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

except that they released twice higher reallife performing devices at lower price points than the other offerings that where available at that point..

 

Dave...Dave...Dave... I say black and you say white. I say salt and you say pepper. I say SandForce and you say Intel...

 

Stop with the fanboi banter please.

I'm speaking from personal experience, no hype. You guys have enough experience that you should know better than acting like L337 fanboiz in a Wii chat room.

Each have their advantages and disadvantages. Right now, IMHO Intel is the best bang for the buck. If you can find a Sandforce similar price as an Intel I'd say take your pick. I got an Intel 120GB for less than $140 if you want to take into account rebates. You can't beat that for $1.16/GB.

But I don't see anything constructive coming out of all this bickering.

 

you say wrong and i say right.

but well, go sandforce, trust your controller from the random company that no one knows, and the other company that sells it that everyone knows for their buggy firmwares, and cheating on customers. enjoy them while they last.

they're still not a blink of an eye faster in usage, and cost more, and are less reliable, and cheat with their durawrite crap (try to use it for video editing and the superwrite fails miserably).

intel delivers a package that works on the whole: a fair price, a fair performance, and a fair reliability.

 

Well at least we know that they are delivering performance for the high price whereas before you got nothing but an expensive paperweight as reward for your investment.




______________________
burning wii games
copying wii games

 

This.

That's what I never understood. People tout sequential numbers and say how fast theirs are. But considering the size of SSD's, how much are you going to write to your SSD sequentially considering you're very limited on space. If you do that much writing on a regular basis then you're better off with an SLC drive anyhow. Even the largest files I (and most people) might copy are a few GB in size. If you're doing SSD to SSD then perhaps this needs to go to desktop forum where you're likely to find people that utilize multiple SSDs where in laptops most users only have one.

 

the biggest stuff i copy around SOMETIMES is bluray copies. but i copy them from/to my whs, then..

 

I need advice on how to wipe an SSD in preparation for a sale.

Anyone?

 

Intel, Sandforce, hmmmm, I STILL actually like my Corsair NOVA. It is a great drive, and I have it backed up. However, I have always loved storage, so my eye is on the G3, and of course any SLC drive that may happen along.

This year I actually want to setup some clients with SSD's! That is my goal!

 

you and your slc dreams again, diminishing returns => not worth it. but go for it, go for your dreams!

been there, done that. they love 'em.

 

secure erase ;-)

 

A little more info please

 

secure erase is an ATA command that is designed for this purpose. The only problem is that it is a bit complicated to do it as for certain SSD, you need to 'live plug' the SSD after you boot up the OS(DOS or linux, not Windows).

Which brand of SSD are you having ?

edit:

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

 

And hasn't this procedure bricked some SSD's?

 

It should not. Secure Erase is a well defined ATA command, the SSD either support or not support it. If it bricks the device, that is the problem of the device or something wrong (human error).

In fact, almost all SSD vendor would recommend you to do it in order to bring the device back to its factory state.

 

I'm using a Patriot Torqx 256gb SSD. I had read some threads and got confused as it was suggested that I use the vendors (Patriots in my case) tools. I am also wondering if I could use linux to securely erase the drive.

@bricking. Not what I want to happen to this SSD!!!

 

on second thought, the buyer would SE it anyway. The easiest would then be just:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

or

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda


that is after you boot up a linux CD

edit:

it should be

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

/dev/null is for output

 

Thanks for your suggestions! I'm going to read up a little bit more

 

If you want to try linux(and haven't play with it before), this is a pretty good tool.

UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads

it would download and burn a CD that is bootable, all from within Windows.

Once booted, just issue the 'dd' command at the command prompt.

 

I actually used that program to make a bootable Ubuntu 10.04 SD card not too long ago!

Great tool

 

ah, first time I heard of bootable SD. How did you do it ?

 

Follow the guide It is the definitive tweak guide for all SSD's as it tweaks windows not the SSD. Windows is designed for regular HDD's so you gotta turn off some of the things in windows that is good for a regular HDD but bad for a SSD, but there are also some tweaks that just improve the performance of windows and don't really do anything for the SSD or even a HDD such as the clearing the page file, which will decrease shutdown times considerably depending on what your pagefile size is if you have more than 4 gb you can drop your pagefile if you have 4 or less leave it alone, But I have 8gb and I just left it alone as I tried to drop it down and some games just wouldn't work.

 

I used this with Windows 7 64-bit.

1. Download Netbootin.

2. Have an Ubuntu or Linux ISO ready. I have a couple of these images as I like Linux a lot and like to try new versions <3 <3 <3

3. run Netbootin. Choose "Diskimage"

4. To the right of that is a box with ... which is the "choose disk image file"

5. Choosing disk image will open a search box. Navigate to where the ISO image of your Linux is at and select it.

5. At the bottom of the box is the selection that will let you choose where to make the bootable drive. Choose the letter that corresponds to your formatted SD card.

6. When it is done. Reboot your comp or laptop and select your USB to boot first.

7. Voila! Your SD card is now a bootable Live SD

That's how I remember doing my Ubuntu SD. I should have took notes but did not. There are instructions and help on UNetbootin's website so read up there also.

 

thanks. do you mean you notebook can boot from SD ? That is the part I am a bit puzzled. And what file system should the SD be, FAT ?

 

I use this on my Thinkpad T400 which allows USB boots. I use an external card reader which is recognized by BIOS and is in my bootup selection.



Looks like it is a FAT32. I'm not sure what other file types for SD there are

Hope that helps

Edit: the SD card I'm using is a 2gb Class 2 Sandisk card. For a great LiveSD I'd suggest a higher Class card such as Class 4 or Class 6.

 

ah, thanks.

So you are booting it as an USB drive. I thought it is aimed for the internal reader.

 

just in case you want to issue secure erase using linux, this page tells you how to

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

 

Thanks!

10 chars.

 

well, not completely true. Windows 7 will sense if the system HD is an ssd or spinning rust (by looking at what the drive reports for it's rpm, ssd = 0) and turn some things on and off to adjust for that.

windows, pre windows 7 had no idea of what an ssd was.

one thing to read is the MS white paper on windows 7 & SSDs. It's linked somewhere and google certainly knows where it is.....

 

Yes, but I think SLC would be good for a server. Where reliability is prime.

I think Intel will surprise us all with the G3. There has been so little real info on it, I think there is plenty of room for surprises. Maybe price

 

As far as I know it will only deactivate defrag but that is not 100% all the time it didnt do this for my samsung SSD or my Patriot Torqx SSD. So I had to disable it myself. Windows 7 sense powers suck for some SSD's from my experience.

 

Les, I did it & you are correct. Pretty much everything show some sweet increase.

New Safe mode Results



Old Results.

WRITE-CACHE BUFFER FLUSHING Enabled



WRITE-CACHE BUFFER FLUSHING Disabled

 

how about: "Windows 7 is supposed to sense"... ?

it turns off superfetch too, ottomh.

this is all predicated on the drive reporting it's speed as 0 rpm - only way to tell without programming every ssd into device manager. If all SSDs have a common GUID string, that would work but the speed figure is way easier to code for.

 

lol fair enough and yah it is supposed to turn off superfetch as well.

 

Bigspin...

Thought so... Comfort yourself in knowing the problem is not your ssd and probably some software issue...

 

Guys you know I come here to learn off you right?

 

I'd suggest applying the tweaks in this thread:
How To Improve SSD performance on Intel Series 4, 5, 965 Chipsets (JJB Tweak)

I noticed a similar drop in 4K speeds while outside of "Safe Mode". After applying the tweaks the results were the same in both "Safe Mode" and outside of it.

Before the tweaks:


After the tweaks:

 

And your BD player would probably be the bottleneck anyhow.

 

sure, for servers, there are slc (but again, depends on the server usage. not all are that disk heavy. those that are might be worth it.
i'm not sure if they will surprise us (esp. you, as they'll bring mlc disks), but i sure hope they'll serve us well. like they did since day one. but we'll see soon, i guess (how's it called, again? CES, exactly.. only some weeks)

it doesn't deactivate defrag on the whole, as you might still have other disks in that need defrag. it does just not defrag the ssd.

then you should listen to us

i ment bd-images from whs to client, so no, it's not from the bd player itself. so it's from a hdd to an ssd. and yes, in one case (the 80gb intel), it's less than the 100MB/s that i have over GBlan and from the hdd. but those cases are few (heck, a bluray rip is around 20gb, i can't copy around too much of those onto an 80gb ssd ).

but even so, copying around large amounts of data is not where the need for performance is. it's everywhere there, where a computer feels slow. you don't copy 20gb of data and expect it to be instant. you see the dialog, and then do something else till the dialog is gone. but when ever you do something and have a tiny lag. from some 10 milliseconds to some seconds, when ever you think ? while it's doing SOMETHING, it's annoying and what people start to throw the mouse away calling the pc slow.


just yesterday, i had a pc with a hdd that was sleeping for a while, and i woke it up and opened google chrome, known to open up instantly. thanks to the sleeping hdd, it took 15 seconds to open it. firefox then took around a minute.

once the hdd is up and awake, and the stuff is nicely cached, chrome is back to instant, and firefox to around 1sec.

that's what the ssd is for: fixing such "why the do i have to wait now?!" issues. and there, an intel serves perfectly well, and better than most ssds i had in my hands. a sandforce doesn't bring more to the table in those cases.

that was my point, les. that's where an ssd matters for the end user the most.

to improve on the intel, i'd have to go in a completely different route. one is a big raid of ssds to get raw speed, the other one is to tune other components. the os boot starts to not be bottlenecked by an ssd on most computers, so i'd have to test out and play with lots of hardware to get the mainboard with the fastest booting up components. i would need hw with a bios that is instant on (very very few are), etc.

getting a sandforce would not change one thing with any of my setups. even the 40gb ssd, known to be "very slow" is just as fast as the fastest ssd i have for actual os usage (not for copying of course), and thus delivers a great media center performance.

 

Just checking in briefly, but in the States, Intels rarely seem to drop below $2/GB, and good sales on them tend to be a bit rarer. Sandforce (or at least OCZ) tends to have a lot more sales and MIRs, like the 240 GB Vertex 2 I picked up for about $375 after $30 MIR a few weeks ago. The amusing thing is, a little bit after that, I picked up a 512 GB SuperTalent for $400 off eBay, so I might end up selling one or the other before too long...

 

well, it looks like in the us, prices are quite different. here, difference is very small, right now in favour of sandforces, but it changes from time to time (and, as i stated, when intel came out, they always had the best price performance ratio by quite a bit here).

but yeah, right now it's all around 2$/GB for quality ssds (when counting sandforce as quality, which i still have problems with ).

 

Yes I'm happy with the performance.. Thanks for the tips/tricks.

Just read the thread. Might do it next week.

 

Okay,

See:
Intel's SSD 310: G2 Performance in an mSATA Form Factor - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News


The giant has been woken again.

Still G2 based - but can you imagine what 4 or more of these will do for notebook performance (and 4 will still be smaller than a single 2.5" drive).

I too think that the G3's will be the best combination of speed, reliability, consistency and capacity (they all go hand in hand after all) in 2011.

Having said that, I still want to test drive a Samsung 470 with the newest firmware inside.

With the results Samsung is showing, I think that Intel and Samsung can rightly take the two top spots for SSD superiority and reliability in 2011.

All other SSD manufacturers are simply leeching off the true leaders - even with 'creative' benchmarking being woven into the marketing speak to help them along.

 

they're so CUTE! so tiny, and CUTE!

too bad they don't fit (well they do fit) into the ordinary wlan or wwan slots. afaik my laptop DOES have a second sata port somewhere on the mainboard, so one could wire it up

 

anyone notices he mentioned that the rumor mill is saying the new Sandforce is months away ?

 

who cares? it's quite obvious something new from sandforce is on it's way, the controller is old by now, too. so it's obvious to expect something in the next half year to be presented. enough to create the rumours.

 

davepermen, I agree: 'who cares'.

SandForce is a great money making company - its marketing is slick and its products are fine for a narrowly focused market segment. But they make money, no doubt.

SSD's though? I don't think you can beat a company (or two) that makes its own nand and controllers. Intel and Samsung are the only two to look forward to true innovations in the SSD consumer market.

No matter what SF presents in the future, I will not make the mistake of trusting them enough to actually be stuck with their technology again.

 

i focused more on the "it's just a rumour, and an obvious one". but yeah, i'll never buy them except maybe for the joy of just messing around.

 

next half year ? From the tone of it, it sounds like 'no where in sight' to me(I doublt whether it is a 2011 product). That contrast sharply with the enthusiasm when the SF-2000 was first mentioned.

 

@all Samsung 470 Series owner.
Is it still possible to Secure Erase them with something like Parted Magic?
Or is it no longer necessary because of the Samsung Magician Tool?
I tried today a SE with a 128GB PM810, Firmware AXM0601Q, but wasn't successfull with setting the required password. The SSD returned always I/O error. HDPARM -I ..... showed "Frozen".
I was also unable to upgrade the FW to AXM0701Q.