Greenliant Launches EnduroSLC SSDs with Up to 250K P/E Cycles

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• JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link

  Yeah, I'd do the same, except every PC in the house already has a UPS backup. But this only matters for storage pools that care about quick random access. Some people here have genuinely expressed wanting to use SSDs for cold storage, for whatever reason, which a RAMDisk + UPS backup really doesn't address.

• Amandtec - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link

  I do this. Only problem is lugging the UPS around along with my laptop bag.
  /jk

• Dragonstongue - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link

  hmmm, maybe they should have done the "reverse" of that others seem to be doing as of late, that is give SLC based drive for the P/E endurance level and give an MLC or TLC/QLC "Speed" buffer so one gets the benefit of "both" unlike say Sammy or Crucial who give a "small" SLC cache that gets filled up quickly enough and performance suffers.
  
  Would be great to have a drive that does not cost a boatload with very good read/write AND a very high P/E endurance rating with a very solid temperature range of operation.
  
  SSD/NVME are "great" these days from a speed and capacity and often very high P/E endurance standpoint (considering the price) but they do not maintain the speed all that long once the cache gets thrown in the gutter.
  
  As your article alludes, I do not see a direct benefit of them doing this when many other makers are at similar levels already (or at the very least in the way they manage to "work around" some shortcomings)
  
  All yours for the low low price of both kidneys and just above a fast high level HDD speed with nowhere close to the same capacity ^.^

• MrSpadge - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link

  You misread the text:
  "Right now, the only other storage solutions from Greenliant that offer 250K P/E cycles are their GLS85VM eMMC 5.1..."
  
  I.e. besides this new "NANDrive" SSD with unpublished specs they only have one other product with 250k P/E cycles and that's this eMMC solution. It's not slow because of SLC, but becuase of eMMC and lacking parallelism. SLC is always faster than MLC etc.

• Amandtec - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link

  They have both DRAM and SLC caches. For regular productivity and games usage these are almost always available. Only if you *say* copy your steam folder once a day or work with TB files do you have to worry. If you do, Optane an option, but you must pay its higher price.

• Spunjji - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link

  This. I don't understand why people complain about cache sizes when it's invariably only a problem in benchmarks. For the edge cases where that's not true, congratulations, the solution to the problem was always going to involve spending more money (RAID array / better quality flash / both).

• PeachNCream - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link

  SLC with decent capacity! I have a Stream 11 with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC on one of those old Bay Trail processors. It didn't have enough storage space with Windows, but under Linux Mint there's enough space for the OS, programs, and a fair number of files. Something with reasonable endurance like this would be just enough capacity to support a computer like that, but I suspect that the per GB price is too high for budget systems like the Stream series. A pity because the 250K P/E is really exciting. It's still not the same as those old VIA C3 and C7 based thin clients' solid state storage (converting one to run TinyCore was a fun project) as the NAND in those was rated to even higher endurance but storage was limited to well under a single gigabyte, but it is nice to see some sanity in the NAND storage market remains.

• Spunjji - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link

  What I genuinely don't understand is why a system like that needs high endurance. Surely it's not going to spend a lot of time on intensive writes to the system drive?

• PeachNCream - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link

  The shortage of RAM sometimes causes a system like this to spill over into swap which is fairly write intensive. At the moment, I'm using a 4GB SD card mounted as the system swap file to keep writes off the internal eMMC. Modern versions of the Stream 11 are equipped with 4GB of RAM which, based on my experience with an older C2D outfitted with 4GB of DDR2, isn't even quite enough to compensate for swap activity though the workload can be a bit heavier before the system resorts to swap. Although even my workload is relatively light (web browsing, playing music, a few mostly text based Linux friendly games) there's a surprisingly high amount of write activity. Web browsers are the worst for that. Chrome-based browsers can easily write a dozen GB as they cache and display websites during the course of any normal day. Firefox is better since its easy to redirect the cache to RAM, but not everyone knows how to do that. Logging, patches, updates, changing file attributes as each file is accessed, all of those add up to a substantial amount of disk activity the end user doesn't see and usually fails to account for when coming up with back-of-napkin estimates of how long their SSDs will last.

• IntelUser2000 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

  I really think you are being paranoid with endurance, even with QLC.
  
  Besides, Stream 11 costs little as it does because it has cheap components. You are not going to see high endurance SLC in there ever.