back to article Micron revs flashy SSD line

Micron has revved its RealSSD C300 flash products, moving them to a smaller process technology, doubling maximum capacity, increasing performance, and christening its new line the RealSSD C400. The existing C300 line uses 34nm process technology; the C400 uses 25nm technology, which has enabled Micron to double maximum …

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  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Missing one thing

    What I would like in my PC is an SSD for the Windows partition, a RAM disk for the swap file and my HDDs for data storage.

    I am missing the RAM disk. I would like a PCI card with two double-channel slots, enabling up to 16GB of DDR3 to be used as a virtual disk unit. Aw heck, even DDR1 would be fast enough.

    Come on, people, it's not like it hasn't been done before. I still have an old i286-compatible card that held up to 8 1MB EDO sticks back in prehistoric 1993. And Gigabyte did one in 2009 but withdrew it not long after.

    1. Malcolm 1

      A bit redundant?

      Why not just upgrade your regular RAM and install a 64bit OS? Paging will be minimised with no need for unconventional hardware.

    2. Lionel Baden
      Thumb Up

      I WANT ONE OF THESE

      http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

      actually scratch that i want quite a few of these :D

  2. Duncan Macdonald
    Thumb Down

    Very poor endurance

    An endurance of 72TB on a 512GB device is only 144 full writes - most SSD memory arrays allow 3000+ writes and have a controller amplification factor of 1.5 or less which would allow 2000+ full writes. Unless there is a typo or error in the article this is a series of SSDs to steer clear of.

    1. MinionZero
      Unhappy

      New way to write less to make it sound more

      I was thinking the same thing about the poor write endurance. Intel's marketing department is working overtime on the duplicitous wording. They make 72TB of written data sound big, when in fact its actually performing very poorly compared with some other flash products. I.e. "endurance is up to 72TB of written data" & "40GB of data written every day"

      So 72Tb/40Gb = 1800 flash writes on average before its dead. That low. Its a lot less than the quotes of 100k writes and even 10k writes we were getting about some flash drives.

      I was thinking about using the Fail Icon, as that's what we get after 1800 flash writes :(

    2. MinionZero
      Unhappy

      New way to write less to make it sound more

      I was thinking the same thing about the poor write endurance. Looks like its the new marketing department method for duplicitous wording as I see Intel are also using this same measurement method. They make 72TB of written data sound big, when in fact its actually performing very poorly compared with some other flash products. I.e. "endurance is up to 72TB of written data" & "40GB of data written every day"

      So 72Tb/40Gb = 1800 flash writes on average before its dead. That low. Its a lot less than the quotes of 100k writes and even 10k writes we were getting about some flash drives.

      I was thinking about using the Fail Icon, as that's what we get after 1800 flash writes :(

    3. Ian Michael Gumby
      Boffin

      You misinterpreted the quote...

      They are saying that the 512GB drive can handle up to 72TB of write cycles. That is if you were to write 40GB a day on to the 512MB drive, you can reasonably expect the drive to last 5 years before you have a drive failure.

      Yes, you're point is valid. However the point that the author is making and what Micron is saying is that these drives will last just as long as regular hard drives will last based on a realistic 40GB of writes per day.

      The use case is within a disk array for database work. That is to say that most companies aren't writing 40GB of data per 512GB drive.

      The point I'm trying to make is that if you put the use case of the drive and the statement in context, they are trying to say that you can use these drives in a commercial grade application.

      A 2.5" 512GB SSD is probably a bit less costly that a PCIe card with 512GB of SLC. (Yeah SLC and MLC isn't an apples to apples comparison, but the idea of 512GB of Solid State Storage is the point. PCIe is very expensive.) For many applications where you want SSD, you don't need the performance of PCIe cards. So Micro does offer a better value.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Notebook drive?

    Then I hope they've done something about the power consumption of the C300s! I put one in my laptop and found it drained the battery FASTER than the original HD. After a month of (failed) tweaking the disk went back in, and the SSD went into my desktop :-(

    Check the power specs before you buy kids (I didn't!)...

    1. Steven Jones

      Almost certainly not the SSD

      The ratings of all the SSDs that I've come across are considerably lower than 2.5" HDDs.

      The reason why you laptop drained the battery faster was almost certainly because something that was previously I/O bound was able to run faster and more frequently and hence chewed up a lot more power in the CPU. Very likely it was some sort of background task or related to security. Given that the read latency on an SSD is usually something of the order of 100 times lower than a 2.5" drive, then it can have a huge knock-on effect on the other resources used as an I/O bottleneck is relieved.

      Tom's Hardware carried out a flawed benchmark test on power consumption on SSDs that found exactly this.

  4. Jerry Love

    Disk Freeze

    I really hope they fix the disk freeze issue that exist on their current drives and is the subject of a long running thread on the Crucial forum. This shows as "Event ID 9: The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period" in Event Viewer. My laptop, an Asus K72J is running two drives, a Crucial C300 128 gig and a 320 gig storage drive. The SSD is set up correctly and all drivers are up to date but there still seems to be a problem with Intel's storage drivers and power settings for this drive. Very annoying when it happens!

  5. zingbot22
    FAIL

    4.2 days of life expectancy with continous writing.

    72 TB of written data... It can write at 415 MB/s, so create a macro loop to copy another SSD to it and fill the SSD. AT this rate, you can save 1GB to the drive every 2.47 seconds. You can fill the drive every 42 minutes which will save out 1/2 a TB. In 84 minutes you can save out 1 TB. That means that in 6048minutes you will have exhausted it's limit for written data. In 100.8 hours, or 4.2 days the expensive, $800 Crucial SSD would be used up and nearing the end of it's useful life. THAT is HORRIBLE, LOL! And to top it off, it's only about 144 write cycles. FAIL

  6. zingbot22

    etc

    By the way, in the "macro loop", I meant that after the drive is full, to of course delete the files and start over. And do this 144 times until the drive was dead.

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