solid state drive?

[Volker Krueger]

Dear all,

I am interested in your comments on solid state drives?
Does any one have experiences with cheaper non-lenovo drives?
what is the speed and wattage? Can one actually save battery time with them?

any info welcome :-))

best,
Volker


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[km-4]

On 16/02, Volker Krueger wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am interested in your comments on solid state drives?
> Does any one have experiences with cheaper non-lenovo drives?
> what is the speed and wattage? Can one actually save battery time with them?
>
> any info welcome :-))
>
> best,
> Volker
>
>
> --
> The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
> http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad

I believe the general understanding is that you dont save power with SSD's.
SSDs use about the same amount of power as a hard drive.

See this article on toms hardware for power comparisons:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html

The wins on the other hand is:
 - speed (my x300 boots XP to desktop in 7 seconds and ubuntu in 15)
 - robustness (no moving parts)
 - sound (no moving parts)

My only experience is with the samsung SSD in my x300. The best way I
have of describing it is that the drive is no longer a factor for
anything in the laptop. Everything is either CPU, network or memory bound.
Disk I/O is never the issue as I see sustained write around 90mb/s, reads
at 100mb/s and nonexistant latency.

One thing to have in mind is that SSDs are still new and theres alot of
things happening so what is true today will probably not be true in six
months. And try to stay clear of MLC SSDs.


-km

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[Laurent Gilson]

Hi,

> I am interested in your comments on solid state drives?

They work fine if you know how to handel them. There
are some tricks and problems you should know about
( http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669 ), but google
will tell you more then you ever wanted to know.

The runtime will not change much. Buying a bigger battery is
the better way.

Using a CF Card for SSD works fine on PATA-Thinkpads. Even
MLC-cards will survive several years desktop usage. But
don't use EXT3, don't write lots of small files, never
defragment. EXT2 works very fine, tmp mounted on a ramfs
helps a lot.

cu
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[Micha Feigin]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:21:50 +0100
km <km@...> wrote:

> On 16/02, Volker Krueger wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I am interested in your comments on solid state drives?
> > Does any one have experiences with cheaper non-lenovo drives?
> > what is the speed and wattage? Can one actually save battery time with them?
> >
> > any info welcome :-))
> >
> > best,
> > Volker
> >
> >
> > --
> > The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
> > http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad
>
> I believe the general understanding is that you dont save power with SSD's.
> SSDs use about the same amount of power as a hard drive.
>
> See this article on toms hardware for power comparisons:
> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html
>
> The wins on the other hand is:
>  - speed (my x300 boots XP to desktop in 7 seconds and ubuntu in 15)
>  - robustness (no moving parts)
>  - sound (no moving parts)
>

Yes, but AFAIK write is a lot slower than standard disk

> My only experience is with the samsung SSD in my x300. The best way I
> have of describing it is that the drive is no longer a factor for
> anything in the laptop. Everything is either CPU, network or memory bound.
> Disk I/O is never the issue as I see sustained write around 90mb/s, reads
> at 100mb/s and nonexistant latency.
>
> One thing to have in mind is that SSDs are still new and theres alot of
> things happening so what is true today will probably not be true in six
> months. And try to stay clear of MLC SSDs.
>
>
> -km
>

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[Tosh-5]

Volker Krueger wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am interested in your comments on solid state drives?
> Does any one have experiences with cheaper non-lenovo drives?
> what is the speed and wattage? Can one actually save battery time with them?
>
> any info welcome :-))
>
> best,
> Volker
>
>

have sold an ThinkPad X200 with an Intel 80GB SSD MLC (special boot
edition), the person is running CentOS 5 and is very happy about speed
an wattage is also les, how much we haven't tested exactly, but roughly
about half
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[Marius Gedminas-4]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 05:09:42PM +0200, Micha Feigin wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:21:50 +0100
> km <km@...> wrote:
> > See this article on toms hardware for power comparisons:
> > http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html
> >
> > The wins on the other hand is:
> >  - speed (my x300 boots XP to desktop in 7 seconds and ubuntu in 15)
> >  - robustness (no moving parts)
> >  - sound (no moving parts)
>
> Yes, but AFAIK write is a lot slower than standard disk

It may depend a lot on the SSD in question.

E.g. my Asus EeePC 900 is horribly slow; basically you can't use Firefox
while downloading a file in the background because those fsync() calls
make it freeze for five seconds every ten seconds or so.

On the other hand there's
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html

Marius Gedminas
--
Perl is not a programming language, it's a natural language that
computers understand.

Better than people, for the most part.
                -- Steve Simmons

[tytso]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 02:51:39PM +0100, Laurent wrote:
>
> They work fine if you know how to handel them. There
> are some tricks and problems you should know about
> ( http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669 ), but google
> will tell you more then you ever wanted to know.

The article you quote is specific for the Intel X25-M drive, and not
necessarily for all SSD's (certainly not the older first generation
SSD's.)

> The runtime will not change much. Buying a bigger battery is
> the better way.

You might see 20-25 minutes additional runtime.  So, not a lot, but
there should be at least some improvement if you are using one of the
newer SSD's that have a native SATA interface.

> Using a CF Card for SSD works fine on PATA-Thinkpads. Even
> MLC-cards will survive several years desktop usage. But
> don't use EXT3, don't write lots of small files, never
> defragment. EXT2 works very fine, tmp mounted on a ramfs
> helps a lot.

Using a tmpfs is definitely a good idea; at least with the Intel
X25-M, using ext3 shouldn't be a problem.  The X25-M is rated for
100GB of writes a day for five years, and that's plenty for a journal.
My system currently has about 10GB of writes over two day's worth of
uptime, and this includes e-mail and kernel compiles, and this is with
an ext4 mounted filesystem.  (You can measure this using iostat.)

                   - Ted
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[km-4]

On 16/02, Micha Feigin wrote:
> >
> > The wins on the other hand is:
> >  - speed (my x300 boots XP to desktop in 7 seconds and ubuntu in 15)
> >  - robustness (no moving parts)
> >  - sound (no moving parts)
> >
>
> Yes, but AFAIK write is a lot slower than standard disk
>

Depends on the SSD. Slow writes are usually a characteristic of MLC drives,
though different SSDs have hugely varied performance.

The Samsung SLC drive in the x300 performs something like this with
sequential writes:

OS Filesystem/driver peak sustained
-------------------------------------------------
WinXP NTFS 4k cluster 90mb/s 65mb/s
WinXP Ext3 ext2fsd driver 60mb/s 25-40mb/s fluctuates _alot_
Linux NTFS fuse 50mb/s 35mb/s
Linux Ext3 4k block 90mb/s 65mb/s

Clearly better than a hard drive.

This was tested with dd with a block size of 1MB and 3GB of /dev/zero.

FS type and OS looks pretty irrelevant when doing sequential I/O, atleast
for native filesystems.

Worth noting is that actual write speeds seem to go down when the filesystem
gets fragmented or is near its capacity.

And for interactive purposes (ie the responsiveness when using your
computer) the access time is usually the most important part and atleast
with this SSD it's so low that I dont notice the disk at all :)

-km

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[Micha Feigin]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:47:18 +0100
Marius Gedminas <marius@...> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 05:09:42PM +0200, Micha Feigin wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:21:50 +0100
> > km <km@...> wrote:
> > > See this article on toms hardware for power comparisons:
> > > http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html
> > >
> > > The wins on the other hand is:
> > >  - speed (my x300 boots XP to desktop in 7 seconds and ubuntu in 15)
> > >  - robustness (no moving parts)
> > >  - sound (no moving parts)
> >
> > Yes, but AFAIK write is a lot slower than standard disk
>
> It may depend a lot on the SSD in question.
>
> E.g. my Asus EeePC 900 is horribly slow; basically you can't use Firefox
> while downloading a file in the background because those fsync() calls
> make it freeze for five seconds every ten seconds or so.
>

That is because the op asked about cheap SSDs. There was a thread somewhere on
one of the mailing lists I'm registered to, can't remember at the moment which
one. Apparently IIRC there are two technologies for SSD. The cheap one that is
probably in the EeePC which is very slow to write and has a life span of about
10000 write cycles and the expensive one (a 80gb costs about as much as the
whole EeePC) which is fast (at least on par to regular disk) and has a life
cycle of around 100000+ writes.

They can't give the cheap ones away. And they are not recommended. It's probably
going to be still another couple of years before SSDs are worth while.

> On the other hand there's
> http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html
>
> Marius Gedminas
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[tytso]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:45:12AM +0200, Micha Feigin wrote:
>
> That is because the op asked about cheap SSDs. There was a thread
> somewhere on one of the mailing lists I'm registered to, can't
> remember at the moment which one. Apparently IIRC there are two
> technologies for SSD. The cheap one that is probably in the EeePC
> which is very slow to write and has a life span of about 10000 write
> cycles and the expensive one (a 80gb costs about as much as the
> whole EeePC) which is fast (at least on par to regular disk) and has
> a life cycle of around 100000+ writes.

You're talking about first generation MLC vs. SLC flash drives; it
turns out though that with the right smarts, though, it's possible to
make MLC flash work well.  See this article from Tom's Hardware:

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012-3.html

Intel was the first to market by about 4-5 months; however, San Disk
is supposed to come out with a drive with similar "smarts" in the next
month or two.  I can't say anything about how well San Disk's drive
will work, since I haven't seen any early reviews yet and I haven't
been able to get early access to the drive, but the reviews from
Intel's SSD (which is ground-breaking) have been glowing.

As far as prices are concerned, the Intel X25-M SSD is more expensive
than traditional MLC drives, but cheaper than SLC drives.  The street
price of the 80GB SSD is $400.  Sure, that's about 4x the price of an
HDD, but given its shock resistance and speed, that's not bad.  In
contrast, traditional 64GB SLC drives cost about $500, and traditional
64GB MLC drives cost about $140.  (And an 80GB HDD is about $40).

                  - Ted

P.S.  Note that if you are doing streaming writes, the Intel X25-M
isn't going to be that much faster than an traditional MLC, because
it's using MLC flash.  The reason why Intel's SSD is better is because
in real life it's rare that the OS will be able to do streaming
writes; instead it needs to do a number of small writes to update the
inode table, allocation bitmaps/tables, etc. for each file writes (and
many files are small to begin with).  What makes the Intel SSD
interesting is that it has better smarts that means that a more
realistic, real-world workload that has lots of small writes still
works relatively well on the X25-M, whereas on a traditional MLC drive
write amplification means that it has to erase and write an 128k block
even when updating a 4k block.  That means that for small writes, a
traditional MLC drive will take a factor of 16-32 hit off of its
sequential write speeds, and factor 16-32 times increase in flash
lifetime (since 128k is getting erased and rewritten even for a 4k
write).

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[Volker Krueger]

thanks to everyone for all the information!

The references were really good!!

thanks!
best,
Volker


Volker Krueger wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am interested in your comments on solid state drives?
> Does any one have experiences with cheaper non-lenovo drives?
> what is the speed and wattage? Can one actually save battery time with them?
>
> any info welcome :-))
>
> best,
> Volker
>
>
>  

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[Noah Dain]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Volker Krueger <vok@...> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am interested in your comments on solid state drives?
> Does any one have experiences with cheaper non-lenovo drives?
> what is the speed and wattage? Can one actually save battery time with them?

I dropped a transcend 128GB ( TS128GSSD25S-M ) ssd in my T61,
replacing a 7200rpm WD scorpio.  Overall, couldn't be happier except
for one occasional quibble.  During heavy continuous write operations,
the drive can become rather unresponsive, sometimes for up to a minute
or so.  Typically, this happens during large package updates/upgrades
(ubuntu).

On the plus side, everything else is definitely superior to a typical
hdd with the exception of storage capacity, of course.  Most
operations are definitely quicker than with a 7200 rpm hdd, but not
anything earth-shattering.  Access times are nothing, and sequential
read throughput is massive.

I tend to consider it a "2nd generation" ssd.  The performance specs
are equal to or exceed the best hdd's out there for most use cases.  I
would consider Intel's ssd's 3rd gen (maybe 2.5?)

The first gens are what you'll find in eepc's and such.  No one wants
one of these (generally, they are slow and small, with limited
lifespans).

I'd say if you need large storage and/or do a lot of large write
operations, ssd's are definitely not for you right now.

However, you can find ssd's in 128GB sizes for somewhere between
$200-300 USD.  If that seems reasonable to you to get rid of spinning
magnetic media, by all means go for it.

-n

>
> any info welcome :-))
>
> best,
> Volker
>
>
> --
> The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
> http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad
>

--
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[Marius Gedminas-4]

This is a very informative and interesting post, thanks!

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 08:13:30PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> As far as prices are concerned, the Intel X25-M SSD is more expensive
> than traditional MLC drives, but cheaper than SLC drives.  The street
> price of the 80GB SSD is $400.  Sure, that's about 4x the price of an
> HDD, but given its shock resistance and speed, that's not bad.  In
> contrast, traditional 64GB SLC drives cost about $500, and traditional
> 64GB MLC drives cost about $140.  (And an 80GB HDD is about $40).

This is slightly confusing: how is a $400 SSD about 4x the price of a
$40 HDD?

Marius Gedminas
--
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the end of Chapter 7 is unbearable) [...]
        -- Juliusz Chroboczek

[Stefan Monnier]

> But don't use EXT3, don't write lots of small files, never
> defragment. EXT2 works very fine, tmp mounted on a ramfs helps a lot.

What makes you say not to use ext3?
AFAICT, it should not make much difference: at most double the number of
writes, i.e. halve the expected life of your drive.


        Stefan

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[Marius Gedminas-4]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:24:10AM +0100, Marius Gedminas wrote:

> This is a very informative and interesting post, thanks!
>
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 08:13:30PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > As far as prices are concerned, the Intel X25-M SSD is more expensive
> > than traditional MLC drives, but cheaper than SLC drives.  The street
> > price of the 80GB SSD is $400.  Sure, that's about 4x the price of an
> > HDD, but given its shock resistance and speed, that's not bad.  In
> > contrast, traditional 64GB SLC drives cost about $500, and traditional
> > 64GB MLC drives cost about $140.  (And an 80GB HDD is about $40).
>
> This is slightly confusing: how is a $400 SSD about 4x the price of a
> $40 HDD?

Also, how do Compact Flash cards fit in the SLC/MLC hierarchy?  They're
also solid-state storage devices masquerading as (ATA) hard disks,
right?

Marius Gedminas
--
2B OR NOT 2B == FF

[Laurent Gilson]

Hi,

> What makes you say not to use ext3?
> AFAICT, it should not make much difference: at most double the number of
> writes, i.e. halve the expected life of your drive.

The journal causes a lot of small writes. Small writes have a bigger write
amplification, so it's a lot more data for the SSD. That makes it slow. I
don't worry about the number of writes, but i do want a fast system.

cu



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[tytso]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 09:50:57AM +0100, Laurent wrote:
>> What makes you say not to use ext3?
>> AFAICT, it should not make much difference: at most double the number of
>> writes, i.e. halve the expected life of your drive.
>
> The journal causes a lot of small writes. Small writes have a bigger write
> amplification, so it's a lot more data for the SSD. That makes it slow. I
> don't worry about the number of writes, but i do want a fast system.

Write amplification has been addressed by next generation SSD's (at
the moment the Intel SSD's are alone in the market, but I expect other
manufacturers will coming up with competing products soon.)

   http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012-4.html

                                                        - Ted
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[tytso]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 07:34:33AM +0100, Marius Gedminas wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:24:10AM +0100, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> > This is a very informative and interesting post, thanks!
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 08:13:30PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > > As far as prices are concerned, the Intel X25-M SSD is more expensive
> > > than traditional MLC drives, but cheaper than SLC drives.  The street
> > > price of the 80GB SSD is $400.  Sure, that's about 4x the price of an
> > > HDD, but given its shock resistance and speed, that's not bad.  In
> > > contrast, traditional 64GB SLC drives cost about $500, and traditional
> > > 64GB MLC drives cost about $140.  (And an 80GB HDD is about $40).
> >
> > This is slightly confusing: how is a $400 SSD about 4x the price of a
> > $40 HDD?

Sorry, you're right, it's about 10x an equivalently sized HDD.  I
didn't realize how much 80GB HDD's had fallen in price until I had
checked.  These days, I tend to buy 300GB+ laptop drives.  :-)

> Also, how do Compact Flash cards fit in the SLC/MLC hierarchy?  They're
> also solid-state storage devices masquerading as (ATA) hard disks,
> right?

CF manufacturers generally don't you a lot about what's inside their
cards, so it varies a lot.  You can bet the cheaper ones are MLC; in
general it's probably better to assume MLC unless the manufacturer
explicitly states otherwise.  The primary problem with CF is that they
are limited by their ATA interface.  If the camera (and the card)
doesn't do UDMA, they are limited to about 16MB/s.  If the camera (and
the card) does UDMA, they could in theory go up to 133 MB/s, but I'm
not sure I've seen camera (and cards) that do more than 100 MB/s (UDMA
mode 5).  Some cards may only do UDMA mode 3 (45 MB/s).  

SATA speeds let you go at up to 150 Mb/s and 300 MB/s, which for flash
is more important when you are reading as opposed to writing.  For
example the Intel X25-E has a maximum read bandwidth of 250 MB/s, and
a maximum write bandwidth of 170 MB/s.  The X25-M has a maximum read
bandwidth of 250 MB/s, and a maximum write bandwidth of 70 MB/s.
(This is because the X25-M uses MLC, and the X25-E uses SLC; the Intel
X25 design avoids the write amplification problem, but if you are
doing streaming writes, you will still be limited by maximum write
speeds of the flash.)  For contrast, a modern 5400rpm laptop HDD has
write speeds of around 55 Mb/s, and a 7200rpm HDD has write speeds of
around 90 Mb/s.

                                                - Ted
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[Dan Maranville]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 03:50, Laurent <pumpkin@...> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> What makes you say not to use ext3?
>> AFAICT, it should not make much difference: at most double the number of
>> writes, i.e. halve the expected life of your drive.
>
> The journal causes a lot of small writes. Small writes have a bigger write
> amplification, so it's a lot more data for the SSD. That makes it slow. I
> don't worry about the number of writes, but i do want a fast system.
>
> cu
>

I found some interesting stuff here,
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html and here
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=51957 when I was looking at
going this route.


--
Dan Maranville

"The one ray of hope is that maybe, just maybe, the thousands of
Windows worms will go to war with each other and kill every Windows
machine on earth. Though that would be a short-lived cure, because
even after a Windows holocaust the first thing the survivors are going
to do is get up, dust themselves off, and see if rebooting will bring
their systems back up." --Carla Schroder
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[Laurent Gilson]

Hi,

> Write amplification has been addressed by next generation SSD's (at
> the moment the Intel SSD's are alone in the market, but I expect other
> manufacturers will coming up with competing products soon.)

The Intel SSD address one problem and create another. The first article
i linked benchmarks an Intel after several months of use. The really
bad performance is caused by the anti-amplification algo. The effect
is stronger if you use lots of small writes. i have seen the same thing
in our testlab: the performance after 2 months depends on the type of
data written. swap and ext3 + small files kills the performance faster
then ext2 + big files.

For the current generation it's a matter of erasing the blocks fast
enough. Most SSD are fast as long as the blocks written by the OS
are as big or bigger as the native block size. Ext3 journal is messy
and syncs lot lots of small blocks. That make the disc a lot slower
if you use lots of smalls files (like my email client or my dev-app).

cu
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