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Steve Wozniak: Why SSD Is No Flash In The Pan

computerworld.com — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak accepted a position as chief scientist at solid state drive company earlier this year. Wozniak says he took the job because the company is so much like Apple was in its early days.

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 14, 2009

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  • spiralspirit, on 10/14/2009, -1/+25the only problem with SSDs now is pricing.

    Cheap SSDs have horrible performance, enough to make them worse than current HDDs. Good performance SSDs cost serious money - $3-5 a GB. thats just way too much. Bring the price down, and more will buy.
  • robwhite1979, on 10/13/2009, -1/+18I've been considering getting a small-ish SSD for a while now, just big enough to install my OS and applications on. That seems like the best solution at the moment: media on a big regular ol' HDD and the "brains" of the beast on an SSD.
  • GrumpytheDwarf, on 10/14/2009, -1/+15Just make SSDs affordable!!!
  • swordedge, on 10/14/2009, -0/+13He never grew out of his high school days. He still does practical jokes.

  • theNazz, on 10/13/2009, -1/+10Fusion-io and Woz, Dugg!
  • cplusplus, on 10/14/2009, -0/+6That seems good to me.
  • combatchuck, on 10/14/2009, -0/+5Funny you should mention that, what with SSD's limited write cycles and block size limitations. Hard drives are fragile, yes, but the failure rate is nowhere near the ridiculous amount you're suggesting. A well-made large hard drive might lose a few gigabytes over the course of its entire life. I have a 120 GB samsung drive that's still reporting better than 99% capacity, and it's like 6 years old. Tell me about your SSD's capacity after 6 years, dozens of reinstalls, swapping computers, and living out its retirement in a computer that belongs to a 12 year old who likes to download. Or I could mention my 250 GB counterfeit WD drive that I acquired for a pack of cigarettes and a ride to get said cigarettes, that's still alive and kicking in a friend's computer after 3 years.

    SSD is good for speed and random access, not for daily use. Definitely don't use one as a scratch drive, heh.
  • combatchuck, on 10/14/2009, -0/+5That's one of his best qualities, and why he is so revered in the tech community. Plus, he's a genuinely nice guy.
  • dhjackburton, on 10/14/2009, -2/+6title makes me want to punch the OP in the face
  • mastercheif, on 10/14/2009, -0/+4While I guess the Fusion iO works well in enterprise applications because those PCI-e slots were not being taxed so much, on the consumer desktop with its rapidly more complex GUIs I don't know if the bypassing of the southbridge is such a good idea. It would really be fighting for bandwidth in an SLi configuration.
  • TransmitThis, on 10/14/2009, -1/+45 pages makes me want to punch computerworld.com in the face
  • TallestSkil, on 10/14/2009, -0/+3Heaven forbid that Woz renounce his fun-loving, thinking-of-new-innovations ways to have a corporate life of nothing but profits and screwing the little guy.
  • Jonjonr6, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2The downside of the Fusion-IO cards is that they're not bootable, so you wouldn't be able to use one of those.
  • rebrad, on 10/14/2009, -0/+2Whoa
  • combatchuck, on 10/14/2009, -0/+2Not true. If you're going to buy an SSD like that, you're not going to cheap out on the motherboard. Intel's X58 chipset has 40 PCIe lanes, and with a throughput of 500 MB/s for each lane, it would take only 3 lanes to max out their SSD. It could safely live in an x4 slot, but an x8 would probably be more comfortable for bursts (assuming burst speed is a meaningful term in those drives), leaving a full 32 lanes for graphics cards, which don't actually use their full bandwidth potential anyways.
  • rolf, on 10/14/2009, -0/+1I just used the OCZ solid series iirc. It was one of the cheapest brand names but it's stable so far. Intel X-25 are king of speed hill but I didn't need it. NewEgg has a nice selection of SSDs plus ratings by users that actually bought item, I usually make sure it has at least 4 stars out of 5 on average.
  • rolf, on 10/14/2009, -0/+1I've been using a set-up like that for almost a year now, works very well. I don't have to wait for a disk to spin-up anymore when starting an application where it's the most noticeable. Since I switched OSes at the same time, I can't say for sure what the speed improvements are, but then again I don't have one of the blazing fast Intel SSDs either. A small SSD is still probably best in a notebook, where I had several traditional drives fail already just due to normal everyday travel.
  • se7envii, on 10/14/2009, -0/+1Yeah i just ordered an Intel X25-M 2nd Gen 80GB SSD (will have TRIM support) a few days ago for ~$240. I put Windows 7 and all my apps on it and leave my games/media/downloads etc.. on a 1TB hard drive. It works great =)
  • Tbags, on 10/14/2009, -0/+1I'm wondering why it can't be bootable? Because I've had PCIe SATA cards which I've booted from.
  • robwhite1979, on 10/14/2009, -0/+1Just out of curiosity, what type of SSD did you end up using?? I have room for another SATA drive in my desktop...
  • skztr, on 10/15/2009, -0/+0hard drives are a crap shoot these days. I've not seen anything approaching 6 years of life for anything above the 100GB mark. I suspect that "report" of 99% capacity is on a drive which is less than 2% full.

    And while I keep hearing that SSDs have well-defined limits to their write-cycles, I also keep hearing of people doing actual tests on these supposed limits and finding out that in most cases they're utterly paranoid, and based on ten-year-old data. That is, I keep hearing you aren't likely to hit the limits. (of course, that didn't stop me from ignoring all the netbooks with non-replaceable SSDs when I bought one a couple of months ago)
  • geekworking, on 10/14/2009, -1/+1They finally updated the Hard Card. Now I can replace that 10MB MFM one that I got in 1985.
  • aosmitty, on 10/14/2009, -2/+1a buddy of mine did this with a couple SSDs. I want to say he RAIDed them but regardless, Windows is on a SSD and it loads FAST. All the other stuff is on regular sata drives. But Windows/Firefox just loads FAST.
  • guncat, on 10/14/2009, -4/+3Dugg for the Woz!
  • shadowspawn, on 10/14/2009, -3/+1I looked at this type of storage. It's ***** fast. 1.5GB/sec. For the price of a raid array using some standard drives, I priced out, for ***** and giggles, a SQL server that would use these.

    Thing is, a properly tuned SQL server caches most of the data in memory after execution, so the drive isn't the limitation. So that got me to thinking before presenting the numbers, besides just having one of these in a workstation (and a couple of dual-nivida cards in SLI) what would really, truly, benefit from this? I thought data logging for some of our websites, but no...

    A mail server.

    The only other thing I can think of is those big-assed raid arrays that print media companies use, like for RIP servers and such, or storage for those 1gb files the designers like to throw around on the network. The thing is most companies don't mind having their employees wait a minute to load a huge file from the lan if the storage server is busy.

    But yep, I'm thinking more and more one, of the mail servers. It's backed up over the wire anyway.

    Then, of course, you have to look at a SAN system that can plop more of these in them for a storage array(?) if you are doing backups or restores over the wire that *need* to be quick, and one is hard pressed to actually find a server with a backplane that can handle these.

    Reliability is a wonderment of mine as well, if the price drops, do we still need to keep spinning platters running anyway?

    But as a middleman SAN, yes, less power in the rack for the thing, but at what cost? Platters vs solid state just simply can't be matched yet, and reliability is what everyone pounces on right away. Additional trying to find a server to bolt these into, once again we are limited by the support architecture needed to "host" this technology. Not enough slots. Not enough room. Whatever the case you have to make something custom to really get the most use out of this technology and then the "what about the on-site warranty" questions come up for such a custom beast.

    In theory you could have a 1u "san" box that uses so little power and has rocket-fast capabilities, but who the hell are you going to buy it from that supports it? Yea I could make my own.

    I'm stuck just trying to pitch this to the bean counters for a R&D mail server and possible replacement if it tests ok, this way I can at least play with it..
  • freakFlag, on 10/14/2009, -4/+2Thanks for the overly general and stupid observation.
  • skztr, on 10/14/2009, -4/+1I'd rather have 1 reliable GB than 500GB which turns into 1GB after six months because so many sectors have silently failed (a problem which is now silently worked-around, so you still don't even notice a problem until it's too late, so it's not worked-around at all.
  • medost, on 10/14/2009, -8/+3SSD is better with no flash.
  • ImTakiNuSRS, on 10/14/2009, -6/+1An Apple logo doesn't make a sheep less of a sheep.
  • Ninh, on 10/14/2009, -12/+4Love the Woz but he never really grew up beyond those garage days, did he?

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