Quo vadis SSD?

[Markstar]

Hi,
last year, I bought an Intel G2 80GB for my main computer and it was one of the best purcheses ever. However, I had hoped that prices would go down so that I could install one of those babies in my server and laptop as well.

But looking at the price development of the past 10 months for those drives, the prices have been pretty much stable and the cost/GB ratio is still horrible, worse than it was back then because at least the price of the traditional drives has gone down.

Surely, when Intel (and others?) switch to 28/22nm, prices will go down again, but imo this is still not satisfactory. And while there are some value drives out now with limited capacity and performance (see Anand's roundup), I don't think they are worth it.

What do you think? Can we expect prices to fall or is SSD going to remain a luxury for quite a while longer?

 

[beginner99]

Hi,
last year, I bought an Intel G2 80GB for my main computer and it was one of the best purcheses ever. However, I had hoped that prices would go down so that I could install one of those babies in my server and laptop as well.

But looking at the price development of the past 10 months for those drives, the prices have been pretty much stable and the cost/GB ratio is still horrible, worse than it was back then because at least the price of the traditional drives has gone down.

Surely, when Intel (and others?) switch to 28/22nm, prices will go down again, but imo this is still not satisfactory. And while there are some value drives out now with limited capacity and performance (see Anand's roundup), I don't think they are worth it.

What do you think? Can we expect prices to fall or is SSD going to remain a luxury for quite a while longer?

Well as long something is not standard and not accepted yet by OEM's it will remain a niche product and low volume product which makes ssd's expensive because a few buyers must carry the whole development cost.

Prices will go down but even with 28/22 nm they will stay way above normal HDD's. I don't expect they will drop that much, sure not by 50%. Rather like 20-30% so this is a pure opinion and based on 0 facts.

I agree that budget ssd's are not worth it. You get low storage and not the full ssd benefit.
I think the 80 gb g2 intel is the best buy right now (if your OS supports TRIM).
The 40 gb is IMHO overpriced. you pay more than 50% for half the GB and less speed.

 

[sub.mesa]

The 40 gb is IMHO overpriced. you pay more than 50% for half the GB and less speed.

I look at that differently; though it is half the price and half the storage space, it is not half the performance. The random reads still get 225MB/s and random writes 45MB/s. That's because it still has the same fast controller, and even with just 5 channels it gets great random read speeds; which is why you want your SSD.

Intel has the lowest read latency of just about any SSD, and the X25-V 40GB only really loses sequential write speed; which gets capped at 45MB/s.

This still makes it an excellent system drive, where random reads are dominant and only some random writes happen not much sequential writing at all. Actually i think Intel X25-V 40GB is one of the best SSDs to buy right now; as it's cheap and allows you to gain most benefit from an SSD by having your Operating System + Applications on it.

Gamers would be less happy as they typically can only store one big game on there. Those probably better wait until christmas this year to buy the third generation Intel SSD with capacities 150/300/600GB, which will also be much faster and SATA 6Gbps capable. Still, random IOps and latency are still the prime reasons SSDs are fast, not really due to their higher throughput on large files.

The real question is: which consumer-class SSD is the first to bring you one million IOps at an affordable price. That would be a milestone i think. Intel currently is at 70.000 on 512-byte and 35.000 on 4K random reads with multiple queue depth (32/64). Only Sandforce and Micron controllers can go higher in the consumer branch.

 

[mutz]

The real question is: which consumer-class SSD is the first to bring you one million IOps at an affordable price. That would be a milestone i think. Intel currently is at 70.000 on 512-byte and 35.000 on 4K random reads with multiple queue depth (32/64).

these queue depths are nothing relevant for any regular usage and windows 7 is anyway using a 4KB sectors,
the relevant numbers as for IOPs should begin at at 4KB, even though the new intel drives are said to elevate they're block sizes to 8KB.

E: it make sense, as 15K IOPs read @ 4KB and 12K IOPs @ 8KB makes 60MBps vs 96 so there seems to be a huge gain from moving toward larger blocks, also 9.2K IOPs and 6.5 for write, gives ~36MBps vs 52.
the only hurdle is the fact 8KB blocks requires 8KB files, and segments of this size can consume a lot of disk space,
from this aspect, it is hard reasoning it :hmm:.

as a side note, it would be interesting to see just how frequent does XP uses 512B calls vs 4KB or less, or Win 7 uses 4KB vs 8KB to estimate the actual gains from such move.