SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

[Christopher]

Yeah, except the Octane is at 25TiB, and is still at MWI = 100. My guess? That attribute isn't working {nor the sector write attributes} on my drive. So who knows?

[canthearu]

Yeah, OCZ are possibly the most arrogant SSD maker out there IMO.

The other thing that really grates me the wrong way is their horrible firmware update system. Having to use their special program to connect to the internet and download the firmware update is far too paranoid, given most other manufactures just give you the sandforce utility and a ROM file.

Not only that, but most of the firmware updates for their non-sandforce drives are destructive ... and then they say on the forums that the firmware update MUST be done ... major source of WTF in my book.

I am NOT looking forward to the Vertex 4 ... unless they can get their stuff up to scratch. Feed me an intel 520 anyday

[Christopher]

I think the options for Indilinx Barefoot drives are great. So now you have regular, Turbo, and Arrowana FWs for Indilinxes.

It is cool that you can usually rescue a dead drive with a destructive flash, but I don't know if the Octane has that capability.

[canthearu]

I think the options for Indilinx Barefoot drives are great. So now you have regular, Turbo, and Arrowana FWs for Indilinxes.

It is cool that you can usually rescue a dead drive with a destructive flash, but I don't know if the Octane has that capability.

This things are cool if you are not actually doing anything useful with an SSD .... as soon as you are though, having a single good, well supported firmware is best.

And having destructive flash the only option of updating firmware (and the manufacturer saying it is most important to flash it) is a pretty awful thing to do.

[canthearu]

Hmm, is anyone interested in seeing intel's advantage with their sandforce firmware.

Around here I can get the Silicon Power Velox V30. It uses the sandforce controller and intel synchronous NAND, so it is very similar in phyisical construction to the Intel 520. Good news is that it is fairly inexpensive, about the same price as the cheapest async NAND drives.

If you guys think it would be interesting, I would not be against grabbing one and endurance testing it (see which one dies first ... the intel sandforce or the bare sandforce drive)

[B.A.T]

Todays update:

Intel X25-M G1 80GB
439,2336 TiB
21868 hours
Reallocated sectors : 04 to 05
MWI=82 to 80
MD5 =OK
44.67 MiB/s on avg


m4
583.3678 TiB
2533 hours
Avg speed 73.08 MiB/s.
AD gone from 24 to 17.
P/E 10171.
MD5 OK.
Reallocated sectors : 00

[bulanula]

This things are cool if you are not actually doing anything useful with an SSD .... as soon as you are though, having a single good, well supported firmware is best.

And having destructive flash the only option of updating firmware (and the manufacturer saying it is most important to flash it) is a pretty awful thing to do.

Indeed. Maybe OCZ SSD is good for gamers that always tweak their system drives but for reliability go with Intel, Crucial or Samsung. Forget OCZ and other such rebranders.

If you want to constantly lose your data and mess about with forums and tweaking and updating firmware then please feel free to act as OCZ's guinea pig ...

[Christopher]

Samsung 830
169 574 GiB in 167 hours
Just shy of 7 days
3.5x the Turbo speed
Had 271.7GB on it before testing started.

Octane
42 205 GiB in 73.64 hours
~ 3 days
Started out of box

Vertex Turbo
197 542 GiB in 671 hours
~27 days
Started out of box

-----------------------
Fantastic

It seems too awesome to be true.

[canthearu]

Samsung 830
169 574 GiB in 167 hours
Just shy of 7 days

Makes me want to throw my 520 under a bus.

Octane
42 205 GiB in 73.64 hours
~ 3 days

Has the Media Wear Indicator moved on this one yet?

Vertex Turbo
197 542 GiB in 671 hours
~27 days

Keeps ticking away. Just how far it can go is anyones guess given the nice error free operation of the NAND

[Christopher]

Makes me want to throw my 520 under a bus.

The Samsung is super sexy.

Has the Media Wear Indicator moved on this one yet?

Not a bit. But this drive is really starting to grow on me. I think the interesting parts are the ones that don't show up in benches.

Keeps ticking away. Just how far it can go is anyones guess given the nice error free operation of the NAND

It's not like they're making a lot of 51nm Samsung NAND anymore, and I'm almost sad that I'm murdering such a wonderful drive.

Almost.

[canthearu]

Hmm, is anyone interested in seeing intel's advantage with their sandforce firmware.

So nobody thinks it is interesting to see exactly how much difference intel's firmware/NAND poaching makes to an the 520's life?

[Anvil]

So nobody thinks it is interesting to see exactly how much difference intel's firmware/NAND poaching makes to an the 520's life?

But of course we do
Are you sure they are using comparable NAND?

[canthearu]

But of course we do
Are you sure they are using comparable NAND?

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/435...ew/index4.html

Seems to be 25nm Intel synchronous NAND.

[Christopher]

I would like to see a SF on 100% incompressible data. I can think of a few things that might happen off the top of my head.

But I probably have enough drives going for the time being. There are some older drives in desperate need of testing, and I for one would very much like to see a Indilinx on 34nm Intel (and the Incompressible data on a SF).

But I think 3 concurrent drives is about my limit, so it's going to have to be someone else for a while. Unless I change my mind.

[canthearu]

No, the velox v30 would be for me to test. That way I'd be at 3 drives as well.

[Christopher]

No, I get that. I was just ruminating on the possibilities. I have that 120GB Chronos Deluxe I've been threatening to test for some time. But I think the next SF I do is gonna be on incompressible data. I think that's where the interesting stuff happens.

But I suspect that it would get VERY slow after a few hours.

[canthearu]

Patriot Torqx-2 64GB - Day 40

Drive hours: 958 (702 Hours, 256 missing)
GiB written: 61,344 GiB (59.91 TiB)
Avg MB/s: 20.17 MB/s

Bad blocks: 2/0/83
Wear cycle counter: 0/3834/5843

Note: The Torqx 2 power on hours counter fell 256 hours when the counter dropped from 0x39F to 0x29F. Strange

Intel 520 60GB - Day 31

Drive hours: 758
Avg MB/s: 91.72 MB/s

Host GB written (F1): 232,571.22 GiB (227.12 TiB, 7442279 raw)
NAND writes (F9): 164,687 GiB (160.83 TiB)

Reallocated sectors (05): 0
Failure count (AB, AC): 0 program, 0 erase
Media Wearout Indicator (E9): 48

[Christopher]

OCZ Octane 128 Day 4

47208 GiB
162.92 MB/s Average
82.43 hours

Samsung 830 256 Day 7

178439 GiB
288.10 MB/s Average
176 hours

7891 Wear Leveling Count
MWI 78

0/0 Erase/Program Fail

OCZ Vertex Turbo 64 Day 28

200138 GiB
84.22 MB/s Avg
679 hours

3586 Avg PE count
20 MWI

0/0/0 Read/Program/Erase Fail

------------------------------------------------------

I sure do heart the 830. And the Turbo.

The Octane is doing well I suppose -- it's average hasn't really moved since it started 683 loops ago.


Here is some funky temp data from the 830:

[Ao1]

Christopher, I found a couple of posts over at OCZ that reported SMART values. It seems that only attribute 5, 12 & 233 update. You have had no movement in 233 at all? With ~47TB of writes it’s starting to look like the drive does not have LTT.

ModelNumber : OCZ-PETROL
Serial Number : OCZ-W693SQFYKX9O7N38
WWN : 5-e8-3a-97 e2a6e73c7

Revision: 18
Attributes List
1: SSD Raw Read Error Rate 7
3: SSD Spin Up Time 0
4: SSD Start Stop Count 0
5: SSD Reallocated Sector Count 169
9: SSD Power-On Hours 0
12: SSD Power Cycle Count 20
232: SSD Total Count of Write Sectors 160
233: SSD Remaining Life (%) 59

ModelNumber : OCZ-PETROL
Serial Number : OCZ-2819HISWE49RZ6VF
WWN : 5-e8-3a-97 e1c601ac3

Revision: 18
Attributes List
1: SSD Raw Read Error Rate 7
3: SSD Spin Up Time 0
4: SSD Start Stop Count 0
5: SSD Reallocated Sector Count 9
9: SSD Power-On Hours 0
12: SSD Power Cycle Count 43
232: SSD Total Count of Write Sectors 160
233: SSD Remaining Life (%) 97

[B.A.T]

Todays update:

Intel X25-M G1 80GB
443,0081 TiB
21893 hours
Reallocated sectors : 05 to 07
MWI=80 to 79
MD5 =OK
44.60 MiB/s on avg


m4
589.5449 TiB
2558 hours
Avg speed 73.02 MiB/s.
AD gone from 17 to 14.
P/E 10274.
MD5 OK.
Reallocated sectors : 00

[Christopher]

Ao1,

The Octane doesn't move anything but POH and Power Cycles on my drive. I thought there was something wrong at first, but I don't think there is.

I went back and looked at some posts involving lower MWI, and they were all non-Octanes. But that doesn't have anything to do with it, IMHO.

Like the first Vertex Turbo I ran, MWI is being governed by reallocations and not host writes/PE cycles. Why they've chosen that route is unclear, but I imagine it had to do with people asking questions about terrible MWI on the forums. Notice how the answer to lower MWI on the forums is never "Oh, you have lots of bad blocks."

But I swear it to be true.

[Anvil]

Kingston SSDNow 40GB (X25-V)

825.06TB Host writes
Reallocated sectors : 05 36 // 4 up
Available Reserved Space : E8 99
POH 7407
MD5 OK

33.88MiB/s on avg (~49 hours)

[canthearu]

Like the first Vertex Turbo I ran, MWI is being governed by reallocations and not host writes/PE cycles. Why they've chosen that route is unclear, but I imagine it had to do with people asking questions about terrible MWI on the forums. Notice how the answer to lower MWI on the forums is never "Oh, you have lots of bad blocks."

But I swear it to be true.

Yeah, seems strange to have linked to the life of the drive, but not measuring how many cycles are used.

The SSD must store this information, otherwise it wouldn't be able to properly wear level.

[Christopher]

Yeah, seems strange to have linked to the life of the drive, but not measuring how many cycles are used.

The SSD must store this information, otherwise it wouldn't be able to properly wear level.

yup. Its just not exposed in smart and has no bearing on mwi.

[Ao1]

One user over @ OCZ reported that relocated sectors had been wiped clean after a f/w update, which would appear quite irregular, but regardless the ratio of relocated sectors reported from various sources is not consistent with the predicted Remaining Life and in any case is nothing to do with the remaining P/E cycle count.

The Octane reports a logical and physical sector size as 512 bytes, which is what most SSD’s report for some strange reason.

According to the SMART read out below there are 250069680 user addressable sectors. X by 512 = 128035676160 bytes or 119.24GiB.

As the minimum addressable size is 4K or 8k depending on NAND geometry the minimum that a relocated sector can represent at the NAND level is 4K or 8K.

For NAND with a 4K page size the approx. values below can be used: (EDIT: Values taken from a Micron product sheet)

• 1 block = 256 4K pages = 1048576 bytes (1MiB)
• 1 plane= 2,028 blocks = 2076672 bytes (1.98MiB)
• 1 LUN = 2 planes = 4,153,344 bytes (3.96 MIB)

1 Relocated sector could = 1 Page (4K), 1 block (1MiB), 1 plane (1.98MiB) or 1 LUN (3.96MiB) depending on how a bad sector is sectioned off.

So, if there are 169 relocated sectors that could represent 0.66 MiB, 169 MiB, 334.62 MiB or 669.24 MiB.

If there is 8 GiB of reserve NAND, 669.24 MiB would = ~ 8% reduction. If you doubled the page size = 16%. In the first example I posted (#3894) there are 169 sectors = a 41% reduction.

ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: OCZ-OCTANE
Serial Number: OCZ-I379591E684V26SL
Firmware Revision: E0882540
Standards: Supported: 8 7 6 5. Likely used: 8
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBA user addressable sectors: 250069680
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 250069680
Logical Sector size: 512 bytes
Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 122104 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 128035 MBytes (128 GB)
cache/buffer size = unknown

ModelNumber : OCZ-PETROL
Serial Number : OCZ-N6V39742RQS8IJ7Z
WWN : 5-e8-3a-97 e47f1a2b8

Revision: 18
Attributes List
1: SSD Raw Read Error Rate 7
3: SSD Spin Up Time 0
4: SSD Start Stop Count 0
5: SSD Reallocated Sector Count 95
9: SSD Power-On Hours 0
12: SSD Power Cycle Count 26
232: SSD Total Count of Write Sectors 160
233: SSD Remaining Life (%) 91