Momentus® XT Solid State Hybrid Drives

[scooterscot]

AtW's quite correct. Enjoy your new drive but make regular backups

Gosh don't encourage him...

[AtW]

The device retains it's 1 or 0 by switching from one state to another, nothing more complicated than that.

"most MLC NAND stores four states per cell"

Source: Multi-level cell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[PRC1964]

20 TB is a lot of writes, especially for older disks that did not have that smart wear levelling algorithms, you must be using SLC SSDs, in which case you might still be ok , but for MLC 20 TB written isn't small amount.

SSDs are ideal for reading a lot, but writing rarely.

Yes it is a lot for an SSD drive and I was concerned about the deteriation of performance when we bought them. They come with an Intel optimiser program that they recommend you run once a week to keep them at peak performance. This is the important bit. If you don't do it, the performance will degrade quickly.

I'm not clever enough to tell you if their speed has suffered much since we put them in, but I can tell you that they are still very fast, and as I said, for the price I'd happily chuck them away whenever they wear out.

[AtW]

I can tell you that they are still very fast

They will still be very fast for random reads - it's the write capability that suffers - it also increases risk of total failure as those things have got limited number of erase cycles, even though recently relesead controllers (like SandForce) help mitigate it to a degree, but it will take some years before fairly cheap SSDs will be reliably useable for things like swap disk.

HTH

AtW in "we've spent a 5 digit amount on SSDs" mode.

[Spacecadet]

AtW in "we've spent a 5 digit amount on SSDs" mode.

£139.99?

[AtW]

£139.99?

I wish terabytes of good SSD cost that much

[MrRobin]

Bugger me, the price of SSDs has plummeted then... I bought an Intel X25M 160Gb for £300 just 1 year ago!

Worth every penny tho, gave me ageing desktop a new lease of life!

EDIT: Oh, it's a hybrid. my bad.

[d000hg]

From reading reviews of SSDs, they only seem to talk about write failing... but read being safe so even a broken disk isn't losing data. This is reviewing for general PC use, not in server farms though... but then from talking to a guy from SNIA, in a big data-centre you view normal HDDs as pretty unreliable.

Been thinking about an SSD, but one of these hybrids sounds interesting. Does the hybrid part mean the flash part gets an extra-special hammering as all data goes 'through' it? Maybe that's what was being discussed, I tuned out a bit during the bickering. AtW do you really know this stuff or are you just opinionated... if the former your advice is appreciated.

[doodab]

I'm afraid it is switching. From one state to another. You don't know this?

No need to get so upset. The device retains it's 1 or 0 by switching from one state to another, nothing more complicated than that. Unless it's multiple states with which you are referring.

This can occur numerous times.

But as I said before, if the driver operates the product like an idiot it's going to fail, the hardware could operate indefinitely.

I understand now why I'm paid the big bucks...

A NAND flash cell will wear out after a finite number of write / erase cycles. For MLC this is about 10,000 cycles, for SLC about 10 times that.

I bought an intel one for my laptop, seriously worth the money even at €200 for 80GB.

[Spacecadet]

Just installed this hard drive on me Macbook pro

Like a normal hard drive expect the most accessed data resides on 4gig of flash.

Awesome performance, booted up and ready to use in 18 seconds from cold.

500Gig, not bad for £95

Hows the drive going? Still fast enough to keep you happy?