SSD & MLC – Why Solid State Drives Seem to Suck
Ξ September 27th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Technology |
I just got a new laptop and was thinking about putting in a Solid State Drive (SSD), now that they seem to be affordable. There was a *huge* drop in price recently, with drives only costing half as much as they did a year before. It turns out this is due in large part to a change in technology – the shift from Single-Level Cell (SLC) technology to Multi-Level Cell (MLC) technology. The trade-off is that MLC drives live only about a 10th of the lifetime of SLC. Even so, it seem that for most people that is long enough (the rough rule of thumb seems to be 20GB/day of data being written for 5 years), and the result is twice the density at the same price.
But reports were coming in that these new drives seemed to really suck. Anandtech had a look at the problem while reviewing the new Intel SSD. Turns out that most of the SSD manufacturers are actually using the same parts, that is a Jmicron controller with Samsung memory, and there is a problem with that combination that results in *very* slow write times – so bad it’s actually worse than a normal drive and results in system instability.
OCZ, who used that combination with their Core series of SSD’s, seem to still be having teething problems, if one were to judge by the hoops people are jumping through in their forums to get everything working. Looks like good, affordable SSD is at least a year away (unless Intel does *way* better than expected).
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