How much faster are the SSDs?

John Doe wrote:
Paul wrote:

Research has discovered that the write life
of NAND flash would improve by a large factor, if the
chip could only be annealed. I'm still waiting for
someone to figure out a way to put an Easy Bake Oven
inside modern drives, to make this happen. The annealing
undoes all the damage. So you're no longer looking at
a 3000 write limit on the worst flash products out there.
But any heater scheme, would be many times larger than the
flash cell sitting next to it. And the density would suck.
But until memristors come along, we can always dream.

I'm waiting for bubble memory to come along...

It came and went. Worked perfectly well.
Just a little slow.

Paul

On Mon, 11 May 2015 22:43:38 +0200, "s|b" wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 14:40:44 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?

Have you set AHCI in the BIOS?

I'll check this.

On Mon, 11 May 2015 22:43:38 +0200, "s|b" wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 14:40:44 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?

Have you set AHCI in the BIOS?


The MB manual says:

AHCI Configures the SATA controllers to AHCI mode. Advanced Host
Controller Interface (AHCI) is an interface specification that allows
the storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features such as
Native Command Queuing and hot plug.

On Wed, 13 May 2015 13:55:40 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 22:43:38 +0200, "s|b" wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 14:40:44 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?

Have you set AHCI in the BIOS?


The MB manual says:

AHCI Configures the SATA controllers to AHCI mode. Advanced Host
Controller Interface (AHCI) is an interface specification that allows
the storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features such as
Native Command Queuing and hot plug.

I tried it for the Win8.1 SSD, but a message said it wasn't supported
in this version.

Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 13 May 2015 13:55:40 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 22:43:38 +0200, "s|b" wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 14:40:44 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?
Have you set AHCI in the BIOS?

The MB manual says:

AHCI Configures the SATA controllers to AHCI mode. Advanced Host
Controller Interface (AHCI) is an interface specification that allows
the storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features such as
Native Command Queuing and hot plug.

I tried it for the Win8.1 SSD, but a message said it wasn't supported
in this version.

Before you randomly change the BIOS disk controller mode,
you need to "rearm" driver detection in Windows. And since the
term "rearm" is used for licensing issues, that term is
useless as a search term.

First question would be, how did you end up in vanilla IDE or
in RAID mode in the first place ? Note that some people have
evil little motherboards, with some sort of AHCI problem. And
rather than the default being vanilla IDE emulation for
compatibility reasons, it's because some aspect of AHCI is broken.
I think a poster had a problem with a Bolton AMD chipset, as
an example of a problem instance. The latest flavor of Bolton.

And you can see here, Windows 8 uses a slightly different
recipe than Windows 7, and has "every color of the rainbow"
in terms of responses. For some people, a certain recipe works,
for others, not. The last dude in the thread "thomthom", probably
has a Bolton or a similar problem (where the built-in AHCI driver,
for some reason, isn't recent enough). Because Windows gave
him the finger, when he tried to change it.

http://superuser.com/questions/47110...ling-windows-8

You don't *have* to use AHCI. From a previous thread here,
both IDE and AHCI have TRIM support now. So that's not a reason.
AHCI has tagged queuing. But is that really necessary on an SSD ?
The thing is, reordering command completion on a hard drive,
allows the drive to find the "most efficient path for head
movement", giving milliseconds of improvement in command
execution, when the "queue builds". Well, an SSD doesn't
have a head, seeks just about anywhere in 25uS. The drive
processor would be hard pressed to work out a more efficient
command completion order. It's probably just doing the
stupid commands in the order received. Although one person
in that thread, notes that his performance index went up by
a fraction of a unit. Whatever that means. So maybe there is
some usage pattern that benefits. I can't figure it out.
Doesn't make sense. Maybe the mere act of queuing, results
in a more efficient path in the Windows file stack ?

Have fun,
Paul

Paul wrote in :

Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 13 May 2015 13:55:40 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 22:43:38 +0200, "s|b" wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 14:40:44 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?
Have you set AHCI in the BIOS?

The MB manual says:

AHCI Configures the SATA controllers to AHCI mode. Advanced Host
Controller Interface (AHCI) is an interface specification that allows
the storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features such as
Native Command Queuing and hot plug.

I tried it for the Win8.1 SSD, but a message said it wasn't supported
in this version.

Before you randomly change the BIOS disk controller mode,
you need to "rearm" driver detection in Windows. And since the
term "rearm" is used for licensing issues, that term is
useless as a search term.

First question would be, how did you end up in vanilla IDE or
in RAID mode in the first place ? Note that some people have
evil little motherboards, with some sort of AHCI problem. And
rather than the default being vanilla IDE emulation for
compatibility reasons, it's because some aspect of AHCI is broken.
I think a poster had a problem with a Bolton AMD chipset, as
an example of a problem instance. The latest flavor of Bolton.

And you can see here, Windows 8 uses a slightly different
recipe than Windows 7, and has "every color of the rainbow"
in terms of responses. For some people, a certain recipe works,
for others, not. The last dude in the thread "thomthom", probably
has a Bolton or a similar problem (where the built-in AHCI driver,
for some reason, isn't recent enough). Because Windows gave
him the finger, when he tried to change it.

http://superuser.com/questions/47110...to-ahci-after-
installing-windows-8

You don't *have* to use AHCI. From a previous thread here,
both IDE and AHCI have TRIM support now. So that's not a reason.
AHCI has tagged queuing. But is that really necessary on an SSD ?
The thing is, reordering command completion on a hard drive,
allows the drive to find the "most efficient path for head
movement", giving milliseconds of improvement in command
execution, when the "queue builds". Well, an SSD doesn't
have a head, seeks just about anywhere in 25uS. The drive
processor would be hard pressed to work out a more efficient
command completion order. It's probably just doing the
stupid commands in the order received. Although one person
in that thread, notes that his performance index went up by
a fraction of a unit. Whatever that means. So maybe there is
some usage pattern that benefits. I can't figure it out.
Doesn't make sense. Maybe the mere act of queuing, results
in a more efficient path in the Windows file stack ?

I have been using an SSD with AHCI enabled for a good reason although I
don't recall exactly what the reason is. I do recall lots of practice with
switching between the two, or the two types of installations. I had a good
reason otherwise I wouldn't have spent so much time with it.

As I recall, switching to AHCI is not something you can do on-the-fly. The
operating system might boot, but I wouldn't trust it.

What do you mean by "both IDE and AHCI have TRIM support now"? The OS, or
the motherboard? If it's the motherboard, that's probably not useful to
the original poster.

Peter Jason wrote:
Win 8.1, MB GA-X58A-UD7-2Rev2, GeForce GTX480Ultra, RAM
12GBOCZ3X1600R2LV6GK, IntelCore i7 970,

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?


Also, I have run out of Sata sockets on the MB. Can I adapt somehow
the PCIEX16 slot to give me more?

Peter


Seagate are investing heavily in new HD technology; aiming for a 30TB
mechanical drive.
http://www.computerworld.com/article...rd-drives.html

Bang goes my theory that SSDs had completely superseded them.

Ed

John Doe wrote:


As I recall, switching to AHCI is not something you can do on-the-fly. The
operating system might boot, but I wouldn't trust it.

It is on a modern OS.

The one with a real problem, is WinXP. You can't (easily)
switch that one on the fly. There is a Catch22 issue, where
the driver won't install, unless the hardware is already in
that mode, which it cannot be. The best thing to do in that
case, is add another storage controller to the computer,
install the driver for that, move the C: drive to the new
controller, *then* screw around with third-party AHCI driver.
That's for things like WinXP or Win2K.

The Vista+ should have driver rearm as an option. You have
to dig up the appropriate recipe in each case.


What do you mean by "both IDE and AHCI have TRIM support now"? The OS, or
the motherboard? If it's the motherboard, that's probably not useful to
the original poster.

WinXP doesn't have TRIM. A newer OS may have TRIM.
For example, my statement would apply to Win8.1 users.

The drive can either do its own garbage collection routine
(ignoring TRIM hints), or it can be a TRIM based drive.
If so, it helps to pass it TRIM hints, as it maintains
the performance better over the long term.

The IDE and AHCI drivers in the modern Windows have
TRIM support. Things like RAID... are complicated.
As RAID doesn't have the necessary direct path to
send the command. Other RAID details remain a mystery.

One thing I don't understand, is one thread I was reading,
a person there said that "SATA 3.1 spec added TRIM as
a tagged/queued command, whereas a previous spec version
it wasn't queued". I think the idea was, with the older
spec, the driver had to stop issuing queued commands,
flush the queue, issue the TRIM hint, then go back to work.
So part of the problem with TRIM, is (apparently) delivering
it seamlessly with the other commands - while at the same
time, not causing real-time performance problems. You
don't want to be sending TRIM, and the user sees a
"drive hiccup" every time TRIM is sent.

Paul

Ed Cryer wrote:
Peter Jason wrote:
Win 8.1, MB GA-X58A-UD7-2Rev2, GeForce GTX480Ultra, RAM
12GBOCZ3X1600R2LV6GK, IntelCore i7 970,

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?


Also, I have run out of Sata sockets on the MB. Can I adapt somehow
the PCIEX16 slot to give me more?

Peter


Seagate are investing heavily in new HD technology; aiming for a 30TB
mechanical drive.
http://www.computerworld.com/article...rd-drives.html


Bang goes my theory that SSDs had completely superseded them.

Ed


With Shingled Writes, who the hell wants them ?

Those drives will write at 30MB/sec, and will have limited
sustained performance. You may not be able to "format"
the drive from end to end. Imagine how long it will
take to write 30TB, at 30MB/sec. Eons...

There will be precisely two kinds of drives.

1) Online drive, no Shingled Write, 6TB capacity, 220MB/sec read/write.
I.e. The last/biggest one worth buying.

2) Backup only drives with huge capacity, but Shingled Writes.
Some will be host managed (useless to home users), some will be
controller managed (suitable for your backup drive only).

If they get rid of the Shingle feature, they're welcome
at my house. As long as they only do 30MB/sec on writes,
I've got better ways to spend my time.

Right now, Seagate makes two 6TB drives. One worth
buying, and one suitable for placing back in the shipping
box and asking for your money back. Make sure you
order the right one :-)

At 4TB capacity point, you have nothing to worry about.
While they could go shingled on those, and do stuff like
reduce the number of platters by one, I've not heard of
any plan to do that. A 4TB drive today might have four platters
and eight heads, and use PMR.

Paul

On Mon, 11 May 2015 02:43:31 -0400, Paul wrote:

Peter Jason wrote:
Win 8.1, MB GA-X58A-UD7-2Rev2, GeForce GTX480Ultra, RAM
12GBOCZ3X1600R2LV6GK, IntelCore i7 970,

I installed an "Intel 530 series 120GB" SSD directly to the MB, but
the speed is no greater than any of my many HDDs.

Is there some special connection required?


Also, I have run out of Sata sockets on the MB. Can I adapt somehow
the PCIEX16 slot to give me more?

Peter

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167180

SSDSC2BW120A4K5
120GB
SATA III --- only needed if the device actually goes that fast

Gave up on getting a benchmark from the review section for a single drive.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75611/...-6Gbs-20nm-MLC

Launch Date Q3'13
Sequential Read 540 MB/s --- reads tend to be pretty good, always
Sequential Write 480 MB/s --- usually a function of capacity, 120GB is low end
Random Read (8GB Span) 24000 IOPS
Random Write (8GB Span) 80000 IOPS
Latency - Read 80 us (target 25us to 100us - 25us is flash delay)
Latency - Write 85 us
Power - Active 140 mW --- fanbois say it's Sandforce, cannot be this low
find a review, with power measurements
Power - Idle 55 mW --- Um, sure buddy

Best motherboard ports, in declining order:

1) Intel PCH (Southbridge) SATA III
AMD Southbridge SATA III
2) Add-on SATA III motherboard chip
3) Marvell 91xx version of (2) - limited to ~300MB/sec
4) Any SATA II port - maybe ~200MB/sec

Best rotating hard drive as of today = 220MB/sec (Seagate 6TB, non-shingled one)

A low-capacity SSD may write at 200MB/sec and read at the
SATA III bus limit. It depends on whether the controller
channel population, uses more channels for the 240GB or
480GB models, as to whether write rate saturated the
SATA III limit. (Maybe the 120GB drive has four flash
channels, and the 240G/480G SSD drives use eight channels.)
You need to find a review of the product somewhere - the
reviewers in the Newegg section, didn't give the quality
of test results I was looking for.

The IOPS (Input Output Per Second) rate should become
more apparent, if you do a Windows search for which the drive
is not indexed. That operation should go faster.

The Windows desktop file system doesn't have a lot of headroom,
which means in many situations where you'd hope to see 10,000
files a second processed, you still only see a couple hundred
files processed per second. The file system is a "bottleneck
to being impressed".

Run HDTune read benchmark, so you can feel better. That
should help tell you whether you've got a SATA II hardware
port on the motherboard...

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The market offerings on expansion hardware are
*really really weird*. Yes, a PCIEX16 should be
an excellent source of connection point. And, there
are some high-port-count chips for connecting
SATA. Trouble is, the manufacturer goes from
charging $10 a port on a dual port chip, to quite
a bit more on an eight port chip. The higher port
count chips are priced for usage on business RAID
cards. Which leaves a real hole when it comes
to a user solving the "me got no stinkin SATA III"
ports problem.

You can see here, $250 can give you hours of hair-pulling fun.
Check out the customer reviews. They flash the onboard firmware,
to change between RAID and JBOD (target mode). Just like Silicon Image
cards of long ago. SAS cards connect to SAS or SATA drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816118112

"4 Crucial M4s in raid 0 are giving me ~ 1800mb/sec"

If instead of going SAS controller based (and dealing
with drivers and firmwares), I could try SATA cards.
I see just one here, and the PCI Express interface is
x2. That means, roughly one or two SSDs might be a good
choice for this four port card. It's not making good usage
of the PCI Express slot. The market simply refuses to
put more PCI Express lanes on these chips. Just as the
two port chips, used a x1 lane interface. It cramps
your style, and makes spending a lot of money a waste
of time - lots of return postage when dissatisfied.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815158365

http://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapte...ard~PEXSAT34RH

Chipset ID Marvell - 88SE9230 --- not a 91xx chip, but research this...

Supported RAID Modes JBOD - (Just a Bunch of Disks) --- single drive, for you...
RAID 1 (Mirrored Disks)
RAID 0 (Striped Disks)
RAID 10 (1+0; Striped set of Mirrored Subset)
Type and Rate SATA III (6 Gbps)

Throughput Benchmark

1 x SSD 490.28 MB/S 120 GB --- could be slightly better...
beats the 300MB/sec 91xx generation

If you connect two SSDs and do disk to disk transfer
between them, they should do 490MB/sec, because the
PCI Express bus is full-duplex, one drive "reads",
one drive "writes", the PCI Express x2 read bus and
the PCI Express x2 write bus run at equal 490MB/sec
rates. If you run two drives in RAID0 however,
and read off the array, don't expect to get
exactly 980MB/sec from that. And if you connect
four drives in RAID0, you're likely to still be
limited to about 980MB/sec range. As the x2 bus
interface is the limitation (Rev2, 500MB/sec bus
rate per lane). That chip really should have
had an x4 or x8 interface. And bumped up the
internal processor power another notch.

Suffice to say, only the really really well prepared
home-builder, gets what they paid for. I'd probably
get screwed, if I went to my local computer store
and just did an impulse buy on the first shiny thing
I saw. I'd end up at 200MB/sec in all probability,
with just impulse buying crap. You have to be really
lucky or really good, to add crap to an old motherboard
and get 500MB/sec SSD performance from it. The market
doesn't have the hardware to offer the home users.
And hackery on a SAS controller is going to try your
patience. There isn't a large population of SAS
hackers, ready to answer your every question.

HTH,
Paul



Thanks Paul, I'll get stuck into this. As well I'll have to get an
external holder for my HDDs (7 at last count) because withdrawing them
from the computer case causes endless entanglement with cables, wires
etc.

Ashton Crusher wrote:
On Mon, 11 May 2015 14:42:49 -0700, "Ken Blake, MVP"
wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 21:34:21 +0200, "s|b" wrote:


SSD's are pretty fast, but be warned!

https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24#ssds-evidence-storage-issues

| A stored SSD, without power, can start to lose data in as little as a single week on the shelf.

I wouldn't be very concerned about shelf life of the data, but much
more about loss of data during vacation travel when the computer's
power is off.

Yikes, that's the first I'd heard of that issue. Do you have any idea
if hybrid drives natively provide an automatic and transparent backup
of the SSD side of the drive so that if the SSD side seems to have
gone back the "regular" side will restore it?

Here's a refutation.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/t...data-retention

Paul