SSD for portable storage

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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widowmaker
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SSD for portable storage

Post by widowmaker » Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:30 pm

I've been thinking of getting an esata enclosure with a cheapo SSD like the Kingston 40 gig SSD. Seeing how a 16 gig flash drive is about $35CAD +tax, I'm wondering if this would be a great idea. An external Kingston 40 gig SSD with enclosure would be about $140CAD +tax This is obviously where high sequential read and write would come in handy. Has anyone done this already? Please share your thoughts.

MikeC
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Post by MikeC » Mon Nov 23, 2009 6:34 pm

Great idea. I've been using something similar for a while. Some SSD makers are offering models that have a built-in USB connector. Like these:

http://www.avadirect.com/product_detail ... PRID=14075
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6820169002

widowmaker
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Post by widowmaker » Mon Nov 23, 2009 7:25 pm

Interesting. I haven't thought of looking at the smaller less well known SSD makers. I think using anything less than sata would be a waste though, since you can saturate the USB 2.0 bandwidth even with a 5400rpm HDD.

Eunos
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Post by Eunos » Tue Nov 24, 2009 2:38 am

A good idea, though you might also wish to consider a 32gb OCZ Throttle USB key, which contains eSATA capabilities.

Currently, Kingston's biggest USB flash drive is 256gb. It is compact but very expensive and worse, slow enough that writing to it fully would be an overnight procedure. But USB3 could well spell the beginning of the end for platter drives even for backup purposes. Even a 2.5" drive may seem a bit dinosaur-ish at that point.

whiic
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Post by whiic » Tue Nov 24, 2009 4:26 pm

Backing up 256 at speed of USB2.0 (usually around 25...30 MB/s practical usable bandwidth of 60 MB/s theoretical, but I've seen some reach 35 MB/s and some others less than 20 MB/s (what a waste!)) will take 2 and half hours, not "overnight". If Kingston takes overnight, it ain't bottlenecking even the old USB 2.0 and cannot benefit from USB 3.0 (for writes, at least).

It's their internal architecture that limits. USB3 will speed up external HDDs more than generic USB flashes (like Kingston DataTraveller). Flash drives are strong for reading, sequentially or even randomly. Writing to them it lethargically slow, always, but especially lethargic when small blocks of data are written.

There are SSD drives that are internally constructed so that they make good use of even fast Serial-ATA connection, but these expensive architectures won't find their way to bulk USB flashes as they are designed to be used for booting computers from or for serving files in performance critical 24/7 environment... obviously, since they're removable.

For USB HDDs, USB3 will give a temporary boost of usability. Somewhere at 250...320GB is pretty much my pain threahold for USB storage (HDD or high-perf SSD) since reading or writing the contents will take around 3 hours. For low-perf SSD (like Kingston) the pain threashold would be significantly lower.

Back when HDD managed to output 55 MB/s on outer tracks and 30 MB/s on inner, 80GB/platter era, I used to store much of my data eternally as it didn't slow down that much. With some HDDs, I even noticed a slight speed dip at the inner tracks, meaning that USB wasn't even bottlenecking transfer rates on all of capacity and the amount of reduced performance on high perf part was less than 50%.

Today speed reduction is 75% on outer tracks and 50% on inner instead of 50 and 0%. If we assumed speeds to drop linearly (which they don't do in reality) speed drop now is 62% where it used to be less than 25%.

In addition to increased portion of lost performance now compared to then, HDDs are now also a lot bigger: with 1000GB HDDs, I would find 10 hour full read/write pretty annoying... especially considering that when mounted internally, the HDDs are not quite a bit faster than the old 55 MB/s (max) of 80GB/pl era. USB3 could sure be useful for 1000+ GB USB mass storage. 2000GB taking not only overnight but 20 hours... that's already pretty ridiculous.

USB3 will not kill HDDs and make flash drives more competitive against external HDDs. It will make optical drives less competitive, with help of both thumbdrives and actual HDDs.

Quite a rant...

Eunos
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Post by Eunos » Wed Nov 25, 2009 12:33 am

Pardon my ignorance but I'm not completely sure where you're coming from there whiic. I'm not sure why the Datatraveller fails to max out USB2.0, but I'd say Kingston just weren't trying hard enough.:lol:

Here is one link to the kind of device that I am talking about. This one is supposedly to be available next month in capacities up to 128GB. I'm sure we don't even want to know the price, but that will change over time.
Super Talent Announces First USB 3.0 Flash Drive, Transfers at 320 MB/s

Another interesting one, OCZ external SSD:
OCZ Prepares USB 3.0 External Solid State Drive For CES

Granted, this bleeding edge stuff is not really relevant to widowmaker's original query, but I stand by my suggestion of the Throttle as a potential alternative, with plenty more alternatives coming over the next year or 2...

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