Are SSDs always rubbish under winXP?

If you just dropped in the drive, you got what you'd expect. There are numerous webpages on tweaks for SSD drives.

EWF might be relevant.

I did a system that used Debian Linux with small SSDs and we eliminated the swap partition and set the filesystem not to update inodes on access. We lost no SSDs in normal operation (lost one to a power-supply accident), but we'd only logged about a year of use in two prototypes. Good statistics would want more samples than that.

Mel.

There is your problem. You are so stupid that you would pay that much for so little.

I'd bet that it comes down to something stupid like your mobo being set your "SMART being on or some other ancient controller chip mode.

Oh, and "controller" is a misnomer. The controller is on the hard drive. "IDE" means that the controller is on the drive. The NOBO chip is no more than an I/O chip, NOT a controller.

All that proves is that you were around back when there WAS a separate controller, and you retained the moniker even though the facts changed. Points to a casual attitude toward technical details.

SATA is slightly different, but not much. Still tertiary to the PCI bus though.

It would not EVER be "to the same spot".

You need to figure out how files get written and how the volume gets managed and how deleted files and the space they occupied gets managed, and finally, how file edits get written to a file.

What you should have done is buy a Seagate hybrid drive. They are

500GB (now 750), with a 4GB flash drive integrated into them.

They give flash like performance with HD like storage capacity and reliability. The 500/4 is nice, but I will be getting the 750/8 soon.

Modern MLC NAND block is rated at about 1-3K program/erase cycles, SLC should be at about 50K. Fingers crossed that the SSD controller does full static wear leveling, you can do the simple math about expected endurance with example block size of 512KB to get the feeling.

The SDRAM cache in the SSD offsets this a bit (by deferring the write to the flash memory), but exactly how much depends on controller policy.

They have. The controller does a lot, and due to complexity there can always be latent bugs. And the NAND reliability is just awful, especially with shrinking the geometry.

Not that it matters to trendy consumer device manufacturers.

Now that you mention it, USB memory sticks don't last, but hard drives seem to never fail. I think the semi guys are pushing flash density to the bleeding edge of reliability.

You may as well buy a PC with a fast hard drive and mountains of DRAM, so it has lots of disk cache and doesn't thrash virtual.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Where are your stats from? I have never had one fail, and I have like

50 of them, and I change file system types, and everything.Lots of thorough use.

They are one of the few things still made with mil specs in mind, if not followed religiously.

They are just now selling stacked 750 GB modules, etc. That really ain't all that big, and the chips use densities which get tested.

Or the OS guys will wise up and make a segmented system which puts logs and other constantly modified files onto magnetic storage, whenever available.

The Seagate hybrids already address these issues with their intelligent management of what ends up on the flash half of the hybrid.

John Larkin wrote

I have done some googling on this topic and it is quite a nasty suprise to learn how poor a life flash drives are *expected* to have. For example (can't find the URL right now) the Intel X25 SSDs can have only about 30TB written to the drive in its whole life. With perfect wear spreading, this will push every part of the drive to the flash write limit in something like 5 years (they reckon) of average desktop computer usage (they reckon).

30TB is not all that much, over years, especially with swapfile usage.

And if the wear spreading is working less than optimally (firmware bugs) then all bets are off. On the SSD forums there is a ton of stuff about different SSD firmware versions doing different things. I have to wonder who actually has a LIFE after worrying about the firmware on a "hard drive" :) You don't worry about firmware updates on a cooker, do you?

So I am not suprised my SSDs are knackered in c. 1 year while hard drives seem to go on for ever, sometimes making a funny noise after ~5 years (on a 24/7 email/web server) at which point they can be changed.

HectorZeroni wrote

You probably don't write terabytes to them though. Also you are extremely unlikely to ever go anywhere near even a very low write cycle limit (1000+) with a removable drive. In most usage, one does just ONE write to the device, in each use.

So my other post re Intel SSD write limits. They are very suprisingly low.

OK, but why does anybody use an SSD?

I used them to make a hopefully silent PC, or one drawing little power. Or, in portable apps, to make a tablet computer work above

13000ft in an unpressurised aircraft

Combining a HD with an SSD defeats both those things.

In actual usage, I find, the SSD outperforms a HD very noticeably in very narrow/specific apps only, which tend to be

- a complex app, comprising of hundreds of files, loading up, perhaps involving loading up thousands of records from a complicated database into RAM

- any app doing masses of random database reads

Anything involving writing is usually slower, and anything involving sequential reading is no quicker.

Because electronics are way faster than physical, spinning media with hard latencies built in to every read and write.

Combining the two gives you instantaneous access to the files in that segment, and HUGE, RELIABLE storage capacity for the greater mass of your data.

Flash *could* be made reliable, but the fabbers go for density. Once they get a really reliable cell designed, they scale it down and multi-level it until it's flakey again.

We only buy ranges ("cookers") that don't have electronics. That makes them cost about 4x as much, but that's worth it.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

A decent SSD should have wear leveling but if you don't disable the virtual memory the SSD will wear out quickly.

Unless you disable the virtual memory XP swaps everything it can to the hard disk to have as much unused memory as possible. Its a real nuisance. Just install 2GB of memory and disable swap to get maximum performance. The performance gain is huge.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

16G, if you intend to compile FPGAs.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

You're a dork.

And you're AlwaysWrong.

--

John Larkin, President Highland Technology Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Only a 12 year old mind needs to call names.

My description of you is not a name, it is a behavioral observation. That is beside the fact that you do not know the first thing about how they are making memory arrays these days, much less any reliability figures, you lying POS.

Wrong again.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

It's not quite that bad - 30-60TB (obviously dependent on the drive sizes and other parameters) is pretty much the worst case (IOW,

30-60TB of random 4KB writes), not the best case.

Eh. I didn't used to worry about firmware updates on my phone, walkman, DVD player or car either. I do now. SO long as its fairly automatic and reliable (which is *not* sufficiently true now of many of these things, including hard-drive/SSD firmware). Most end users allow MS to install patches pretty much at will on Windows, and it rarely leads to disaster (at least not nearly as frequently as *not* installing the patches does!). At that level of reliability it becomes a non-issue for most people.