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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2012 4:29 pm 
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Hi everyone,

As many of you are aware, I released Home Server SMART 2012 into beta last week, and quite a bit of the feedback that I've gotten back has been over incorrect reporting of Solid State Disks (SSDs). Having never had an SSD, until last Friday, it never even dawned on me that they would report a completely different set of SMART attributes.

To add insult to injury, it would seem that each SSD controller manufacturer (i.e. Indilinx, Intel, SandForce) has implemented their own set of SMART attributes, so while traditional "Winchester" hard drives--for the most part--go by the same general set of attributes, SSDs branch in 8 different directions (9 if you count now-defunct Satron).

I found the tables of definitions for them here: http://code.google.com/p/hddguardian/wi ... attributes (the link says Intel but they're all there). Unfortunately, while some of these tables offer a full suite of information, many offer only attribute IDs and names, with no explanation as to what it is or how to interpret it. Many also just have a question mark.

I found out that OCZ acquired Indilinx last year, so while many OCZ drives (including mine) have a SandForce controller, newer OCZ drives are "Indilinx Infused." And Indilinx is one of the tables that has very little information to go by. And so I visited the Contact Us page at OCZ, and there were some email links on how to request information and even a form (for the press) to request an evaluation drive.

I cannot afford to buy a bunch of SSDs for testing. Most are $100 or more, so I'd need to drop nearly a grand to make sure I cover all the manufacturers and controllers, or at least most. The SSD I got last week was generously donated to me by an individual who felt very strongly about not having his SSD reported as Geriatric (which the current beta of HSS does with all SSDs).

So my questions are:

1. How willing are SSD manufacturers to donate an SSD to a software vendor for evaluation purposes? I'm not looking to keep the drive. Even if I can only have it for one week, that's all I'd need.
2. Do I need to be a member of the press to get one?
3. How willing would a hardware manufacturer be to release its SMART specs? From my experience, they are very reluctant to release APIs, which is one of the reasons why HSS doesn't support drives in RAIDs because I have no way of reading them.

It's not uncommon for a technical writer in a newspaper to state that they've got an evaluation version of a device, such as a phone, that they can try so they can write about it. Would a software developer be treated the same way?

SSD support is going to very difficult to provide without having some real hardware to test against. Support for HDDs is pretty easy...I have tons of them laying around and can easily acquire extras.

If anyone has any insight it would be much appreciated!

Matt

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HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 9:11 am 
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Honestly it really depends, primarily on the vendor and your "status" or visibility in the community. Your best bet is probably to use the contact forms that you can find to approach the marketing departments of the companies you'd like to have drives for, making a strong case for the value you will offer them in return for them providing you an evaluation model. I think stating up front that you can return the evaluation model could help things. Unfortunately some may not want your tool showing when their drive is failing, for various reasons that may not always be in the customers best interest.

Another possibility is to try to align yourself with a site that has access to drives and get some time with various drives that they have. I don't get drives unless I buy them so unfortunately can't help much, and I doubt the other WHS focused sites get many drives either.

A more likely idea is a public solicitation for users of your Add-In to volunteer to send you their drives for testing and development, or for donations to hit a specific amount that allow you to purchase drives. That I can help you with in the form of a blog post. :)

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PostPosted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 2:08 pm 
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Hi Alex,

Thank you for the tips. Believe it or not, I sent in an inquiry to OCZ and expressed my concerns (as I stated above), two weeks ago--I think the same day I posted my query here.

I wound up being contacted by Jessica Luken, OCZ's director of global marketing. What a wonderful experience I had with OCZ! She apologized for the delay, even though only a couple of days had passed, but she assured me she would get the SMART specifications sent to me. She also sent a Octane 128 GB SSD to me. I asked her if there were any NDAs involved and where to return the drive when I was done. She replied that I was welcome to keep the drive (I was shocked!) and there were no items I needed to complete.

Needless to say I thanked her immensely for the information, and for the drive. I felt obliged at the bare minimum to also share my findings with her, including some unrelated testing (i.e. non-SMART) like the performance I found, how it behaved running WHS 2011, etc. I also expressed some concerns about the very small set of SMART attributes (less than a dozen), the most surprising being the lack of temperature sensor. Since folks often use a device's temperature as a means of gauging airflow (or lack of), it was quite surprising to me that there was no sensor on the Octane drives. She thanked me for providing feedback and said she'd share my feedback with Indilinx, since their Indilinx subsidiary actually builds the controller. In my closing remarks to her I indicated I was so pleased with the SSD that I ordered a second one on Newegg.

Now both my work laptop and my personal laptop have OCZ Octane 128 GB SSDs as the primary (OS/application) drive, with an HDD storing high-write items like my data, indexing files and the notoriously write-intensive paging file. I am thoroughly impressed with these SSDs. I benchmarked it in an HP EliteBook 8540w laptop against the WD Caviar Black 320 GB HDD and there was no comparison. The HDD was left in the dust.

To anyone else reading this, if you're hankering to buy a Solid State Disk, I am more than happy to very highly recommend OCZ drives, especially the Octane series!

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PostPosted: Tue Feb 21, 2012 11:22 am 
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Kudos to OCZ, that's huge! Glad they helped you out.

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