The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The OCZ Summit: First with Samsung’s New Controller
Well before Intel ever introduced the X25-M, there was one chip company who had already been making well behaved SSD controllers: Samsung.
The fit just made sense; Samsung makes NAND flash, Samsung makes microprocessors, thus Samsung should make SSDs.
Samsung is a unique company in that it is very well known in both the OEM and consumer spaces. You’ll find Samsung ICs in nearly everything; DRAM, smartphones, even the flash on the JMicron drives I’m always complaining about - Samsung makes it. With strong OEM ties as well as a good-sized HDD business, it didn’t take long for Samsung to get into the SSD market.
Because it was primarily selling SSDs to OEMs like Apple and Dell, the controller had to be perfect. Stuttering, pausing and strange reliability problems wouldn’t cut it. Apple wouldn’t dare ship a MacBook Air with a SSD that would deliver anything less than a flawless usage experience.
With that sort of pressure, Samsung’s SSDs and its controllers always just worked. Even before the JMF602A ever shipped, Samsung’s controllers were doing just fine. They had to. Their customers were Apple and Lenovo, there’s no room for silliness.
There were two problems with Samsung’s controllers: 1) they were expensive, and 2) they weren’t very fast.
The cost drove SSD makers to companies like JMicron, to drive SSD prices down faster than Samsung would allow. The performance made it so that the very first SSDs weren’t much faster than the fastest hard drives, and in some cases they were slower.
Late last year Samsung announced a new version of its MLC controller that would slowly replace all of the existing Samsung MLC drives in the market. OCZ was the first to get us a sample based on this new controller, even faster than Samsung and the drive is called the Summit.
OCZ's Summit, it's an early sample
Lots of glue and no screws on the pre-release Summit. The final drive should be ready soon.
I’ll save a detailed investigation into the Summit and Samsung’s controller for another article, this one is already long enough. The Summit should be priced similarly to the Intel drive, although OCZ is trying to make it cheaper. The performance level is designed to be greater than the Vertex and competitive with the Intel X25-M. We’ll see about that shortly.
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Natfly - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
DangerMouse4269 - Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - link
Nicely written. Even a very out of practice Comp Eng understood that.geekforhire - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
I have just replaced the hard drive in this 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 notebook computer with a new and very quick OCZ SSD, manually configured the partition with a 1024 offset, freshly installed the OS, freshly downloaded all of the latest and greatest drivers from Dell, and applied all currently available OS updates from Msft.The problem is that when the machine resumes from Standby, it will /reliably/ (4 out of 4 attempts) produce a BSOD 0xF4 after the power button is pressed to resume the machine from standby.
Here's the sequence to recreate the problem:
0) Machine is booted normally into Windows, and log in to an account which has administrative privs.
1) Click on Start -> Shut Down -> Standby.
2) See display turn black, disk I/O light flashes then stops, then the power indicator light begins to flash on and off slowly.
3) Wait until the power light has made 2 slow flashes.
4) Press the power button.
5) See the Dell Bios splash screen, then disappear
6) Boom: See the BSOD 0xF4
The values reported after the STOP are:
(0x00000003, 0x865b3020, 0x865b3194, 0x805d2954)
Note that I've been in contact with OCZ before about this SSD+computer, because the previous BSOD that was produced was 0x77. Their recommendation was to create the partition with an offset with a 64 interval, and to reflash the SSD with their modern firmware. This was done, the OS was reinstalled as described, and now I'm getting a different BSOD code. Another mention was a question whether the notebook computer uses a SATA2 controller (definitely compatible) or SATA1 (which may have troubles).
I've run Spinrite on the SSD, and there are lots of ECC errors being reported. I've been in contact with Spinrite, and they chalk this up to the SSD being chatty (which they like), but since SSD's are new and magnetic disks are common, they want to stay focussed on magnetic disks.
When the machine boots back up, the OS reports that a serious error has occurred, and asks that a problem report be submitted, which I do. Then an attractive but somewhat generic page is displayed with common causes (Aging or failing hard disks, large file transfers from secondary media to local hd, loss of power to a hard drive, hard disk intensive processes (eg: antivirus scanners), recently installed hardware that might have compatibility and performance problems)
Has anyone else encountered this kind of problem, and do you have any suggestions?
angavar - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
As a medical student I can appreciate a well researched and analytical article when I see it. This is by far the best computer hardware review I have ever read! Thank-you for your time and effort in producing what is clearly a thoroughly researched and detailed analysis.mac021 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Thank you for the lesson and helping me understand SSD drives. May I just ask for your advice...For everyday use designing and generating prototypes for websites and running typical office s/w like word and excel for long documentations while listening to music or just having some video play in the background, then the occasional gaming of, say Star Craft 2 and Dead Space 3, and lets assume I do this on a 5 hours a day average for 365 days in a year, how long before I need to replace an OCZ Vertex/Summit SSD? And does format/reinstall help in prolonging the life of an SSD just as it does for my old hard drives (from a computer that's 6 years old and counting)? Or there's no stopping the SSD's death after reaching 10,000 times of being erased and rewritten on? I'm not one who keeps upgrading or buying new computer systems for every new thing that comes out, i'm more of a keeper and maintainer for as long as the system servers my needs... but when I make a purchase, I make sure it will be enough to last me another 6-12 years IF possible! Which is why I'm still considering SATA for my next purchase late this year or early next year (and I'm only buying a new PC just because I made a mistake buying a foxconn motherboard that can't support anything higher than XP, not even Vista... weird, anyway I found that out too late).
Also, would you know of a motherboard that supports SSD, Windows 8, Nvidea, third gen i5/i7, and up to 64GB ram?
Thanks so much!
windows10 - Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - link
This article is meaningfull, interesting. thank you for sharingsusanbones - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I was wondered to these many responses here.