News - OCZ launches Core Series V2 SSDs, raises capacity to 250GB

[HEXUS]

OCZ has launched V2 of its Core series solid-state drives, offering performance gains and increased storage capacity.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

id like to see benchmarks of SSDs

[pauldarkside]

Looking forwards to seeing the prices! If they sit well with my wallet I'll take one for the netbook and another for my main rig.

[cordas]

100+Gb make these intresting now, its plenty enough space to run the OS and applications. Now the question is price and performance....

[shaithis]

Always interesting to read about new SSDs, they are certainly set to replace hard drives, once they become super-affordable.

OCZ seems to be selling them substantially cheaper then anyone else, are they cutting corners or are other manufacturers over-inflating prices?

A quick browse of SSDs on scans shows the price differences to be astronomical. OCZ cheaper then half the price of the nearest competitor.....

The magic spot for me will be around 400-500GB for £100 (I need 4 for my RAID )....starting to think I have a long wait ahead of me

[chrestomanci]

Originally Posted by shaithis

The magic spot for me will be around 400-500GB for £100 (I need 4 for my RAID )....starting to think I have a long wait ahead of me

I think you might be waiting a long time.

Prices at present appear to be around £2.50 per GB, which is where hard drive prices where about 8 years ago, so you have a long time to wait. Personally, I would accept about £1 per GB in a ultra portable laptop, less in a desktop PC or large laptop.

Why do you want to put them in a Raid array? Is it for reliability or speed? Either way I am not sure RAID is the right way to do things, as it was designed for discs which have different failure modes and performance limitations compared to SSDs.

I would like to see the evolution of filling systems designed for SSDs instead of ones like ntfs which is designed for rotating discs. Magnetic media has small sectors (512byes) that can be read an unlimited number of times, but has big seek delays when moving accross the disc, so the filing system tries to cluster data together, and reads and writes freely. Raw SSD devices have big sectors (64 kbyte), which can only be written a limited number of times, stored bytes cannot be overwitten, instead the whole sector must be erased to a virgin state. Currently SSD devices emulate hard discs by having a firmware interface that pretends to have small sectors, like a hard disc & it does wear leveling & other housekeeping in the background. This emulation introduces a performance penalty.

Linux has filing systems like JFFS2 that will work natively with SSD, and avoids the performance bottleneck by moving wear leveling and block aggregation operations to the host OS. It would be good to see an equivalent FS available for windows.

[shaithis]

I love both the speed and reliability of RAID.

I store a lot of data and don't like doing complete system backups because of that, so I tend to backup important data and rely on RAID to protect my OS and programs from having to be re-installed or having the PC un-usable should a drive failure occur.

The speed is a lovely added bonus

I know it will be a long wait but no-where close to 8 years. I think the technology will be adopted so fast that prices will plummet and overall SSDs will become relatively cheaper then hard drives are today. 2 years maximum I would say, 1 year if I am lucky

[Biscuit]

SSD hard drives have dropped massive amounts in the year... i doubt you will be waiting THAT long for the prices to drop so much. On hdds they have to find ways of fitting more data onto platters and fitting more platters into the casing which is a little more compicated than increaing the chip capacity.

[chrestomanci]

Originally Posted by Biscuit

SSD hard drives have dropped massive amounts in the year... i doubt you will be waiting THAT long for the prices to drop so much. On hdds they have to find ways of fitting more data onto platters and fitting more platters into the casing which is a little more compacted than increasing the chip capacity.

I am not saying it will take 8 years for SSD prices to drop to the approximately 10/Gb that HD prices are at the moment, but I do think that it is wishfull thinking to think that they will drop to that price in one or two years.

In order to cost effectively produce SSDs for 1/25th of their current price, you would need to shrink the fab process that makes them to fit 25 times as many cell onto a flash memory chip the same size. Current flash chips are fabbed with a 60 nanometre process. To get 25 times as many cells onto the same chip, they would need to be fabbed at a 12 nanometre process. When you consider that no one is fabricating anything that small, I think it is fair to say, that it will be a while before flash gets fabbed at that size. I would say at least 3 years.

The other way that flash can become much cheaper, is if someone builds a huge factory and floods the market. This has allready happend, and is why flash prices have dropped so much in the past three years, but I don't think they will drop much more. Fabs that big cost billions to build and the investors want a return, which they will get if prices stay where they are, but not if their is a glut in the market, and prices plummet. I doubt anyone will want to risk such a big investment in a falling market.

Originally Posted by shaithis

The magic spot for me will be around 400-500GB for £100 (I need 4 for my RAID )....starting to think I have a long wait ahead of me

I think there is another factor that will prevent your building your SSD Raid array. Suppose that in 3 years time, SSD has dropped to your target of 20p, per GB. In that time hard drives will probably have dropped further from their current 10p to perhaps around 2p, and you may decide, that your £100, budget would be better spent on five 1Tb drives. (To store all the 1080p films you downloaded using your 50Mb broadband connection). It will probably be more like 10 years before SSD finally overtakes hard drives as the most cost effective storage medium.

[Funkstar]

The question is: Does flash actually need to be as cheap as magnetic drives?

It can certainally be a lot faster, and that is where the real market is going to be in my opinion. Once well performing 64GB drives are affordable, then you will have a lot more people sticking one of them along with a nice big 500GB+ magnetic drive in their PC.

I don't really expect flash drives to be as economical as regular drives for a long long time, but i do expect them to become mainstream in the next year to two years.

[pauldarkside]

After a quick check online I don't think these are "within reach of the average consumer" as the article puts it. OCUK (yes, sorry) is listing pre-order prices for the 30, 60, 120 and 250GB drives at around £152, £206, £365 and £730 respectively (prices include VAT). Scan's prices for the V1 series are cheaper so hopefully that will follow when they list the V2 series.

I guess I fall outside of OCZ's definition of an average consumer as I don't intend on spending that sort of money. I'll be waiting until they drop with the £1 to £1.50/GB range.

[Speed]

Don't OCZ normally offer a lifetime warranty with their memory? Makes me wonder why these only have a 2 year warranty on them!?!

[Funkstar]

Originally Posted by Speed

Don't OCZ normally offer a lifetime warranty with their memory? Makes me wonder why these only have a 2 year warranty on them!?!

Because flash memory has a limited number of write cycles per sector, this is not the case for regular RAM.

This is the same reason you don't get hard drives with a lifetime warranty, they will fail eventually.

[Hyuukai]

Im glad SSD based solutions are coming on alot more but for me they are still too expensive and generally i am going to wait till they come down before i make the lunge, i should be upgrading my pc over christmas time i doubt they will of gone done much before then so ill go with the velicoraptor's

[Speed]

Originally Posted by Funkstar

Because flash memory has a limited number of write cycles per sector, this is not the case for regular RAM.

This is the same reason you don't get hard drives with a lifetime warranty, they will fail eventually.

It is true that flash memory has a limited number of write cycles per sector, but standard hard drives have moving parts, so are much more likely to fail regardless. These drives are also rated for 1.5 million hour mean time before failure, which is something ridiculous like 171 years. So why they couldn't offer a better warranty is still strange. Maybe they are keeping the costs down by reducing the amount spent on RMAs and customer services for this particular product.

[cordas]

Each generation of SSD is cheaper, larger and faster than the last at the moment, This is simply the newest on the arket so its currrently the cheapest. Personally I wouldn't be at all supprised if by this time next year you couldn't pick up a 100-128gb SSD for £50-100.

Hopefully MS is working on a file system specificly designed to work with SSD and take full advantage of the different ways these opperate to traditional HDDs and are planing to roll it out for Vista (and hopefully XP).