MLC SSDs

[John Connor]

I heard MLCs suck. Is this true? I want to buy an enterprise SSD PCI-E card and they all seem to be MLC, but they are fast!

 

[Essence_of_War]

Whaaa?

It obviously varies by specific model, controller, etc, but there are excellent MLC SSDs. In fact, there are excellent TLC SSDs (the 840 and 840 EVO). Are you sure that your use case requires the performance (and associated price!) of an enterprise PCI-E SSD for? Or are you just spending money for the funsies?

 

[John Connor]

I can pick up a cheap enterprise SSD on eBay. Just wondering with what I heard about MLC if it was worth it. I was thinking of creating a 32 GB RAM drive for my games, but after I spend nearly $300 in RAM I could buy a $500 enterprise SSD on eBay.

 

[Soulkeeper]

You'd be better evaluating on a drive by drive basis imo

 

[John Connor]

Well crap! I just looked at eBay for the SSD I was interested in and it's not there anymore. Looks like I'll have to win the lotto to buy something else.

EDIT! Never mind! I found some even cheaper! Woooot!

 

[John Connor]

So what about a OCZ RevoDrive 3?

 

[Essence_of_War]

What capacity enterprise SSD? And what is the warranty like?

For ~$400 you can get ~500 GB of blisteringly fast MLC SSD.

 

[John Connor]

I would like something that is at least 128GB and a speed above 1 GB/s. I've see some 800MB/s drives and that's okay too.

Now how do you go about putting Windows 7 on it? Do I have to slip stream the drivers into a Windows disk? Can I clone to it with my current installation?

 

[Cerb]

An enterprise SSD will get you poorer data retention, typically lower performance, and a bunch of wasted flash. Why do that?

And, if you want 128GB, you need to stop, and put down your wallet. You will not get a fast SSD at that size. Just go check out RevoDrive reviews, FI. Anything less than the 480GB is simply not worth it, compared to regular SATA SSDs, and with a fairly new PC, the onboard RAID will be able to beat even those. With new SATA SSDs, generally ~250GB is the low threshold for performance per drive.

Big business oriented products are rarely the best option for most users that are not trying to create big business solutions. This goes from SMBs, too, much less individual users. Enterprise does not mean better, though such gear often may be. It means that the product is made for a different set of wants and needs, which consumer gear is not a good fit for, for whatever reason. If your needs don't fit with theirs, then you're not going to get anything out of such a product, and may end up having wasted money, and can even end up with worse performance and wasted money. Many enterprise SSDs, FI, are almost the same as consumer ones, but with much more factory over-provisioning. Many of those that aren't tend to be slower with light duty, and are mainly geared towards keeping performance high when being hammered, such as when used as a cache of, or main storage for, a database that is being written to all the time. Reading files off the disk for Flight Simulator is not going to come close to that.

Just make a RAID 0, on a H or Z 7 or 8 series chipset, with a fast SSD that's good at maintaining performance over time (M500, M5 Pro, Neutron, and Extreme II are a good short list, IMO, though the 840 Evo would likely be fine, too). You'll beat the RevoDrive's performance, in all but the most useless sequential read benchmarks, and shouldn't need to get a RAID controller, with one of those modern chipsets. With an older chipset, or AMD, you might want an LSI RAID card (not an HBA, and the 9000 series is preferable), which can be had for $100 or under, most of the time (sometimes $50, but how much searching and waiting do you want to do? ).

A fast ~250GB on sale should be under $500 for 3 of them, and get you 1.2-1.5GB/s sequential performance (improvements in random performance require such high concurrent requests counts as to be pointless).

Whether you RAID 0 some SSDs or not, though, I doubt the RAM disk will get you much, if anything, over the SSDs themselves, so long as you get good ones, and it could be detrimental to the system's average performance (recent files will end up being copied from RAM to RAM, FI, then discarded, then that repeated over and over and over again).

 

[VirtualLarry]

I doubt the RAM disk will get you much, if anything, over the SSDs themselves, so long as you get good ones, and it could be detrimental to the system's average performance (recent files will end up being copied from RAM to RAM, FI, then discarded, then that repeated over and over and over again).

What about Samsung's RAPID software, in conjuction with an 840 EVO 500GB SSD?

 

[John Connor]

Just found one for $240 for 240 GB. Not bad. 1 GB/s read.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Dont buy OCZ if you dont want problems.

Simply get a Crucial M500 and be happy.

 

[SSBrain]

An enterprise SSD will get you poorer data retention

This is not entirely true. Don't get me wrong: with an enterprise SSD you will do get a lower residual data retention at the end of the drive's rated NAND life, of course. However the end life for an enterprise SSD is usually set at a higher number of P/E cycles compared to its consumer counterpart. The main reason for this is because of the less strict data retention requirements they have compared to consumer SSDs, which by JEDEC specifications need to offer 1 year of minimum data retention at the end of their life cycle.

The data retention of NAND memory decreases with wear and is relatively long in new state conditions (>10 years). Since enterprise drives need to guarantee a shorter minimum residual data retention period, their NAND can be specified for a higher number of P/E cycles, that is, amount of data written, which is what matters the most for their intended userbase.

It's a matter of guarantees, in the end. Consumer NAND can usually be pushed to the same wear level of equivalent enterprise NAND. However there's no guarantee that it will still have a minimum of 3 months of data retention, that it will be within JEDEC-specifications required bit error rate margins, or that it will get there at all.

 

[lopyx]

So what about a OCZ RevoDrive 3?

don't buy OCZ D:

Now how do you go about putting Windows 7 on it? Do I have to slip stream the drivers into a Windows disk?

you can't boot from a pci ssd..

 

[John Connor]

you can't boot from a pci ssd..

Yeah, you can. I just got done watching a video on a guy demonstrating how to install windows on one of these and you load the driver when the Windows install screen loads. There's a trick that you have to do to get Windows on it. I'm just going to clone to one after I install the driver.

 

[lopyx]

cool they fixed that
but I still not like the OCZ RevoDrive 3
it's a 2011 product with still broken TRIM or Unmap support and the performance for bucks are still sheit

http://techreport.com/review/22663/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-240gb-solid-state-drive

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/revodrive-3-x2,2967.html


better go for two 840 pro in RAID 0 for the same $$$ :awe:

 

[Essence_of_War]

What are you doing with this SSD that you believe that you'll be taking advantage of 1 GB/s sequential reads from the single drive?

 

[FiLeZz]

I can tell you first hand you can not tell the difference in 1100 mb/s vs 550 mb/s real world.

I just swaped out my raid 0 corsair force gt ssd drives fro a Samsung 1tb evo. I can not tell the difference unless I run a benchmark. The extra speed was not worth my cash vs the extra space.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Yeah, that's sort of what I was thinking too FiLeZz.

OP, it's fine if you just want the hottest of hot rods to say that you have the hottest of hot rods, but if real-world performance or perf/dollar matters to you, I would spend that money on a good capacity model of any of the multitude of excellent consumer SSDs. Maybe step up to a Samsung 840 Pro or SanDisk Extreme II (or something similar) if you know you're going to be using it for video/photo editing scratch space.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I can tell you first hand you can not tell the difference in 1100 mb/s vs 550 mb/s real world.

I just swaped out my raid 0 corsair force gt ssd drives fro a Samsung 1tb evo. I can not tell the difference unless I run a benchmark. The extra speed was not worth my cash vs the extra space.

Its also mainly the seektime that made SSDs fast. 10000-14000us down to 65-85us.

 

[John Connor]

I thought originally that I would use a RAM drive for Flight Simulator so that terrain loads faster. When I have 3rd party terrain installed it takes forever to load and I have to constantly refresh the sim. So a 1GB/s card should work with what I'm doing.

Keep in mind I don't currently have the luxury of SATA III. At the moment I'm using a SATA II SSD in a SATA II MOBO..

 

[mode101wpb]

you can't boot from a pci ssd..

I boot FreeNAS from a PCI SSD, no problems also have booted Windows from it without issues.

 

[mode101wpb]

I heard MLCs suck. Is this true? I want to buy an enterprise SSD PCI-E card and they all seem to be MLC, but they are fast!

Enterprise SSD that are good tend to be SLC = $$$$$

I am looking at several SSD on Egg, seems many got great reviews.

 

[AdamK47]

Get an OCZ drive.

 

[Charlie98]

I thought originally that I would use a RAM drive for Flight Simulator so that terrain loads faster.

Keep in mind I don't currently have the luxury of SATA III. At the moment I'm using a SATA II SSD in a SATA II MOBO..

I'm curious to see if an SSD makes terrain load faster in FS... I wouldn't think so, but maybe.

I don't think it matters what SSD you get... plugged into SATA 2.

Personally, I wouldn't give the type of NAND another thought... by the time you could wear an SSD out, they will be down to $59 for a 1TB SSD...