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

This is actually good to hear from you. Now that I have the new Samsung I will clean up the XT and partition it and see how it does. It's either a bad drive, or it's not liking something that I am doing. HDTune already shows that the temp has been reached beyond it's threshold??? Which is nuts to say the least, I have a temp reading that is always running, like right now my 470 is showing a cool 79 degrees.

VZAccessmanager is Verizon's WWAN program. I am a 4G who**

 

^ @ Toyo

I also just got a Samsung 470 128GB SSD and Love it! ATTO benchmark rated my reads at 270 MB and Write at 262 MB and my drive has 47GB used (72 free) on a fresh install on W7 Ultimate plus a few games and office! Much better than advertised! Anyway...For anybody who is on the fence on whether or not to get a Samsung 470, GET IT!!

 

bstapley, Awseome to hear. I have been loading and working on it all day. Kinda playing hooky from work! I'm the boss though so the heck with them....

I have a little problem I used the Samsung Magician program and I can hit just over 100 on each R/W. I have something wrong and can't figure it out? Everything seems to be working fine though

HELP!

 

did you update to the latest firmware? Here's the process that I did when I first got it last week:

1) Install the drive in my laptop and install windows 7 as normal.
2) Boot into Windows and DONT update any windows updates (updating the firmware will format the SSD) and then download SSD magician from samsungssd.com.
3) Install samsung SSD magician and update the firmware (I used a bootable Flash drive to do the update) by changing the boot order in your BIOS to your USB stick or Disk drive.
4) Follow the steps to update the firmware.
5) go into bios and change the boot order to the SSD first again and disc drive 2nd.
6) Reboot the computer and re-install Windows for the 2nd and final time.
7) Follow this guide on optimizing your SSD: Windows 7 Tips & Tweaks - The Corsair Support Forums

And you're done!

Also use ATTO to test the read / write speeds. Also Crystal Disk Mark works well.

 

This helps me alot, thank you.

Here is my hiccup. I have the Panasonic Recovery discs for Vista and XP. I load Vista 1st, then do an upgrade to W7. After 7 is installed I delete the old Vista files. Why would I do this you ask? Panasonic has some programs that are like performing eye surgery to install them without the discs. This way when I am done it is just like taking it out of the box when new. Panasonic does not put any bloatware, or programs that you wouldn't really ever use. Kinda like all the HP crap etc, at all on there computers, thank god.

#1. Would this slow me down in your opinion?
#2 The F/W update loses your data for sure I guess?
#3. Did you ever use your drive before the update to notice a difference?

I did read one review that stated the update helped big time. I can really kick myself for not reading the details about the update losing all your data before I did my install. This really has me bummed! A couple of programs that I have installed are pretty time comsuming

Thanks for helping me out with this.

 

That sounds interesting, do you have more information about this? Is there some gossip whether those additional mPCIs would be user-accessible?

 

New Intel® Solid-State Drive 310 Series Offers Full SSD Performance in 1/8th the Size

PCIe devices have always been CRU's in Thinkpads (and probably all machines), so yes they'll be user accessible.

 

Answers:

1) No I dont think it would really make that big of a difference.

2) Yes your SSD will be restored to factory specs... say bye bye to Windows and everything.

3) No fortunately for me, I read that you are suppose to do a firmware update the second you get it so that you wont waste all your time loading on programs then having to wipe them with the updated firmware. So...I'm not much help there...

Good luck with the whole process! In the end it will be worth it to have the SSD performing at maximum potential.

 

Yep, I agree 100%. I will tryo to do it sometime today At least I can make a couple of tweaks I didn't do last time.

I have to call a company to get a CrypKey everytime I do this, they are going to start disliking me!

 

Lol good luck!

 

Gee thanks

I might PM you later if i need some help, if that's cool with you?

What is the F/W# that you are using now?

 

Hey guys, just got my OCZ Vertex 2 and did a clean install and I'm loving it so far. I've done most of the general tweaking and the performance is not too bad but also not as close to most of the drives on this site.



Any suggestions on increasing performance just that extra little bit? By this I mean stuff that might not be in those optimization guides found online.

 

You could do the JJB or Stamatisx tweaks, but truthfully, you're almost certainly not going to notice a difference. It will probably about double your 4K read/write, though, but there are often some minor side effects.

 

@ ZooseIII: Try 0 Fill or 1 Fill

 

hi boys, i've done my choose: yesterday i ordered a vertex 2 60 gb Extended version


but...argh, i'm going crazy, i'm reading tons of pages and pages on ocz forum and overclock.net, someone says a thing and someone the exact opposite...

talking about extending lifespan of SSD:

1) to disable or not the pagefile ? is true that windows 7 use it anyways when i disable it?

2)is good or bad transfer User folder on the HDD ?

check this thread http://www.overclock.net/ssd/664738-how-setup-ssd-boot-drive-secondary.html

 

Firmware is AXM0701Q. Find it using Crystal Disk Info here: Software - Crystal Dew World or by using Samsung SSD Magician obviously.

 

Now I remember these, thanks for the advice I might try these in the future but right now the speed increase from my 5400rpm drive is already enough for me

That did increase my numbers, thanks.

 

The 0 Fill or 1 Fill is just a trick for benchmarking though; the reason it increases the numbers on a Vertex 2 (or any Sandforce drive) is that Sandforce drives perform on the fly compression for all the data they write and read from the drive. Since all 0s or all 1s are easily compressed, they can achieve really high numbers that way. Of course, since real life data is almost never like that, it's an unrealistic speed that you'll never hit.

 

Actually, for SF drive, the actual read speed is slower. One can easily see that in HDTune(where it reads the entire disk). For a typical SF drive with fresh install of Windows, the empty area show very high read speed whereas the beginning range(where Windows is installed) has noticeably slow read speed

 

Sorry, I should have been a bit more specific; while the 0 Fill or 1 Fill trick improves the write speeds (because of the compression) it doesn't do anything for the read speeds. The thing is, because of the compression, it has to do the "on the fly" bit when it writes, and when it reads (of course, when it reads, it's decompressing, not compressing). The "all the data the write and read from the drive" bit was referring to the compression, not the increase in benchmarks. Although... if the read speed is based on what the benchmark writes (and not what's already on there) then the read speed would be increased too, because there's more data expanded from less reading (AKA, 5 MB expands to 15 MB instead of, say, 10 MB). With your HDTune (has that been upgraded to deal well with SSDs, by the way? Last I heard, it didn't read SSDs very well), the installed data reads slower than the empty data for the reason I just mentioned; it's reading the "actual" written bits at the same speed, but the bits in the empty section expand to equal more information per bit than the bits in the "full" data.

 

That is exactly why I said it reads slower for real data. As for HDTune not read SSD well, my guess you are talking about it may not be utilizing NCQ. HDTune measure the throughput perfectly. There is no difference between a HDD and a SSD as far as throughput testing is concerned.

We all know SF read 0's very fast because it only needs to read may be 1 byte to expand it into 512 bytes but we don't care about that, do we ?

 

No, apparently HDTune has issues reading flash appropriately or some such, which can lead to weird spikes in the graph. There's a PDF here that explains things in a bit more detail. It seems to be particularly bad for OCZ/Sandforce drives.

Apart from that, though, my entire point was that using 0 or 1 Fill wasn't really useful in terms of the speeds you'd actually get from a Sandforce drive, which we both seem to agree on.

 

Personally, I am not too convinced by that link as what I see in HDTune is not about those spikes but a clear pattern of actually reading from the NAND(when the real compression factor is more in the 20-30% range) vs reading from '0' which has a huge compression factor.

But you are right that we are both saying that all 0's or 1's are meaningless for measuring SF.

 

One thing I found interesting in that link was the statement that HDTune regularly returns burst speed numbers that are lower than the sustained speed numbers... have you ever seen that? If that's really true, then there self-evidently is something wrong.

 

may be something wrong with the measuring of the burst speed or the poll(or whatever it is) but that doesn't automatically means everything is wrong.

to measure throughput a simple test can be just :

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

where /dev/sda is fully populated with real data(like multiple windows installation in different partition or something like that) and just use a stop watch.

of course this doesn't take into account of NCQ.

 

That's the reason I suggested 0 Fill or 1 Fill. One can spend days "optimizing" system, but with random data will never get benchmarks like others do.

 

man, Samsung 470 256G SSD price drops alot now, its around $440 at both Amazon and Neweggs.

 

VZAM actually is not that bad, besides, it allows me to have Verizon 4G WWAN in my daily travels all over the place.

The XT is history, been replaced with a new Samsung 470 256GB SSD. Back to my 30 second boots and applications actually open up with no lag that the human being can decipher.

After you suggested to Defrag the XT, I checked it out and it was only at 4%. It Defragged, but I could not tell a difference. I think it must be a bad drive. I am still under my 30 days so it's going back.

 

Of course the price is starting to drop! I just bought one last week

 

Toyo, how's the battery life from the 470 compared to the Patriot and Intel ssd's?

 

Hello guys, Can you please explain to me what is raid 0? And what benefits do i get? I plan to buy a ssd drive for my "FUTURE" R3. I searched it on wikipedia Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, still I dont get it. My g73 does not support raid thats why im planning to do it on my future r3. Thanks guys.

 

The battery life is awesome. Using a SSD I have always been around 7 to 9 hours, if I inserted the extra battery I could stretch it to 12 if I lowered the brightness a little. Who needs 1000Nits anyway! Since I was so use to using SSD's, when I did use the XT it was huge. I dropped to about 5 to 6, but the heat and vibration was huge. The drive sits under where my right hand rests while typing. When I have a mechanical drive in here I feel a very faint vibration, now it's dead silent and smooth.

The Patriot gets pretty good battery life itself. I have that one in my other TB. I am going to do the F/W upgrade on my Intel 80GGB G2 today and start using it, the Patriot is only 64Gb.

 

RAID 0 is when you take your data, break it into as many pieces as you have drives (usually 2, but you could have a RAID 0 array of 3 or more disks if you really wanted, and had the drives for) and spread those pieces out across all of those drives. To the OS however, all of those drives will look like just one big drive. Let's say you have a RAID array of 2 drives in RAID 0, and that you have a picture file. If you stored this picture file on that RAID drive (which will look like just one drive when you open My Computer or Windows Explorer), half of all the bits of that file will physically be on 1 drive, while half of the bits of the file will physically be on the other drive. You won't see this, though, because all of the splitting and recombining will be handed at a level "under" the OS; as far as you're concerned, you're just putting the files onto 1 "drive".

Now, the reason people do this is because it's faster than just using one drive, because you can read the information from both drives at the same time for (theoretically) double the speed. The problem with RAID 0 is that because all of your files are split up over 2 drives, if one of those drives should go bad, you're going to lose _all_ of your data because of the way the data has to be arranged to be split up over the 2 drives. It's like having a sheet of paper with an article or story on it. If you suddenly took away every other character on that sheet of paper, what you have left is total gobbledygook.

So, for your particular case, there's no point in RAID unless you plan to get 2 SSDs and put them in RAID together (because a RAID array is limited to the speed of the slowest disk in the array).

 

+1 Judicator, Thankyou very much. Now i get it. So an ssd drive + 7200rpm in raid 0 is not going to work well right? Because it will be limited only to the speed of the 7200rpm? Thanks again.

 

I'd be surprised if it worked (reliably) at all. (SSD+HDD in RAID).

 

It's not going to work at all. For RAID-0, the drives must be identical. At the same time, doing RAID-0 with SSDs isn't the best idea. Sure, it's extremely fast, but its performance will degrade over time because TRIM, the function that maintains SSD integrity, doesn't work (at least not yet). The best option is to use an SSD for your operating system and basic programs, then have a fast, high-capacity platter hard drive for games, media, etc.

 

what do you mean by identical ?

TRIM is only a feature of Windows 7 and performance/life can be compensated via other means like over provisioning.

Agree with everyone saying that RAID 0 with SSD + HDD makes no sense. In fact, RAID 0 itself(no matter it is HDD or SSD) is only useful for very rare cases.

 

ICGC of the newer drives is reall efficient... and when coupled with overprovisioning... degrading performance in raid 0 ssd setups is slowly becoming a thing of the past... this is highly dependant on which ssd you go for however... like i said... which the top 3-5 ssds... i dont see this being a problem

 

It will work, and drives doesn't need to be identical. You can create RAID-0 with USB flash drive, HDD and SSD and it will work. It's true that nobody is doing it, but it can be done.

 

Ppl Intel Rapid Storage Technology 10.1.2.1004 WHQL is available @ station-drivers

 

Plextor announces the m2s line - sata 3 - 380mb/s

 

Guys...I need advice.

Looking to upgrade my laptop (see signature) with SSD technology.

Currently, I am considering a few options. they are as follows:

1. x2 Intel X25-M 160gb in Raid 0 - use an existing 500gb internal in an external casing/caddy.
2. x1 Crucial C300 256gb and using one of my existing 500gb 7200 HDD's in non raid.

Trouble I am having is trying to find figures that show how well the C300 performs on a SATA II bandwidth. All the figures that I can see are based on its maximum performance using SATA III which will obvioulsy not be applicable to me.

Im trying to weigh up the pros and cons of both setups. Obviously TRIM isnt available on the Intel setup. Is TRIM likely to be available anytime soon? - If so, Id be swayed towards the Intels, I think.

Both will work out around the same cost to me (researched and found deals for both options) so its a case of deciding which will be the best option to go for.

Id like to know figures for the C300 and if anyone has any input, that would be really appreciated.

Another "spanner inthe works" is that I (among many) am waiting for news on Intel Gen 3 drives or Series 510 Intel drives......anyone any ideas?

Thanks

 

The fastest current SSD's right now on SATA2 are the SandForce based drives.

The C300 suffers on a SATA2 interface. PHIL has good info on that aspect of this particular drive.

I would wait for the new SSD's - even though SandForce is the fastest (benchmarks), in real life it really depends on what you're using them for.

The best thing I can impart from my past ~18 months with direct experience with SSD's is this: go for the higher capacity models 'always'.

SSD's thrive (performance and longetivity-wise) on leaving as much free space as you can on them.

I would also question the use of RAID with even the Intel G2's. Unless you're doing video editing, there really isn't much benefit (and many downsides) of a RAID0 config.

With new models so close now, unless you're getting 50% off deals, waiting is the best (non-business) decision you can make right now.

Good luck.

 

why are there still no cheap SLC SSD

 

SLC SSD's have always been for the Enterprise market.

Simply no need to lower prices for prospects that can afford to pay.

 

another marvell ? have to ask my close contact in there to see how they are doing in this front.

 

quick question guys... anyone have experience with a dead ssd? say my vertex 2 would to "die" on me, still under warranty... would i have to send it in and wait for a new one? or do they send you a new one and then you ship yours back?

 

Hello,

I recently received my new laptop (specs in sig) which came with a 256GB SSD. I'm unsure of whether or not it's an OCZ or Intel drive. I've pulled out the drive but it's in an enclosure and I didn't feel like completely removing it. My model is MTFDBAK256MAG (I've been unable to decipher this, aside from the 256). I have read that there are some tweaks you can use to increase the performance of your drive. I searched and came across this beast of thread. Any help would be appreciated.

 

I don't think they are going to send you one first. YOu can only RMA and wait.

 

Many companies have "cross shipment" but they require a credit card to hold the cost of the SSD until they receive the returned part. I did that a couple times with hard drives and flash drives because it's quicker than waiting for them to receive and process the dead drive first.