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Q&A: Tom's Hardware And Kingston On SSD Technology

Q&A: Tom's Hardware And Kingston On SSD Technology
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Getting new information from a major vendor isn't always easy. Once you get through the marketing pages and white papers, it can feel like everything has all been said before. And maybe it has. But by getting information straight from the horse's mouth, in a candid, informal conversation, sometimes new facts emerge or get said in new ways that make them more intelligible or pertinent.

This particular conversation between Tom’s Hardware and Kingston grew from the memory vendor’s ongoing evangelism meetings, called SSD Acceleration Programs, in which the company goes out and presents the technology to IT professionals to explain what it is and the benefits it offers. Attendees cover the whole spectrum of technical knowledge, but several questions seem to always emerge from audiences. We used those as the basis of the following conversation with Kingston senior technology manager Louis Kaneshiro and lead engineer Tony Chen.

Tom's Hardware: Hi, guys. I know the technical press, including Tom’s, has done a good job of describing the ins and outs of SSD technology. I’d like to see if we can tackle some of the big issues within SSD, like endurance and TRIM, in a little different way.

Louis Kaneshiro: That sounds good. I should throw in here, William, we launched the V+ drive just a few days ago, and that does support TRIM.

TH: Great—now I’ll have to upgrade my V-series. Thanks. Any more product placements you want to add?

LK: No, I'm good. [laughs] Just so you know, I'm more of a user first and a geek second. I know the geek route has been traveled many times on this subject. So I'm going to try to take it from a little bit more of a user perspective. Let's move out of the benchmarks and into the real world.

TH: OK, let's start with endurance. We know that early SSDs were at risk of failure. What's the reality today?

LK: Tony should jump in here, but it’s true. They do wear out—the NAND that's in your USB drive, the microSD card in your BlackBerry, your camera, all of that. It has a limited amount of program/erase cycles—write cycles—and sooner or later you are going to reach the end of that. When you do, essentially that drive will stop working.

Tony Chen: More precisely, when you reach the mean time of a drive—its data endurance—it’s not really a fail. It's not like the data is no longer there or the format has vanished. It just becomes read-only at the end of its life. You still can recover your data to other media. Most of our Kingston SSD drives carry at least one million hours MTBF, their average life span. We also cover at least three years in the drive warranty. That data endurance compares well against traditional hard drives. Actually, SSD has a better life span in the media and in the interface. And SSD has 1500 G of operational shock tolerance. You’re not going to find that on a hard drive. So however you want to look at it, SSD has a better life endurance.

TH: So SSD failure isn’t like an HDD head crash where I'd just lose everything. I don’t have to panic, even if the drive goes “bad.”

TC: Yes.

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  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , 8 February 2010 16:45
    Thanks for that, very interesting. I found the video of the baseball bat test; robust little drive, isn't it?

    If I have an SSD as a boot drive and a mechanical hard drive for mass storage, am I better off putting the Windows swap on the mechanical drive?

    Also, will I kill an SSD in short order if I put an encrypted volume (e.g. TrueCrypt) on it that uses most of the space on the drive?

    Alan.
  • 0 Hide
    shanky887614 , 8 February 2010 22:16
    interesting

    1mill hours divided by 24 =41,666 divide 365 = 114 somehow i dont think they will run constantly for 100+ years
  • 0 Hide
    Skid , 9 February 2010 18:54
    Why is that video not on the article?! Come on I bet you anything you when looking for it after you finished speaking with them.
  • 0 Hide
    enkidoe , 10 February 2010 01:36
    pitty they are still so expensive. cant wait to get 1
  • 0 Hide
    kesgreen , 17 February 2010 01:23
    A pity that Kingston didn't make sure they were going to be allowed to have TRIM support on the Intel-based 40GB SSDNow drive. People who bought them were lied to by Kingston (who said that TRIM would be supported) and have had to hack firmware to enable TRIM. There have been no explanations or apologies from either Kingston or Intel and as a result, I for one would be wary of companies who treat their customers in such a shoddy way.
  • 0 Hide
    dcssr , 11 May 2010 03:54
    If you use SSD's in a Raid, does Windows 7 still use TRIM. Also, does Windows Web Server 2008 R2 use TRIM with SSD's in a Raid?

    Thanks,
  • 0 Hide
    dcssr , 11 May 2010 04:24
    What a great blog about SSD's. It answers many questions I have. So Would it be correct for me to assume that if I used an Intel Motherboard wtih the built-in ICH10R controller running Windows 7 or Windows Web Server 2008 R2 (I think it is base on Windows 7) in a Raid 5 configuration, 4 drives (3 for the Striping Array and 1 for the parity) would maximize on its potential. Also, would I notice much improvement with an external RAID controller. I will be using the Intel S5520HCR motherboard and the 2 XEON X5650 processors.

    Thanks