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

I have the old IMSM installed. I won't force install it either. Thanks.

 

Yes, but I still don't think the current Samsung nand and controller is going anywhere anytime soon. There will continue to be OEM's like DELL and consumers( like myself who entered the SSD market based on price--$129 OCZ Summit) who will buy the lesser performance based on price. The average user will rarely if ever realize the performance benefits of sustained high mb/sec random 4k reads and writes so why pay extra for it?

I looked at some of DELL's notebook configurators and saw with the XPS 16 you can get a 256gb SSD for $325.( yes it's a PM800/PB22-J Samsung--same as my Summit and there still is no way of knowing whether you will get GC FW) I expect the costs do drop even further as the next crop of controllers hit the market early 2010. Samsung is still the biggest player in nand tech if only by size.

 

sure. that just doesn't make it good anyways. then again, i know i never buy dell i know why

 

512G SSD:"Product Life: 5 years or 20,000 power on hours"???
http://www.eworldsale.com/super-tal...x-sata2-solid-state-drivemlc-_8529_38929.html

 

thats super stupid

 

Anyway I went and benchmarked my Intel. Can anyone tell me if this is good, bad, or ugly for the G2?

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 253.483 MB/s
Sequential Write : 99.864 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 191.441 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 86.516 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 15.140 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 34.108 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/11/28 11:31:15

 

I just bought a Adamo that comes with a Samsung 256GB SSD (should be arriving sometime next week) and I'm new to the whole SSD thing.

I'm planning to do a fresh Windows 7 install. Can I format the SSD like a normal HDD?

 

yes, everything should just work like on a normal hdd, tissot.


laptopgun, yes, looks fine the way it is.

 

When you get it let us know what firmware it has--inquiring minds might be interested to know if Dell is shipping Samsung SSD's with GC or TRIM. Samsung and Dell should be ashamed to ship drives without at least GC 4 months after having GC FW that works.

Samsung does not appear to be ashamed to ship drives without GC or TRIM in the least even after getting unmercifully bashed by almost every credible SSD reviewer out there. I guess, since they are so big and so many OEM manufacturers use their drives they don't have to care.

 

Hi. I am looking to order a dm3t on HP's website. The customization offers a 160gb SSD for $300. I have basically don't have much idea on how to weigh the cost vs. gains of getting one, although I have the money to burn right now. My question would be: is it worth it? are there any known issue with ssds, specifically the one that will be included on the dm3t I will order?

 

sounds like a nice deal. the only question that would be nice to be answered is, is it gen1 or gen2. it is definitely an intel ssd. but the old or the new one? normally, hp doesn't sell old stuff, so i'd guess it's the new one.

hm..

 

I wonder if they offer the $300 Intel SSD option on a netbook? It would almost be worth it to buy a netbook to just get the SSD.

EDIT: I checked and the $399 mini can be configured with 80gb for $210 extra. meh

 

I remember reading somewhere, can't remember where and it was a long time ago that if I delete all partitions and format, my speeds would lessen. Is that true or did I misread?

Will do.

Does GC or TRIM affect the way I format in any way?

 

what would be the difference between a gen1 and gen2 ssd?

 

How do you plan on formatting and what OS will you be using? I have GC and am using Win 7 x64 and have had no performance issues with using "format" within the installation disk options.

 

Trim support and I think speed too.

 

I see. Thanks for the info.

 

When the original post (with the very impressive benchmarks) surfaced, I ignored it because my gut feeling said 'something is not quite right' (laugh, but I trust my feelings). When I read this post, that 'feeling' I had got validated.

This reminds me of the neighbor kids who would soup up their engines and even though they could impressively hit 600+ HP, they were constantly building and re-building their engines due to breakdowns of one part or another. Why? Heat.

Its easy to get more HP - but, its an order of magnitude harder to get rid of the additional heat it creates - same for computers and now; SSD's.

In electronics, heat and excessive power usage is a sign of immaturity of the design. Which can be fixed before the product goes 'live', or it can be ignored and consumers pay the consequences - all the way up to premature failures.

Intel has been criticized for higher power consumption (+heat) in its SSD line, but we have also been given an appropriate increase in performance. If they didn't sacrifice performance to achieve a reasonable energy consumption, I feel that their current tech could surpass this Solidata effort easily.

Intel is still the 800 lbs gorilla and smaller companies are using everything they can to hang around Intel's backyard. I'm willing to play with them, but there is no information out currently that makes me trust them that they are at the level Intel is playing at, nor that they ever will be anytime soon.

No matter what their performance is today (and even that is questionable) - their 'trustability' as a company will be known sometime in 2012, if ever, for me.

This looks like a copy of what OCZ did; show something impressive, don't show all the warts on your product, when they are brought to light, give them a new 'improved' product to buy and rinse, repeat - make profit (on immature tech).

What I do like about this though? It will force Intel's hand and make them bring the G3 out sooner, rather than later.

Thank you Solidata.

 

The results are fine. You can compare it with mine here. As you can see I got some speed up after installing new Intel drivers...

 

more or less missread (every write affects the ssd, but nowadays it gets quite complex..). all in all, it won't matter.

then again, for win7, just delete all partitions, and install on the whole. it's the most easy (it will create two partitions, then, one being a tiny one with recovery tools on it).

how much partitions do you consider?

not really no.

 

my pb22-j from dell came with the latest firmware, that does support GC as far as i know.

this is the firmware mine shipped with

 

zirdaj,

Basically, with that deal you are saving $140 maximum. As Intel is the only SSD I would currently consider and, you can ensure they ship the G2 model to you, it is a good deal, with one additional caveat.

How much capacity will you actually use on your drive? If you can live with close to 75 or 80GB of total O/S, programs and data on it - you'll be very happy. If you're thinking you may need closer to the 150GB offered (after formatting) by the SSD, then the performance will take such a hit that you'd be better off with a mechanical, but larger capacity HD.

If I were buying today, I would order the cheapest HD option offered on the machine I want. Ideally, I would choose a machine that offers two on-board HD's too (make sure you order with a second HD if you can, otherwise the wiring/connectors for a second HD may not be installed) in a non RAID configuration.

If data storage is an issue (and you want/need your data with you):

I would separately order both the Intel G2 160GB SSD (when the price was right) and the currently $80 Hitachi 7K500 (newegg.com) as my 'data' drive (second HD slot in the notebook). The original HD's shipped would be stored away until I sold that notebook and I would be using the best configuration possible on a notebook today (unless you can get a chassis that can hold 3 or more drives!).

What are your computing and data needs? More importantly, how big is your budget?

 

remember that they won't sell you a hdd, which is not for free. say the hdd they put in would cost 100$, then the actual cost of the ssd would be 400$ on hp, as they remove the hdd (-100$) and add the ssd (+400$).

that's why it sounds that cheap.

 

davepermen, came back to edit my post but your point is exactly what I wanted to add - a very important point too!

 

I was faster, that's important, too *smile*

 

VBM19D1Q does not support GC, this was confirmed by Samsung 1 month ago through the email.

 

s**t that sucks. i must have misread something. i thought my version did, and i was waiting for TRIM.

 

Anyways.
How to enable S1 sleep on Dell laptop? I have E6400.

 

You have posted several different "correspondences with Samsung", like the one that said there would be TRIM support FW flasher by the end of November... It is the end of November and still no flasher.

 

I dont know, its samsungs problem

 

Post an HD Tune benchmark, that can tell us if it has GC and is working. Some Summit users(PB22-J)have reported getting GC to work by leaving their PC's on at the BIOS screen, 10-20 minutes should be sufficient with HDtune before and after benchmark to tell if it is working) doesn't work on mine--only S1 sleep mode.

HD Tune will show a flatlined 150 mb/s or so graph on a degraded drive that the controller doesn't see the free space the OS is showing. If GC is working the graph will jump to +200 mb/s at the free space areas.

 

tissot,

you may be remembering one of my posts (which I can't find for the life of me now) where I was helping someone clean install an Intel G2 with the new firmware (TRIM enabled)?

The important part of that post was that under an O/S that supports TRIM, like Win 7; you should first format the drive then delete the partitions so that the drive is 'clean' again for a fresh install at full drive speed. If you simply delete the partition first, then the O/S doesn't send the TRIM command and the drive is 'dirty' and 'used' and will not perform to spec's, even with a clean install.

see:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=2

for additional information.

Was this what you were thinking of?

 

the moment the new partition then gets written to, it gets cleared. if i got that right, it all doesn't matter. it just means the moment of sending trim is later than expected: first time the partition gets written to.

 

davepermen, No.

There is a distinction here as the link I provided proves.

 

Windows 7 using TRIM?
File Delete: Yes
Partition Format: Yes
Partition Delete: No


all that says is, it doesn't happen when you DELETE the partition. every partition you want to put to USE, you have to FORMAT afterwards. and THEN, it happens.

 

Thanks. I figured as much, but wanted to be sure given I'm a Thinkpad user and not exactly a pro at installing hardware and clean installing OS's. Yeah I know it was the T/X 61 and earlier that were limited to SATA 1 speeds. Still paranoid.

Good. That's the name of the RAID version of Intel Storage Manager right? No RAID for me but I'll take it under advisement. I'm waiting on the TRIM FW and i'll upgrade to W7.

I have to ask again though (I got no answer). Is it correct to say the Intel Storage Manager didn't support Trim so I have to use Windows built in SATA driver if I want Trim. When the time (fixed firmware, ponied the $ up for W7)comes, of course.

 

the new drivers are not just for raid, they are for everything. and can boost the performance quite a bit.

 

davepermen,

The distinction is that if you are simply deleting partitions and re-installing the O/S (even Win 7), then you are beginning life with a compromised SSD (performance-wise). It may eventually all get cleaned up after a (long?) while of using it under a TRIM aware O/S, but why would you not want the maximum speed right from the beginning?

 

+1

The new Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers have increased the 'snap' factor of both my non-SSD based and non-RAID systems.

On my desktop VRaptor/3xRaptor +4TB data drive configuration they have 'civilized' the Raptors - yes they are actually quieter. (I'm guessing a better optimized NCQ algorithm?). These benefits are for both Win 7 x64 and Vista x64 installations.

 

Seriously? This was one of the first and only drives that offered battery life increases as an SSD on a Notebook. If your X25-M ever runs hot, its probably faulty or you managed to stick it in backwards, shorting it. Must be some kind of FUD people are trying to spread. NOT TRUE.

Oh BTW, the Samsung Summit's aren't bad despite their slow random write speeds. Their surprisingly good performance in real-world tests show they know what they are doing too: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/17269/7

There's way more to the drive than just IOPS/random writes and sequential speeds.

 

i've been closing all my apps, turning off all power saving / sleep / lid close sleep, and then logging off, and leaving the lap sitting there with the lid closed, after a brief wait, my hdd LED started going off, and did for like 15 min then stopped. i opened my lid, i was still at the login screen, and now i wonder what the hell it was doing, if not GC.

here is the HDTune benchmark.

[11:39am] <~max420> Total Storage: 223GB Total Used: 77.7GB Total Free: 146GB

i'm not sure which ones to run exactly, what do you think?

 

no, because the moment you INSTALL the os, it WILL, ALWAYS, format the disk.

maybe you mean that if you would create an os partition being just 20gb, and the resting 140gb are then still "dirty", as long as they're unformatted?

hm.. that could be what you mean

but i only work with "install os on full disk" => it will work in my case, always.

 

what i mean, if you leave unused sections on your disk, they might be un-trimmed. but normally, you want any of your disk to be useful (like a c: and a d:, maybe even an e: on it.. how ever that's useful is out my judgement right now ).

so you will, at some point, create partitions all over the disk. in my case, it's at install time, and it's all over the whole disk automatically.

so the issue is mood. it only is an issue if you consider buying a 160gb ssd, to only use 40gb of it afterwards. which nobody would consider, now, would anyone?

 

Yeah, those are the benchmarks of a badly degraded drive max420, you have only used 34% of the SSD. Your 512k IOPS should be 9 or 10k and the graph should be about 160 gb/s for the first 34% then jump to 200+ mb/s the rest. Have you tried scrolling through the BIOS screens and looked for HDD activity light activity?

 

reason why they did it that way with the partition deletion, tiller?

because you might have wrongly deleted a partition. a restore tool can recreate it, then, and the data is still available. which it wouldn't, if trim allready freed it on the ssd.

and, as already said: normally you create partitions all over the disk when setting up the system, anyways.

 

Ok so a unified driver thing. I have the Intel Storage Manager installed already...

 

GC seems work fine here:
on Nov 21, ATTO results:

and today:

from HD Tune today:

 

Then I would suggest you try the newest driver (and yes, Intel changed the name on us again):

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5563053&postcount=894

and:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5563824&postcount=924

and:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5563852&postcount=926

 

Yes, seriously.

Even in this thread someone mentioned it (I'm pretty sure it was here).

I agree that in real world use it actually saves power - but a Samsung SSD is the most frugal of the SSD's currently out (claim made by multiple people who actually own and/or compared to Intel's offerings).

In my own very brief experience with a Torqx SSD, I even saw a little drop in battery performance (10min) - but I will be the first to discount that as I only paid attention once, to that parameter.

 

in general, the intel is not hot, and uses very low amounts of power. some reported a difference, but mine is cool all day long at least