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Atomizer posted:Or if you need NVMe, this Bay-area chain has the 2 TB 660p for $220. Not bad, we're closing in on $100/TB for NVMe storage! The 1TB 660P was $105 this week and is currently $110 at Newegg, so we're basically at $100 1TB NVMe as we speak, albeit with QLC drives.
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Mar 3, 2019 03:11
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Both my Samsung EVOs 840, 850 reads 96% life remaining and have been in service for many years, system wipes, two different OS, massive games, updates, OS upgrades. Not a single error. The only issue was the old af 840 slow down bug which at the end of the day had no impact post patch in any noticeable way. SSD's a pretty mature now and as long as you aren't buying basement quality product overall it seems to have commodified like HDD other than the high end where it is still pretty fluid with QLC, NVME, Optane etc. I look forward to DNA storage. Rubbish seek times having to unzip the helix but absurd capacity with lifespan measured in millennia encased in bones.
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Mar 3, 2019 07:06
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So I have an 970 EVO.quote:PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> fsutil fsinfo sectorinfo c: Why?
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Mar 3, 2019 17:59
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It's NVMe right? Does any of that stuff even apply to NVMe? I have no idea. [edit] My Intel 750 NVMe: code:
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Mar 3, 2019 18:13
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Yea, NVMe. I don't know, my naive interpretation of things would suggest that going with 4K sectors would involve less protocol overhead. Recent harddrive models the last few years are 4K, so I was surprised to find that my SSD was still at 512b.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:29
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Combat Pretzel posted:Yea, NVMe. Yeah this surprised me as well. Google says you are right and 4k would involve less overhead. Wonder wtf the deal is?
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Mar 3, 2019 18:50
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It works with 4k sectors internally, but displays them in 512b format for compatibility reasons, I assume. This is why correct alignment was something to look out for before all utilities were aware of advanced format drives. Everything is working as expected.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:52
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Because 512 is more compatible, and the reported physical sectors on a SSD have nothing to do with what's really going on inside the SSD. Intel has drives that can swap 512 / 4k reported. Combat Pretzel posted:I don't know, my naive interpretation of things would suggest that going with 4K sectors would involve less protocol overhead. Recent harddrive models the last few years are 4K, so I was surprised to find that my SSD was still at 512b. I don't think the SATA & NMVe protocols have overhead based on the sector size. A single read command could already fetch 65536 contiguous sectors at a time, which is 32mb of data with 512. After that the data doesn't go over the wire in 512 or 4k chunks. Hard drives needed to switch to 4K sectors due to physical constraints of data on spinning platters, nothing else. Seagate's page on the subject is good. edit: Lambert posted:It works with 4k sectors internally Klyith fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 3, 2019 |
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Mar 3, 2019 19:01
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On the PCIe bus most root complexes/devices for regular PCs have max payload size of 256bytes, with 3-4 dword header overhead per transfer (plus LCRC) just for interest’s sake. Another interesting thing is pcie transfers are usually reversed from how you’d expect, a write to drive actually has the host telling the drive to read from the host memory location so the data is sent as completions to reads issued by the drive. Likewise a read from a drive has the host telling the drive to send writes to a location in host memory. This is so the host has control over its memory. I’m not sure how SAS/SATA does it but it’s kind of an interesting thing.
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Mar 3, 2019 19:11
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on page size: A recent article from ExtremeTech: quote:The entire grid layout is referred to as a block, while the individual rows that make up the grid are called a page. Common page sizes are 2K, 4K, 8K, or 16K, with 128 to 256 pages per block. Block size therefore typically varies between 256KB and 4MB. From a research paper by people who definitely know what they're talking about : quote:In MLC NAND flash memory, each flash block contains 256–1024 flash pages, each of which are typically 8 kB to 16 kB in size. My conclusion: SSDs are very complex on the inside and you should probably just not worry about it unless you're a SSD engineer or writing the filesystem code for an OS. 4k alignment of partitions on a SSD is a happy median that does not necessarily correspond to the real physical structure inside the SSD. It's good enough whether the SSD actually uses 4k or 16k. What you really want to avoid is being off by 512 bytes.
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Mar 3, 2019 19:27
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Klyith posted:on page size: Interesting. Guess my thinking was still stuck in the hard drive days where 4k sectors became the new norm.
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Mar 3, 2019 19:28
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My NVME drive looks a bit different, it's the HP one. code:
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Mar 3, 2019 19:32
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Lambert posted:Interesting. Guess my thinking was still stuck in the hard drive days where 4k sectors became the new norm. Nah that "SSD flash uses 4k pages, so align your partition to 4k" thing is common advice for SSDs, you're not crazy. I believed that was a fact until 10 minutes ago too. I just suddenly had the wait a second moment thinking if a flash cell doesn't even have a constant number of bits in it, the larger structures probably weren't static either. It's still a useful short way to say that partitions need to be 4k-aligned even if it isn't precisely accurate.
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Mar 3, 2019 19:53
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You should be using 512 blocks on NTFS partitions backed by 4K media presenting 8 512 blocks. Modern controllers optimize writes to 4K media when only a few logical 512 subsectors need to be edited. Almost every os y'all could be using sets this up correctly automatically. Can't wait for 4Kn drives to become more common. Klyith posted:It's still a useful short way to say that partitions need to be 4k-aligned even if it isn't precisely accurate.
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Mar 3, 2019 20:29
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format Basically everything consumer is still 512e not 4Kn, probably because of compatibility. Windows 7 doesn't support 4Kn, for example.
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Mar 3, 2019 21:05
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Klyith posted:Nah that "SSD flash uses 4k pages, so align your partition to 4k" thing is common advice for SSDs, you're not crazy. I believed that was a fact until 10 minutes ago too. I just suddenly had the wait a second moment thinking if a flash cell doesn't even have a constant number of bits in it, the larger structures probably weren't static either. You can read up on Open Channel specification if you're interested in what the firmware in a regular SSD generally has to deal with.
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Mar 3, 2019 21:42
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SSDs which claim 512 never are underneath, they just count on the OS having 4K file system allocation granularity and alignment. If the SSD controller "knows" writes will always be done in multiples of eight 512 byte LBAs, it can coalesce them into 4K and operate nearly the same as if it was 4Kn. There doesn't have to be protocol overhead for this either, the OS is going to issue multi-LBA commands to read or write contiguous groups of eight 512 byte LBAs rather than eight commands per group. The number 4K isn't because that's what's best for the flash media, 4K is just the most common file system allocation unit by a huge margin. NTFS, HFS+, ZFS, APFS, UFS, EXTn, XFS, they all default to 4K allocation blocks, meaning that all accesses will be in chunks of 4K. There are many reasons for 4K, one of the most important being that decades ago most computers (including the PC) converged on a 4K virtual memory page size, and it's super convenient for an OS if the FS allocation unit is exactly the same as VM page size. So, when SSDs got rolling and they needed a number to optimize around, 4K was it. In a more storage device centric universe, the host OS would know about and exactly match the SSD's media page size, but we aren't in that universe so the people who engineer SSDs make sure they handle the common case (4K) efficiently. Because of all this It's still true that a SSD which advertises 512 will not like it (bad performance, write amplification) if you use it such that writes are not done with 4K granularity and alignment. The only reason 4Kn hasn't taken over already is that (a) they did too good a job at making there be no penalty for advertising 512 as long as the FS is 4K anyways and (b) the PC industry is loving terrible at moving forward to new standards whenever a viable hack to let the old one keep limping along exists. BobHoward fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Mar 3, 2019 |
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Mar 3, 2019 22:06
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apropos man posted:I've had one of the blue, OCZ Arc 100 drives since... since they were on the market. Same here.... We have a small "fleet" of the 120GB variants at work. Maybe 15 or so. Never had a failure. I personally have a OCZ/Toshiba RD400 NVMe drive that is great too. Meanwhile, nearly every Intel 5xx/7xx series drive at work has failed. Including the the 2 Intel 530's I had at home. In fact Intel is the only SSD brand I have ever had a failure with that I can remember at this point.
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Mar 4, 2019 15:44
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stevewm posted:Same here.... We have a small "fleet" of the 120GB variants at work. Maybe 15 or so. Never had a failure. I personally have a OCZ/Toshiba RD400 NVMe drive that is great too. To contribute - My 120 GB Intel 320 failed suddenly with a loss of all data. The "PNY 256GB XLR8 Pro" drive I had (SandForce SF-2281VB1) failed by being unable to write at speeds above a few hundred KB/s. At least I could easily image the PNY drive. I'm really surprised by how unreliable the SSD's I've owned have been.
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Mar 4, 2019 17:56
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I had an Intel 320 (80 GB) fail on me as well as two Corsair Force, the F80 and the F120. Since then, I haven't had any problems. But the early ones were quite unreliable.
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Mar 4, 2019 18:11
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Lambert posted:I had an Intel 320 (80 GB) fail on me as well as two Corsair Force, the F80 and the F120. Since then, I haven't had any problems. But the early ones were quite unreliable. Agreed on that point. All the new ones seem to be pretty reliable, even the weird off/no name brands that many OEMs are using these days.
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Mar 4, 2019 18:14
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Huh, finally a Phison E12 drive with Firmware 12.1 baked in: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13955/the-silicon-power-p34a80-ssd-review-phison-e12-with-newer-firmware I'm guessing this is what's keeping Seagate's version of the drive off the market. Probably having to manually update the entire damned run because there's no way a first-tier drive maker is going to put out an SSD that has to wipe itself to upgrade to the newest/best firmware.
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Mar 5, 2019 02:20
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Anecdote: I have an Intel 330 240 GB still going strong after almost 6 years in my gaming desktop. I don't think I've ever had an SSD die on me.
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Mar 5, 2019 09:06
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If any eurogoons are looking for more storage: Amazon.de has the 2TB Sandisk 3D Ultra for 218€ today (50% off list price)
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Mar 5, 2019 13:21
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Atomizer posted:Anecdote: I have an Intel 330 240 GB still going strong after almost 6 years in my gaming desktop. I don't think I've ever had an SSD die on me.  The 330’s were Sandforce, though, and I had good luck with SF controllers over the years.
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Mar 5, 2019 19:45
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Some SSD sales: On the low end, this 240 GB Team 3D SATA 2.5" is only $30, and it does apparently have DRAM, so there's really no excuse for anyone to still run their OS on an HDD. At the other end, the 2 TB 660p is available for <$220 after tax, shipping, and the promo code EMCTWTA36 (which requires you to be signed up for the newsletter.) There have been intermittently cheaper deals, especially on Google Express, but those are a headache because they usually are only for first-time buyers.
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Mar 6, 2019 08:40
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You can get around that first-time buyer thing by just making a new account with a new email (ironically enough most people make new G-mail accounts).
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Mar 6, 2019 08:55
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Atomizer posted:Some SSD sales: At that price I'm thinking of replacing a m.2 MX500 with that Intel drive, is it a dumb idea?
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Mar 6, 2019 08:56
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BIG HEADLINE posted:You can get around that first-time buyer thing by just making a new account with a new email (ironically enough most people make new G-mail accounts). I know, but it's far too much effort just to save the $20 max or whatever. Also I've heard that you may or may not have to use a different shipping address and/or CC. I'm patient enough where I can wait for other deals; if Google doesn't want my business then too bad. Endymion FRS MK1 posted:At that price I'm thinking of replacing a m.2 MX500 with that Intel drive, is it a dumb idea? That would be fine, but make sure your m.2 slot supports both protocols. The MX500 is SATA and the 660p is NVMe. If you're good to go, then by all means give it a shot, because at worst you're doubling your capacity (IIRC the MX500 m.2 came in 1 TB max,) but also you can get a ~$10 USB enclosure for the newly-removed MX500 and just use it externally (if you don't have another use for it, or another open slot in the same system.)
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Mar 6, 2019 09:17
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Atomizer posted:I know, but it's far too much effort just to save the $20 max or whatever. Also I've heard that you may or may not have to use a different shipping address and/or CC. I'm patient enough where I can wait for other deals; if Google doesn't want my business then too bad. I don't know whether they've fixed it or not, but I took advantage of codes three times with three different emails with the same CC and all going to the same address. It's  , sure - but doing it five times saves you $100-150 depending on the max discounts. That's the difference between a 9700K vs. 9900K, a 2060 vs. 2070, or 16GB vs. 32GB.----- Evidently Micro Center is selling the new 1TB Inland Premium NVMe drive for $144, it's Phison E12-based and comes pre-installed with the 12.1 firmware: https://hardforum.com/threads/hot-inland-1tb-nvme-premium-144-microcenter-samsung-970-pro-killer.1978390/ All of these seem to use the same components - the Corsair MP510, MyDSSD BPX Pro, Sabrent's drive, the Firecuda SSD (when Seagate finally releases it to retail channels), so in this case Inland isn't iffy, I suppose. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Mar 6, 2019 |
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Mar 6, 2019 11:46
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BeastOfExmoor posted:I've been hearing about these high cost industrial and scientific instruments that are controlled by ancient PCs for so long now. Did the companies in these industries smarten up and start releasing things that could be more easily maintained long term or are we just going to be seeing the same issues for the next few decades? A bit late, but often the universities that own the instruments can't get budget approved for a PC upgrade / software upgrade, even though they can get additional multi million dollar instruments.
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Mar 6, 2019 13:47
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Naffer posted:I just ordered an IDE SSD (Transcend PSD330) to replace an aging 40 GB 3.5" hard drive in a 533 MHz VIA Cyrix3-powered embedded PC that runs an old piece of scientific equipment. The embedded PC runs Windows XP SP1. It's a goofy SSD - draws about 1.2W and is completely powered off the IDE connector. Naffer posted:Update 1: Update 2: SSD has arrived. I'm an idiot and didn't realize that a 44-pin IDE standard existed. It took me at least 2 minutes to realize why the ide cable I had would not plug into this SSD. Now I'm spending $5 on a 44-pin IDE to 40-pin IDE adapter and having to wait another few days. I ended up shelling out for the item out of pocket because none of our approved suppliers have this stupid item and I don't want to fight with procurement for a week. This also explains how it is powered off the IDE cable - the 44-pin IDE standard has extra power pins.
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Mar 6, 2019 21:59
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Ika posted:A bit late, but often the universities that own the instruments can't get budget approved for a PC upgrade / software upgrade, even though they can get additional multi million dollar instruments. Yeah, ten years ago I was working with a piece of scientific software and they were still writing their program to be compatible with either win 3.1 of MS-DOS, something egregious like that, because they had customers that were still using that OS on their workstations and either couldn't or wouldn't upgrade them. It was ridiculous but when you're dealing with those niche uses, the userbase is small and has a lot more power.
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Mar 6, 2019 22:51
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Ika posted:A bit late, but often the universities that own the instruments can't get budget approved for a PC upgrade / software upgrade, even though they can get additional multi million dollar instruments. Oh believe me, I understand that. It seems like most of the problem is unsupported drivers rather than hardware upgrade cost for the PC driving the device? Given that this seems to be a universal problem, you'd think that there'd be some demand from consumers (university's and industrial users in this case) to require that the drivers for the equipment be open sourced so they could eventually be ported, run in a VM, or whatever.
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Mar 7, 2019 05:10
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Naffer posted:Update 2: Yeah that's the connector used for laptops. Not anything unusual or special, but I'll forgive you for forgetting it existed because fortunately SATA's been around for well over a decade!
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Mar 7, 2019 10:23
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Evidently Micro Center is selling the new 1TB Inland Premium NVMe drive for $144, it's Phison E12-based and comes pre-installed with the 12.1 firmware: https://hardforum.com/threads/hot-inland-1tb-nvme-premium-144-microcenter-samsung-970-pro-killer.1978390/ Specs say it's got 1600 TBW endurance. Pretty good for a $144 part! Samsung 970 Pro is only 1200 TBW.. Dunno how they got 1600 unless it has something to do with that fancy Phison firmware.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:57
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Binary Badger posted:Specs say it's got 1600 TBW endurance. Pretty good for a $144 part! Samsung 970 Pro is only 1200 TBW.. They probably got it by (rightly) assuming that no one who shops at MicroCenter will ever get to 1200 TBW, let alone 1600 TBW, so they can quote whatever they want and no one is likely to really call them on it. Even "just" 1200 TBW is a bit over a full 1TB written, every single day, for the entire 3 years the warranty lasts.
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Mar 8, 2019 02:04
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MC will just replace the drives than to split pointless hairs for the select few special snowflakes who manage to exhaust the TBW rating within warranty so.
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Mar 8, 2019 02:22
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Also, you can't hold them to their spec sheet if you're not actually an inland professional using the drive.
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Mar 8, 2019 02:31
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So I decided to saunter by my local MicroCenter, and lo and behold... Turns out it was actually on sale until a week ago for $139.99, now it's back to $144.99. They'll usually whack off $5-$10 in "Instant Savings" if a product is experiencing slow sales; presumably they mistook this for the non-Premium model of which I saw they had stacks of. Haven't had a chance to benchmark it but probably will by the middle of the week. Edit: there were two at my branch but just checked, all gone now. I get this bad feeling this is going to be revealed as a pricing mistake and they'll come back in for something ridiculous like $219 or whatever. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Mar 10, 2019 |
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Mar 10, 2019 06:47
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