SSD Thread (Benchmarks, Brands, News, and Advice)

well, they have stellar write speeds (the g2, 160gb, soon for everyone 100MB/s, so you can max out a gb-lan in both ways ).

and, most important, they normally have at least 1/3rd of that speed, no matter how you write to them, unlike the others who highly fluctuate. and believe me, that enhances experienced write speed very very much. all in all, software mostly installs faster on the intel (g1 here, 70mb/s) than on different 200mb/s writespeed configurations (mtron raid0, samsung ssd).

they did something right by reducing the max speed.. it still has to be terrible for their marketing department

 

yeah, intel does do a good job in its SSD product, I am totally attracted by its 10 channel desing which deliver high 4k reading and writing. I am waiting for its 320G SSD...

 

how come i only get 50/60 write speed on my 160GB G2 drive???

 

GC, or Garbage Collection is a way of clearing the SSD blocks so it can be written again. If there was a SSD drive with no GC, it would mean you write once, and your drive will be dead.

 

I'm with you man...OCZ will never get my business again. Their Indilinx-based drives are good performers, but I'd never give my money to a company that is so dishonest about their products.

 

i have intel 80 x25-M
i have been using it for a week
here is the result



how long have you been using it?
what is the product code? mine is SSDSA2M080G2GC

 

OCZ launches Colossus 3.5” SSD

 

If you are using the original shipped firmware, then that seems about right.

At the end of the month, flash to the latest Intel firmware and everyone with the 160GB G2 Intel's should be enjoying 100MB/s writes.

 

You don't seem to find the 4K random writes a LITTLE BIT LOW?!? Even the G1 drives at their worst had the 4K random writes pretty fast. I assume it might be a hardware related issue.

 

uhm, the 40MB/s is hell fast for 4k random writes, and about the same the g1 had, yes.

 

and here is mine.
I have the 160GB G2 with the latest firmware. I guess i'm one of those lucky few whose disk didn't crap up.

 

lucky few? like.. uhm.. most..

they state there are SOME that have problems. and that's why they pulled it. not "all have problems". some. some few. most are not affected.

the interweb blowing all up again

nice numbers btw.

 

Dave, go back and look at Thatoe's results. He's getting 4MB/s 4k random writes. My response is to tiller saying its perfectly fine.

 

oh, must have looked at the wrong one sorry

yep, very low. close to samsung low hahaha (runs away from all those samsung lovers in that forum )

 

mine is SSDSA2MH160G2R5. I've been using it for like two weeks. It's always been the same speed.

There's no way to get faster speed for now then? cuz i'm feeling like games install faster on my 7200 drive.

 

have you tried changing sata drivers. your random writes are very low, it might help.

 

How? Uninstall the driver I have?

 

yeah, but first check the vendor for most actual drivers. don't know the chipset you have, you have to find that out yourself. i got my info from hp first, then moved to the intel webside, and grabbed the most actual sata drivers there. helped quite a bit.

 

I'm sure i have the NVIDIA chipset driver for M17x.

 

LoL .. yea I guess the interwebs have been blowing it out of proportion. I was looking at the intel forum where ppl were posting that the firmware upgrade screwed up their drives, thats why i've been thinking that i'd gotten lucky.
Been using this drive in my main laptop a Latitude E6400 with Windows 7 ultimate for about 3 months now, and applications seem as zippy as the day I first installed it. I've been using Virtual Machines on here too and those seem like they're on steriods..lol
Of course i'm also using my old 320GB drive in a drive enclosure...so that way i have access to all my old files and movies and ISO images.

I honestly think moving to SSD was perhaps the biggest speed upgrade i've ever had....its even better than upgrading my ram to 8GB

 

If I were to get myself an Intel 160GB G2 for the holidays, is there any reason I should wait or should I go ahead and order now?

I have a windows 7 install and will use True Image Home 2010 to clone to the new drive.

Dave

 

the only reason to wait might be, prices might go down.. but.. well, no one knows

other than that, just go for it.


to nev_neo. well, if you wouldn't use virtual machines, i would now have told you to get rid of 6 of your 8 gb ram as you have mostly no need for them anymore. but of course, for vms, one can never have enough ram

 

I FOUND A FIX! damn, i'm not even sure if it'd be called a "fix".

I followed some guide on the net and it said to disable the write caching. Now, I re-enabled it. Look at the immediate change.



I've been using the crappy write speed because of that guide for weeks.
Gonna reinstall the games now. Just for the fun of it. >.<

 

I guess I was more asking for updated firmware reasons more than price going down reasons. Wait long enough, and the price WILL go down So the ones being sold now would have the latest firmware available? Thanks, Dave

 

hah, and, together with the post in this section about "my core i7 shows only 2 cores instead of 8", this goes into the same region: don't follow tweak guides on the web blindly. they more than often just tell you to do something so you feel great that "you knew better" afterwards.

 

it just doesn't matter. why? because else you can do the upgrade later. it's not like that hurts anything, or such. i don't get peoples mess with that. the drive is documented to perform well, after the upgrade even more so. it will not kill your data or anything by doing so.

just get it, and do updates when they come.

most likely, it has the new firmware. but even if not, who cares? not you. not at all.

 

davepermen, I know 8GB of ram would be an overkill for normal users, but for me i've seen VM's gobble up ram like its sweet apple pie on more occasions that I can remember.
But now, with the SSD, lack of ram has never been a limiting factor.
Now the only thing I need to do is find a way to upgrade my T9800 to maybe a quad-core.

 

as said, for vms, you can never have enough ram an i7 would be best, having enough threads (8) for a lot of vms

 

No, it wouldn't be dead, the problems with not having GC or TRIM is the controller has to erase the written blocks before writing new ones-thats where the degradation slowdowns occur. The controller without GC or TRIM has no idea that there is any free space until the OS tells it it does. GC tries to erase and consolidate blocks when the drive is idle so that there will always be "clean" high performance free space to write to. Another complication among the multitudes for implementing SSD's is that a "clean", erased drive is written with 1's to represent empty where a conventional HDD has 0's written to it when "clean".

 

Well... I gave myself an early Christmas present. Or I just got my last tidy paycheck before I buy Christmas presents and airfare for a trip I'm planning.

x-25M G2 160GB... Newegg. Those in the know will know why Newegg is attractive for the next couple days... I only needed about 50GB (that keeps going up, but whatever) for my needs, but the 80 was sold out. And you know what, at the end of the day I kinda wanted the 160GB since it's what my Thinkpad's Hitachi hard drive is. I didn't lose any space. Ok ok ok I'm happy.If I wake up and regain sanity I'd flip it on Ebay or here.

I'm insane so that won't happen.

So do I do a clean install and lose my saved games for Fallout 3? Or do I image my drive and continue as if nothing happened?

 

You can image your hard drive and be fine but I recommend doing everything clean. Install the OS, give it some time, install the programs you need immediately, give it some time, gradually install everything else. btw, congratulations, I'm jealous

 

That could actually be a good case for installing everything from a backup image. If you don't have the time and patience to allow the SSD to recover between writes (of course this doesn't apply to the Intel drives with their industry leading 4k random writes) then you might be much better off imaging. I think another good reason for being patient in installing all of your apps is that Windows Vista and 7 are self tweaking and they perform better as time goes by?

 

Gun - there should be some files you can save in the Fallout directory so you don't lose the saved games?

 

newegg why?

 

Hope you bought the Kingston-branded Intel X-25M G2 160GB... which has been in stock since November 11th...

It's $130 USD cheaper than the retail Intel X-25M G2 160GB and uses the exact same firmware, tools, etc. as the Intel version (it reports itself as Intel actually just like previous generation Kingston-branded Intel G1's; Kingston-branding is no where in the FW, device, etc.). That's the one I'm using in my ASUS G51Vx-X3A...

Cheers,
Kermee

P.S. You should be able to backup your Fallout 3 games.

 

Out of stock now May have actually popped for it

 

And of course, I was responding to the OP who was referring to his sequential and 512K writes...

 

it should recover withing seconds, not hours or so. the recovering process is not random writes but sequencial ones, so it's quite fast.

and for vista/win7 selftweaking over time, just run this batch after everything is installed (might take some time): Defrag Boot Files

 

Intel is supposedly instock. Supposedly. They charged my credit card already. I said I would never buy Intel from Newegg because of all their price gougging and jerking buyers around... but then something happened. I have a firm confirm email. if they jack the price up, I cancel the order. I pay the bill and since refunds take forever no matter what accept the credit later. I get a "free" credit building block (unless the credit means I didn't get the bonus on my credit score... I'm 23 and don't understand all that BS about credit scores).

That Kingston is out of stock apparently, or at least its on autonotify. I had decided the Intel G2 drives were the one type of SSD without gotchas (minus firmware snaffus). Kingston is the same, but it came down to the money. I got a better deal on the OEM Intel.

Damn I forgot about Bing cashback but whatever.

I'm going to pretend I'm not going Christmas shopping soon...

Hmmm... maybe I should snooparound the Fallout directory and see if the save games are moveable. Good idea Mr. 755

To everyone mildly interested: I would check our tech deals forum if I were you.

 

google backup+savegames+of+fallout ?

looks like they're easy to backup

 

shoulda bought yours from BLT .. thats where I got my 160GBR5's from.. paid 480 something for each..
I will never buy newegg anymore..their price gouging techniques have left a pretty bad taste in my mouth

 

Disregard... i didnt see the deal on slickdeals about the 175$ discount

 

Just found it. Nice deal!

I'm done for SSD's for a while. I've bought two 40GB X25-V's, three 80GB X25-M G2's, and a 160GB X25-M G2...

I'd hop on the 160GB on that deal if I needed more but can't justify it =)

Cheers,
Kermee

P.S. Newegg's inventory is virtually realtime. If it's in-stock and you successfully check out... you'll get it.

 

Link to deal please!

 

Go straight to the source...

http://twitter.com/NeweggHotDeals

As of this posting, it's the 4th "tweet" down and the 160GB G2's are still in stock (amazingly...) -- Course at the "normal" Newegg price... I shouldn't be surprised... I'm sure they weren't moving stock on those 160GB G2's at all.

Cheers,
Kermee

 

thanks! I fopund it! I have never really looked at that part of the forum before. WHAT A DEAL! I bought a 160GB! Dave Permen will be so happy! AWESOME paid 13 for 2 day shipping, may have it for the weekend. Got a dental implant on Monday, this may take my mind off that

 

Is Intel hiring stealth forum posters? If so, can you please provide contact info? I ask for no particular reason.

 

too bad I dont have money for a new SSD now,
I need to pull out 3 impacted wisdom teeth which I have to pay $1000 out of pocket... damn expensive

 

Just clone Your drive, align it and enjoy!

 

The saves are in the My Games folder in My Documents.