Friday, November 18, 2011

Death and Resurrection of an SSD

Jonathan Rentzsch:

SSDs live fast, die young, and pretend to be OK even while they’re dying. Don’t use one without awesome backups.

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I love OWC products, and I'm willing to open up my boxes to put in RAM and platter hard drives myself.

But the whole SSD controller factor complicates matters, doesn't it? I paid extra for a BTO box with Apple SSD, and I assume I was wise for doing so.

But...

What the hell makes SSD's so different, anyway? How long until they get abstracted away into generic drivers? Or is this a Cupertino issue only - aka does Redmond write a generic SSD driver that makes commodity generic SSD's a reality?

@Chucky No, I don’t think it’s a Cupertino-only issue. The controller matters a lot because so much fancy work needs to be done to hide the (inherent) problems of the SSD hardware. This is all much more complicated than with rotating platters.

"The controller matters a lot because so much fancy work needs to be done to hide the (inherent) problems of the SSD hardware."

There are inherent problems in platter drive hardware. There are inherent problems in RAM hardware.

But the fancy work to abstract away the inherent problems in both of those has been standardized and commoditized. It's just a matter of time with SSD's, no?

@Chucky Yes, I think so, although it’s not clear to me that this would happen at the OS level.

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