Intel launches 64-layer 3D flash client SSD Intel has hatched a new SSD, a 64-layer one, available in a lovely coincidence at etailer Newegg for $179.99. This is, Intel claims, the world’s first commercially available SSD using 64-layer 3D NAND, and is only shipping with a 512GB capacity. It has a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and its 4K block read/write IOPS are up to 75,000 …
The very reliable Sandisk Plus MLC* 480GB were selling for as low as £75 each this time last year. That's your benchmark Intel, not £100 more than that, given the increase in chip density/lower production costs (in theory at least).
This needs to be at lot nearer the £100 mark, than the launch price. Even the Taiwanese unbranded SSD drives (i.e. Integral SSDs) are rock solid.
*Sandisk Plus moved to TLC, not long after.
The same Sandisk 480GB is $160 now. SSD's have gone up in price *a lot* in the last year. Demand is higher than ever and every manufacturer is running into shortages. It is not fun purchasing enterprise SSD currently, end price on the exact same server build over a year ago has gone up considerably.
There are many advantages to SSDs, but there are setups where SSDs cannot give the same performance as spinning rust.
I once had a job repairing hard drives in a class 10 clean room (MFM days). The risk is that any particles on the disk behave like a ski-ramp for the ceramic heads.
When they take off and come back down, they create an impact crater which just means that the problem will only get worse from there. Enough 'pings' and you will suffer a head-crash (where the ceramic head disintigrates) and you are then ploughing your platter with a metal spike at 7500rpm :)
Having said that I once did a rush job swap of platters on a 20Mb MFM drive on my desk and when we ran it through the tester it had zero errors - something we struggled to achieve in the clean room!
In my yoof I remember seeing an 8 inch hard disk that had decided it preferred to be a lathe until the tool bit, er, I mean head assembly finally disintegrated.
There was literally a large pile of bits in the bottom of the drive. First major hard drive failure I ever saw. Most of the rest have been really tame compared to that one.
The most spectacular failures were always the big drives, I've seen pictures of drives that had broken loose from their floor mounts, my understanding is that those were like those out of balance washing machine destruction videos on Youtube.
But the best one I've personally seen was a much smaller drive, a 2.5", the glass platters (does anybody still use those? They were supposed to be the next great thing for a while, I've not seen a drive with them in years) had apparently exploded at speed.
When I got it drive rattled weirdly. Acted really strangely when power was applied, the spinup/spindown sounded very odd. After poking at it for a bit, decided that data recovery wasn't going to happen, opened it to see how bad the head crash was.
There were no heads. There were no platters. The head carriers were mostly there. And there were lots of little chunks of broken glass and glass powder.
The user claimed that the computer hadn't been dropped. I tend to disbelieve the user's account, but there wasn't any obvious sign of drop damage.
(Of course there wasn't a backup. The user was initially upset that I hadn't tried harder, then I showed him the drive internals and the internals of a normal-looking drive. A quick explanation of how a hard drive worked, and he believed me that there was absolutely no point in further recovery attempts.)
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