WooHoo!! 400GB OWC SSD

[retnuh]

I have been eagerly awaiting a larger sandforce SSD and by chance decided to see if there was any changes to the OWC Mercury Extreme today. 400GB model is a very welcome surprise, not a big fan of the price, but finally something that fits my needs.


http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce

 

[QueBert]

JEBUS that's impressive, way too much money but I'd get the 80 gig one if it's just as fast. 30 seconds from power button to OSX open like 5 CS4 apps open is freaking crazy.

 

[flamenko]

If I can help, I just received the press release and have pasted it below:

I have the 100Gb enroute to try out as well.

OWC Doubles Capacity Of Award Winning Built In The US
Mercury Extreme Pro Solid State Drive To 400GB

SandForce® processor based SSD line offers up to 285MB/s sustained data rates,
up to 28% Enterprise level over-provisioning, RAID readiness,
and industry leading five year warranty available now from $219.99

May 4, 2010, Woodstock, IL -- Other World Computing (OWC&#174 http://www.macsales.com, a leading zero emissions Mac® and PC technology company, announced today it has added a new highest capacity 400GB model to its award-winning OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD™ line. Designed and made in the U.S. from imported parts, the new 400GB model doubles the capacity of previously announced OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD models while delivering the same best combination of performance, reliability, and warranty coverage available on the market in a 2.5" SATA Solid State Drive (SSD).

Ideal For Mac and PC Power Users and RAID Configurations
The new OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD 400GB model comes with enterprise level 28% over-provisioning, five year warranty coverage, and is compatible with Mac and PC computers that can utilize single or multiple 2.5" SATA compatible drives including all RAID configurations. Priced at $1599.99 MSRP, the 400GB model is available for pre-ordering with shipping to begin 5/21.

Existing models in the line (previously named the Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD) are available for immediate ordering and share the same redundancy, reliability, and form factor as offered by the 400GB model which provides easy installation in notebooks as well as in desktop/towers with an adapter:

• 50GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD $219.99
• 100GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD $399.99
• 200GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD $729.99

For more information on the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD, including Reseller inquiries, visit: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce

The Fastest, Most Reliable Long Term Performance Available
Ordinary SSDs offer fast read/write performance during first initial uses, but then experience significant write speed degradation over repeated usage. Independent tests (http://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld.html) by leading Mac performance experts confirm the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD is able to provide sustained and consistent read and write times of over 260MB/s with 0.1 ms latency and experience virtually no reduction in data transfer rate over heavy usage of the drive.

 

[tcsenter]

Can't wait for SSD prices to come down by at least 50%. For all youz early adopters helping to pay-off the R&D and scale production so that I won't have to, thanks!

 

[jimhsu]

Just like for hard drives, I don't really believe SSD prices will go down; rather capacity will go up. Considering the costs of the controller, packaging, delivery, etc, $100 is about as low as it will go (this is true for hard drives to some extent too). In other words, we won't see a $50 SSD or anything like that, but moving to 25nm should roughly double capacity.

 

[tcsenter]

Wha? SSD represents about 1% of the storage market, if that. I predict SSDs will actually be slightly cheaper than mechanical hard drives at some point (granted, not in the next few years, but definitely in several years). The controllers are less complex than current state-of-art mechanical drives. e.g. see the latest Compact Flash cards (flash controller and I/O interface integrated in a rather simple piece of silicon compared to hard disk controller ASICs).

SSD will eventually stratify into at least these segments:

high-performance with lower capacity
mainstream/economy performance with higher capacity
exotic (high performance with high capacity)

Eventually, the first two segments should achieve parity with each other and to mechanical drives. You'll just be giving up capacity to get substantially better performance, or vice versa.

Mainstream/economy may further segment into mainstream and economy products.

 

[retnuh]

JEBUS that's impressive, way too much money but I'd get the 80 gig one if it's just as fast. 30 seconds from power button to OSX open like 5 CS4 apps open is freaking crazy.

Since I spend 80% of my time in vmware fusion this would be a HUGE win for me, I'm generally not cpu bound at all. I wish they'd come out with a 300gig model, I just need more than 200 since I've got ~130 gigs of VMs and the lower cost would be nice. The most I've ever paid for a HD was ~$800 for a U320 Cheetah years ago, I can stomach that, $1600 is a bit rough.

Actually I'd really like to see some vmware benches HDD vs SDD.

 

[MagickMan]

Does that really say $1600 ($4/GB)? Eep!

 

[Ben90]

Just like for hard drives, I don't really believe SSD prices will go down; rather capacity will go up. Considering the costs of the controller, packaging, delivery, etc, $100 is about as low as it will go (this is true for hard drives to some extent too). In other words, we won't see a $50 SSD or anything like that, but moving to 25nm should roughly double capacity.

SSDs actually have the ability to scale down lower in price than hard drives once the technology becomes mature enough. It will take a very long time though as demand is incredibly high, and supply is very short. NAND may not even be the technology used by then, but it will happen.

Another thing we seem to forgot is that all these SSDs are trying to deliver to the performance market. There is always a huge premium in this market. For example look at this performance platter drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822332078
Notice it costs two thirds of the SSD, and only has one third more capacity. You would be ignorant to believe pricing is going to stagnate. Three years ago a 64GB SSD cost $1600, now a 64GB SSD with twice the performance of that drive costs an entire order of magnitude cheaper

 

[Emulex]

yeah that drive however will sustain 100% write speed well over 200meg/sec 24/7/365 for 5-15 years easily endlessly random patterns - some of the best SSD in the commercial sector maybe only 700gb a day. plus that price is about 20-30% markup over what most people can get them for.

you ever see the inside of a cheetah 15K 3.5"? the platter isn't much bigger than a 2.5" savvio 10K sas or a 7200rpm 2.5" - it's pretty trippy to have such a large form factor but most of it is not platter at all. check it out sometime.

i think we're going to hit a roadblock as well on reliability if they start to use >2bit nand in ssd - or you'll have a rock bottom $$ ghetto fabulous ssd that is highly unreliable long term wise. however you might get that $99 SSD 320gb 3-bit 25nm nand.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

it would be cheaper (and faster) to RAID-0 two of the 200GB drives.

 

[retnuh]

it would be cheaper (and faster) to RAID-0 two of the 200GB drives.

yeah, if I wasn't for my notebook, I'd just get a single 200GB and leave all the media on a HDD.

 

[retnuh]

you ever see the inside of a cheetah 15K 3.5"? the platter isn't much bigger than a 2.5" savvio 10K sas or a 7200rpm 2.5" - it's pretty trippy to have such a large form factor but most of it is not platter at all. check it out sometime.

I'm betting less stress and wobble of the platters so it can hit 15K rpms. Its a shame too, the transfer rates on a full 3.5 platter at 15k rpms would be great.

But I've always been amazed at the magnets they put in there.

 

[Emulex]

what i found is the 2.5" are slower sorta - even though the platter is smaller?? on 2.5" they just don't have the vroom vroom at the end of the day as the 3.5". must be areal (sp?) density. i'm talking 8 10K 2.5" 146gb in raid-0+1 . very disappointed. would only recommend 15K units now.

when i mean disappointed i meant coming from 3.5" 10K - no less.

 

[Old Hippie]

Oh My!

Wayyy to rich for my blood!

 

[Nothinman]

it would be cheaper (and faster) to RAID-0 two of the 200GB drives.

And dumber...

 

[retnuh]

what i found is the 2.5" are slower sorta - even though the platter is smaller?? on 2.5" they just don't have the vroom vroom at the end of the day as the 3.5". must be areal (sp?) density. i'm talking 8 10K 2.5" 146gb in raid-0+1 . very disappointed. would only recommend 15K units now.

when i mean disappointed i meant coming from 3.5" 10K - no less.

makes sense, the 2.5" drives have what a 1.8" - 2" platter? We've never bought any, let alone have one die so I could tear it apart.

 

[retnuh]

Ok, scratch the 400gb there's a OWC 240gb thats big enough to replace my 250gb HDD and doesn't hurt nearly as bad price wise. We'll see how the 7% over provisioning does, but it sounds like sandforce's controller logic might be performing better than they were originally planning if they can drop from 28% to 7%. The warranty dropped to 3 years, which is fine, I'll have a new notebook by then anyways.

 

[flamenko]

Actually, the new drive released is the RE which increased from 7 to 28% over provisioning and 3 to 5 year warranty.

 

[Idontcare]

Just like for hard drives, I don't really believe SSD prices will go down; rather capacity will go up. Considering the costs of the controller, packaging, delivery, etc, $100 is about as low as it will go (this is true for hard drives to some extent too). In other words, we won't see a $50 SSD or anything like that, but moving to 25nm should roughly double capacity.

Don't you remember the hard drive market 10-15yrs ago? Prices ranged from a couple hundred dollars for bare-bones small and up to $1k for the top-end capacity consumer drives. (not even talking enterprise)

This whole situation right now where the asp range for consumer hardrives has completely collapsed below the $200 level was brought on about 4yrs ago when drives started exceeding 500GB (and more importantly they started exceeding the storage needs of ~80% of consumers out there).

SSDs are following the same business path. Give'm time.

 

[Rubycon]

One chief difference we're seeing today that we did not have ten years ago was interface speed was far ahead of STR capability. Even if SATA was at 10+ Gbps it could easily be bottlenecked by specialized drive packages made up of striped arrays with fast controllers onboard. With mechanical drives STR was limited by areal density and to a lesser extend, spindle speed.

This problem will only be augmented in the future with faster memories and more advanced controllers. This is why the best performing devices are on peripheral cards that plug into a 16X PCI-E 2.0 slot. (aside from expensive enterprise solutions with their own intelligent hosts)

Don't you remember the hard drive market 10-15yrs ago? Prices ranged from a couple hundred dollars for bare-bones small and up to $1k for the top-end capacity consumer drives. (not even talking enterprise)

This whole situation right now where the asp range for consumer hardrives has completely collapsed below the $200 level was brought on about 4yrs ago when drives started exceeding 500GB (and more importantly they started exceeding the storage needs of ~80% of consumers out there).

SSDs are following the same business path. Give'm time.