Not sure if anyone else has seen this, but the 15th of Oct is approaching so might be worht keeping an eye on. I dont know if its legit but having fitted a 256gig maybe 6 months ago Im waiting to see how it pans out. Essentially there is an issue with read performance, but a firmware update will be made available on the 15th to fix it.
I have a Samsung 256 GB SSD waiting on an external USB 3 case from GearBest. It’s an 840 PRO not an EVO so I’m guessing it doesn’t have this read bug? I’ve been using it for about a year with no issues. I’m putting in an external case so I can boot my VM work computer off of anything with a USB 3 port. I’m not big into SSDs but man they sure rock when you have a lot of virtual machines running off the same host box.
From what Ive read the PRO is not effected. I use it as the boot drive with OS and apps on it, but most stuff is on a HDD as a slave. My load times are quick.
I never reboot my work box so it’s got a slow-as-molasses 3 TB green drive in it for the boot drive. I guess I still don’t trust the SSDs but I’m fine with having work pay for them. If an SSD fails, I can just swap it out and restore the VM on it from a backup in a half hour-ish, so I don’t really care if they are reliable for my purposes.
Somewhere I read that the mega-corporations like Google and Facebook no longer use spinning platters. They just have a bazillion hot-swap-able SSDs and it actually costs them less. So SSDs don’t really have that early adopter stigma they used to. Still, it doesn’t surprise me to see major manufacturers still having issues with them.
Magnetic media still seems a long way away from being obsolete. Seagate just announced a new 3 1/2 inch, 8 TB desktop drive.
eh, I’m pretty sure they’re still using rotating media in almost all their storage scenarios. SSDs don’t make much sense when you are doing what they do at the scale they do it at.
I’m keeping an eye out for the firmware patch.
Flash Drives Replace Disks at Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox
http://www.wired.com/2012/06/flash-data-centers/all/
A relavant quote from the article:
‘THOUGH SOME PEOPLE STILL HAVE A HARD TIME GRASPING IT, THESE DRIVES SAVE A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF MONEY. THEY LOOK MORE EXPENSIVE, BUT WHEN YOU NEED HIGHER PERFORMANCE, YOU NEED WAY LESS OF THEM.’
– ARTUR BERGMAN
The New Flash Technologies Speeding up Data Centers
http://www.storagecraft.com/blog/new-flash-technologies-data-center/
Meh? Storagecraft’s article is a puff piece, the article in Wired goes into more useful detail. Basically it covers how SSDs are used for the DB servers of the companies mentioned. The DB’s keep track of metadata, all the files get kept on HDDs. For FB (and maybe some others) both database lookups and files live behind big RAM caches which make performance differences less relevant - bringing space-per-dollar (or dollars-per-space-per-failure or something like that) back into the equation. The DB servers were the “almost” I was hedging on when I said almost all.
EDIT: capitalization.
Good thing my SSD is currently not a primary drive. I’m supposed to convert to it eventually but hard to do so with a bunch of programs still on the old HDD.
There was an article about the NSA’s shiny new Utah data center that mentioned that the highest physical density digital storage device currently available is the 64GB micro-SD card.
128GB already available on Amazon $110.00
Oh boy, now they can store twice as much juicy gossip on us than before. They are shooting for a yottabyte of storage. Divide 10^24 by the 7 gigapersons on the planet and that works out to be around 140 terabytes per person on the planet (doing the math in my head).
Oh, and if they audit what is stored there and it turns out like Livermore National Lab, it will be 90+% porn… and that’s a yotta porn. It would take the US senate and house combined at least a month to watch that much porn.
Now that sounds like a sticky situation. Glad I'm not a cleaner.
An engineer at a place that I worked, worked his way through college as a projectionist at a porno theater. Oh, the stories he could tell about their clientele…
Some laptops have been running hybrid drives with the OS on small SSD boot drives for a number of years with success (although not certain of their reliability as I havent had one). The prices of them are tumbling too, I can buy an EVO 500 for not much more money than I paid for my EVO 250, and I didnt pay all that much when I bought it 6 or so months ago.
My thoughts were in 5 yrs any drive will be obsolete anyway so 250gig probably wont be enough space to contain a single app lol and Id want to upgrade the system anyway (upgrade? I never do, I just replace it all although I might keep the tower next time). Well, something like that anyway.
Bring on the memristors!
Awesome, I finally jump on the SSD monkey, & now I need to scratch it’s arse with a firmware update….
Isn’t it always the way!
Thanks for the heads-up.