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

Wish I could try out those new Intel drivers but my Nvidia chipset doesn't meet "the minimum requirements."

 

sgilmore62, that's too bad about the Intel drivers, have you searched for newer/equivalent nVidia chipset drivers?

BTW, you reminded me to check for my clients Dell M6400 for a possible SSD update to his 128GB Samsung, but no luck yet.

 

VDM19D1Q does not have background GC, this is the firmware on my SSD, and it degrades fast. righ now my seq write is only 80mb/s

 

Did you tried the Frimware from Lenovo?

 

ronan_zj, are you nuts!

this is my clients $6,000 machine, not mine! lol...

Okay, where's the link? I can read about it, right?

 

FYI:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-69806

loo, the 6000 machine is the total, not the hard drive tho.
jk jk.
the upgrade process is safe because the start disc will detect if the SSD can be upgraded

 

The Lenovo FW will work with PM800/PB-22J Samsung drives but you have to remove? the hardware strings from the FW flasher and that will void your non-Lenovo OEM drives warranty. I don't know how to remove the hardware strings or else might try it even though I don't need it and I heard it sucks and is buggy.

 

Which computer is it in? have you tried S1 sleep mode? S1 sleep mode is the only way for GC to work on my Qosmio.

 

sgilmore62, I can confirm my clients computer also has this SSD firmware too - no GC.

 

VBM1801--no GC
VBM18C1Q--GC
VBM19D1Q--no GC? must be the FW id that Samsung puts on Dell OEM SSD's.

 

Yes, the VBM19D1Q no GC (computer left on login screen overnight for a week).

 

Has he tried sleep mode? logging off thing doesn't work for mine either. It only takes a few minutes to restore performance in sleep mode if it has GC.

 

the VBM19D1Q no GC, this was confirmed from Samsung SSD department by the last email. VBM19D1Q is written for DELL OEM, so initially when I told them the firmware version and I didn't tell them my system setup, their had already told me this firmware is specific made for DELL system.

 

Yes, I tried it about two weeks ago (as per your directions about 3 weeks ago?). Thanks.

 

Does anyone know how to "fix" (by adding VBM19D1Q, VBM1801, etc, to hardware strings)the Lenovo FW to work on non-Lenovo PM800/PB22J Samsung drives? OCZ support confirmed that it was doable but discussing it on their forum was strictly verboten.

 

you tried S1 sleep on DELL laptop?
I thought DELL system does not support S1 sleep.
when I type powercfg -a in my E6400, it returns:
The following sleep states are available on this system: Standby ( S3 ) Hibernat
e Hybrid Sleep
The following sleep states are not available on this system:
Standby (S1)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.
Standby (S2)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

 

ronan_zj, interesting.

I'll have to check next time I'm called there, but I'm pretty sure I took it out of an S1 sleep mode myself last time. Will let you know, when I know.

 

From my understanding, I think 1.8" SSD has different firmware from 2.5" SSD.
I just double checked all the firmware posted on Lenovo website, these updates are for 1.8" SSD, no 2.5" one.

 

Thanks for the heads up! My client's system will live...

 

I see CDM has a beta 3.0 version, haven't seen any screenshots posted.

 

Look at the benchmarks of an ES Solidata SC-64 SF-1500" SLC with Sandforce controller on this thread. Supposed to be avaiable Q1 2010

Makes my Summit look like vaporware

 

lol，its expensive man.
This is my friend's company in china.
this is an engineering sample, not retail version.
so the price he post there is not final price.
I have a quote on SanFroce MLC SSD 128G, the engineering sample is around $1000.
but the price eventually will go down when the massive production starts.
Because SF is still developing the firmware, so SF was blaming Solidata's SF SSD production was so quick.

 

Nope, not really.

You have to ask yourself, if it indeed was Intel who actually developed those drivers, why aren't they offering it up for download on their own website ??
Do you think its perhaps because Intel doesn't want to foot the download bandwidth for the file ??

 

Could you check if the benchmark still counts the highest score as the final score? Because if it still does that rather than averaging it out, its still worthless.

 

Who do you think would pirate Intel's digital signature and then proceed to give a better driver than the IMSM for free?

You're too funny - and too cautious.

 

Yep, still a useless benchmark(takes highest of the 5 scores as final). There's a reason IOMeter is so complex to use...

 

Yes it does, and it does not show the scores for successive passes if lower, only higher. The queue depth 32 is interesting though, more in line with real world OS writes. AS SSD benchmark and IOMeter does a queue depth 64 4k random write to simulate real world OS usage.

 

agree 100%

What is this, "best ball"? lol... When benching a drive we want to know its actual performance, not a pretty picture to make us feel good.

Although I see that the beta has a QD32 option (a step in the right direction - and look at the difference it makes in terms of numbers in the screenshot posted), the fact that it still does its tests for mere seconds will still inflate actual performance due to cache. Add to that the fact that it only tests a very small portion of the disk (most users test 100MB, but 1GB max) and the program is still worthless for accurate SSD testing.

 

I take back what I said. CrystalDiskMark isn't the best benchmark, but there's no way to look at disk performance with one app. You have to analyze with multiple applications.

According to what I read, SSD critics think even the QD of 32 on Intel's datasheet page is way too high. Too high of a QD and it starts being not too real world consumer usage either. It's sort of relevant in workstation and servers, as there are much more disk usage happening. It's not totally irrelevant, but you can't ever take one data and put it as conclusive evidence of how the product performs, which extreme tests try to do.

As for the Sandforce controller, it looks like Intel has met its match. I wonder how Postville-refresh devices will do.

 

That is a very good point, but is it possible to take it too far? How long does an application write 4k random data to a drive and how important for the average user is the ability of a drive to sustain 4k random writes for 5 minutes? What real world usage does this? If a drive can sustain 12mb/s random writes for 10 seconds and then taper off to 3mb/s after 5 will the average user think his drive is less, "snappy"?

 

hahaha, lol...

This is why I like this benchmark (says a benchmark 'hater') - because its fast and doesn't kill the HD needlessly.

If I want 'real' benchmarks, I'll read reviewers who don't care about the equipment they're thrashing on.

 

How can I check to make sure that Win7 has turned off defrag and any other services that need to be off? I am just not sure of the name of the precise service or registry entry that would tell me for sure that it/they are off. Anyways, I am still liking the G2, and my drivers appear to be the stock MS drivers that come with Win7 so I am truly curious about any new / enhanced drivers, and for sure would not download any that were not also available from Intel themselves. It was their name and rep that sold me on the drive, so I wold be silly to experiment with any unknown drivers, even if they appeared to be correct. Thanks, Dave

 

Cape Consultant,

All I would do is turn off system restore, set the pagefile to 512MB (but, I have 8GB) and turn defrag off.

Simply type in defrag in the Start box and uncheck scheduled defrag.

Right click on Computer, Properties, System Protection and turn off.

Right click on Computer, Properties, Advanced System Settings, Settings, Advanced and Change pagefile to Custom 512, 512 (Initial/Max sizes).

 

I cant even run defrag now, when i click preperty and choose defrag, it returns nothing/

 

Then, you're set!

 

Thanks, tiller, for all your help and support! I wil do that now. I HATE system restore, so that is always off! It has NEVER worked for me when I needed it, so I just do good backups and be done with it. Waste of good CPU cycles if you ask me.

 

Totally, totally agree (about SR).

You're welcome.

 

Man, glad I asked that question, as I somehow had my PAGE file set to 4GB! I habve 4GB of Ram, soon to be 8, but must do the whole aforementioned reformat thing to get to 64 bit. I think I will get the win7 64 disk from my buddy tomorrow and see what happens

 

Hey tiller, what's the new intel rapid storage manager chipset compatibility? I tried that on my system with Intel mobile 965 (Santa Rosa) and get the system not compatible error. Of course it could be because of using Server 2008 R2, but I think the info page says that's compatible too.

 

And oh yeah, I saw this some where, but precisely where do I go to see what Storage Driver I have? Is it device manager or elsewhere? i am very much looking forward to the re-release of the newest Intel drivers.

 

OK, I maybe wrong here, but I just saw a new firmware test result on DELL E6400 from Samsungssd.com website, and the new firmware is : VBM1AH1Q

 

Cape, please note that I edited my post to 512MB (was GB). I'm sure you'll love Win 7 x64's performance - especially with 8GB of RAM + a G2! :laugh:

The compatibility should be exactly the same as for the 'old' IMSM.

If it doesn't install, then you might want to try manually (force) installing them. (I wouldn't though).

see:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=17882&lang=eng

Look in Device Manager for Intel AHCI Controller, that's the driver (version) that's important.

ronan_zj, I can't seem to locate a link to download that firmware - is it available?

 

no, there is no link to download it.
Right now the Korea time is Sat, so no one will work on Sat.
Hoping Samsung will post new stuff on Sunday Night which is Monday in Asia.
corss finger

 

Man, 8Gb RAM, I want 8G ram on my laptop too.

 

Whoops, um, I am not even sure I have AHCI enabled in BIOS. Yet another reason to re-format Maybe that is why the drivers would not install!

 

noto worthless per se, as it shows what the maximum is that you can get, thus great for comparing different drives, and comparing if your installation has issues.

it would be nice to be able to chose what to measure, yes. but worthless? definite no.

 

that's no reason to reformat. just switch, and it will do all on it's own afterwards. i switched sometimes, the only thing that changes is performance.

 

looks like quite some will have to catch up. indilinx will get dropped 100%, just as jmicron before (poor tiny companies), samsung really has to get something new working, and even intel has (but they allready have, from what i heard so far).

i'd love to see some preview of an MLC sandforce, though..

we're btw considering ssds company wide by now


oh, and, your summit is vapor since day one still, as long as it works it's still nice to have

 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/SSD-power-Solidata,news-30636.html

 

hehe, at least shows where the focus from gen to gen goes..

my single mtron (with the new intel drivers):
100 / 100
99 / 24
29 / 0.3
33 / 0.3

my intel g1 (with the new intel drivers):
222 / 74
181 / 57
15 / 36
142 / 64

hehe