On 05/24/11 10:32 AM, Gordon Messmer wrote:

On 05/24/2011 09:57 AM, John R Pierce wrote:

 also you want SSD that has a supercap on its internal cache so pending
 writes aren't lost in a power failure scenario.

You know, I've asked people about that in the past since the whole block
read/erase/write cycle seems like a risk in the event of power loss, but
never got any satisfactory answer.  What manufacturers/models offer that
feature?  Are most drives with caps clearly labeled?

I just looked at OCZ's marketing fluff--err--webpile and it appears the 
Vertex EX and PRO drives advertise that they have a supercapacitor.  the 
others I sampled didn't.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-vertex-2-pro-series-sata-ii-2-5-ssd.html


my superficial scan of Intel's webpile didn't turn up any reference to 
them on the x25-e or 510 drives.     ah, the intel 320 series has power 
failure protection which presumably means something like a supercap to 
supply sufficient power to complete any pending write cycles..

There's an article on anandtech detailing datalosses on many SSDs on 
power failure scenarios.

(and, please folks, UPS's are great, but they fail too, you can't rely 
on them for data protection).