256GB New SSD, What do we know?

I want to make a thread dedicated to collect what we "know" of this new drive.
In the last week the 256GB SSD showed up as an option for some of the XPS machines.

I don't see anywhere that Dell confirms it but it is confirmed to be the Samsung 256GB that was highly anticipated from November.
It's not listed as a seperate part on the Dell site, at least that I could find.
The Samsung 128GB SSD was not too impressive, but the 256GB is another animal and infact a beast.

Currently it is a $400 upgrade from the base 320GB 7200 RPM drive on a Studio XPS.

Although there nothing is keeping them from swapping the drive around with other MFR/Makes but here are the specs:

--SPECS--
_____________________________________________________________

Samsung says: "highest overall performance [of all SSDs] in the personal-computer industry".

Model: PM800 2.5" 256GB (w/51nm) ( confirmed - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4491042#post2858)
Samsung Part Number - MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB00

Technology: SATA II MLC 256GB SSD (16GB comp) equipped with highly effective controller on base of Samsung technologies.

Controller: 3C29RBB01-YK40

Size and power: 2.5", 2.9 oz, 1.1 watts.

Quoted Specs: Read:200-220 MB/s Write:160-200 MB/s

Erase cycles: Run to 100GB per second.


Please participate if you know:

• Has anyone seen a proper review done on the Samsung 256GB SSD yet?
• Anyones personal experience and testing with these drives is much appreciated.

Intel SLC drives are the kings of performance like Intels X25 series, but the MLC Nand flash has been showing great improvements recently like with the G.Skill Titan and are much much cheaper to produce.
This is starting to make SSD an approachable technology with tangible performance benefits available for the masses.

So what do we "know" about this Dell 256GB SSD offering?


Nyceis's findings from this forum:
Atto test scores - http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=30415&d=1233974428
Crystal test scores - http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=30416&d=1233976357

--REVIEWS--
_____________________________________________________________

While there are no English reviews I could find, there is one Japanese review that is interesting from Feb 12th. Can't read Japanese? No worries.
It's a great comparison with the Intel and OCZ offerings using CrystalDiskMark 2.2.0, HD Tune Pro 3.50 with charts of many data sizes.
Google - http://translate.google.com/transla...hirasawa014.htm &sl=ja&tl=en&history_state0=
Babelfish - http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translat...2/hirasawa014.htm&lp=ja_en&btnTrUrl=Translate
(When looking at HDtune writes be aware the vertical scale is higher on the Samsung than Intel x25-m, that is why it appears comparitively lower overall, but actually it just bursts way higher and as a result also avgs higher in most)

--BENCHMARKS--
_____________________________________________________________
Samsung (256G) VS Intel X-25M (80G) VS OCZ Apex(120GB)
From Japanese review above.
CPU: Core 2 Quad Q8200
Memory: PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM 4GB
Motherboard: GIGABYTE EP45-UD3R
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate SP1

Samsung 256GB SSD (MLC)

Intel X-25M (MLC)

OCZ Apex (internal RAID 0 (MLC))


HDTune - Random Write ----- Write 1000MB
Samsung 256GB SSD (MLC)

Intel X-25M (MLC)

OCZ Apex (internal RAID 0 (MLC))


I'll update this topic post with info as it can be confirmed.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=208242&page=286
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=208242&page=287

Not a proper review, but you get the idea. Start at Nyceis' post 2856.

 

Great first post confirms much, I see Nyceis in post 2858 is reporting:
"I reached 225MB read and 188MB write!!!!"

That is uber!

 

Can an SSD be used as a DVR. Would it provide smooth video playback? Or is a regular HDD better suited for this?

 

You can use an SSD as a DVR (you mean IN a DVR, right?)... Eevery current generation SSD will provide smooth video playback. Nonetheless, as neither a standard HDD or an SSD will bottleneck video playback so the HDD is actually better suited in that you get more storage for your money.

 

SSDs, by their nature, aren't very good at sustained writes. A regular HDD would probably do better.

 

After scouring the web there is very little info but I confirmed and updated the specs of the drive, this is the only place I think you can find it all in one place now.

Also there is a Japanese review from yesterday that shows some great screen captures from CrystalDiskMark 2.2.0 & HD Tune Pro 3.50 comparing the Samsung, OCZ Apex, Intel X-25 M & E. Nice benchies.

Some interesting points in the review is that there is no current schedule for Samsung to go into retail channels with the 256GB SSD. While in bulk, the drive is selling for about $900 US by a Japanese distributor. You can find one on ebay for $1,099 though apparently.

It looks to have a 1GB DDR SDRAM cache.

In HDtune compared to Intel X-25M (80GB mainstream) the Samsung does pretty well beating it in avg. writes of data sizes of 8MB, 512kb, only losing in 64kb and random writes.

The Random read and writes is where the Samsung drive falls below Intel X-25M but not nearly as bad as the OCZ Apex. Unlike the Intel X-25m, the Samsung has some stalls with the > 1MB transfer sizes mainly in the 400 ms range from time to time. That's it's only draw back, hard for me to say how that translates to real world.

So far this drive seems like it's a current leader with a good mix of capacity/price/performance, but is only available with a new machine with no ETA on retail.

 

It's random small writes they're horrible at. At least the latest faster drives will blow away an HDD at sustained writes.

 

Any basis on this? Some SLC drives are faster than traditional HDs in sustained writes.

edit: and you can buy it in retail, go to dvnation.com, I believe $1175... for the cost, you might as well buy a Dell and upgrade for $400 then sell the laptop.

 

There are several places taking orders, none of which i know have stock though.
But yeah, you can get a laptop at that price. $400 upgrade with Dell makes it an awesome deal too.

 

See, this is why I'm just doubting that this can actually be the new Samsung. I mean computer manufacturers gouge people for hardware upgrades, not give them $300+ discounts. If you figure the base drive is worth $200 + $400 for the upgrade to the 256GB SSD, that's $600 for the drive.

 

This SSD drive is the first I am considering because it's much better than the other mainstream ones.

 

I've confirmed it it is indeed the Samsung, I will post more proof if you need it, but this P800 the one revealed in November and the only 256GB SSD Samsung has in 2.5".
I have plenty more specs on internals but it would just waste space. I only found that Japanese review because I knew the model number of the drive, searched the Japanese sites for it. I didn't get the model number from the review, but other way around.

And Dell gives great discounts, I can't build a business PC for $399 with a 19 inch monitor and OS license. But Dell does everyday. It's been years since I could out price them on a custom build.
OEM's get you on the addons for the PC, devices, software, warranty, etc.

No guarantee what this drive upgrade will cost in a week though, but Apple and Dell are selling this drive in their machines, dunno who else.

 

It's not the speed of sustained writes that's the problem. Due to the way that SSDs work, they need to perform periodic garbage collection in order to free up used blocks. This garbage collection consists of erasing previously used blocks so that they can be written to again. This is a very slow operation.

When doing a lot of writes, the SSD will eventually run out of spare free blocks and be forced to perform garbage collection to free up some unused blocks. This will murder performance if you're trying to record a video or something.

Many SSD manufacturers alleviate this by always keeping extra blocks around so that it's less likely that a full garbage collection will be forced while you're trying to write to the drive. That's why, for example, OCZ only lists their drives as 120GB or 250GB. The missing 8/16GB goes into these spare blocks.

 

I noticed one interesting anomaly with this drive.

It's in the Japanese review, under the HD TUNE benchmarks...

For Random Reads, the numbers look ok for Iops but there is a strange anomaly not seen in the other drives. A couple 4k reads actually hit the 100ms mark (1/10th of a second). It's rare but interesting since no other drives really break 9ms in that test.
I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's something to watch for in future reviews if it reemerges.

 

No no, I believe you. I ordered one yesterday. In 2 weeks I will find out for myself. It just doesn't follow logically in terms of what Dell is charging. Can anyone explain it? Why a drive that appears to have a market value of around $1100, that has a similar or better performance to other drives in the same price range is being sold at an effective price of nearly half that by a company that typically marks up significantly all other upgrades? Is it Christmas for all of us?

 

Where did you order the 256GB SSD?
I'm a bit confused because as far as I thought this particular drive was only available with a new system.

Besides, didn't you just get a G.Skill Titan? Starting an SSD farm?

 

I ordered another SXPS with the 256GB SSD option. Yes, I just got a Titan. But the Samsung is better, no? Want to buy a slightly used Titan? It will most likely be available in 2 weeks.

I'd also like to add that I'm not too impressed with this Titan at the moment. Frankly, neither the Macbook nor this SXPS (pronounces Suxps?) seem any faster than a 7200rpm notebook drive with lots of space and degragmented. I'm still experimenting with various tweaks, though, so we'll see.

 

Aparently the guy on ebay buys dell laptops with the 256gb samsung drives and sells them separately.. then goes on to sell the laptops aswell. but the hes having trouble selling the laptops...

he also mentioned that dell is doing this on purpose to get rid of its laptop stock pile...

at the mo though 1k is alot of money for this drive.. i wonder how long it will take for th eprices to drop..

what i am hoping is that dell makes these drives availabel for upgrade options on their machine.. since i've got m6400 i'm hoping to be able to upgrade for a decent price..

my dell rep says to wait a month or two... so they must know something...

 

and a few on ebay too for 999, the minimum build for a dell xps m1330 with a 256gb samsung is 1199

 

Yeah, I looked all through the parts section. No mention of it. Just the 128 for like $800 or something. That's still doesn't make any sense about trying to get rid of a stock pile of notebooks, because they would be having other sale incentives, not just a $400 upgrade that most people won't go for. Well, I'm hoping the Samsung is worth it, because this G.Skill I've got seems to be worthless.

 

A couple articles you will want to check out.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48309

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=1

I really don't like the failing performance and what is necessary to regain it.

There's also some cool ideas out there of using a Ram disk and setting your program cache's to use the ramdisk, to minimize writes to the SSD.
If I get one eventually, I will consider making a tweak article.

 

Yep. Read those, tried all the tweaks including SteadyState. I'm trying MFT tonight. MFT + SSD = Holy Grail of performance??? Or path to data destruction?

 

I attached some benchmark comparisons on the first page for easy viewing.

Straight to them - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=352730#benchmarks

 

The MFT is working great. My VM is faster than any computer I've ever used. I'm wondering if I should also use SteadyState, since FMT speeds up the non-boot drive and SteadyState is supposed to speed up the boot drive. I'm not using a RAM disk yet either. I'm kind of waiting on 8GB notebook memory prices to come down from outer space. 4GB of DDR3 SODIMM is like $80, 8GB is like $800.????

On the other hand I'm thinking about going all VM, basically not using a host machine for anything other than hosting a VM. It sure makes it easy to migrate machines and back up.

I'm not sure what to do to benchmark the G.Skill vs the Samsung when it comes. Synthetic benchmarks, I don't trust. I guess I'll just script some things I normally do like open my dev project, compile it, run the app, edit a movie and convert a movie. Yeah, that should do it.

 

Check Anands article on the x-25 m, they had some good ideas and ways to compare and showing pro's cons, like multitasking (running av scan, while decompressing a file, doing x, etc.).
Funny, I was considering if I want to make a proper realworld SSD benchmark, just don't have the time to devote.

I look forward to seeing your results, share some numbers with us on some repeatable tests.

I'm running with a ramdrive now, you don't need alot of space just something to cache the constant cache writes.
It's been too long since I was running without ramdrive, forgot what I was missing. Cached sites are almost instantaneous, I use it for my sandboxie environment and it's great.
I like this one - http://www.cenatek.com/product_page_ramdisk_download_list.php
beta works well with x64.
if you need tips on setting it up, let me know. Start with unformatted, then use windows to make it a ntfs partition, etc.
I prefer saving it on shutdown option, then loading it on startup, nice.

 

I just got my Samsung 256GB drive off ebay Friday night. I installed Vista Business 64 bit on my Dell XPS M1530 and ran ATTO and I received good results. I averaged 190MB/sec read, 175 MB/sec write. There seems to be some write dropoff at 4MB and 8MB files to the 140MB range, but read rates maintained.

Transfer rates at low sizes was pretty good too. at 512 bytes, 8M read, 4M write; at 4K it had 20+MB write, 35MB read

I am running MFT on an empty partition (until I can figure out how to move stuff to it, the numbers above are on the non-MFT partition. I also have a 512MB ramdisk with temp internet files moved there. No other optimizations.

Cold boot to login prompt varies from 20 to 26 seconds. I have not felt any hesitation and everything is quite fast. My old HD took 45 to 50 seconds to boot to login.

My old HD was a Samsung HM251JJ 250GB 7200 RPM that the label says draws .85A at 5V, for a whopping 4.2Watts (I am sure that is peak). The palmrest got quite hot with the HD. With the SSD, it is cool except for just around the touchpad, which is likely heat from the motherboard. The palmrest is quite cool, much better. Also it is slightly quieter.

It was expensive, but I am happy with it. If easyco ever gets the Vista 64 bit migration to the MFT partition worked out, I'll pay the $$$ for it. ATTO benches of the MFT partition are erratic, but are outrageous (300 to 900 MB/sec writes, (200 to 700 MB/sec reads).

 

I'm getting a X25-E soon (as I hear that is the best) to go in my 1640 2.93ghz lappy with 4GB DDR3.

My question is, should I use this MFT and/or Ramdisk?

Ramdisk:
I use Firefox and my user profile is about 50mb, if that matters for the ramdisk. Maybe my Thunderbird email could go on it too since my profile for that is about 55mb. I have a 16gb OCZ usb flash drive, does that have anything to do with this ramdisk?

I just don't know anything about this MFT or ramdisk yet, lol.

 

I am running Vista 64 bit, MFT and the Cenetek Ramdisk (M1530 with 4GB of RAM).

The Ram disk will let you use Readyboost, and put IE temp files in it. So in that limited way it will extend SSD life since there are so many small files to be written and any programs cached by Readyboot will be loaded even faster than SSD.

MFT will extend the life of a SSD, but it requires that you split the SSD into two partitions and it only write caches the MFT partition. It doesn't do anything for the OS/boot partition. But the problem that MFT wants you to move most of the OS partition to the MFT partition and MFT doesn't have a working script to automate this for 64 bit OSes.

IMHO The ideal would be to use both ram disk and MFT. With 32 bit Vista, you need 4GB of ram and a ramdisk that can access the memory above 3GB. That is why I went with 64 bit Vista (it is the future, anyway). This way I can create a 500MB ramdisk, give 300MB to readyboost and the rest to cache IE temp files and this won't take away from the amount of RAM that I was used to in 32 bit Vista.

If only they designed MFT to protect all the partitions, then it would be perfect. As it is, I have moved the system temp files and user files, and the page file to the MFT partition and am consciously saving files there. All the tweak guides mention to turn off the page file, but I think if you use MFT, putting the page file on the MFT partition would be a good thing.

If EasyCo ever gets the 'Move the OS to the MFT partition' scripting working and/or cover the OS partition, the program would be perfect and I'd buy it (I'm in day 2 of 30 day trial).

I looked at SteadyState (not x64 compatible), MFT and a ram disk, but felt that they would eat up too much RAM in a 32 bit OS.

When the price of 4GB 200 pin DDR2 SoDimm comes down from outer space I will upgrade to 8GB and increase the ramdisk.

 

Wow, thanks for that voyager6, but I didn't understand much lol.

I plan on installing W7 x64 on X25-E (SLC) and using FF (not IE). Would you recommend MFT for me, or is it to complicated to setup & maintain?

Would I be able to use ramdisk from a usb flash drive or is it best to use only RAM? Also, will it work for FF?

 

I just rec'd my Studio XPS 13 with the 256 GB SSD.
It is in fact a Samsung
From Everest: Drive #1 - SAMSUNG SSD PM800 Se (238 GB).
Everything just rocks!

 

I have an M1530 as well. Are you sure it supports that much RAM?

 

The M1530 does support 8GB of memory.

 

Does anyone know if the XPS Stuido 13 had 2 or 4 Ram Slots? Currently I ordered mine with 4BG of RAM. I am wondering if I will have to trash the installed 4GB if I want to ever upgrade to 8GB.

 

Thx for an informative post.

Coincidentally, I'm in the process of researching and preparing to use Cenetek's RamDisk on my sig lappy.

+rep

 

I'm curious about SSDs, RamDisks, and the windows pagefile. I'm new to SSDs and am using my first one in my SXPS 1640. I have 4GB of RAM. I shut the pagefile off because I read that it's bad for SSDs because of the constant writes/rewrites or whatever. My question is would it be a good idea to use a RAMDisk for my pagefile? If so, how much ram should I allocate? Thanks for any help you guys can give me!

 

I would go to the major SSD thread about general SSD info here. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=208242

This thread is more specific around the performance to the Samsung 256GB SSD.

If you absolutely must have a pagefile, most don't need one, then ramdrive will help, but it makes no sense to make it anything much bigger than 50MB. RAMdisk does help performance but it's major reason in this context is to extend the life of your SSD by offloading performing excessive writes. See more info in link above.

 

Thanks a lot for the quick response MadBoris. That's exactly what I was looking for. I have the 256GB Samsung SSD in my computer and the performance is pretty outstanding.

 

Yes you'll have to sell or trash your current memory. 99% of notebooks have only 2 slots (some smaller ones have 1 slot, not sure if any have more than 2 - possibly those back breaking behemoth desktop replacements). But really, unless you do intensive video editing, then you probably don't need more than 4GB.

 

requires A12 bios

 

I thought I'd bring this post back to life with one of the very few reviews done on it here -
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/17/review_storage_ssd_samsung_mmd0e56g5/

Got an Editors choice.

 

Good thread regarding the most balanced SSD out there, it's the one I have in my M4400.
Also - the 128GB Corsair SSD in the future ex's E6400 has been super good as well - so for those considering the Corsair S128 at ~$300 - it's definitely a best buy as far as price, capacity & REAL WORLD usage.

 

so I finally got my studio xps 16 ( i actually just bought it for my gf) but I thought I test it out before gave it to her. here are some benchs with windows 7 7077. fyi I used the ssd tweaker tool, turned off all the options except the ssd with onboard cache and it made a lot of difference

 

i just bought a dell studio 16 with this samsung ssd, i will post a pix if anyone wants to take a look at it.
anyway, i dont see no performance increase at all compared to 7200 rpm 16mb hard drive. boot up/office file/ install itune/transfer 4gb files from a sandisk sd card these are the regular tasks i do everyday on my computer, however i see no real life performance increase.
and thats one of the reasons my newly arrived studio 16 is for sale on ebay now.

 

Really? What version of windows are you using? have you run any tests? I have 2 samsung 1tb spinpoints with 32mb cache each in a raid 0 as well as 2 raptor 150gb in raid 0 and I noticed a difference in boot up shut down, as well as application opening, after superfetch got a hold of them, they start much faster, maybe you could try the ssd tweaker tool , but bench first so you know if you are making any increase

did you get the 128 or 256?

here are my results from my spinpoints:

 

its samsung 256gb. i have never run a benchmark test for a hd b4, so its this crystaldiskmark2.2 tool that im going to use for benchmark.

 

No one can tell you what you notice or not. But there is actual big differences beyond running any benchmarks.

I'm someone that has a couple Raptors and a couple fast TB drives so I can easily notice the differences when using the laptop with SSD.

"transfer 4gb files from a sandisk sd card"

You could be transferring straight to memory and it would still be as slow as the sandisk, so that is an obvious one. But for everday use there are huge performance benefits on several fronts, the older the operating system gets (bigger and more fragmented registry, more files, more prefetch, bigger file caches, more applications, more updates, the more windows slows down over time) then the bigger the gap will be between SSD and mechanical.

 

Thanks for that, I will likely be posting some benchies today. I'm getting 4k writes like you but I expected higher. One bummer is that I got a drive with firmware VBM15D1Q. There is newer drives with newer firmware so I called dell to push the issue on providing new firmware which Samsung is making for the SSD's. Unlike a graphics card firmware, for an SSD it can affect everything from performance to longevity with wear leveling algorithms as well as data integrity. Because the technology is new it needs newer revisions. I suggest others call dell and escalate the communication to the engineers on getting us SSD firmware, normal tech support say look for drivers on the site but you need to escalate it that the right people hear about the demand for firmware. I have an open ticket and am awaiting for an email as to what the software testing dept. will respond.

 

how do u tweak ssd? there is no option in the bios of studio16.
its impossible for an experienced pc user like me not to notice diference if ssd
does have an huge improvement over hard drive.

 

It's simple mathematics. Seek time on a mechanical drive 8-9 ms. Seek time on an SSD <1 MS. Throughput on an SSD far exceeds mechanical drives too.
I can't help it that you don't notice it but the effects on an "established and used" operating system are significant.

Some people don't notice the difference between single core and dual, but the OS is much more responsive. SSD also makes OS much more responsive.

If the OS takes 1 second to open an application with mechanical drive, and the SSD takes .25 seconds, just because you don't notice that doesn't mean that isn't a big difference.
Also that difference we be realized in everything that is high in I/O but for some people waiting 3 seconds is no different than 1, even though it's 300% difference.

If an OS takes 5 mintues to load with mechanical and 1 minute with an SSD, because you can't notice doesn't mean it isn't there.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/17/review_storage_ssd_samsung_mmd0e56g5/page5.html
The point is I/O overhead is in everything we do, now the bottleneck is shifted to other things with high I/O requests, like CPU and memory subsystems more. It's not about the computer starting or applications starting. If you compared two established used operating systems after they slow down over time next to each other there would be a big difference. You lack good point of comparisons that is one reason you can't notice.

On my established OS there is literally 100,000 reads and writes to the hard drive per minute, without me ever moving a mouse, most are unaware of this. Someone else that doesn't pay attention to IO and disable services or processes with high I/O will see maybe 500,000 I/O a minute, well won't 'see it' without the right tools. Now if you think an SSD does not make a difference to the overall responsiveness from simple mathematics then I don't know what to tell you.
Noticing is based on how in tune you are to performance changes. I can notice about 5% difference in CPU frequency, but not many people would notice that.

Does an SSD save me 15 minutes in opening programs a day?
No, it's not about just startup times, who cares about that. I like the responsiveness in everything.

It effects everything I do and makes the whole experience more responsive with I/O bottle necked operations because even on the fastest machines I often have to wait for windows to catch up with me, so that is how I notice it.

If it wasn't for a laptop, I would not own an SSD. I will wait for costs to come down and performance to increase to put one in my desktop, but that is just me.