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Super Talent sprinkles fairy dust on its "budget" SSD lineup

The solid state disk (SSD) market is really starting to heat up. Super Talent threw down the gauntlet with its low-priced MX series SSDs. OCZ then returned the favor with its Core Series SSDs.

OCZ held the upper hand with not only lower pricing for its Core Series SSDs, but also the advantage of faster read/write performance. Super Talent's MX SSDs clocked in with read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds of 40MB/sec. OCZ's Core SSDs feature read speeds of 120 to 143 MB/sec and write speeds of 80 to 93 MB/sec depending on the capacity of the drive in question.

With OCZ breathing down its neck, Super Talent worked a little magic on its MX drives. The 15GB and 30GB models now feature read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds of 60MB/sec. The 60GB and 120GB have the same read speeds, but now have write speeds of 80MB/sec.

"Our expert engineering team is constantly discovering new ways to improve our products, and this is one improvement that will be well received by power laptop users", said Super Talent Director of Marketing, Joe James. "We continue our relentless drive to add performance, features and value to our SSDs while driving the price down."

In addition to the speed bumps, Super Talent also recently posted a new $40 rebate to make SSDs more price competitive with OCZ's core lineup.

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Longevity?
By EricMartello on 7/21/2008 6:41:31 PM , Rating: 2
My main concern about SSDs is their actual longevity in a "real world" environment. Current Flash memory "wears out" after a certain amount of RW operations, and when you consider how often the swap file is paged on any system, I'd be leary about picking up an SSD that may fail in less than 2 years.




RE: Longevity?
By leexgx on 7/21/2008 6:45:20 PM , Rating: 2
users who own SSD are likey to have 4gb of ram installed so the page file is not likey going to be used much

id be more bothered about windows defrag and system restore, if useing vista as both are hdd useage can be big in some systems to the point you have to turn them off


RE: Longevity?
By EricMartello on 7/22/2008 5:48:16 AM , Rating: 3
If you're running on any current OS then yes, the swap file will be (should be) used. You CAN disable it in XP if you have a good amount of RAM and most of the time your system will run just fine...but a disabled swap file is unlikely to provide any noticeable performance gains...and it forces your physical mem to hold junk that is not necessarily needed by the program/game you are running. It does not have the perceived effect of forcing XP to use physical memory more efficiently.

As for the SSD MTBF ratings...I don't trust those. I read somewhere that the cells in SSDs are "cycled" so that the same cell is not constantly written to...but even so, as a given cell loses its ability to "remember" it could have an effect similar to bad sectors on a standard HD. The drawback being that it might happen more often unless the SSDs are using some improved flash memory technology.

I never wore out any of my flash memory, but then again, I've never used flash mem to run an OS or other I/O intensive application. I just use them for quick file transfers, digital pics and stuff like that.


RE: Longevity?
By mindless1 on 7/23/2008 1:57:19 PM , Rating: 2
Ah, but it does in fact have the actual effect of forcing XP to use physical memory more efficiently.

If you leave the pagefile enabled, it IS used even when the system has remaining free memory. Take a look at the figures in XP's Task Manager to see it, though I'll grant you that a significant chunk of the space is just a virtualized allocation based on application demands, not actually real data paged out, but nevertheless it is an overhead for the system to perform, an addt'l amount of time and processing required to do so.

The only reason not to disable virtual memory is if the system does not have enough physical memory to handle the sum total of allocated, not just actually *used*, space demanded by all applications, OS, etc.

It is always faster to not have a pagefile. It is sometimes a trivial difference in performance, even one not so readily measured with benchmarks since it's the multitasking, paging in and out between applications where you would see the most benefit - but that benefit is definitely there in some uses, readily perceivable especially in cases where you ran an application using a lot of memory then exited that application having to wait for other data to page back in before you can resume normal operations with the other apps.

Let's worry about SSD write cycle limitations when people start seeing it causing failure. Until then, we have nothing but evidence that mechanical drives are a bigger liability when it comes to data loss or downtime.

There are a fair amount of people that have used flash memory for OS. More than you might even realize when talking about industrial or other commercial embedded systems, mainly what needs to be done is essentially what you are arguing against, to disable needless and excessive writes to the drive from paging, and of course equip a system with enough main memory to allow this.

Beyond pagefile, a properly designed SSD should last several years running an OS for typical uses. EVen if you continually wrote to a drive over and over it could take many years.


RE: Longevity?
By shabby on 7/21/2008 6:57:07 PM , Rating: 2
People keep saying flash wears out... has anyone actually had one fail because of this?


RE: Longevity?
By Belard on 7/22/2008 5:35:38 AM , Rating: 2
Yes.


RE: Longevity?
By mindless1 on 7/23/2008 1:59:00 PM , Rating: 2
Care to provide a real example for us?


RE: Longevity?
By kmmatney on 7/22/2008 11:48:58 AM , Rating: 2
Sounds like a fun project. I have some old 32GB memory sticks. I'll write a program that writes to them constantly, and see if I can get them to wear out!


RE: Longevity?
By TennesseeTony on 7/22/2008 4:34:00 PM , Rating: 2
Holy crap! 32 Gig memory sticks? :) Yeah yeah, I know, you meant MB, not GB.


RE: Longevity?
By Brandon Hill (blog) on 7/21/2008 7:09:03 PM , Rating: 5
RE: Longevity?
By shabby on 7/21/2008 7:26:35 PM , Rating: 2
If only regular hard drives had that kind of lifespan, i guess this solves the longevity mystery.


RE: Longevity?
By Flunk on 7/22/2008 1:39:47 AM , Rating: 2
Actually MTBF rate for consumer drives works out to be about 30 years. Now of course we all know that these numbers do not mean that every drive lasts that long, but the same holds true for those SSD numbers. To really know how these things last we are going to have a wait a few years for real world numbers to be available.

Check the MTBF on this sheet if you don't believe me.
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_...


RE: Longevity?
By mindless1 on 7/23/2008 2:10:40 PM , Rating: 2
You have somewhat of a point, but the same does not really hold true, it's an apples and oranges comparison you are trying to make between a MTBF number and a write cycle number for a flash chip... especially true when we realize that it would be like using a rotational wear rating for the hard drive motor instead of the lifespan of the whole device.

Besides, it's just inappropriate to consider MTBF at all since we know it would be extremely rare to have any drive work continuously for 15 years, let alone twice that, while given a reasonable environment there is a good chance a properly designed SSD will last for the entirety of the rated life cycles.

Even so I would have to agree that we need more time to be sure of this, that there is not some other failure mechanism that will cause mortality instead of the so often quoted write cycle limitations. PCB delamination, tin whiskers, power surges, shock to the PCB causing it or onboard component damage are all more and more likely the longer the interval. A SSD might actually last 30 years even if nobody wanted to keep using the same one, being old/small/slow tech eventually, for even half that period.


RE: Longevity?
By Cunthor666 on 7/22/2008 12:46:37 AM , Rating: 2
How about a picture source?


RE: Longevity?
By Brandon Hill (blog) on 7/22/2008 2:42:44 AM , Rating: 2
It's a crop from the Super Talent spec sheet:

http://www.supertalent.com/datasheets/6_132.pdf


RE: Longevity?
By coversyl on 7/22/2008 2:57:50 AM , Rating: 2
I have been using XP with 2GB memory and no swap file for 2 years now.


RE: Longevity?
By Brandon Hill (blog) on 7/22/2008 3:01:46 AM , Rating: 2
Same here. I'm running an MSI Wind with 2GB of RAM and no swapfile. I did the same with my Eee PC which also had 2GB of RAM in XP.


RE: Longevity?
By mindless1 on 7/23/2008 2:20:07 PM , Rating: 2
There's only one real concern, that you buy a drive with ample free space. For example if you put Vista and some apps on one and had only 4GB free space remaining, you end up with roughly 1/5th the lifespan compared to using a larger SSD with 20GB remaining. Even in the former case you may find it lasts years.


Progress, yet...
By grath on 7/21/08, Rating: 0
RE: Progress, yet...
By DarkElfa on 7/21/2008 6:29:21 PM , Rating: 2
Indeed. They might as well be selling 1000$ toasters.