Studio XPS 13 SSD Options (UK)

Hello,

I am looking on the Dell UK website, and the Studio XPS 13 has 2 SSD options:

128GB Solid State 'Ultra Fast Performance'
256GB Solid State SATA Drive

What is the difference between the 2 apart from the capacity? The 256GB drive is a £200 (~$300) upgrade from the 500Gb 7200rpm drive.

I am happy to pay the extra £200 if it is worth it - by that I mean it actually has the performance of a SSD, not a poor quality one that isn't much better than a HDD.

Many thanks

W

 

These are both going to be Samsung solid state drives, and therefore solid picks either way. The 128GB drive is most likely a first-gen MLC and the 256GB drive is most likely a second-gen MLC. The 256GB is about twice as fast as the 128GB drive (in those rare occasions you hit the top speed of the drive), so I don't know why they'd say the first drive is "ultra fast".

 

Thanks for the info - I was wondering if you knew of any technical data sites for this SSD? I have looked through Dells website but it all seems to be advertising, as opposed to hard details on read/write speed, etc.

Thanks again

 

Ok, this chart is a bit dated, but you go down to line 52 and 53 and you've got two sets of benchmarks for the first-gen MLC controller...

http://colette.trianglesoft.net/2009/doc/090122a.xls

Then the Anandtech SSD anthology has some benches for the the OCZ Summit, which uses the second-gen MLC controller...

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

 

Thanks for the links! Useful.

I found the following webpage: http://anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3540&cp=4

This is a good thing, right?

 

I mean, ninety percent of the time, you aren't going to be hitting those maximum sequential speeds. What that figure (the quoted figure) doesn't tell you is that the random write speeds are only on the order of about 4MB/s, which isn't bad but is near the lower end of the scale and the same speed as the random writes of the first-gen drives.

 

Thanks for the info, I will look into it a bit more.