SSD : I Think I Leaped Before I Looked

I bought a OCZ Core 64GB SSD last month on eBay and I finally had a chance to install it. I never used a SSD drive before. I don't need a lot of space and was looking for a speed increase. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but so far this thing isn't worth the money. The transfer rate in HD Tune is a little over 60MBs which isn't much faster than my Seagate drive. OCZs spec claim up to 93MB, but I haven't seen anything close to that speed. As near as I can tell Vista does seem to boot a bit faster, but that's about all and I don't in this case see the justification for the high price. I don't know maybe some of the other drives are better.

The other perhaps more important issue for me is the battery life. Right now I get a little over four hours on my R60 on full brightness using the regular drive. That drops to under three using the SSD. I was hoping for the same amount of battery life, but a 25% hit is pretty big in my opinion.

I guess my question would be is there something I missed in the settings or elsewhere that I can get this thing running better or is this as good as it gets? I'm thinking of getting rid of this thing if I can find a buyer. Thanks for any help.

 

I think Les would be the one to ask. I'm surprised by your experience though, it kind of goes against all the claims I've heard about SSD drives.
Hope you find a buyer if you indeed decide to get rid of it.

 

Interesting....

SSDs main strength is their quick random access read times. Yours seems to be under-performing on the read speeds and the battery hit is the real bad news.
General SSD write speeds aren't so good. There have been a lot of issues with these SSDs and OCZ is releasing an updated version.

Did you contact OCZ support. The first thing would be a firmware update. The second would be an exchange.

John

 

Have you read this article?

According to that, SSD's lack power saving states. It might or might not apply to the OCZ core.

 

I feel a bit guilty as I was one of the people who recommended it, based on the first reviews. As more reviews showed up, more problems became visible. Sorry for that.

Strange thing is, I have mainly heard of write problems and some reliability options. I have not heard of slow read speeds and battery life problems.

Here's a HDTune benchmark that gets 109Mb/sec average in HDTune:
http://www.bluefi.co.uk/ocz.gif

Here they also get over 100 Mb/sec: http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/storage/ocz_ssd_64gb_core_series_solid_state_disk/4
(something wrong though with the links on the page)

Maybe there is a problem with your controller or BIOS. This seems to have happened more, reading from the Newegg reviews of the 128GB.

 

SSD's are really not worth it, I have seen videos online of people having them, and showing their boot times and really they are pretty much identical in startup speed. What befrugles me, is that the ssd's get like 70mb/sec on pcmark startup, while mechanical drives do like 9mb/sec, but yet the boot time is near identical.
I would have thought SSD's were fast, but they are not proving that way. A friend of mine has a gigabyte I-ram 4gb ramdisc, and boot time is just under 15 seconds from the push of the power button to fully loaded system, which is ridiculously fast, and much faster than any ssd I have ever seen. At first I thought ssd's would start as fast, but they do not seem to be anywhere near as fast based on the ocz and other ssd video's I have watched. This got me thinking, cause I like fast boot times, and yet mechanical drives are still just as fast for a fraction of the price.

K-TRON

 

It seems that a lot of you in this thread doesn't study SSD enough. The OCZ Core is an MLC. It is cheaper, and of course performance is mediocre compared to SLC drive. I am using a Sandisk 32Gb harddrive and already notice performance boost (It's an SLC drive) You can see the difference between SLC and MLC drive with this excellent topic from Les:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3036991#post3036991
To topic creator, I agree that you jumped ship too soon. You should wait at least one or two months looking at reviews before doing such a heavy investment, or at least look at this review before making the decision:
http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

And to K-TRON, if you're judging SSD based on startup speed then you're sorely mistaken. It's the general smooth flow from within the operating system itself that is the strength of SSD, not some startup time contest.

@flipfire, look at this later article by Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html
Apparently they tested old SSD that doesn't increase battery life at new. The new ones change that.

 

This review gives an excellent overview of where SSDs perform fast, and how close the WD Black scorpio comes in performance: http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/5
On the next page system boot times are shown.

 

Not sure about your transfer rates, but your seek times with an SSD will be much, much, much lower than any magnetic hard drive. It should be quiet too. And less worry about the drive suddenly failing.

I have trouble believing your battery life dropped 25% due entirely to the drive, since any drive's power consumption should be fairly small compared to the laptop as a whole. However, I suppose it's possible for a drive to be ridiculously power-hungry.

Oh yeah, about those transfer rates... check your BIOS settings... I think it's AHCI mode... I forget which setting it's supposed to be for good performance so you could either research it or play with the settings.

EDIT: I guess they say to disable AHCI:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16820227344

Disable swap... ugh... I did read some bad things somewhere about multitasking/multiple disk operations at once with this drive though....

 

Like I said about the only difference I can tell so far is that Windows seems to boot a bit faster. That in my opinion is not worth $300. Plus the fact I'm giving up 100GB in storage space. Perhaps I'll try it in compatibility mode.

I saw the battery article before I bought. I was kind of hoping for around the same amount of battery life. It truly did by an hour. The CPU usage in HD Tune was like 43% whereas my Seagate was like 3%. The only that was different was the drive.

I might try support and see if they have any suggestions. I bought it on eBay and the seller's not responding to my mails. I might play with it and see if I can get some better performance out of it. If I can't I'll probably flip it on eBay and take my losses. The prices of these things are droping like rocks.

 

If it doesn't perform according to manufacturer specifications, you can return it.

 

that sucks, it almost sound defective to me.

 

I don't know if this SSD comparison has been shared before, just thought I'd throw it into the ring:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/flash-ssd-hard-drive,review-31258.html

 

If the SSD is underperforming relative to the advertised specs then I would contact OCZ, not the seller.

John

PS: I just spotted these SSD power consumption charts in a review at Tom's Hardware.

 

Thanks for the link. I did contact OCZ. They said to run it in compatibility mode instead of AHCI which I was using before. Perhaps that'll help some. I'm going to throw XP on there later and see how it goes.

 

ZaZ,
Do you have any kind of warranty on this drive? I know you got it on ebay, but thought I would ask. Maybe it is just defective. If after your XP experiment you still notice slow speeds maybe you could have it replaced by OCZ?

 

Isn't the number he's giving an average? What is the writing speed, and reading speed individually.

If its an average, wouldn't that number be correct after being pulled down by the writing speed?

 

Yes, it is still under warranty, but the seller never sent any kind of receipt for the item. I don't know if it's any good. If I could think of a way to return it I would.

I did throw XP on here today. The battery life does seem to be doing better. I'm not sure if it's the XP or running in compatibility mode.

My biggest complaint is other than the quicker booting it doesn't really seem much faster than my old drive for which I gave up the money and 100GB of storage. On the spec sheet it's supposed to be twice as fast, but you could never tell. I'd have to say I've been disappointed with the drive to say the least. There are also times when it hangs unexpectedly. I'm not sure if it's the drive or something else, but all the software installed is the same and it doesn't do it on my regular hard drive.

 

It sounds more like problems with other things like electronics on the drive rather than the drive itself.

 

That sucks. I was really looking into the Core Series. I hate seeing all these bad reviews and the reliability problems.

 

ZaZ: I was having the exact same problems. Considering the glowing professional reviews, and the OCZ staff saying that they're not having similar problems, I've sent mine in to OCZ for an RMA. It sounds like you should too.

 

Mine's getting worse I think. It often hangs when doing stuff which is not the reason to get one.