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L337Tech » Hardware » General Hardware » A whole loada' capital letters

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Author Topic: A whole loada' capital letters
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Posts: 1
Post A whole loada' capital letters
on: March 11, 2009, 15:36

I have a question about:

SSD, on PCIe, with regards MLC vs SLC of CF for OS….

Told ya it was a lot of letters…

Anyway if anyone is here and I am in fact not a hermit talking to himself in a large digital cavern then I’ll proceed.

After following the excellent Nettop 100 guides on here I have been wondering about that little mini pcie slot.

Now let’s say for instance that you are a complete heathen and don’t want to be fancy and wireless, could you use it for one of those increasingly cheap mini-pcie ssd drives?

Well I suppose first question is actually if you could would you even want to? Seems companies like super talent have been making relatively cheap ones since the ASUS Eee range gave them a market so I was considering if such a card would be a better alternative to booting from CF.

What ‘better’ might be is subjective. Low power, faster, more reliable as a system drive? I have no idea. My guess is a lot of testing would probably prove there to be little advantage, bar the fact the slot is more accessible. However I do wonder about the reliability bit, as geeks geekier than myself whisper to me that the cell write load balancing might be superior.

Of course I suspect the slot does not register as a legitimate boot source so this point is moot. Some may want to see it help with Windows ReadyBoost, but I’m a newbie nixer wanting to show off to friends so that’s not my primary focus.

The internet can tell me nothing, MSI live chat cannot help, so here I am seeing if you tech heads have an answer… would be a great way to make a Nettop server even better.

D.
KC - L337Tech
Administrator
Posts: 3
Post Re: A whole loada
on: March 11, 2009, 18:59

Welcome to our brand new website!

Your question is actually a really good question. In fact we are going to do a piece on compact flash vs SSD the second we find some decent prices.

Your question is definitely loaded so i will answer it in pieces and then form a final conclusion.

First off I am sure you are aware but MLC is slower and cheaper than SLC. SLC is uber fast but expensive. MLC can be made more dense (thanks to multiple layers) therefore more storage for less money compared to SLC.

Now that we got that out of the way lets talk about the two buses that are involved with the compact flash and mini pcie slot on the MSI Nettop 100. The compact flash is connected by way of old school pci therefore it is at 33Mhz and has a maximum speed of 133MB/s unless you are running 64bit then its double. The mini pcie slot runs at 1X pci express which has a maximum speed of 250MB/s. Mini pcie can also run as usb 2.0 which has a maximum speed of 60MB/s.

Both compact flash and mini pcie drives are going to be MLC. However SSD are built for excessive writes so for durability you want a SSD over a compact flash. Plus i cannot find any compact flash card that can match SSD is speed.

However, both compact flash and mini pcie drives are not even close to reaching their respective bus speeds.

You questioned power usage, I would argue that the mini pcie slot uses less because it can utilize advanced power management features. But in all honesty either pick would produce negligible power compared to total system.

Now lets get to your question about the bootability of the mini pcie slot on the board. This is definitely a bios problem. The bios currently has no options to include the mini pcie slot in the boot order. However it does have a place for usb devices in the boot menu so i am thinking it could boot before the hardrive or cd drive if it was running in usb 2.0 mode. However there is no option to set the slot at either pcie 1X or usb 2.0. I do think if you are running a standard linux distribution like ubuntu that you will have no problem recognizing the SSD and installing the grub menu to all disks so it wont matter which one the bios boots to because grub will give you the option to boot into your SSD.

Final conclusion, go with the mini pcie SSD. Read/writes will be much much faster than compact flash and it will last longer (more write cycles). Also it should use less power. However we definitely need to test this setup out because I am sure we will need to rig some stuff to get booted into linux while other SATA drives are installed.

Stay posted for an article on this matter. And let us know if you find some uber cheap and fast compact flash and/or mini pcie SSD’s.
KC - L337Tech
Administrator
Posts: 3
Post Re: A whole loada
on: March 12, 2009, 05:14

okay another note I might add.

I think we need to test what is better running your OS on compact flash/mini pcie SSD or just running it on the same sata hardrive that is severing files.

The very best compact flash i could find boasts speeds of 30MB/s read and no mentioning of writes so i am assuming its half of the read so 15MB/s and costs 200dollars for 32GB.

The very best mini pcie i could find boasts speeds of 90MB/s read and 55MB/s write and costs for 55dollars 16GB.

So its obvious that SSD would dominate compact flash for less money so lets just skip the compact flash argument and compare SSD vs sata hardrive.

The green series 1TB drive can hit average speeds of 60MB/s read and 60MB/s write. So we see that the SSD may have an advantage at 90MB/s read. However I have been told that random out of order mini writes can cause extremely slow writes on crappy SSD’s so we definately need to perform a real world test. And another thing worth mentioning is that if there is any performance gain is it worth the extra 55dollars given the fact that the total system build (w/o SSD) was only 290dollars.

I think there is a lot of potential using the mini pcie slot for an SSD we just need to test the theory and post a video on it.

-L337Tech
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