SSD characteristic slow down after use - Anandtech article

[ericyoung]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/1

I wonder how this SSD slow down issue will impact Red's SSDs and also, will Red One and other cameras support "trim" and secure erase to bring speed back up?

 

[Stuart English]

SSD

SSD

We are fully aware of this issue, you can sleep easy.

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

We are fully aware of this issue, you can sleep easy.

Hi Stuart, been a while, nice to see you emerge from the lair and chime in and give really exciting news! That's all we need is more anticipation.

 

[Bruno Solaja]

Wrote about it a long time ago....

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=39914[/URL]

 

[Stephen Strangways]

There are two quite simple ways I can see to get around this:

1) When the camera formats a drive, it erases all pages - a "secure erase" type solution, the same as deleting all files with a TRIM command. This, however, would make formatting a drive take a long time.
On a side note, a TRIM is only needed/beneficial when you are deleting files, so unless RED allows individual files to be deleted in-camera, it would be completely inapplicable if a secure erase were instead performed at format time.

2) If your SSD writes at, say 258 MB/s when brand new or secure erased, but only 250 MB/s when it's been full and normally erased, that 8 MB/s difference is the added overhead for the drive to erase an old deleted page before it writes a new one. The good news is that it will never be slower than 250 MB/s. A drive fully used once will be 250 MB/s, and a drive used 5,000 times will still be 250 MB/s. So as long as you never need to write more than 250 MB/s, you've got no problems at all.

So presumably all RED needs to do is make sure their SSDs are still fast enough once they have fully written to once (i.e. fast enough to erase an old deleted page and then write a brand new one) to handle the data rate of the camera. I think that's the easiest, fastest, and most reliable solution.

 

[Deanan]

So presumably all RED needs to do is make sure their SSDs are still fast enough once they have fully written to once (i.e. fast enough to erase an old deleted page and then write a brand new one) to handle the data rate of the camera. I think that's the easiest, fastest, and most reliable solution.

Our SSDs and firmware are tightly integrated so performance is maintained.

 

[Elsie N]

This referenced article, though somewhat dated, helps to understand why simply putting an off-the-shelf SSD into a hotrod like the Epic would be folly... bad as I hate to say it.

The more I know, the more I put my trust in RED.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Bah. That was two years ago. Even the bargain brands support TRIM now. Not an issue. Gonna be even less of an issue in a couple months when the die shrink gives us much larger (per cost) SSDs [aka less concern about running out of spare area for write leveling].

 

[Stephen Strangways]

The bargain brands support TRIM commands if your operating system sends them, and so far that's Windows 7, Server 2008, Linux, and OpenSolaris. If you are using OS X, the operating system doesn't yet send TRIM commands, so you want to spend more on a better SSD with a controller that automatically takes care of TRIM commands by itself.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Another edition to my "reasons not to buy a Mac" list. Thanks