Yes, and Linux can do the same by mounting the filesystem as "sync" (synchronous). Doing so does sort of defeat a lot of the benefit of having a large data cache, though. Ideally, the SSD should have enough backup power, via capacitors or other, to write the entire contents of cache during a power outtage.
Don't normal drives write their ram cache out as quickly as they can though? In that case you're really not getting much beyond a warm and fuzzy feeling from the latency added to all your IO.
That would mean you could restore, if the drive isn't totally hosed, from your last backup. Unless you're advocating tiered storage managed by the user?
The consumer models of every other SDD with a ram cache have also dropped the battery/ultracap to cut costs. Given OCZ's habbit of making a zillion variants with each controller they use I'm mildly surprised they aren't launching a premium variant which adds backup power for a 100 or 200% marginal profit rate.
Everest is a big deal. This will allow OCZ to offer next-gen SSD's at a price point no other company can match.
The latency of this controller will certainly quiet down Fusion IO. They used to talk about IOPS until OCZ surpassed them and then focused on latency which it seems OCZ has surpassed them again.
OCZ's challenge will be ensuring that this drive is reliable, but since the controller is owned by OCZ I doubt we'll see any issues similar to the "BSOD" debacle that occurred because they had to wait for sand force to implement their changes.
OCZ is the same company that has the dubious honour of screwing customers on all 3 generations of it's SSD products.
With them now in the drivers seat on the controller development I certainly don't view this as a positive - their business tactics will just continue but now the problem gets deeper with the rush to market.
As for even mentioning OCZ going up against Fusion IO is a joke. Let me give you a hint : one has well established enterprise level support and qualification, one doesn't have any real support and zero qualifications (and don't say they have a support forum as if you ever voice a problem they rapidly lock and hide the thread as they don't want the transparency of all the issues).
That lack of transparency though can be applied to many many enterprise hardware providers when it comes to known issues (dell and their leaky capacitors, apple and pretty much anything that goes wrong with apple parts, etfc).
The world is a "what have you done for me lately' world and if OCZ can deliver, businesses will do what they have always done: make a business decision.
Lookup the 25nm transition fiasco. They sold drives with less capacity than was advertised on the packaging and they didn't even issue a recall. OCZ left it up to the consumers to find the fault themselves and complain to OCZ.
All SSD's have not only the formatted capacity misconception that HDD's have, but also the reserved area on top of that. Or was there an issue that went beyond even that? I googled it and found nothing, so I doubt its that bad.
It was that bad. If you bought an OCZ Vertex 2 in Oct 2010 and then another one in Jan 2011 then chances were that you wouldn’t be able to RAID them because the latter one would be GBs(!) smaller.
"With twice the density per NAND die in these early 25nm drives, __usable__ capacity was also reduced when OCZ made the switch with Vertex 2."
As I've been saying from the start, OCZ have tried very hard to burry this issue and unfortunately, it seems that they have succeeded.
They can use all the terminology and excuses they want (RAISE and whatever) but the fact was, OCZ was misleading customers and NEVER issued a recall (the only correct way of dealing with the problem).
I paid ~$800 for my 160GB Intel x25-m G1 (~$5/GB), and OCZ is announcing pricing of $1.10 - $1.30 per gig, giving a 1TB price of ~$1100-1300. A hefty improvement, if you ask me; it won't be long before the price of a 1TB drive drops below what I paid for a 160GB drive.
- As long as these drives offer middle of the road performance, we all win. To OCZ: Please don't let these drives suck. That's all I ask. I'm not asking for top tier performance. I'm asking for solid,reliable performance. Something to get my parents on SSD's.
- They will drive down the cost of competing products, and offer a budget alternative. $1/GB is the "golden" price point a lot of people have been holding out for before purchasing an SSD.
- No caps on the drive == no problem. If you are running a computer without a UPS you've allocated your money poorly.
Not really when you have a decent PSU and are running well within its power envelope (<70% load or so). I have an old OCZ that kept my computer running when the power flickered (before I got a UPS) despite everything without a built-in battery resetting.
"also i've had ocz vertex2 and 3 and never had any issues. "
Me too, I had a vertex, vertex 2 and now Agility3 without a single issue. Customer response to OCZ's SSD's has been overwhelmingly positive, what is that guy even talking about?
If 1% of hundreds of thousands of people compain it will make a forum absolutely blow up. I don't know why everyone who makes it sound likel literally every OCZ SSD customer has a problem can't figure this out.
I won't buy another SSD for a while. I've been so turned off. When SSDs came out they were supposed to be awesome. But soon we learned that Windows XP has stuttering and other problems with SSDs. Then we learned that SSDs have problems with performance loss when heavily used. OK, so TRIM came to the rescue. Everybody rejoiced. But then we learned that TRIM requires new drives, compatible controllers and compatible OS and it doesn't work with RAID controllers. So we bought new SSDs, new motherboards and Windows 7 brought us TRIM support. Everybody rejoiced. Then we learned about the compressible versus incompressible data performance gap and issues. Then the SandForce firmware shenanigans saw the light of day. What's next? When will it be safe to buy an SSD and not to worry about yet some other issue surfacing? They still cost way too much to have all these issues and such short warranties, they need to come with 5 year warranties like most upper end hard drives. Two of my original OCZ SSDs died few months after their 2 year warranty.
All these issues? Only the last two are valid as the rest have been resolved as you said, but the last two only apply to Sandforce-based SSD's, not SSD's in general.
Windows 7 had TRIM at launch. It launched roughly at the same time as SSD's hit the mainstream. The only reason you would have problems is if you were using an 8 yr old OS that doesn't even handle block devices correctly.
As for TRIM in RAID, it is lamentable, but not a huge issue. We've been doing testing in RAID arrays, and the controller is such a huge bottleneck that hardware RAID makes no sense. If you are using SSD's, you want performance. So it's better to do something in software, use a few CPU cores to handle the RAID calculations, and have much higher performance. I never thought I would see the day when I was against hardware RAID for performance reasons, but here we are.
Even with those issues you mentioned (trim, incompressible data etc) an SSD still kills a hard drive in performance. Never had a problem with mine, its been rock solid since day one, no stuttering or anything like that.
What OCZ is calling "enterprise" market simply isn't. They are playing numbers games. Sell an SSD to anyone except an end user and it's "enterprise".
Manufactures like EMC, Hitachi, IBM, NetApp are not using OCZ products but they are using STEC, Intel, Micron, and Fusion-IO products as fast as they can get them - to the tune of over $1B/year of true enterprise SSD being sold. I know EMC had some products on hold as they could not get SSD's quickly enough to keep up with sales.
"The list of OCZ's OEM partners include companies such as Dell, HP, SGI, Quanta Cloud Computing, Supermicro, Panzura, Tegile, Astute Networks, Penguin Computing, Wistron, JVL, Flextronics."
"According to Ryan Petersen, either directly or through OEMs, OCZ SSDs have recently been deployed to enterprise and data center clients such as AOL, eBay, SAP, Prudential, Marketwire, EdgeCast, ASK.com, NTT Docomo, South Korean Telecom, Boxel, Boeing, Chevron, Carbonite, Honda, Bloomberg."
This is not a busieness site. We are not interested in their business and financial accomplishments but their technological and customer care ability. They have no problem with selling shit to customers and then defending their decision.
"This is Ryan Petersen:
He’s the CEO of OCZ Technology. He wasn’t too happy after my Intel X25-M SSD review.
Although that review was about the X25-M, it addressed a major shortcoming with a number of other SSDs in the market - the most popular at the time being OCZ’s Core line."
I wonder how much more different this area is as compared to it's previous generation and the current competition. I like the fact that they released a 1 TB SSD, simply because this will hopefully drive down prices for other SSDs and that competition will be more focused on getting that out for their next line-ups.
OCZ's reliability has always been something of an issue and I don't know what will happen if this drive starts failing. Especially since this would be better marketed to small businesses/enterprise division than a regular consumer. I meaning having a TB is great but who uses more than 256 gb anyway?
I will never understand this sort of statements. Can you really not imagine anyone using a bigger then 256GB SSD? Are you that shortsighted?
I build workstations for video apps and I've been wanting to have an "as big as possible array" for real time non-compressed 4K video. Media workstations will benefit enormously from having an 8TB array for that purpose in a 2-bay (5,25") space. There you have a use case.
Want another? What about a small very fast server for a medium sized company?
Even in the consumer space, the only reason for not having a 1TB SSD in a laptop is its price. Once is goes down, I bet you'll find dozens of reasons for having more than 256GB.
There was no recall. More importantly this should never have happened. It is not as if OCZ didn't know that there was less usable capacity in those drives. They knowingly missold their products.
Its bleeding edge technology. You should know you're taking a risk. There are many issues between hardware. These days everyone rushes to market.
Go sue a video game developer for releasing a product with bugs while you're at it. All of OCZ's drives come with a warranty, and they release firmware updates. They DO support their products.
Furthermore, use of the product is exclusively stated in ALL storage products that the manufacturer is NOT responsible for lost data. It is up to YOU to back up your data and make sure that it is kept safe. They cannot be responsible for YOUR stuff. Only for THEIRS. As a huge corporation they do an amazing job of holding up their end of the deal. They sort through thousands of RMA requests a day I'm sure.
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Squidward - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Looking forward to see how this compares to SandForce, just might have some real competition with these new SSD Drives from OCZ,FunBunny2 - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
What are they thinking? User data in DRAM and no net underneath?davepermen - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
who could have though OCZ would do something like this? :)josephjpeters - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
People should be backing up with an external. If you have a Mac, go buy a Time Capsule so you don't even have to think about back up.jmke - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
I don't see how an external data backup will prevent data loss when that 512Mb CACHE memory falls without power....Sunburn74 - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Can't you have window's automatically flush the cache after all writes?Sivar - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Yes, and Linux can do the same by mounting the filesystem as "sync" (synchronous). Doing so does sort of defeat a lot of the benefit of having a large data cache, though.Ideally, the SSD should have enough backup power, via capacitors or other, to write the entire contents of cache during a power outtage.
DanNeely - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Don't normal drives write their ram cache out as quickly as they can though? In that case you're really not getting much beyond a warm and fuzzy feeling from the latency added to all your IO.stoggy - Saturday, October 29, 2011 - link
if its that important to you, buy a ups?FunBunny2 - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
That would mean you could restore, if the drive isn't totally hosed, from your last backup. Unless you're advocating tiered storage managed by the user?Paul Tarnowski - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
While that would work, a better (and when power goes out cheaper) solution to the problem is using an UPS. Means that writes are finished regardless.Of course, it doesn't get around PSU failure. Hmm, I wonder if there's money in selling SATAPOWER-CAP-SATAPOWER connectors.
DanNeely - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
The consumer models of every other SDD with a ram cache have also dropped the battery/ultracap to cut costs. Given OCZ's habbit of making a zillion variants with each controller they use I'm mildly surprised they aren't launching a premium variant which adds backup power for a 100 or 200% marginal profit rate.josephjpeters - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Everest is a big deal. This will allow OCZ to offer next-gen SSD's at a price point no other company can match.The latency of this controller will certainly quiet down Fusion IO. They used to talk about IOPS until OCZ surpassed them and then focused on latency which it seems OCZ has surpassed them again.
OCZ's challenge will be ensuring that this drive is reliable, but since the controller is owned by OCZ I doubt we'll see any issues similar to the "BSOD" debacle that occurred because they had to wait for sand force to implement their changes.
sanguy - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
OCZ is the same company that has the dubious honour of screwing customers on all 3 generations of it's SSD products.With them now in the drivers seat on the controller development I certainly don't view this as a positive - their business tactics will just continue but now the problem gets deeper with the rush to market.
As for even mentioning OCZ going up against Fusion IO is a joke. Let me give you a hint : one has well established enterprise level support and qualification, one doesn't have any real support and zero qualifications (and don't say they have a support forum as if you ever voice a problem they rapidly lock and hide the thread as they don't want the transparency of all the issues).
Sunburn74 - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
That lack of transparency though can be applied to many many enterprise hardware providers when it comes to known issues (dell and their leaky capacitors, apple and pretty much anything that goes wrong with apple parts, etfc).The world is a "what have you done for me lately' world and if OCZ can deliver, businesses will do what they have always done: make a business decision.
semo - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Lookup the 25nm transition fiasco. They sold drives with less capacity than was advertised on the packaging and they didn't even issue a recall. OCZ left it up to the consumers to find the fault themselves and complain to OCZ.retrospooty - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
All SSD's have not only the formatted capacity misconception that HDD's have, but also the reserved area on top of that. Or was there an issue that went beyond even that? I googled it and found nothing, so I doubt its that bad.semo - Friday, October 21, 2011 - link
It was that bad. If you bought an OCZ Vertex 2 in Oct 2010 and then another one in Jan 2011 then chances were that you wouldn’t be able to RAID them because the latter one would be GBs(!) smaller."With twice the density per NAND die in these early 25nm drives, __usable__ capacity was also reduced when OCZ made the switch with Vertex 2."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-...
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=21433...
As I've been saying from the start, OCZ have tried very hard to burry this issue and unfortunately, it seems that they have succeeded.
They can use all the terminology and excuses they want (RAISE and whatever) but the fact was, OCZ was misleading customers and NEVER issued a recall (the only correct way of dealing with the problem).
JonnyDough - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
You can raid two drives of unequal size. Your raid volume would simply be reduced to the smaller of two drives...jjcrandall - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Wasn't this a big + of the SandForce drives? The nDurance stuff looks really interestingBench this Anand!
jdietz - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Estimated cost $1500 ($1.5 per GB).Guspaz - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
I paid ~$800 for my 160GB Intel x25-m G1 (~$5/GB), and OCZ is announcing pricing of $1.10 - $1.30 per gig, giving a 1TB price of ~$1100-1300. A hefty improvement, if you ask me; it won't be long before the price of a 1TB drive drops below what I paid for a 160GB drive.darckhart - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
finally. the return of indilinx. yay.James5mith - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
A few thoughts:- As long as these drives offer middle of the road performance, we all win. To OCZ: Please don't let these drives suck. That's all I ask. I'm not asking for top tier performance. I'm asking for solid,reliable performance. Something to get my parents on SSD's.
- They will drive down the cost of competing products, and offer a budget alternative. $1/GB is the "golden" price point a lot of people have been holding out for before purchasing an SSD.
- No caps on the drive == no problem.
If you are running a computer without a UPS you've allocated your money poorly.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
You'd better have one that switches real fast.Paul Tarnowski - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Not really when you have a decent PSU and are running well within its power envelope (<70% load or so). I have an old OCZ that kept my computer running when the power flickered (before I got a UPS) despite everything without a built-in battery resetting.retrospooty - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
"also i've had ocz vertex2 and 3 and never had any issues. "Me too, I had a vertex, vertex 2 and now Agility3 without a single issue. Customer response to OCZ's SSD's has been overwhelmingly positive, what is that guy even talking about?
sanguy - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Go read their forums, plenty of issues... Even Anand has written about them in detail.Stuttering Vertex-1. Vertex-2 firmware issues. Vertex-3 BSOD issues.
MadMan007 - Friday, October 21, 2011 - link
If 1% of hundreds of thousands of people compain it will make a forum absolutely blow up. I don't know why everyone who makes it sound likel literally every OCZ SSD customer has a problem can't figure this out.Zak - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
I won't buy another SSD for a while. I've been so turned off. When SSDs came out they were supposed to be awesome. But soon we learned that Windows XP has stuttering and other problems with SSDs. Then we learned that SSDs have problems with performance loss when heavily used. OK, so TRIM came to the rescue. Everybody rejoiced. But then we learned that TRIM requires new drives, compatible controllers and compatible OS and it doesn't work with RAID controllers. So we bought new SSDs, new motherboards and Windows 7 brought us TRIM support. Everybody rejoiced. Then we learned about the compressible versus incompressible data performance gap and issues. Then the SandForce firmware shenanigans saw the light of day. What's next? When will it be safe to buy an SSD and not to worry about yet some other issue surfacing? They still cost way too much to have all these issues and such short warranties, they need to come with 5 year warranties like most upper end hard drives. Two of my original OCZ SSDs died few months after their 2 year warranty.Wardrop - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
All these issues? Only the last two are valid as the rest have been resolved as you said, but the last two only apply to Sandforce-based SSD's, not SSD's in general.Proxy711 - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
Welcome to new technology.Even if all those issues were valid at this point in time, which they arent. SSDs are still a lot faster then HDDs.
James5mith - Friday, October 21, 2011 - link
Zak,Windows 7 had TRIM at launch. It launched roughly at the same time as SSD's hit the mainstream. The only reason you would have problems is if you were using an 8 yr old OS that doesn't even handle block devices correctly.
As for TRIM in RAID, it is lamentable, but not a huge issue. We've been doing testing in RAID arrays, and the controller is such a huge bottleneck that hardware RAID makes no sense. If you are using SSD's, you want performance. So it's better to do something in software, use a few CPU cores to handle the RAID calculations, and have much higher performance. I never thought I would see the day when I was against hardware RAID for performance reasons, but here we are.
JonnyDough - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
I haven't had any issues, but then...I know how to upgrade my BIOS, firmwares, drivers. I say firmwares because even DVD drives have firmware. :)cactusdog - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Even with those issues you mentioned (trim, incompressible data etc) an SSD still kills a hard drive in performance. Never had a problem with mine, its been rock solid since day one, no stuttering or anything like that.sanguy - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
What OCZ is calling "enterprise" market simply isn't. They are playing numbers games. Sell an SSD to anyone except an end user and it's "enterprise".Manufactures like EMC, Hitachi, IBM, NetApp are not using OCZ products but they are using STEC, Intel, Micron, and Fusion-IO products as fast as they can get them - to the tune of over $1B/year of true enterprise SSD being sold. I know EMC had some products on hold as they could not get SSD's quickly enough to keep up with sales.
josephjpeters - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
"The list of OCZ's OEM partners include companies such as Dell, HP, SGI, Quanta Cloud Computing, Supermicro, Panzura, Tegile, Astute Networks, Penguin Computing, Wistron, JVL, Flextronics."http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/2011101...
josephjpeters - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
and..."According to Ryan Petersen, either directly or through OEMs, OCZ SSDs have recently been deployed to enterprise and data center clients such as AOL, eBay, SAP, Prudential, Marketwire, EdgeCast, ASK.com, NTT Docomo, South Korean Telecom, Boxel, Boeing, Chevron, Carbonite, Honda, Bloomberg."
semo - Friday, October 21, 2011 - link
This is not a busieness site. We are not interested in their business and financial accomplishments but their technological and customer care ability. They have no problem with selling shit to customers and then defending their decision."This is Ryan Petersen:
He’s the CEO of OCZ Technology. He wasn’t too happy after my Intel X25-M SSD review.
Although that review was about the X25-M, it addressed a major shortcoming with a number of other SSDs in the market - the most popular at the time being OCZ’s Core line."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/18
They also have no problem with knowingly misselling products to their customers and only reacting when directly confronted (see my post below).
soliozuz - Thursday, October 20, 2011 - link
I wonder how much more different this area is as compared to it's previous generation and the current competition. I like the fact that they released a 1 TB SSD, simply because this will hopefully drive down prices for other SSDs and that competition will be more focused on getting that out for their next line-ups.OCZ's reliability has always been something of an issue and I don't know what will happen if this drive starts failing. Especially since this would be better marketed to small businesses/enterprise division than a regular consumer. I meaning having a TB is great but who uses more than 256 gb anyway?
sicofante - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
"who uses more than 256 gb anyway?"I will never understand this sort of statements. Can you really not imagine anyone using a bigger then 256GB SSD? Are you that shortsighted?
I build workstations for video apps and I've been wanting to have an "as big as possible array" for real time non-compressed 4K video. Media workstations will benefit enormously from having an 8TB array for that purpose in a 2-bay (5,25") space. There you have a use case.
Want another? What about a small very fast server for a medium sized company?
Even in the consumer space, the only reason for not having a 1TB SSD in a laptop is its price. Once is goes down, I bet you'll find dozens of reasons for having more than 256GB.
JonnyDough - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
I have games that will take up 20 GBs...semo - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
There was no recall. More importantly this should never have happened. It is not as if OCZ didn't know that there was less usable capacity in those drives. They knowingly missold their products.acknowledged != fixed
semo - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
So you don't mind being sold less than what you paid for and expected, as long as the manufacturer "is leading the way"?JonnyDough - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
Its bleeding edge technology. You should know you're taking a risk. There are many issues between hardware. These days everyone rushes to market.Go sue a video game developer for releasing a product with bugs while you're at it. All of OCZ's drives come with a warranty, and they release firmware updates. They DO support their products.
JonnyDough - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
Furthermore, use of the product is exclusively stated in ALL storage products that the manufacturer is NOT responsible for lost data. It is up to YOU to back up your data and make sure that it is kept safe. They cannot be responsible for YOUR stuff. Only for THEIRS. As a huge corporation they do an amazing job of holding up their end of the deal. They sort through thousands of RMA requests a day I'm sure.JonnyDough - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
"Firmwha?"The issues with most PCs can be narrowed down to a problem between the keyboard and the back of a chair. :) Education is power.
zhangqq - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
http://ygn.me/bTf7pQapa - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
Anand?Ao1 - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
"The first Octane drives will be available in the channel starting November 1st"So where is it then?