Indeed. We will have to wait and see. Hopefully the numbers are not too optimistic. Hopefully there are not too many firmware pains. Still...it's an exciting time for SSD development. Beginning of next year is when I will be ready to buy an SSD for my desktop (have one in my laptop already). Should be nice new choices by then!
better yet, put that behind Nvelo's "Dataplex" software, and use it as a cache for your disk(s). Seems like a waste to use it as a storage drive, most bits sitting idle most of the time...
Well yes, you could get infinite life out of it (or any other SSD) if you never actually used it... The point is that if you are going to spend the $$'s for the SSD that uses this controller (I assume both NAND and controller will be spendy), then you want to actually "use" it, and get the max efficiency out of it. Using it as a storage drive means that most bits are sitting idle, using it as a cache drive keeps it working more. Get that Ferrari out of the barn and drive it!
I really don't get the obsession whit raid specially raid 0
Its the IOPs that count for how fast your PC boots ore starts programs and whit 60k IOPs i think you're covert.
Putting these drives in R0 could actually for some data patterns slow them down as data is divided over 2 drives they have to arrive at the same time ore one of the drives have to wait for the other to catch up.
Yes you will see a huge boost in sequential reads/writs but whit small random data the benefit would negative, and the overall benefit would be around up to a 5% benefit. and the down side would be the higher risk of data loss if one of the drives breaks down.
No it isn't. Typical PC boot and app loading is linear in nature, it's only benchmarks that try to do several things (IOPS) simultaneously, very limited apps or servers which need IOPS significantly more than random read/write performance.
You are also incorrect about slowing them down waiting because if not the drives' DRAM cache, there is the system main memory cache, and on some raid controllers (mid to higher end discrete cards) there is even the *3rd* level of controller cache on the card.
Overall benefit 5%? LOL, if you are going to make up numbers at least try harder to get close or, get ready for it, actually try it as-in actually RAIDing two then run typical PC usage representative benchmarks.
Overall the benefit will depend highly on task, or to put it another way you probably don't need to speed up things that are already reasonably quick, rather to focus on the slowest or most demanding tasks on that "PC".
I want to see some benches first before I believe ANYTHING.
Same with SF1200. 275MB/s seq. writes on paper but in reality you are down to 100-140MB/s. Same for the IOPS. So yeah - unless I see some real benches...
Agreed, however even if we get real world speed improvements proportional to the best case "on-paper" specs then we're looking at well over 400/MB read and 200MB/sec write real world speeds, which would be amazing for a single drive without resorting to a RAID controller.
Intel really seems to be falling by the wayside when we compare these projected specs to what Intel is claiming with their G3 drives, which don't look too threatening to current Sandforce drives let alone this future beast. Hopefully this means some competitive pricing that finally starts to truly drive down SSD prices.
These specs are controller specs, not SSD specs - remember that. These specs are, what the controller can handle - Flash NOT included. So I would really be impressed if we see those specs on a MLC-based SSD for us consumers.
Playing the "steady as she goes" song seems a very sensible path for Intel considering the Rock'n'Roll stuff others play. While Intel really wants to be major player LONG-TERM, they need not hurry.
Alas they had their share of mess with buggy FW upgrades not so long ago. I do not see them being overly aggressive anytime soon.
It isn't all about the controller. Intel will have, at least for a while, a huge lead in price/performance because they are going to 25 nm flash. They will get nearly double the capacity of current 34 nm flash for the same price. Others will also move to 25 nm flash, eventually, but meanwhile, Intel will have an advantage. Also, Intel's controllers have proven to be really good in the real world, and the new one is expected to be on par with SF-1200.
I'm sure SF-2000 will be the better performer, but if I a 300 GB Intel drive is the same price as a 160 GB SF-2000 drive, then the SF-2000 drive better be twice as fast. It remains to be seen, but if the SF-2000 isn't WAY, WAY faster, then I'll take twice the capacity for the same price any day.
Totally agreed. And the more "application-specific" the benchmark is, the better. There is so much data 'manipulation' going on inside these modern SSD controllers that you almost need to run "your own" workloads to gauge actual performance.
Intel's revealed specs on the G3's performance were so underwhelming that it wouldn't take much to destroy them when it comes to performance. SandForce's previous generation parts are already faster than the G3 on paper in terms of sequential transfer rates. Even if they don't surpass that in practice, they're not that far off, so it wouldn't take much of a performance increase from SandForce's next-gen parts to surpass that.
Intel's 3G's SSDs overall performance should be way over SandForce's actual generations SSDs simply thanks to superior IOPS (read/write 50000/40000).
Now, if Intel's 25nm production technology produces significantly cheaper SSDs, could Intel's SSD remain somewhat competitive choice in every day desktop use with its pretty decent speed. Especially if SandForce is putting a hefty pricetag to its new controller.
Keep in mind that Intel sells a complete drives not just the controller. They can affort to make their profits not only from the controller but from the entire product. Other SSD manufacturer pay the profit margin of the controller manufacturer as well as the falsh manufacturer and therefore at the end of the day the cost of their final product is highe than Intel's. Intel can affort to sale their products at a significantly lower price than its compatitor and still maintain higher profitability than Sandforce (controller manufacturer) and OCZ, Corsair (drive manufacturers). I believe that Intel position its G3 to capture larger market instead of trying to acheave king of the hill performance. If the supply for SSD begins to match the demand prices of SSDs might start shooting down (as we have been promised for a while now) and Intel will be the big winner. As I've said before, Intel's performance is enough for the needs of the mainsteam PC user that is currently using fast HDDs due to the high cost of SSDs.
You mean 25nm vs 34nm? And Intel products are generally not vaporware. They have a fairly good record of delivery. This isn't Duke Nukem Forever, here.
That link indicates that the company in question is using SLC flash in their drives. This is guaranteed to put them out of the same price range as the Intel and Sandforce MLC drives, the latter already being expensive enough to be seriously limited in their market uptake. Conclusion: almost nobody is buying the Pliant Technology drives because they are too expensive compared to other options.
Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives.
X25-E and the Sandforce stuff is mostly good for HPC and lower mid-range, but mostly DAS setups. The EMC's of this world use far more robust (and far more pricey) solutions.
"""X25-E and the Sandforce stuff is mostly good for HPC and lower mid-range, but mostly DAS setups."""
X25-E is an SLC drive. The X25-M is MLC.
"""Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives."""
You'll find that vendors are not targeting MLC at enterprises, but rather eMLC, which is somewhat different.
And you'd be wrong about enterprises wanting to avoid eMLC drives. They (will) serve pretty well for many work loads, in places where SLC is cost prohibitive, and spinning disks are too slow.
"Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives" ????
I work for HP in the Server division and all I can legally tell you is your WRONG.
PS: Ever heard of a slow little drive called the ioDrive Duo? The 640GB model uses MLC. I recently sold 3 of these to a Global 100 company that plans to run a SQL based Data Mining app on them.
...Isn't going to stay relevant long, is it? Already up to 500MB/s SSD's, and SATA 3 isn't even mainstream yet. Its going to become a bottleneck soon, just like SATA II is for current SSD's.
Can we plug 2 SATA 6Gbps into a Single 2.5" SSD? We manage to max out SATA 3.0 in one go, and it is SATA 3.0 not even widely available yet.
I hope the there would be at least some minor improvement in their DuraWrite and other part of the controller. Otherwise it looks like an overclocked Sandforce with better NAND interface to me.
Firmware should be less of an issues, since it is similar to older chips, the firmware should be stable enough. Cant wait......
Ehh, you know 12Gbit SATA/SAS is due out in 2012, right? That's about in time for Sandforce's 3rd gen controller.
And just because they've managed to double their bandwidth with this generation doesn't mean they've still got another trick up their sleeves to double their bandwidth again for the rev after this one.
we're not talking physical limitations of a head moving back and forth on a spinning disk.... doubling performance at the least is much more the norm in the realm of silicon, nothing remotely close to a "trick" about it
I hope we get light peak before that; I just like the idea of my data flashing around through my pc in bursts of light. It's all so very "future is now."
No Trick, DDR NAND @ 133Mbps x 8 Channel already gives you just over 1Gbps SSD. And that is with CURRENT tech, the best thing about SSD is that it is easily scalable. You could do 10 Channel like Intel, ( Expensive ), or 16 Channel for total bandwidth since you get 16 Chips on a SSD.
You could also speed up NAND with DDR tech or small node but higher clockspeed.
The only limitation is how fast the controller could work. Which we still have much headroom.
Sandy Bridge and the Intel 60 series chipsets. Intel has already announced they will have 2 SATA 6Gbps ports on those chipsets.
Core i7 2620M with 8GB of DDR3 and a SATA6G SSD? Yes Please! Stick a 750GB Green SATA Drive where the Optical drive usually goes and then just use a $40 USB DVD Drive when you really need it (rarely now that DVDs include the "digital copy" and software companies are embracing online delivery. And of course throw in an nVidia Optimus 4xx as well.
In a battle of specs, I am going to trust Intel a lot, and Sandforce not at all.
The most careful SSD reviews these days are coming from bit-tech.net. They use AS-SSD to test sequential write speed for incompressible data, and also they fill the drive up with data, delete it, run TRIM, and then test the drive again.
Check out the lighter-colored bars on the sequential write speeds. Those are the speeds after writing a lot to the drives and then TRIM. Note that the Intel X25-M 160GB gets 99 MB/s sequential write even after being heavily used. It is spec'ed at 100 MB/s sequential write. Just as Intel specified, so their SSD performs.
Next, look at the Sandforce drives lighter-bar sequential write, for example, the OCZ Vertex 2E 120GB. This is a drive that is spec'ed at 275 MB/s sequential write. But when someone actually measures the speed with realistic data, after the drive has been used, it only manages a pathetic 83 MB/s sequential write. That is only 30.2% of the spec'ed value, and is even lower than Intel's 99 MB/s !
Or look at the Revodrive, which is two SF drives in parallel with a RAID controller. It is spec'ed at 490 MB/s sequential write, which looks quite similar to what Sandforce is claiming for the SF2000 series. But what is the actual, real world sequential write for the Revodrive? bit-tech.net measured it, and it is a pathetic 139 MB/s. A single Crucial C300 256GB drive achieves 190 MB/s !
Bottom line is that none of Sandforce's specifications can be believed.
Just wanted to tell you, that the german site computerbase.de came to the same conclusion. They even had a talk with OCZ about it and they admitted it: the sandforce drives lose performance after being heavily used which cannot be restored with TRIM, only with a secure erase. Sequential write on random data dropped from 140MB/s (fresh) to 90MB/s (used) on a Vertex 2 120GB. Real world usage was still pretty good though.
You have to benchmark the drives with an application you're actually using. If you only write encrypted data that looks random, then do not buy a Sandforce.
On the other hand, if you use real programs the data will not be random and the Sandforce will perform well.
They use incompressable data for what you linked. That's not realistic. That's worst case scenario, which is unlikely to happen. I believe anand did a set of similar tests and got a low speed too. SF's speed relies heavily on compressing data.
I suspect that SandForce worker force is out of this world. I think the slides that we just witnessed today confirm that indeed Aliens have come to this planet and are working for SandDorce. How else would you explain such amazing performance on very new technology in so short time?
I call all UFO hunters and Aliens investigators to go to SandForce HQ and investigate, ladies and gentlemen this way be the most historic day in the history of planet earth by uncovering aliens working for a human firm.
It is the Sandforce marketing department that is impressive. They have a lot of people drinking their Kool-aid. But Sandforce's actual technology does not live up to their hype.
Note that the Sandforce drives got beat by the C300 and the X25-E on the benchmark you cited. Neither of those SSDs claims a write speed as high as 275 MB/s as Sandforce does.
Also check out these benchmarks of copying real data files:
The Sandforce drives do not even achieve 50% of their claimed write speed when faced with copying realistic data files. With real files, their write speeds are about 130 MB/s on a fresh SSD, and drop to about 83 MB/s on a well-used SSD.
This from a company that claims 275 MB/s write speeds. Sandforce is good at hype, not so much at delivering what they claim.
Also check out these benchmarks of copying real data files:
(couldn't include this in previous comment)
bit.ly/96HJIL
The Sandforce drives do not even achieve 50% of their claimed write speed when faced with copying realistic data files. With real files, their write speeds are about 130 MB/s on a fresh SSD, and drop to about 83 MB/s on a well-used SSD.
Seriously, how often do you spend the majority of your time copying that many files to other drives?
Those examples are pretty selective and also, it's hardly fair to pit SLC against MLC. Special use scenarios are all fine and good, but for your typical user, the current SF MLC drives beat Intel MLC in typical multi-tasking real-world scenarios (AT's benchmark, Vantage).
According to AT's reviews of SF-based drives, they all bounce back original speeds after TRIM... with "real" files. Intel degrades over time as well and then is restored after TRIM. It's the nature of the beast.
The evidence points strongly to SF beating out Intel overall by a substantial margin in real-world and synthetic tests, with Intel only winning in a handful of non-typical scenarios. I think you're just seeing what you want to see.
Copying files is a basic benchmark which gives an indication of how all other reads and writes will go. If a drive performs at less than half its claimed specification when copying files, you can be sure that it will perform similarly poorly on other tests.
Yes, Anand's tests missed the Sandforce problem of performance degradation that cannot be recovered through TRIM, I'm not sure what your point is. Surely no one thinks Anand is perfect. The problem is real, and has been observed by bit-tech and by computerbase. I have also spoken with several people who have seen the problem themselves.
And the evidence is that Intel matches or beats Sandforce on most real world tests, when you are looking at a well-used drive. Sandforce's used performance degradation is really bad when you are writing data that its controller cannot compress.
Copying files is not necessarily representative of normal workloads, you need a course in deductive reasoning. You cannot assume that large, contiguous, compressed files copied one at a time are at all representative of small, uncompressed, random files accessed concurrently.
This seems to be a bit unfair with SF. Since their Controllers (or lets say SSDs with their controllers) can achieve a fairly high IOps count, you should at least bench the aggregate bandwidth they achieve with multiple file transfers at once...
If this is a realistic workload or not depends entirely on your needs of course, but you also should choose Hard Drives and especially SSDs depending on your application and what delivers the best performance for you. Maybe SF-SSDs aren't the best SSDs for your average workload if speedy large single-file data transfer is your main goal. :)
Anand has covered this already. Compression reduces write amplification, thus improves performance in most workloads, and extends Flash life by writing to NAND less.
"SandForce’s controller gets around the inherent problems with writing to NAND by simply writing less" - from this article.
No drive is perfect. Most large files, such as what you linked with 6.8 GB files, are compressed already. Highly compressed files like movies do not benefit from SF compression, but they also don't need to. How fast do you watch a movie? All of my movies are on hard drives.
This is not Kool-Aid, this is a choice. Use what is most appropriate for your workloads. Don't trash-talk the drive or mislead others due to one type of synthetic benchmark, or one supposed "real world scenario" that really is not what most people would use them for anyway.
Just accept that this drive has less performance with compressed, encrypted, or truly random files. I have, and I have moved on. I have purchased three sf drives while being fully aware of that fact, two OCZ LE's and a G.Skill Phoenix Pro. I do not use compressed data on them anyway, just windows and applications, all are compressible. Well, mostly compressible.
"The SF-1200/1500 controllers have a real time AES-128 encryption engine. Set a BIOS password and the drive should be locked unless you supply that password once again (note I haven’t actually tried this)."
Why don't you? No site I've found have and this would differentiate AnandTech. Surely it's of interest for anyone with a laptop?
As a Sandforce SSD owner (60GB Corsair Force) I hope they won't forget SF-1200 customers and release a firmware that fixes random disappearing drives. while the computer is working as well as in idle. There is a 30-page topic on Corsair forums about this. My drive so far stuck three times since the end of July, so you can live with it even if it's a bit annoying, but there are reports of suddenly erased drives. The firmware here is the key, and as Anand has already shown they aren't flawless.
About SF-2000 drives, it would be interesting to see if there is a benefit switching from an "old" SF-1200 drive from the consumer perspective. Half a gigabyte in a second is pretty astounding, but if it translates into less than a second faster at loading a software, I suppose Intel 25nm's drives could be better because of their cost per gigabyte.
Interesting. Also the other comments. Did not know that sf-drives have so much issues. Well I'm glad now I went conservative an bought an Intel 80 Gb drive. No issues till now and it's fast enough for me. My PC now boots faster than most other devices like my mobile phone (And I don't even have one of those fancy ones).
Thank you for posting your real world experience agent smith, i've seen alot of people talking about these drives but also alot of people saying once you hit data it can't compress its start to get slower than intel drives.
I will be waiting for real benchmarks aswell because right now those are just controller specs and the actual retail product might be slower I also highly doubt they will release consumer drives that read/write at 500/500 if they can actually live up to this performance.
After looking at the intel specs again I understand why they aren't going balls out for speed, reliablity and capacity are bigger driving factors in the current market people wants prices to go down and size up more so than 500mb/s.
Q1 2011 will be interesting.... alot of people said in 2009 that 2010 will be the year for SSD's well I think they were off by a year.
After their announcement of first generation product, which was extremely buggy, it took 1.5 yrs to make it work. Let's see how long this one takes. Rumor is that they have issues with sequential bandwidth.
Just a small question, I have wondered if normal drive imaging/cloning is still possible on SandForce based drives? and are there any limitations to the type of drives that the image can be restored to.
"SandForce’s controller gets around the inherent problems with writing to NAND by simply writing less. Using real time compression and data deduplication algorithms, the SF controllers store a representation of your data and not the actual data itself. The reduced data stored on the drive is also encrypted and stored redundantly across the NAND to guarantee against dataloss from page level or block level failures. Both of these features are made possible by the fact that there’s simply less data to manage. "
When I read that it makes it sound like you would not get a proper image of a drive. I am currently using Acronis software to make images of my own computers which use Intel SSD's and everything seems to work fine.
You would get a drive image just fine. All the remapping and compression and redundant storing and encryption AND wear-leveling happen behind the scenes.
Acronis would only see the data and 'sectors'.. Sector 1 *IS* sector 1, regardless of where it is stored on the drive. Sector 1's data may be spread across several pages or blocks and chips. But that is irrelevant.
If you ask for data at sector 1, you get data from sector 1. Simple as that. So yes, it will work just fine.
2 facts: -A single NAND (dual plane) reads 330MB/s and writes 33MB/s -Controllers looks like being capable of aggregating the bandwidth of more and more NAND
Hypothesis 2012: -A quad plane NAND may reads 660MB/s and writes 66MB/s (using 16KB page) -Controllers may read/write from 8 NAND simultaneously (think of a 128KB stripe) ==> Reads @ 4GB/s and Writes @ 500MB/s may be expected !
This clearly means we are facing an INTERFACE bandwidth bottleneck !!!
SAS 3Gb or SATA II and their 300MB/s are just ridiculous ...but SAS 6Gb and SATA III and their 600MB/s looks already outdated
What's next for those SSD interfaces : -SAS or SATA 12Gb ? Not mature enough ! -FC 16Gb ? Always been so pricey ! -100Gb Ethernet and iSCSI embedded ? This is a revolution ! -Infiniband 40Gb ? A good challenger !
I think the only possible "short term" solution will be PCIe...
But to be honest: I think we need to stop somewhere. No home user needs 4GB/s. I rather have a really stable, cheap 1GB/s drive, with a robust firmware than a 4GB/s unstable thing I don't need. Of course - faster is always better, and there will be a time where 4GB/s + stable + cheap is possible, but seriously...the computers of today are too slow to handle this (talking about IOPS now). You probably won't see a difference between a 100k IOPS drive and a 30k IOPS drive using a hexacore. The bottleneck in real performance isn't the drive anymore, it's the CPU (at least with about 2-3 drives on external controller).
So yeah - to be honest, I don't really care about huuuuuge numbers anymore - all I want is a cheap, really stable, bug-free, big drive with nice performance.
1. reads 330MB/s and writes 33MB/s ?? I think you need reference to backup your "facts" DDR /Toggle Mode NAND only reads @ 166Mbps ( Mega Bits, Not Bytes as you reference )
But yes, NAND SSD speed is easily scalable. ( As i mentioned in previous comment which i asked the same question )
We will be limited by controller, someday due to all the error correction, overhead etc. But that is still very far off.
In the thread i posted in forum about Diminishing returns of SSD Speed. Basically concludes we have already / near reach that tipping point. Because under very limited situation you will ever need 4GB/s Read write speed. It is the Random Read Write that will count.
However software still assume we are on HDD, therefore we will be limited to OS, drivers and other side of software to see any other performance difference.
This reminds me very much of the Hewlett-Packard cartridge tape drives of the mid-nineties. They were sold as "250MB" although they really only held 125MB. The fake rating was created by assuming all your data could be compressed by 50% !! Impressive work by HP - advancing the standard of US technical innovation.
Anyway, I really hope Anandtech will test these SSDs with compressed files as well.
Even do if these drives come out and will be near enough to the price of a Vertex 2 i will certainly get one, but what i am waiting for even more is a controller whit native PCIe 4x ore 8x support.
PCIe 2.x got a bi-directional throughput off 500MB/s per lane, that hold in that PCIe 2.x throughput of 250MB data in and/ore 250MB data out, minus +/- 20% overhead. PCIe 4x ((4 x 250MB = 1GB) - 20% = 800MB/s) ore PCIe 8x ((8 x 250MB = 2GB) - 20% = 1.6GB/s)
Also saves a lot of steps of the ones currently in use (RevoDrive: SATA > raid controller > PCI-X > PCIe) ore the more expensive ones (other one's: SATA > raid controller > PCIe)
"At full speed you could copy 1GB of data from a SF-2000 drive to another SF-2000 drive in 2 seconds. If SandForce can actually deliver this sort of performance I will be blown away."
I don't give much of a hoot about 6GB/s controllers and sequential performance. I'd be happier to see a 1.5GB/s interface actually utilized. Real desktop and a lot of server use consists of overlapping highly random reads, and moderately random writes. Loading an application with tons of resource files, saving documents and state to 3 or 4 directories at once, things like that. This is the whole big win of SSDs: eliminating the seek time. So I don't care about some 500MB/s number if you happen to be copying a giant file from one freshly written drive to a new blank drive. I do care about random access to a heavily used disk, and this is still sitting back in the realm of 10's of MB/s.
In fact this whole hoopla about ever-increasing pure sequential transfers reminds me of the megahertz wars -- everyone shouted 10 years ago about this several hundred MHz or that GHz, meanwhile memory (and hence most actual computing) poked along at tens of MHz. Most of the progress in CPUs since that time has been in using all kinds of fancy branch prediction and pipelining structures exactly for the purpose of dealing with memory latency.
It certainly looks as if we are approaching some amazing speeds in the months to come, lovely.
But what is it with RAID, that makes it pop up every now and then in storage-reviews?
"... the sort of performance you’ll be able to get through a multi-drive array will be staggering..."
As far as I can read in every single test of RAID-0 vs single drives I´ve ever read - here at Anandtech inclusive - it appears, that there is no real difference in speed with a RAID-0 setup.
In synthetic benchmarks, there is a measurable effect, but in everyday use there is none.
A lot of folks in various forums claim they have doubled their transfer-speed, some even tripled, but everytime a serious Magazine like Your own, Tom´s, BitTech or others try to find out just how great it is, it always end up the same way: No bang for the buck at all.
Are there maybe new aspects when we´re talking SSD´s, that I am not aware of?
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karndog - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Put two of these babys in RAID0 for 1GB/s reads AND writes. Very nice IF it lives up to expectations!Silenus - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Indeed. We will have to wait and see. Hopefully the numbers are not too optimistic. Hopefully there are not too many firmware pains. Still...it's an exciting time for SSD development. Beginning of next year is when I will be ready to buy an SSD for my desktop (have one in my laptop already). Should be nice new choices by then!Nihility - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
It'll be 1 GB/s only on non-compressed / non-random data.Still, very cool.
mailman65er - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
better yet, put that behind Nvelo's "Dataplex" software, and use it as a cache for your disk(s). Seems like a waste to use it as a storage drive, most bits sitting idle most of the time...vol7ron - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
"most bits sitting idle most of the time... "Thus, the extenuation life.
mailman65er - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Thus, the extenuation life.Well yes, you could get infinite life out of it (or any other SSD) if you never actually used it...
The point is that if you are going to spend the $$'s for the SSD that uses this controller (I assume both NAND and controller will be spendy), then you want to actually "use" it, and get the max efficiency out of it. Using it as a storage drive means that most bits are sitting idle, using it as a cache drive keeps it working more. Get that Ferrari out of the barn and drive it!
mindless1 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Actually no, the last thing you want to use a MLC flash SSD drive for is mere, constant write, caching.Havor - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I really don't get the obsession whit raid specially raid 0Its the IOPs that count for how fast your PC boots ore starts programs and whit 60k IOPs i think you're covert.
Putting these drives in R0 could actually for some data patterns slow them down as data is divided over 2 drives they have to arrive at the same time ore one of the drives have to wait for the other to catch up.
Yes you will see a huge boost in sequential reads/writs but whit small random data the benefit would negative, and the overall benefit would be around up to a 5% benefit. and the down side would be the higher risk of data loss if one of the drives breaks down.
mindless1 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
No it isn't. Typical PC boot and app loading is linear in nature, it's only benchmarks that try to do several things (IOPS) simultaneously, very limited apps or servers which need IOPS significantly more than random read/write performance.You are also incorrect about slowing them down waiting because if not the drives' DRAM cache, there is the system main memory cache, and on some raid controllers (mid to higher end discrete cards) there is even the *3rd* level of controller cache on the card.
Overall benefit 5%? LOL, if you are going to make up numbers at least try harder to get close or, get ready for it, actually try it as-in actually RAIDing two then run typical PC usage representative benchmarks.
Overall the benefit will depend highly on task, or to put it another way you probably don't need to speed up things that are already reasonably quick, rather to focus on the slowest or most demanding tasks on that "PC".
Golgatha - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
DO WANT!!!IceDread - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Hehe oh yes.Looks like they beat intel's new controller as well, impressive!
Chloiber - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I want to see some benches first before I believe ANYTHING.Same with SF1200. 275MB/s seq. writes on paper but in reality you are down to 100-140MB/s.
Same for the IOPS.
So yeah - unless I see some real benches...
bunnyfubbles - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Agreed, however even if we get real world speed improvements proportional to the best case "on-paper" specs then we're looking at well over 400/MB read and 200MB/sec write real world speeds, which would be amazing for a single drive without resorting to a RAID controller.Intel really seems to be falling by the wayside when we compare these projected specs to what Intel is claiming with their G3 drives, which don't look too threatening to current Sandforce drives let alone this future beast. Hopefully this means some competitive pricing that finally starts to truly drive down SSD prices.
Chloiber - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
These specs are controller specs, not SSD specs - remember that.These specs are, what the controller can handle - Flash NOT included. So I would really be impressed if we see those specs on a MLC-based SSD for us consumers.
mino - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Playing the "steady as she goes" song seems a very sensible path for Intel considering the Rock'n'Roll stuff others play.While Intel really wants to be major player LONG-TERM, they need not hurry.
Alas they had their share of mess with buggy FW upgrades not so long ago. I do not see them being overly aggressive anytime soon.
Jaybus - Saturday, October 16, 2010 - link
It isn't all about the controller. Intel will have, at least for a while, a huge lead in price/performance because they are going to 25 nm flash. They will get nearly double the capacity of current 34 nm flash for the same price. Others will also move to 25 nm flash, eventually, but meanwhile, Intel will have an advantage. Also, Intel's controllers have proven to be really good in the real world, and the new one is expected to be on par with SF-1200.I'm sure SF-2000 will be the better performer, but if I a 300 GB Intel drive is the same price as a 160 GB SF-2000 drive, then the SF-2000 drive better be twice as fast. It remains to be seen, but if the SF-2000 isn't WAY, WAY faster, then I'll take twice the capacity for the same price any day.
mailman65er - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
So yeah - unless I see some real benches...Totally agreed. And the more "application-specific" the benchmark is, the better. There is so much data 'manipulation' going on inside these modern SSD controllers that you almost need to run "your own" workloads to gauge actual performance.
Guspaz - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Intel's revealed specs on the G3's performance were so underwhelming that it wouldn't take much to destroy them when it comes to performance. SandForce's previous generation parts are already faster than the G3 on paper in terms of sequential transfer rates. Even if they don't surpass that in practice, they're not that far off, so it wouldn't take much of a performance increase from SandForce's next-gen parts to surpass that.rundll - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Intel's 3G's SSDs overall performance should be way over SandForce's actual generations SSDs simply thanks to superior IOPS (read/write 50000/40000).Now, if Intel's 25nm production technology produces significantly cheaper SSDs, could Intel's SSD remain somewhat competitive choice in every day desktop use with its pretty decent speed. Especially if SandForce is putting a hefty pricetag to its new controller.
We'll see.
jonup - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Keep in mind that Intel sells a complete drives not just the controller. They can affort to make their profits not only from the controller but from the entire product. Other SSD manufacturer pay the profit margin of the controller manufacturer as well as the falsh manufacturer and therefore at the end of the day the cost of their final product is highe than Intel's. Intel can affort to sale their products at a significantly lower price than its compatitor and still maintain higher profitability than Sandforce (controller manufacturer) and OCZ, Corsair (drive manufacturers).I believe that Intel position its G3 to capture larger market instead of trying to acheave king of the hill performance. If the supply for SSD begins to match the demand prices of SSDs might start shooting down (as we have been promised for a while now) and Intel will be the big winner. As I've said before, Intel's performance is enough for the needs of the mainsteam PC user that is currently using fast HDDs due to the high cost of SSDs.
ibudic1 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Intel will be slower, but I bet it will be more reliable.Intel will also be able to offer twice the storage for the same amount 22nm vs 32 nm.
So high stable performance and twice the area, vs fast and small. So far all of this is vaporware.
Nihility - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I wouldn't call the Intel product vaporware. It's almost guaranteed that they'll ship them on time.ggathagan - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I believe ibudic1 was referring to the Sandforce controller as vaporware, not Intel's product.sbrown23 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
You mean 25nm vs 34nm? And Intel products are generally not vaporware. They have a fairly good record of delivery. This isn't Duke Nukem Forever, here.anindividual - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
http://www.plianttechnology.com/They have had an enterprise drive line with a proprietary controller on the market for over a year with much of this capability.
bji - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
That link indicates that the company in question is using SLC flash in their drives. This is guaranteed to put them out of the same price range as the Intel and Sandforce MLC drives, the latter already being expensive enough to be seriously limited in their market uptake. Conclusion: almost nobody is buying the Pliant Technology drives because they are too expensive compared to other options.mino - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives.X25-E and the Sandforce stuff is mostly good for HPC and lower mid-range, but mostly DAS setups.
The EMC's of this world use far more robust (and far more pricey) solutions.
nexox - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
"""X25-E and the Sandforce stuff is mostly good for HPC and lower mid-range, but mostly DAS setups."""X25-E is an SLC drive. The X25-M is MLC.
"""Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives."""
You'll find that vendors are not targeting MLC at enterprises, but rather eMLC, which is somewhat different.
And you'd be wrong about enterprises wanting to avoid eMLC drives. They (will) serve pretty well for many work loads, in places where SLC is cost prohibitive, and spinning disks are too slow.
Casper42 - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
"Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives" ????I work for HP in the Server division and all I can legally tell you is your WRONG.
PS: Ever heard of a slow little drive called the ioDrive Duo? The 640GB model uses MLC. I recently sold 3 of these to a Global 100 company that plans to run a SQL based Data Mining app on them.
HachavBanav - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Pliant "LB 150S" = 150GB (2.5" + SLC + SAS dual port ) for $4500 !@anindividual : please ask your boss to review the price, this is just non-sense !
tipoo - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
...Isn't going to stay relevant long, is it? Already up to 500MB/s SSD's, and SATA 3 isn't even mainstream yet. Its going to become a bottleneck soon, just like SATA II is for current SSD's.rundll - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Well, OCZ introduced few days back a new data link interface HSDL to handle Sata bottlenecks. Let's see what this means in real life.aguilpa1 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Break out your piggy banks if this is the wavejonup - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
They are a private company. As Anand said, a success of the new controller might force them in an IPOiwodo - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Can we plug 2 SATA 6Gbps into a Single 2.5" SSD? We manage to max out SATA 3.0 in one go, and it is SATA 3.0 not even widely available yet.I hope the there would be at least some minor improvement in their DuraWrite and other part of the controller. Otherwise it looks like an overclocked Sandforce with better NAND interface to me.
Firmware should be less of an issues, since it is similar to older chips, the firmware should be stable enough.
Cant wait......
rundll - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
"...Otherwise it looks like an overclocked Sandforce with better NAND interface to me"Did we read the same article?
nexox - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Ehh, you know 12Gbit SATA/SAS is due out in 2012, right? That's about in time for Sandforce's 3rd gen controller.And just because they've managed to double their bandwidth with this generation doesn't mean they've still got another trick up their sleeves to double their bandwidth again for the rev after this one.
Iketh - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
we're not talking physical limitations of a head moving back and forth on a spinning disk.... doubling performance at the least is much more the norm in the realm of silicon, nothing remotely close to a "trick" about itsoftdrinkviking - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I hope we get light peak before that; I just like the idea of my data flashing around through my pc in bursts of light. It's all so very "future is now."iwodo - Saturday, October 9, 2010 - link
No Trick, DDR NAND @ 133Mbps x 8 Channel already gives you just over 1Gbps SSD.And that is with CURRENT tech, the best thing about SSD is that it is easily scalable. You could do 10 Channel like Intel, ( Expensive ), or 16 Channel for total bandwidth since you get 16 Chips on a SSD.
You could also speed up NAND with DDR tech or small node but higher clockspeed.
The only limitation is how fast the controller could work. Which we still have much headroom.
Casper42 - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
You know what else comes out in Early 2011?Sandy Bridge and the Intel 60 series chipsets.
Intel has already announced they will have 2 SATA 6Gbps ports on those chipsets.
Core i7 2620M with 8GB of DDR3 and a SATA6G SSD? Yes Please!
Stick a 750GB Green SATA Drive where the Optical drive usually goes and then just use a $40 USB DVD Drive when you really need it (rarely now that DVDs include the "digital copy" and software companies are embracing online delivery.
And of course throw in an nVidia Optimus 4xx as well.
Hector2 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
So we have a battle of Specs ? Sure makes the Marketer's jobs easierjwilliams4200 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
In a battle of specs, I am going to trust Intel a lot, and Sandforce not at all.The most careful SSD reviews these days are coming from bit-tech.net. They use AS-SSD to test sequential write speed for incompressible data, and also they fill the drive up with data, delete it, run TRIM, and then test the drive again.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/09/0...
Check out the lighter-colored bars on the sequential write speeds. Those are the speeds after writing a lot to the drives and then TRIM. Note that the Intel X25-M 160GB gets 99 MB/s sequential write even after being heavily used. It is spec'ed at 100 MB/s sequential write. Just as Intel specified, so their SSD performs.
Next, look at the Sandforce drives lighter-bar sequential write, for example, the OCZ Vertex 2E 120GB. This is a drive that is spec'ed at 275 MB/s sequential write. But when someone actually measures the speed with realistic data, after the drive has been used, it only manages a pathetic 83 MB/s sequential write. That is only 30.2% of the spec'ed value, and is even lower than Intel's 99 MB/s !
Or look at the Revodrive, which is two SF drives in parallel with a RAID controller. It is spec'ed at 490 MB/s sequential write, which looks quite similar to what Sandforce is claiming for the SF2000 series. But what is the actual, real world sequential write for the Revodrive? bit-tech.net measured it, and it is a pathetic 139 MB/s. A single Crucial C300 256GB drive achieves 190 MB/s !
Bottom line is that none of Sandforce's specifications can be believed.
Chloiber - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Just wanted to tell you, that the german site computerbase.de came to the same conclusion. They even had a talk with OCZ about it and they admitted it: the sandforce drives lose performance after being heavily used which cannot be restored with TRIM, only with a secure erase.Sequential write on random data dropped from 140MB/s (fresh) to 90MB/s (used) on a Vertex 2 120GB.
Real world usage was still pretty good though.
Zan Lynx - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Agreed about real world usage.You have to benchmark the drives with an application you're actually using. If you only write encrypted data that looks random, then do not buy a Sandforce.
On the other hand, if you use real programs the data will not be random and the Sandforce will perform well.
DoktorSleepless - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
They use incompressable data for what you linked. That's not realistic. That's worst case scenario, which is unlikely to happen. I believe anand did a set of similar tests and got a low speed too. SF's speed relies heavily on compressing data.hackztor - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
they never mentioned price. All is cool for 1gb in 2 seconds, but if the price is 1000, I think many consumers will have a hard time justifying this.Phynaz - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
It's not a consumer device.Chloiber - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
"Enterprise", "Industrial" - everything but conusmer.slickr - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I suspect that SandForce worker force is out of this world. I think the slides that we just witnessed today confirm that indeed Aliens have come to this planet and are working for SandDorce. How else would you explain such amazing performance on very new technology in so short time?I call all UFO hunters and Aliens investigators to go to SandForce HQ and investigate, ladies and gentlemen this way be the most historic day in the history of planet earth by uncovering aliens working for a human firm.
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
It is the Sandforce marketing department that is impressive. They have a lot of people drinking their Kool-aid. But Sandforce's actual technology does not live up to their hype.therealnickdanger - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
It doesn't?http://www.anandtech.com/Bench/SSD
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Note that the Sandforce drives got beat by the C300 and the X25-E on the benchmark you cited. Neither of those SSDs claims a write speed as high as 275 MB/s as Sandforce does.Also check out these benchmarks of copying real data files:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/794-11/ssd-2010...
The Sandforce drives do not even achieve 50% of their claimed write speed when faced with copying realistic data files. With real files, their write speeds are about 130 MB/s on a fresh SSD, and drop to about 83 MB/s on a well-used SSD.
This from a company that claims 275 MB/s write speeds. Sandforce is good at hype, not so much at delivering what they claim.
jwilliams4200 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Also check out these benchmarks of copying real data files:(couldn't include this in previous comment)
bit.ly/96HJIL
The Sandforce drives do not even achieve 50% of their claimed write speed when faced with copying realistic data files. With real files, their write speeds are about 130 MB/s on a fresh SSD, and drop to about 83 MB/s on a well-used SSD.
therealnickdanger - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Seriously, how often do you spend the majority of your time copying that many files to other drives?Those examples are pretty selective and also, it's hardly fair to pit SLC against MLC. Special use scenarios are all fine and good, but for your typical user, the current SF MLC drives beat Intel MLC in typical multi-tasking real-world scenarios (AT's benchmark, Vantage).
According to AT's reviews of SF-based drives, they all bounce back original speeds after TRIM... with "real" files. Intel degrades over time as well and then is restored after TRIM. It's the nature of the beast.
The evidence points strongly to SF beating out Intel overall by a substantial margin in real-world and synthetic tests, with Intel only winning in a handful of non-typical scenarios. I think you're just seeing what you want to see.
jwilliams4200 - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Copying files is a basic benchmark which gives an indication of how all other reads and writes will go. If a drive performs at less than half its claimed specification when copying files, you can be sure that it will perform similarly poorly on other tests.Yes, Anand's tests missed the Sandforce problem of performance degradation that cannot be recovered through TRIM, I'm not sure what your point is. Surely no one thinks Anand is perfect. The problem is real, and has been observed by bit-tech and by computerbase. I have also spoken with several people who have seen the problem themselves.
And the evidence is that Intel matches or beats Sandforce on most real world tests, when you are looking at a well-used drive. Sandforce's used performance degradation is really bad when you are writing data that its controller cannot compress.
'nar - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
Famously simple answer:"You're holding it wrong."
Copying files is not necessarily representative of normal workloads, you need a course in deductive reasoning. You cannot assume that large, contiguous, compressed files copied one at a time are at all representative of small, uncompressed, random files accessed concurrently.
Breit - Saturday, October 9, 2010 - link
This seems to be a bit unfair with SF. Since their Controllers (or lets say SSDs with their controllers) can achieve a fairly high IOps count, you should at least bench the aggregate bandwidth they achieve with multiple file transfers at once...If this is a realistic workload or not depends entirely on your needs of course, but you also should choose Hard Drives and especially SSDs depending on your application and what delivers the best performance for you. Maybe SF-SSDs aren't the best SSDs for your average workload if speedy large single-file data transfer is your main goal. :)
'nar - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
Anand has covered this already. Compression reduces write amplification, thus improves performance in most workloads, and extends Flash life by writing to NAND less."SandForce’s controller gets around the inherent problems with writing to NAND by simply writing less" - from this article.
Then here is the test with truly random data:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-s...
No drive is perfect. Most large files, such as what you linked with 6.8 GB files, are compressed already. Highly compressed files like movies do not benefit from SF compression, but they also don't need to. How fast do you watch a movie? All of my movies are on hard drives.
This is not Kool-Aid, this is a choice. Use what is most appropriate for your workloads. Don't trash-talk the drive or mislead others due to one type of synthetic benchmark, or one supposed "real world scenario" that really is not what most people would use them for anyway.
Just accept that this drive has less performance with compressed, encrypted, or truly random files. I have, and I have moved on. I have purchased three sf drives while being fully aware of that fact, two OCZ LE's and a G.Skill Phoenix Pro. I do not use compressed data on them anyway, just windows and applications, all are compressible. Well, mostly compressible.
vol7ron - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I imagine the added compression generates more heat for these components.Do you think that it will deteriorate the drive quicker?
I'm not up to speed on the cooling inside an SSD, but I'm curious what happens to performance when a few cells in the proc begin to go.
mino - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Not really. Remember how 5 Watt VIA chips crushed 130W quad cores by HW accelerating it.Encryption is not that hard for specialized circuitry.
DesktopMan - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
"The SF-1200/1500 controllers have a real time AES-128 encryption engine. Set a BIOS password and the drive should be locked unless you supply that password once again (note I haven’t actually tried this)."Why don't you? No site I've found have and this would differentiate AnandTech. Surely it's of interest for anyone with a laptop?
theagentsmith - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
As a Sandforce SSD owner (60GB Corsair Force) I hope they won't forget SF-1200 customers and release a firmware that fixes random disappearing drives. while the computer is working as well as in idle. There is a 30-page topic on Corsair forums about this.My drive so far stuck three times since the end of July, so you can live with it even if it's a bit annoying, but there are reports of suddenly erased drives. The firmware here is the key, and as Anand has already shown they aren't flawless.
About SF-2000 drives, it would be interesting to see if there is a benefit switching from an "old" SF-1200 drive from the consumer perspective. Half a gigabyte in a second is pretty astounding, but if it translates into less than a second faster at loading a software, I suppose Intel 25nm's drives could be better because of their cost per gigabyte.
beginner99 - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Interesting. Also the other comments. Did not know that sf-drives have so much issues. Well I'm glad now I went conservative an bought an Intel 80 Gb drive. No issues till now and it's fast enough for me. My PC now boots faster than most other devices like my mobile phone (And I don't even have one of those fancy ones).Makaveli - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Thank you for posting your real world experience agent smith, i've seen alot of people talking about these drives but also alot of people saying once you hit data it can't compress its start to get slower than intel drives.I will be waiting for real benchmarks aswell because right now those are just controller specs and the actual retail product might be slower I also highly doubt they will release consumer drives that read/write at 500/500 if they can actually live up to this performance.
After looking at the intel specs again I understand why they aren't going balls out for speed, reliablity and capacity are bigger driving factors in the current market people wants prices to go down and size up more so than 500mb/s.
Q1 2011 will be interesting.... alot of people said in 2009 that 2010 will be the year for SSD's well I think they were off by a year.
toast2 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
After their announcement of first generation product, which was extremely buggy,it took 1.5 yrs to make it work.
Let's see how long this one takes.
Rumor is that they have issues with sequential bandwidth.
Sublym3 - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Just a small question, I have wondered if normal drive imaging/cloning is still possible on SandForce based drives? and are there any limitations to the type of drives that the image can be restored to."SandForce’s controller gets around the inherent problems with writing to NAND by simply writing less. Using real time compression and data deduplication algorithms, the SF controllers store a representation of your data and not the actual data itself. The reduced data stored on the drive is also encrypted and stored redundantly across the NAND to guarantee against dataloss from page level or block level failures. Both of these features are made possible by the fact that there’s simply less data to manage. "
When I read that it makes it sound like you would not get a proper image of a drive. I am currently using Acronis software to make images of my own computers which use Intel SSD's and everything seems to work fine.
Keatah - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
You would get a drive image just fine. All the remapping and compression and redundant storing and encryption AND wear-leveling happen behind the scenes.Acronis would only see the data and 'sectors'.. Sector 1 *IS* sector 1, regardless of where it is stored on the drive. Sector 1's data may be spread across several pages or blocks and chips. But that is irrelevant.
If you ask for data at sector 1, you get data from sector 1. Simple as that. So yes, it will work just fine.
HachavBanav - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
2 facts:-A single NAND (dual plane) reads 330MB/s and writes 33MB/s
-Controllers looks like being capable of aggregating the bandwidth of more and more NAND
Hypothesis 2012:
-A quad plane NAND may reads 660MB/s and writes 66MB/s (using 16KB page)
-Controllers may read/write from 8 NAND simultaneously (think of a 128KB stripe)
==> Reads @ 4GB/s and Writes @ 500MB/s may be expected !
This clearly means we are facing an INTERFACE bandwidth bottleneck !!!
SAS 3Gb or SATA II and their 300MB/s are just ridiculous
...but SAS 6Gb and SATA III and their 600MB/s looks already outdated
What's next for those SSD interfaces :
-SAS or SATA 12Gb ? Not mature enough !
-FC 16Gb ? Always been so pricey !
-100Gb Ethernet and iSCSI embedded ? This is a revolution !
-Infiniband 40Gb ? A good challenger !
Chloiber - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I think the only possible "short term" solution will be PCIe...But to be honest: I think we need to stop somewhere. No home user needs 4GB/s. I rather have a really stable, cheap 1GB/s drive, with a robust firmware than a 4GB/s unstable thing I don't need.
Of course - faster is always better, and there will be a time where 4GB/s + stable + cheap is possible, but seriously...the computers of today are too slow to handle this (talking about IOPS now). You probably won't see a difference between a 100k IOPS drive and a 30k IOPS drive using a hexacore. The bottleneck in real performance isn't the drive anymore, it's the CPU (at least with about 2-3 drives on external controller).
So yeah - to be honest, I don't really care about huuuuuge numbers anymore - all I want is a cheap, really stable, bug-free, big drive with nice performance.
Zan Lynx - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
People will be able to get what they want and/or need based on what they can afford.The guys who pay for custom painted cases with three GPUs and water cooling will probably want to throw in a 4GB/s storage "drive".
The ordinary people will be happy enough if their games and word processor open in less than 10 seconds so they will be paying for the cheap drives.
The enterprise folks will throw a half-million dollars at a SAN vendor and say "Make it work really really fast." Heh.
iwodo - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
1. reads 330MB/s and writes 33MB/s ?? I think you need reference to backup your "facts" DDR /Toggle Mode NAND only reads @ 166Mbps ( Mega Bits, Not Bytes as you reference )But yes, NAND SSD speed is easily scalable. ( As i mentioned in previous comment which i asked the same question )
We will be limited by controller, someday due to all the error correction, overhead etc. But that is still very far off.
In the thread i posted in forum about Diminishing returns of SSD Speed. Basically concludes we have already / near reach that tipping point. Because under very limited situation you will ever need 4GB/s Read write speed. It is the Random Read Write that will count.
However software still assume we are on HDD, therefore we will be limited to OS, drivers and other side of software to see any other performance difference.
Keatah - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
Uhm yeh, that's what they said about 640k! Nobody is gonna need more than 640k!I would stick to mechanical drives to meet those requirements. SSD's are anything but bug-free and stable and cheap. Not yet.
JonnyDough - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
"Performance: Welcome to the 500 Club"As long as its nothing like The 700 Club. Those crackers are so off base its scary. :P
Arbie - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
This reminds me very much of the Hewlett-Packard cartridge tape drives of the mid-nineties. They were sold as "250MB" although they really only held 125MB. The fake rating was created by assuming all your data could be compressed by 50% !! Impressive work by HP - advancing the standard of US technical innovation.
Anyway, I really hope Anandtech will test these SSDs with compressed files as well.
PeanutGallery - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Will I be able to use the encryption if it's installed in a MacBook Pro? (latest 13 inch)If so, how?
Havor - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Even do if these drives come out and will be near enough to the price of a Vertex 2 i will certainly get one, but what i am waiting for even more is a controller whit native PCIe 4x ore 8x support.PCIe 2.x got a bi-directional throughput off 500MB/s per lane, that hold in that PCIe 2.x throughput of 250MB data in and/ore 250MB data out, minus +/- 20% overhead.
PCIe 4x ((4 x 250MB = 1GB) - 20% = 800MB/s) ore PCIe 8x ((8 x 250MB = 2GB) - 20% = 1.6GB/s)
Also saves a lot of steps of the ones currently in use (RevoDrive: SATA > raid controller > PCI-X > PCIe) ore the more expensive ones (other one's: SATA > raid controller > PCIe)
Think they will come it just will take time.
aviv - Saturday, October 9, 2010 - link
hey anand all winsxs dir in vista or windows 7 are dupes files that make the test not rightsoonlar - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
"At full speed you could copy 1GB of data from a SF-2000 drive to another SF-2000 drive in 2 seconds. If SandForce can actually deliver this sort of performance I will be blown away."1GB?
Keatah - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
Anyone that buys an SSD today is an early adopter. These drives are not consumer grade and definitely not prime-time ready.Another 2 years. Then we're good to go. Simple as that!
Rasterman - Sunday, October 17, 2010 - link
Anyone have any guesses on sizes and prices?ABR - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
I don't give much of a hoot about 6GB/s controllers and sequential performance. I'd be happier to see a 1.5GB/s interface actually utilized. Real desktop and a lot of server use consists of overlapping highly random reads, and moderately random writes. Loading an application with tons of resource files, saving documents and state to 3 or 4 directories at once, things like that. This is the whole big win of SSDs: eliminating the seek time. So I don't care about some 500MB/s number if you happen to be copying a giant file from one freshly written drive to a new blank drive. I do care about random access to a heavily used disk, and this is still sitting back in the realm of 10's of MB/s.In fact this whole hoopla about ever-increasing pure sequential transfers reminds me of the megahertz wars -- everyone shouted 10 years ago about this several hundred MHz or that GHz, meanwhile memory (and hence most actual computing) poked along at tens of MHz. Most of the progress in CPUs since that time has been in using all kinds of fancy branch prediction and pipelining structures exactly for the purpose of dealing with memory latency.
Powersupply - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Good post!kevith - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
It certainly looks as if we are approaching some amazing speeds in the months to come, lovely.But what is it with RAID, that makes it pop up every now and then in storage-reviews?
"... the sort of performance you’ll be able to get through a multi-drive array will be staggering..."
As far as I can read in every single test of RAID-0 vs single drives I´ve ever read - here at Anandtech inclusive - it appears, that there is no real difference in speed with a RAID-0 setup.
In synthetic benchmarks, there is a measurable effect, but in everyday use there is none.
A lot of folks in various forums claim they have doubled their transfer-speed, some even tripled, but everytime a serious Magazine like Your own, Tom´s, BitTech or others try to find out just how great it is, it always end up the same way: No bang for the buck at all.
Are there maybe new aspects when we´re talking SSD´s, that I am not aware of?