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

SA2MH080G2 01 -> 7mm OEM version
SA2MH080G2 C1 -> 9.5mm OEM version
SA2MH080G2 R5 -> 9.5mm Retail Box version

Info on Intel website: http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/nand/feature/index.htm

 

same here in vostro 1400 laptop, if excluding BIOS 5 seconds flash delay, then roughly 20 seconds for win7 64bit ultimate.

 

Thank you for the information! Didn't manage to dig that far. So, essentially, is there any difference between the 01 and C1? Except the thickness, that is. What's the thickness of a standard 2.5" laptop HDD?

 

Standard is 9.5mm.

 

seems like the same old arguements raging on and no new news in the past hundred pages HAHA

But boy am i glad i got my agilites for $130 a pop a while ago and not wated to spend $230 now haha. Still running exactly as they did the first day i baught them with multiple os installs and no gc tool and no firmware upgrades. Infact every time i do a fresh install i get "like new speeds" until the os gets a little bogged down and scrambled with apps. even at the most degraded states it hasn't lost more than 5% performance TOPS (RAID0). Still waiting on free Win7 upgrade from Gateway to update my firmware.

I downloaded and installed Win7 for a bit and didn't really see any real benefits there... But i think it's cuz RAID0 and ssd isn't fully supported yet (no trim and it doesn't recognize drives as SSD). benchies were the same still though. Oh well... I'm sure support will come. so i'm gonna reinstall Win7 when i finally get my licensed copy.

 

hehe. same, in general, here: i got my stuff early, and it's still worth all the money i've put in.

the last sentence of one anandtech ssd statement was "my commendation, even while price is high: get them as fast as you can, they're worth every day you have them". more or less that way.

and actually, it was like that since the mtrons came out back in those days even while it's a lot of money, it's sooo worth it to not wait.

 

Xiphias: Thanks again for your help!

 

Okay, this thread is alive again!

New news:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=17006

Indilinx delays next gen controller...

I wonder what's up?

 

This is indeed good news

bad for my wallet, however....

 

My little Samsung based Summit may be utter crap, but it still performs well after 4 months usage.

 

My little Summit gets 23,785 PCMark Vantage HDD Suite.

 

The thing is, Dreamweaver is NOT a simple text editor.

I change a filename, it changes all link, I drag and drop to create a link (Visual Web Developer allows the same).
I can check the whole site for errors etc.

Yes, maybe the setup is a bit slow - but the actual programmes are running pretty much brilliantly By the way, this makes me think.
Dreamweaver is quicker on a SSD compared to a HDD; but the difference is smaller than with Photoshop...

 

Is there a way to reduce the BIOS splash screen delay? I could get my restart times down below 30 seconds if it weren't for the 10 seconds of BIOS splash screen.

 

sgilmore62,

Stop tweaking your computer!

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21753401-See-What-Your-Windows-7-Restart-Time-is

 

Here is another review that I know I won't agree with...

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/patriot_torqx_128gb/
(The Torqx 128GB SSD is faster than the 80GB Intel?)

So much for benchmarks, huh?


Edit; should I be worried (when I test the Intel G2 160GB) that it might not live up to my expectations?

With a cold boot - PS CS4 opens up in 5 seconds for me, as does Dreamweaver too. What's amazing is that I have a few suites of plugins installed in PS and they are also loaded too (ie. not a 'default' PS install and this is the 32bit version of PS I'm launching).

Of course: Scorpio Blue 500GB + eBoostr Beta 4 build 544 using almost 13.5GB of cache on a Lexar ExpressCard SSD (16GB).

 

Nothing is tweaked--I just did a clean install and ran AS Cleaner with FF and command prompt defrag C: /X

 

Sounds good

Photoshop CS4 takes about 8 seconds - Dreamweaver on Battery saver about 8, but its quicker on AC in my "regular mode".

I have a Firmware from August and no trim though.

 

Good

In the long run tweaking since Vista leads to more problems than you'd have without.
(Experience - and not only mine)

By the way - tweaking does not include chucking out "junk" that software you install adds.

i.e. if you don't want the JavaUpdate scheduler after installing Java - ans you stop that, that's not tweaking. that's cleaning up.

 

@ things:

1. Come to think of it, what the heck happened to Mtron? I thought they were going to be a big player.

2. with the latest drivers and an Intel 160G2 and Win7 32 is there anything I need to do to initialize TRIM or is it automatic when, say, I leave the computer alone for awhile?

OK, 3. What is AS Clean mentioned in a post a few above this?"

Thanks, Dave

 

Data Retention: 5 years at 25ºC
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/patriot_torqx_128gb/3.htm

reliability seems questionable?

 

Hi all,

I've been enjoying my X25-160GB G2 Intel SSD in my MBP over the last 3 months. It's as fast as day 1. Then again, I am only using 23GB of it at the moment

I was notified by Intel that there is a firmware update for my SSD. I assume this should be related to TRIM support. Since I am using the drive in a Mac under Snow Leopard, should I go ahead and apply it? Is there anything in the current firmware that would make things better/worse?

Thanks in advance for your time!

 

The driver update went well for me booting from the disk I burned from the ISO and then being patient while it updated. Took less than 4-5 minutes. I am not familiar with the MAC however. And I did a good backup first

 

The Intel G2 160gb gets a 30 mb/s seq write boost from 70mb/s to 100 mb/s with the TRIM FW. As you know TRIM only works with Windows 7 but the seq write boost is nice. I wonder if you would be shooting yourself in the foot if GC no longer works because of the TRIM FW? From what I understand GC and TRIM do not play nice together so GC is disabled when TRIM FW is flashed? Not sure whether the Intel drives GC will still work with Macs if you flash TRIM. AFAIK there is no flashing back if GC gets disabled and your drive starts degrading. I would wait and let another 160gb Intel/Mac owner be the Guinea Pig.

 

pih...
photoshop cs4 portable on my sammy needs only 4-5 sec to open

 

It gets that boost earlier - I have firmware from August and get 100MB sequential write - but I don't have trim.

 

benchmark for using intel turbo cache as SSD's TMP directory:read max 888M/s, write max 376M/s

 

Most BIOS have an option called "quick boot" which you are probably already aware of...it just skips some basic hardware checks and saves a few seconds maybe.

Other than that, we'll just have to wait for something like Phoenix's "instant boot BIOS" as demoed on a Lenovo T400 here. 11 seconds to desktop...not bad!!!

And by way of comparison with your Samsung-based Agility, here is my old and much maligned JMicron-based Solid:

 

I thought the Agility's have Indilinx controller? Mine is a Summit, same as Samsung PB22-J/PM800. Has your Solid recieved FW upgrades lately?

 

Thanks very much for your reply. Since I have no complaints at this point, I'll just use it as it is. As you mentioned, the FW update -and the problems- seemed to stem from issue with GC and TRIM. Since I dont have TRIM support under Snow Leopard, I'll hang on to GC as long as I can

 

I'm running the firmware, and while it hasn't been a week yet, I've had no problems and better benchmarks than usual (could have just been a good test) after the upgrade on OS X.

Last one is obviously the SSD. The other two are external drives. Using X-Bench. 80GB with 24GB free space left.

Not posting the image since it stretches the screen.
http://i49.tinypic.com/335gz5y.png

 

ooops, my mistake(s)...

and yeah, I applied the JMicron firmware update some time ago which has fixed the drive as far as I'm concerned...still a dog compared to any other controller, but totally usable now.

 

no clue.. looks like they're not going to be a big player.. (hint, they worked on mlc ssds, and had to drop them. most likely the main reason why they're not a big player anymore)

it doesn't work like this at all. when ever you delete something, it gets IMMEDIATELY reported to the ssd, thanks to trim, that this region is free again. that's ALL. no waiting, no initializing, no "automatic thing". it's just a message "this region is free". and once the ssd understands that, and GETS the message (by having drivers that send it trough), all is ready.

but there is no waiting, no gc-blabla anything.

there are trim-tools out there, that scan your whole filesystem, and report any free region as "this region is free", a.k.a. send a trim for that region. these tools are manual, and you should get the one for your disk to do that. but the tool is, afaik, not yet out there.

no clue. new fancy marketing bla?

 

Thanks for the answers, that is really great about TRIM, wow! I can stop worrying, my drive will always be fast!

 

you never had to worry. my drives are all still fast after half a year/more than a year usage. it's mostly internet-drama.

 

AS Clean is a program that writes FF's to the free space on ssd's then deletes them resulting in 1's written across all the free space. It works on Intel drives also, I've seen people post benchmarks after using it only to have their posts deleted because OCZ bans all discussion of competitor products.

 

oki thanks for the info.

 

I do wish people would think about web searching when they name their products. Obviously googling 'as clean', even with the quotes, is gonna pick up millions of irrelevant hits.

 

don't even consider what happens if you typed it in wrong.

i know a company which has the short cut version A S S. and it has it written in BIG letters on their trucks lucks fun when driving around

but yeah, i like terms that lead to actual results in searches

 

So I'm looking at people updating the firmware and posting some numbers that I really don't understand.

I'm ordering the Dell Studio 17 and plan on installing the Intel 160GB SSD on it. I'm going running all my PostgreSQL databases on it and definitely plan on putting it to full use. The laptop itself will come with a normal HDD with Windows installed on it but I plan on removing it and installing Windows on the SSD. How much of a hassle is it to install the firmware on this setup? Worth it?

 

no, it's just booting from a cd, getting some white-on-black text, and then confirming "yes, i want to update".

 

You can download FreeSpaceCleaner HERE He also has AS SSD Benchmark.

 

darQ96,

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5588200&postcount=1316


I just want to clarify to everyone that the Lexar 16GB SSD in the ExpressCard slot I'm using is dog slow, for writes - how slow? Well, it's 16GB nominal, 14.9GB NTFS formatted and to copy around 14GB of data to it would take over an hour - the worst was about three hours (smaller files are worse than one big one).

In the link above I am using this slow writing card (which, although its name says SSD is linked to the ExpressCard via USB technology!) as a cache for eBoostr. I'm using about 90% of 15,268KB (13.5GB) of the total allocated 14.9 size.

Just to clarify... thanks.

 

The AS SSD Benchmark scores are heavily weighted in favor of 4k random writes and queue depth 64 4k random writes. The Intel drives score much higher than Indilinx and Samsung drives. Also note that software RAID arrays show inflated scores with this benchmark similar to what you see in CDM and HD Tune. Software RAID should use IOMeter for realistic scores.

 

ran the cleaner, filled my disk till 0mb free fun to watch. other than that, question is now, does that help if you don't have trim?

 

It helps drives with unaggressive GC, whenever running the freespace cleaner there is a flurry of HDD activity afterwards indicating that GC is kicking in. Usually go to sleep mode right after running it then as soon as everything shuts down press the power button and remain at logon screen until HDD activity stops. Usually takes 3-10 minutes. Don't recommend using that perfectdisk10 to consolidate free space first because it runs processes in the background that I think prevents the controller from seeing the drive as idle. If you want to consolidate free space before running the cleaner run command prompt defrag C: /X which invokes the consolidate free space.

 

Newegg has a couple colossus now for a lot less than Amazon. This is closer, but still not as good as OCZ's official word on pricing.

OCZ's press release stated $300 for the 120GB. Newegg has it for $460 and Amazon for $556

OCZ said $650 for 250GB. Newegg has it for $860 and Amazon for $969.

Intel's Gen 2 are also being sold at above MSRP. Maybe in the next few months the inflation will come down.

 

dunno if my mtrons actually do something gc style

 

The collosus are 3.5" drives and wont fit in a notebook unless you can remove the case so that you can possibly slide it over the connector without the case hitting the second connector? Wish someone at OCZ could consider testing that out--it would be cool to have hardware RAID'd SSD's in a notebook.

 

You tested the cleaner on the Mtron's? Benchmarks are worse with the Summit right after running the cleaner if GC doesn't do it's thing first. Skeptical about freespace cleaner working on drives without GC, think it can actually make the drive slower because it has to do 2 things first instead of 1 erase before a new write can be performed.

 

well, a full format helped the disk to get to it's default performance back, too..

worth a try anyways