Thursday, 28 May 2015 00:00

Hard drives 2.0

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In my opinion evolution of data storage devices is one of the most fascinating. I thank that even before IBM cards there have been many interesting things. Quite a logical course of history, I’d say.


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Nowadays the industry experiences another round of developmentsolid state drives are day by day penetrating into our lives.

The other day I faced a problem of drive overheating in my computer (I still have media hub a size of a DVD-player). Due to drive’s cooler failure, 1 TB 3.5’’ SATA-drive was heated up to 76 degrees Celsius in a virtually airless space! Having felt the trouble (which was — vigorously heated box), I opened the media hub and replaced 3.5’’- heater with 2.5''-heater as an emergency. I couldn’t hold the drive with bare hands, that hot it was! On the other hand I thought that now it will be cooler and more silent…But I was wrong.

It still was warm and noise remained. I was left with a little bit of free space, so eventually I bargained one trouble for another.

In the meanwhile, quite recently Intel company introduced its two high speed SSD — Intel X25-M and X25-E.

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The former is designed for Mainstream system, the latter for Extreme systems. Heh, if I had such SSD at that time, for around 160 Gb – like in this post. By the way, I got it, but a bit later, I took it only out of personal curiosity.

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Description

So I got Intel X25-М. It is 2,5-inch device. Its size is 100х70х7 (mm). Since there was nothing except a small mailk-and-water cardboard box I had to recognize the model by looking at markings.

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Now then, I have a 160 Gb MLC model with SATA interface. Besides the point, the capacity is mentioned on the cover and primary SATA connector is on the side. Nevertheless, SLC and MLC drives differ radically from each other (SLC – Single Level Cells – memory, in each single level cell it can store 1 bit of information; MLC – Multi Level Cells – multi level memory cells can carry two bits of information). SLC – fast and expensive, MLC – cheaper, as storing 2 bits takes more time.

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The enclosure is black, metal. In fact, its just a thin metal “skin” containing all the electronics inside. 4 screws in total and we see a small green board with 10 RAM cards, 10-channel parallel data controller and Samsung DRAM cache circuit. It comes out that the drive itself is even more compact than its enclosure. Such tiny thing can be installed virtually anywhere (be it netbook-notebook or a CarPC.)

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Connection.

This is how we do it:)

Frankly speaking, my experience in testing SSD is around or equals to zero, so you can google this very meticulous process to later compare it with another model.

In my case, I tried to install operating system to see what is it and how to eat it.

Evaluation version ;) Win7 installed rather fast (by the way I don’t reinstall it that often to compare but this time I really didn’t have to wait long) – all that time I monitored drive’s temperature. Even though they claim that they do not heat up, I know that nobody cancelled Ohm’s law ;) All in all, drive really heats up but the temperature does not even reach the human body temperature. The drive always remains cool, therefore it does not contribute any heat to the “greenhouse-like environment” inside the computer casing, and that’s good.

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I have implicitly believed to the second substantial advantage of SSD that they are noiseless – although I tried to hear to the drive operation :) And it was checked and confirmed – no noise.

Having changed the device order in BIOS, I booted the system for the first time and…I was pretty astonished. The time to full load of operating system from the moment of turning it on on my ancient machine was only 20 seconds!

Further, the work was very smooth, starting from folders (large catalogues, images, etc. are displayed fasted), on out to the speed of many programs and simply file copying.

Just out of curiosity I took measures of drive’s linear read and access time. See for yourself (mark the yellow line at the bottom of diagram):

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System index has changed drastically – the drive gained the highest score in the entire system (7.4 out of 7.9 possible).

If you are interested, here you can see the specs X25-M and X25-E.

Fix It

I’d like to say a few words about the work of operating system on SSD.
As you know, so far the life span of similar drives is rather short – the number of write cycles of memory cells is highly restricted.

SLC organization can do around 100.000 cycles at the time when the resource of MLC is smaller – even 10 times smaller.

If such drive is used as big flash drive, even 10 thousand cycles may well if not outlive the owner, then at least get morally old. But flash drives are flash drives, we want speed in everyday work! And, unfortunately, operating system has another approach to this issue – due to high number of writes, flash drive can fail after several months. Drive's controllers try to minimize this problem by using different technologies like Wear Levelling (when controller ensures that memory cells are used equal number of times and wear out evenly), but you can help them in their endeavour.

In particular, you can switch off all possible caching, swap file (turn it on only when it is required by any program), as well as different defragmenters, hard drive benchmarks and other backup-related programs (or rather, programs monitoring system changes and creating files backup).

By the way, there is another good reason to shift to Windows 7 – as compared to its predecessors, it is good enough to distinguish a simple hard drive from a solid one and allows you in case of the latter to automatically carry out all necessary actions – turn off defragmenter, Ready Boost and other Prefetch/Superfetch.

Additionally, Windows 7 is well aware of TRIM command, allowing the drive to inform which blocks were deleted. Prior to the next write procedure it will give a chance to controller to free the relevant blocks without time-wasting search – in XP and Vista it would only reduce the writes speed by around 40%. Additionally, in XP, system partition starts in 126 sector of the hard drive (on SSD its approximately half of a page), that will inevitably lead to extra reads and writes, and therefore it will also lead to uneven wearout of memory cells. For resolution of this problem you may shift the system partition in the Diskpart program in such a way that NTFS clusters would match SSD-pages, but this quite crippled. What about other OSes, I really don’t know.
This command is not available on all drives, but in case with Intel there is no such problem, updating the firmware will suffice. For older OS, perhaps, there will be separate programs.

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Additional wear out to hard drive is done by deleting operations due to the fact that liner data write in solid state drives in not possible (before writing new data in used cell the controller has to free it first). For this reason, permanent transfer of data from SSD block to buffer and back additionally scoops some resources. So you better put aside all possible data deletion programs.

As far as I know, there are around 6% of cells in reserve but, in any case if you handle the drive carefully and tenderly, then there are all the chances that it will work for several years.


Pros and Cons

Pros:

— Compact design;
— Absolutely noise-free;
— Shockproof enclosure;
— Almost doesn’t heat up;
— Comsume little energy;
— High performance;

The speed of SSD even under the worst conditions will be much higher than of the fastest hard drive (like VeloCiraptor), not to mention the access time. And of course the noise – complete absence of it is definitely an advantage as compared to the most silent hard drive.

Cons:

— Limited life;
— Peculiarities of operation in different OS;
— PRICE!

If the first two cons are strongly interrelated with each other and, in principle, under particular circumstances are not cons…then there is nothing you can do about the price. Where from do they get these numbers?! I can’t understand it so far.

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Conclusion

The conclusion is clear – future belongs to solid state drives. But it it as clear as an assertion that nowadays such drives cost unjustifiably expensive. At the same time it seems to me that the majority of people does not experience a sharp need for speed in such devices – it is rather a natural urge to keep up with the times, earn extra minutes for the purpose of achieving some abstract objectives. Although I prefer noiselessness to speed. Hence, perhaps, there is a sense in waiting, though there are no precise forecasts and such idleness can take quite much time.

But if you have money and at least the minimum requirement in high performance, then do not hesitate and take it, for none of the existing drives on ‘pancakes’ will not offer you similar experience – neither in terms of speed nor in terms of noise/temperature.

And Intel, again well done! According to the company’s roadmap for 2010, installing similar drive in your computer may not affect your pocket as hard already this year.

Translated from Russian. Link to original article: http://habrahabr.ru/company/intel/blog/85612/

Last modified on Thursday, 28 May 2015 13:36
Data Recovery Expert

Viktor S., Ph.D. (Electrical/Computer Engineering), was hired by DataRecoup, the international data recovery corporation, in 2012. Promoted to Engineering Senior Manager in 2010 and then to his current position, as C.I.O. of DataRecoup, in 2014. Responsible for the management of critical, high-priority RAID data recovery cases and the application of his expert, comprehensive knowledge in database data retrieval. He is also responsible for planning and implementing SEO/SEM and other internet-based marketing strategies. Currently, Viktor S., Ph.D., is focusing on the further development and expansion of DataRecoup’s major internet marketing campaign for their already successful proprietary software application “Data Recovery for Windows” (an application which he developed).

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