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[Mr Skrunts]

Bought a small SSD about a year ago to try in my PC and then put as a 2nd drive in my Dell laptop. 

The drive had no cache and for what it was it ran windows quite happily, the only program/game it would load/play was command and conquer Kane Edition.  Used it for a few months and like most things it's now sat in a draw some where.

I have looked at prices on and off over the year as I know htere are drives out there with 128mb and looking at the reports from the gaming lads they seem to work pretty fast set as a raid system.

Raid systems, tried it one and and when I reistalled windows I seemed to lose all by backup data in the process, Maybe my fault, maybe dont understand raid enough to have tried it, but any further use I would only ever use it for Windows and program files,  (even if I tried mirrored raid I would still backup to a single external drive (untill I was confident at least))

So just recently I checked the price of SSD with the price hike on hard drives, and found the Revodrives, not gone into detail with it but thought I would ask on here.

Has any one got one, or used them at work, what are they like and how easy are they to use as they are installed into a slot.  Will they run windows easyily or is there a special way to intall it, To gain raid access are the drives configured before or after windows install.

Are these the next thing in hard drive technology, are they better or worsr, do they have good/bad points.

Sorry for all the questions, but as we have some very clever members here on the forum I value thier opinions before going ahead and purchasing one (after I have saved upfor it)

T.I.A. 

[Mr Skrunts]

Adding a link might help 

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=pricelow&store=33&cat=385&filtersubcat=3442&filterca5320=PCI+Express+x4&limit=10&page=1

[cem_devecioglu]

talking for normal (ie not slot type)  SSD disks, I happily used them on servers (as raid 5)  and they are working for more than a year..  but they rely on a special card (those cards are expensive same price as SCSI cards and they have their built in ROMs,caches and batteries ) for raid configuration and you have to configure the RAID level (from its bios before system boots) before you setup windows ..(dont use windows built in raid its software based and I dont recommend)
and also you have to format using its bios uitility.. then when you boot from windows CD/DVD you supply the driver at some point (IIRC F6 at some point) (otherwise windows dont see any disk) and then continue to install.. those cards are generally in PCI-x standard.. now , as far as I see the cards in the link you supplied are already in PCI-x standard , I'm not sure how you can make raid with them..
even if your system supports more than one PCI-x card ?? even if so (more than 1 PCI-x card)  personally I wouldnt recommend with a normal pc board unless its designed for special purpose as a server...
 even a single PCI-X slot can already flush the cpu with big data.. And must note even a single ssd card/disk will be adequate for personal needs ; they are really fast..  reading this link can give more info imo..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X 
 
also lets see what TheBoy thinks (he knows more on servers and disk subsystems )
 
 

[aaronjb]

I can't imagine what kind of gaming would possibly benefit from ~1Gbps throughput vs the 500Mbps of a regular SATA-III SSD like the OCZ Vertex 3 series, really..

And in a server, if you want out-and-out disk performance then you're probably talking about something that's highly transactional and has a huge number of read/write cycles (like a database) - we specifically didn't use these in our new DB server (24 core, 64Gb RAM etc) because we were worried about longevity. I bet you could burn through their write cycle lifetime pretty quickly on a big DB server.. 15k RPM server grade spindle discs would be my choice there.

[TheBoy]

The OOF server's raid card apparently doesn't support SSDs. Not even expensive HP ones. Bugger.

The next thing, I believe, will be hybrids, integrating flash for some storage, and mechanical platters for mass storage.


WD have one factory dried out and almost up and running, with another due to be water-free in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, we should start to see (mechanical) disk prices stabilise within 4-6 months (but will go up between now and then).

[aaronjb]

The next thing, I believe, will be hybrids, integrating flash for some storage, and mechanical platters for mass storage.

I was sceptical about these but I know several people who swear by them, at least for desktop use. Gaming and server might be a different matter as they're great at accelerating repeated access of (relatively) small files (due to the relatively small 4-8Gb SSD on board). If you're loading multiple Gb+ games, that might not help much..

I'd really like to swap out the 500Gb plattered disc in the laptop (data drive, secondary to my 200Gb Vertex2 SSD) for one of the new 750Gb hybrid drives, though, and see if it speeds up suspend & resume in VMWare. (Although work did just give me a shiny new laptop with 16Gb of RAM, SSD *and* plattered disc and 8 core i7 that I have ESXi on..)

[TheBoy]

The next thing, I believe, will be hybrids, integrating flash for some storage, and mechanical platters for mass storage.

I was sceptical about these but I know several people who swear by them, at least for desktop use. Gaming and server might be a different matter as they're great at accelerating repeated access of (relatively) small files (due to the relatively small 4-8Gb SSD on board). If you're loading multiple Gb+ games, that might not help much..

I'd really like to swap out the 500Gb plattered disc in the laptop (data drive, secondary to my 200Gb Vertex2 SSD) for one of the new 750Gb hybrid drives, though, and see if it speeds up suspend & resume in VMWare. (Although work did just give me a shiny new laptop with 16Gb of RAM, SSD *and* plattered disc and 8 core i7 that I have ESXi on..)

My work gave me a reasonable craptop with even memory to be useful, then crippled it with XP!

[aaronjb]

My work gave me a reasonable craptop with even memory to be useful, then crippled it with XP!

That's why I've put ESXi on this laptop; Siebel CRM requires x86 Windows according to our 'consultants', and the default corporate Windows build is now Win7 64bit.. so I'll virtualise everything and make use of that 16Gb of RAM - then use it headless and just RDP in from my Mac.

[TheBoy]

My work gave me a reasonable craptop with even memory to be useful, then crippled it with XP!

That's why I've put ESXi on this laptop; Siebel CRM requires x86 Windows according to our 'consultants', and the default corporate Windows build is now Win7 64bit.. so I'll virtualise everything and make use of that 16Gb of RAM - then use it headless and just RDP in from my Mac.

Due to no user interface, seems odd to have ESXi on a lappy, as you need another computer to use any of the functionality on there. Do you lug 2 lappys around?

I run VMWare server on my works lappy instead.

[aaronjb]

Due to no user interface, seems odd to have ESXi on a lappy, as you need another computer to use any of the functionality on there. Do you lug 2 lappys around?

Heck no, I wouldn't want to carry the Dell around anyway - it weighs as much as a paving slab! (Ok, 10.5Kg) So that stays in the office and if I'm remote I'm on the VPN anyway..

Although I did consider sticking Linux on it and running regular VMWare instead.

[cem_devecioglu]

I can't imagine what kind of gaming would possibly benefit from ~1Gbps throughput vs the 500Mbps of a regular SATA-III SSD like the OCZ Vertex 3 series, really..

And in a server, if you want out-and-out disk performance then you're probably talking about something that's highly transactional and has a huge number of read/write cycles (like a database) - we specifically didn't use these in our new DB server (24 core, 64Gb RAM etc) because we were worried about longevity. I bet you could burn through their write cycle lifetime pretty quickly on a big DB server.. 15k RPM server grade spindle discs would be my choice there.

 ssd server disks will beat and eat mechanical disks in breakfast.. no debate.. longevity worries are common and before buying them I have checked lots of papers and documents..  those papers briefly says that self working management software (written on these disks rom)  arranges the data clusters so that its unlikely you will hit a dead memory cell within logical operation period.... you will retire the server long before you reach that point..

[TheBoy]

I can't imagine what kind of gaming would possibly benefit from ~1Gbps throughput vs the 500Mbps of a regular SATA-III SSD like the OCZ Vertex 3 series, really..

And in a server, if you want out-and-out disk performance then you're probably talking about something that's highly transactional and has a huge number of read/write cycles (like a database) - we specifically didn't use these in our new DB server (24 core, 64Gb RAM etc) because we were worried about longevity. I bet you could burn through their write cycle lifetime pretty quickly on a big DB server.. 15k RPM server grade spindle discs would be my choice there.

 ssd server disks will beat and eat mechanical disks in breakfast.. no debate.. longevity worries are common and before buying them I have checked lots of papers and documents..  those papers briefly says that self working management software (written on these disks rom)  arranges the data clusters so that its unlikely you will hit a dead memory cell within logical operation period.... you will retire the server long before you reach that point..

Hmmm, our client is running some customer facing critical systems on 15yr old servers.  Obviously the (platter) disks fail with tedious regularity, and are so old/small, that Sun Oracle can only provide us with refurbished disks.  Well, reburb is a lie, reclaimed, as they often have data on them

So servers often aren't swapped out during the 5-7yr life

I think the SSD's biggest issue is not failures in certain locations, but bit flipping, quite common in NAND (NOR storage is too expensive).  Mostly overcomable given enough error correction, but there is always that lack of true certainty...

[cem_devecioglu]

I can't imagine what kind of gaming would possibly benefit from ~1Gbps throughput vs the 500Mbps of a regular SATA-III SSD like the OCZ Vertex 3 series, really..

And in a server, if you want out-and-out disk performance then you're probably talking about something that's highly transactional and has a huge number of read/write cycles (like a database) - we specifically didn't use these in our new DB server (24 core, 64Gb RAM etc) because we were worried about longevity. I bet you could burn through their write cycle lifetime pretty quickly on a big DB server.. 15k RPM server grade spindle discs would be my choice there.

 ssd server disks will beat and eat mechanical disks in breakfast.. no debate.. longevity worries are common and before buying them I have checked lots of papers and documents..  those papers briefly says that self working management software (written on these disks rom)  arranges the data clusters so that its unlikely you will hit a dead memory cell within logical operation period.... you will retire the server long before you reach that point..

Hmmm, our client is running some customer facing critical systems on 15yr old servers.  Obviously the (platter) disks fail with tedious regularity, and are so old/small, that Sun Oracle can only provide us with refurbished disks.  Well, reburb is a lie, reclaimed, as they often have data on them

So servers often aren't swapped out during the 5-7yr life

I think the SSD's biggest issue is not failures in certain locations, but bit flipping, quite common in NAND (NOR storage is too expensive).  Mostly overcomable given enough error correction, but there is always that lack of true certainty...

 
phew.. 15 years is long time, here in govt organizations ( as we are too ""rich""! )  a server will unlikely see over 6-7 years.. even the software may not see over 5 years..rarely you can see some exceptions..