime limits and which is something like 100 times faster or more than a common FLASH card could be for around the same money 8GB of flash cards would cost.
Of course RAM is better in that your actual applications can use it too if you ever need more than 2-3GB for that, whereas FLASH is mostly only good for disc read caches.

On the other hand for quickly *booting* the OS, it'd be nice to have the commonly used "static" OS files loaded into FLASH since FLASH will save its contents even when power is off. Then again if you have a few hundred megabytes of data in your user profile et. al. that need to be scanned with the AntiVirus scanner, etc. etc. on boot, you'll still be slowed down by the data access from hard discs that isn't sensibly going to be stored in your SSD.

Also the benefit of quick access to an unused PC is also minimized since it competes with the option of simply having your PC "sleep" or "hibernate" in a state that is about 90% ready to go within a few seconds when you decide to start it again and resume work from where you left off. As long as sleep/hibernate works and is commonly used, 95% of the time you'll have the PC "boot" or "wake up" plenty fast even without flash discs.

Now once we start to see cheap flash in the 32GB and up size ranges with good durability and access times, then there's going to be some real possible advantage for keeping the whole OS and set of your most relevant programs / data files ALL on a transportable flash drive, and that'll be nice.
They're talking about producing cheap terabyte level solid state storage technologies within the next few years; that'll be exciting and useful. I think anything we do in the short term (1-2 years) that's limited to capacities of 0-32GB may be temporarily "handy" but will very quickly be made obsolete by VASTLY better/cheaper storage technologies and computer system configurations / capabilities.

Doing RAID with 4GB level CF cards is like solving yesterday's problems today, but right at the point when tomorrow it'll be all kind of obsolete anyway.
Granted they should have done a better job of commercializing SSDs / hybrid drives / "readyboost" type operation / etc. about 5 years ago in which case it would have been a very relevant solution with a usefully long lifespan.

 

[Lorne]

I used to have fun doing exparraments with hardware like that, Though not the biggest recognition like the second man on the moon you still get your name in the books.

Check out the Gigabytes Iram, Same price in the end with x2 the performance.

SSD's are here, Its just time as with RAM (DDR2 and 3) the prices will go down the capacities will get bigger and we will all be looking back in memorance saying " Remember those spindle days".

 

[bigpow]

I actually tried this a while ago when I had a spare CF lying around.
I bought a cheapy CF-to-IDE from ebay and used it with a spare 1GB Sandisk Extreme.
I was NOT impressed with the performance, ended up selling the adapter & CF here at AT forum.
Maybe with today's technology, it'd be a lot better - but someone please verify this before I try again

 

[flexy]

yes..the interesting alternative would be the new lexar 300x cards...BUT..

Then i just saw that you can get a real Mtron SSD SATA 16GB for "only" 289EU already with 100MBs r / 80MBs write...even if this is still very expensive so it would probably about the same as building 16GB CF drive with ultra-fast CF cards, and the real SSD drive would be way faster. The 300x CF AFAIK are only 45MB/s, i think.

So..yes..right now this is tech which is not worth "investing" a lot of money... i can see this getting really big, predicted the next few years and we will probably see big price drops...its just taking off with that whole technology making it into mainstream.

 

[taltamir]

newegg is selling those adapters for 10$ + 5$ shipping. And you can find them on variety of sites for ~15$ for an adapter. The cheapest CF modules I see are also on newegg. with 32GB unit costing 140$.
This is awesome. I am gonna buy one and put it into my file server as an OS drive.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Wouldn't mind seeing this done in a raid 5 array with say 4-5 of these drives.

 

[olmer]

Not worth it speed-wise (£1 mapping adaptor from dx [http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.711] with normally priced cards that is) ? just to play around if you have nothing better to do. Vista shows speeds below 1MBs. I have not tried chip-based processing adaptor and expensive cards but do not think you can get anywhere near hdd performance. Has its uses for silent operation though.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Originally posted by: olmer
Not worth it speed-wise (£1 mapping adaptor from dx [http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.711] with normally priced cards that is) ? just to play around if you have nothing better to do. Vista shows speeds below 1MBs. I have not tried chip-based processing adaptor and expensive cards but do not think you can get anywhere near hdd performance. Has its uses for silent operation though.

The article was showing 29gb read speeds and 15gb write speeds using just a raid 0.

A large enough raid 5 array could double that (and have security for when a drive dies), and access times would still be insanely low compared to a hard drive.

 

[PCTC2]

I did it in my iBook G4 when it's started frying hard drives like there was no tomorrow. I tossed 2x 16GB CF cards in it. Not the best performance, but the "drives" no longer die and I can drop it without killing it.

 

[taltamir]

oh its definitely SLOW... but this isnt for speed. you want speed, you pay 500$ for OCZ new 32GB flash drive (or 1200$ for the 64GB)... it gets 120 MB/s read and 100 write... only thing comparable is 15K SAS drives (145 read, but 3.5-3.8 seek time vs less then 0.1 on the SSD).

This is wonderful for people who want to replace the HDD on their ipod, laptop, PDA or any other such device for much improved battery life and performance (remember, 2.5inch and smaller magnetic drives have very low performance compared to full size ones). As well as cases where people want extremely low or quit operation.
An OS drive for an HTPC, a drive for a silent computer used in an audio recording room, a low LOW power OS drive for a distributed computing farm, a render farm, or a fileserver.

This is basically a jury-rigged super cheap SSD, with low performance. it has its uses.

 

[Silversierra]

I tried a sata to CF adapter in my macbook pro with a 233x card, but performance was abysmal. The card had fast reads (35MB/s), but the write speeds were so terrible that I couldn't stand to use it. On small files I was getting write speeds that measure in KB/s instead of MB/s! Maybe with a different card it'd be better...

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Silversierra
I tried a sata to CF adapter in my macbook pro with a 233x card, but performance was abysmal. The card had fast reads (35MB/s), but the write speeds were so terrible that I couldn't stand to use it. On small files I was getting write speeds that measure in KB/s instead of MB/s! Maybe with a different card it'd be better...

Sounds like a conservative (safer) write policy. True, writes are slower but this is where an aggressive write back policy helps. The downfall is if the power fails uncommitted buffers are lost.

 

[taltamir]

Good point ruby, luckily with a laptop, you have a battery, so even if the power goes out the battery still holds a charge. With battery indicators I expect this to never actually be an issue in a laptop. It would be risky to turn this on on a silent desktop though.

Also, the article doesn't mention it, but I found a SATA-CF convertor too, for 30$, compared to the IDE that costs 15$...
Still, very very nice. Considering that a 16GB CF costs 50$ and a 32GB costs 140$. And I didn't see any 16GB SATA SSDs for anything less then 350$ each. And thats for the crappy slow ones!
And the 32GB starts at 950$ and goes up QUICKLY

EDIT: I did some calculations... 24/7/365 operation and assuming you save 10 watts by using one of those psudeo ssd instead of a harddisk, and you are looking at saving 10$ a year (on 12cents per KWH). Less if you live somewhwere with cheap electricity. So the benefit in cost for a server is, limited.

Oooh, It just occured to me, a farm will be better off with booting from a CD and no HDD whatsoever. But that would require complicated software.

 

[Fox5]

There are flash drives out there with guaranteed decent write speed (sandisk extreme/ultra 3 and 4 come to mind.....I think 20MB/s write for the ultra 3). RAID a couple of those and you can eclipse any magnetic storage in speed....for way more anyhow. They're not cheap, that's for sure, at probably roughly $100 per 8GB, that's $400-$500 before you're even at top end magnetic drive speed, with 40GB or less of hard drive space. Flash drives should scale better in RAID than magnetic though due to the lack of seek times (basically).