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

http://www.puresi.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=4&Itemid=9

Feature summary
-- 1TB SSD in 2.5-inch form-factor (highest density ever at
2.5-inch)
-- 300MB/s SATA II interface
-- Industry-leading performance
-- State-of-the-art industrial design

Specifications - Nitro Series SSD:
Capacities: 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB
Performance
-- Transfer rate: 300MB/sec
-- Sustained read: 240MB/sec
-- Sustained write: 215MB/sec
-- Random read (IOPS 4K): 50,000
-- Random write (IOPS 4K): 10,000
-- Latency < 100 µsec
Reliability
-- MTTF: 2.0 million hours
Environmental
-- Temperature (operating): 0°C to +70°C
-- Temperature (non-operating): -45°C to +85°C
-- Shock (operating): 1500G, duration 0.5ms, half sine wave
-- Vibration (operating): 20G peak, 10~2,000Hz, x3 axis
Power
-- Active: 4.8W typical
-- Idle: 0.1W typical
Physical
-- 2.5in form factor: 100.2mm x 69.85mm x 9.5mm

 

is it just be or is that really high by todays standards?

 

sure, funny thing is that this product was introduced in last CES and was announced to be available in early 2009 but has yet to be seen market.

 

yeah. i call first 1tb 2.5" ssd when it's available to order for me. not that i would, as it would cost a fortune for sure. but available in an online store to order in switzerland == available for me (i know in america you can do strange special orders for fun ssds, but i don't consider such shops "generally available").

we'll see.. with the newer 22nm 3bits flash, storage size per $ should double..

 

darQ96,

sorry, but isn't this what we've been (all) saying to you?

And, in the article, the writer mentions that a TRIM speed up will not happen when you overwrite a file. As far as I know, that can't happen on an SSD (at least not on purpose), so TRIM will be used there too. Because it will delete the original file and write the new version.

Glad you're trying to understand 'our' side.

 

I'm sure that such a slow, clunky SATA2 based SSD will never see a market. With those capacities and the right controller, we should be seeing double, if not triple the spec's (in the 4K random r/w's) it posts.

Not to be dismissed is it's abysmal power requirements... 2.5 times more than my 7K500 needs 'average'.

Yeah, they killed it for a reason - they would be essentially giving them away at cost today (and they'd still be sitting in shelves and warehouses all over the world).

 

Question: Would a good SLC like the Mtron Pro 7500 FEEL faster regardless of benches? Also, I hear that SLC does not ever slow down at all regardless of Trim or no trim or full drive or no full drive. True? False? thanks, Dave

 

no, it does feel about the same as your intel. (i have the slc 3500, but from the numbers, but in raid0, it delivered better numbers than the 7500).

and it does degrade without trim, and being a full drive. but slc memory has lower density cells, so the individual cell has less data. the result: the slowdown isn't as big or as rapid. besides the memory lives longer, so wear leveling doesn't have to be as agressive. this helps for less degradation when the disk gets full.

but all in all, you won't feel much difference to your actual ssd, no. i don't, and i'm quite picky 'bout it

 

Excellent answer, thanks. I get it. These SSD's are actually quite complex beasts. I am so happy to have one! I love Intel! I want an i7!

 

hahaha i want an i9, or two of them actually

why not? and i want it to consume only 5W max, so it works in my tablet

but seriously, i5 or i7 will be one of my next purchases.. will fly with the g2 together and be 100% quiet, that's the goal

 

any one know if the new 'Eco' controller that is in the Falcon II is any good?

 

From what I've read, the 'Eco' controller only enables use of 34nm chips. The actual performance is lower than the G2's in reads and the writes, unless you're comparing to the bigger Falcon II (128GB). The 64GB model is not really any faster than the Intel G2 160GB SSD.

So, overall? If the price of the FII 128GB is not less than around $250 then the controller is not worthy of consideration, imo.

 

they are 210$ CAD for the 64GB version. 365 for the 128.
price just dropped, 195 for 64, 345 128GB
hmm. one of these or 300$ for 80GB G2... I already have a G1 80GB but I think I may put it in my desktop and get a different one for my laptop.

 

I think the $300 for an 80GB G2 is well spent (if the space is sufficient for you).

The other prices are what I suspected of the FII, but certainly not enough savings to push me to spend $365 for an unremarkable and unproven product.

$$/GB's, it is worse than the Intel 160GB G2 is up to $465 - and, we've seen them for (much) less here.

 

465??? WHAT?! they are just shy of 600$ here!

edit just did a $$/GB the intel 160 in canada is 3.4$ the G.skill is 2.6.

 

it was CA$489 in xmas without PST:

http://www.anitec.ca/product/589850...l-solid-state-drive-pack-of-1-ssdsa2mh160g2r5

now this one seems to be best price:
http://www.infonec.com/site/main.php?module=detail&id=450249

 

Sorry, didn't notice the CAD prices you were quoting...

Still, even with the $0.80 price difference per GB for your prices (or $211 difference and with a 32GB capacity increase to the G2... so effectively only a $186 difference), the Intel is still my choice of a 'mature' SSD early in 2010.

I see it as spending $186 extra on a 'known' commodity vs. possibly 'wasting' $365 on a 'wannabe' (and, potentially having to spend an additional $600 to the $365 in the near/short term anyway)...


Cheers!

 

i got my 160G2 for 410

 

last week I got another 80 intel xm25-m oem from tiger direct for $190. 15% off bing, and 20 bucks rebate from ebillme comes out to 190.00

 

yah i one an intel 80GB, and I love it... we get ripped off... we don't get bing cash back period. TD.ca is generally pretty expensive. so I decide I'll put the intel in my notebook. we'll still need to think about what to do on the desktop. maybe 2 or 3 30GB vertex's in raid 0?

case and point http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5256783&CatId=4216
160GB intel 725$

 

Huh. So I guess my Intel 160GB G2 for $400 flat was a good deal, then.

 

the best deal i have seen was G2 160G at CA$420 (US$380), four available in GTA, brand new sealed.

 

yuio,

you're not paying attention here!

Vertex SSD's are known to fail randomly for no (good) reason at all. With 2 or 3 of them; are you trying extra hard to see them fail for you?

 

it can't hurt to try! I kid, I didn't know that they just up and failed randomly haven't been around this thread for a while, actually the last time I was really here was just after the vertexs release.

but to be fair, doesn't intel have there 8mb issue?

I may just wait for the next round of hardware and buy the intel stuff on the cheap.

 

no the 8mb issue is was only a tiny issue for some, very few persons. actually, i can't find more than possibly 5 different citations of it all over the web.
failed vertexes, you find quite some.

and the last 8mb issue will soon have it's first birthday..

 

ocz vertexes dropping dead randomly ? oh yes ... here are a few that died recently including one on Jan 1 ... http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=66063

plus their used random read performance (really the only one that count in my daily and presumably quite normal / regular usage) is no where close to intel's.

my vertex turbo 250 gb disappeared from bios about 2 weeks after i got it .. it came back for a while, then disappeared again.

switched to intel g2 160 gb ... i did miss the extra capacity, but day-to-day performance (not benchmarks - i never run them) is noticeably better and not having to worry if the bios is going to detect the hdd the next time i turn the notebook on is worth whatever few pecentages extra in premium intel might be charging.

 

good to know,

hey does anyone know any tricks to speed up win 7's boot on a intell SSD? it's a little slower than my hard drive mainly because when it gets to the fancy win logo it basically stops and sits there for 25seconds or so and then finishes(which is really really fast).

 

it sits and stops without the hdd light glowing? then it's not the ssd, but some driver that hangs. i could fix it on some systems, but not on others, by disabling random for me useless hw (card readers, webcams, etc.. all those things with possibly cheap hw and drivers)

 

type msconfig in search bar from start menu and uncheck all the boxes under the startup tab.

 

yes basically the ligh turns on a 1 1/2seconds then stops and seems to wait untill the log finished animating then waits an addition 20secs or so, then the light turns back and it flys.

 

some hw or driver issue. can't be fixed by msconfig. disable all hw you can in the bios and hope that fixes it. in my case, i opened the desktop and ripped everything off the motherboard that wasn't needed for booting. suddenly, vista boot time went down from 2.5 minutes (with dual ssd raid0!!) to <30secs.. hw intialisation can sometimes take ages for nothing..

 

hmm I do have one 'unknown device' in device manager but i have no idea what it is.

 

just disable everything you can in the bios. all you want really is keyboard, screen, hdd.

you can enable it all later again if you want. check if that fixes something. or can you unplug some devices? like dvd rom or what ever. get rid of everthing you can and check if that changes anything.

is it a clean installation? if not, consider that, too.

 

it's a clean install, and it on a HP Elitebook, so the bios is limited and I can't remove alot of the stuff. I'm going to try and see what I can disable.

 

i'm on an elitebook, too. i was able to disable quite some stuff, but, to be fair, i still have a 10sec idling that i can't fix.

 

ok, 10sec is better than what I have now. now to figure out the new HP bios...

edit: ok, that's seems to have done the trick more or less. it's now down to asbout 10seconds wait or so.

it's too bad windows isn't as fast as linux. Ubuntu completely loads in less than 10seconds.

 

well, i see win7 loading in <20 secs on the intel ssd, so it's mainly dependent on the hw that has to initialise. blame the driver developers for having failed.. why ever.

 

Toshiba SSD benchmark borrowed from the Lenovo forum. Unknown controller, but most likely Toshiba controller. Pretty impressive

 

yeah, JMicron got hooked up with Toshiba -- that takes a lot of balls to buy a JMicron SSD but apparantltly it is paying off! That would be cool if JMicron ended up being the SSD to buy in 2010 instead of Intel.

What is interesting is the headline benchmark that everybody advertises is sequential 64k read and write ends up being the least relevant. Everybody that reviews SSD's uses random 4k writes to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

zephir,

was that an O/S boot SSD, or just a secondary, data drive when it was tested?

 

That was the main boot drive, 1.8" variant of the Toshiba SSD.

 

Hi all,
I've been using an Intel G2 160GB on my Macbook Pro for the last 3-4 months, and it's been great!
Now, I ordered the 80GB Intel G2 SSD for my desktop running Windwos 7 Pro 64 bit. It will be my "boot and programs" drive. Currently my primary HD is 640GB WD Black HDD that I partitioned about 100GB for Windows and programs, and only 30GB is occupied.

Here is my question: Should I just "clone" the C partition of the HDD onto the SSD and just go from there? Of course, the other option is to do a fresh installation of Windows + programs, etc. My personal data is stored on two RAID1 1TB drives, so I dont need to restore any of that. Just wanted to ask if there are any advantages or disadvantages of doing disk clone on an SSD.

Thanks in advance for your time and help!

 

You should definitely do a clean install. Windows 7 sets things up differently for SSD's.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll go ahead and do a fresh install of everything.

I'll also check to see if the Intel drive has the most recent firmware (if not, I'll update it).

A quick Google search for "optimize SSD for Windows 7" brought up this page and this one. Quoting from the second article "When a solid state drive is present, Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching.". That's quite nice if it works that well, because I had to do most of those manually under Snow Leopard.

Assuming that all the aforementioned changes are done by Win7, is there anything else that I need to pay attention to or change (e.g., in Windows, BIOS, etc). Just another assumption would be that the TRIM support will be there with the most recent Intel firmware and I dont have to tweak anything for it to work under Windows 7.

Thanks again!

 

zephir,

Thanks, that does look like excellent numbers it posted. Will definitely have to keep a look out for those drives/controllers in the future.

Cheers!

 

I would ignore those pages as they were written before Win 7 became RTM.

What MS discovered was that SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and application launch prefetching was still beneficial - even with an SSD installed as the boot drive, so at Install, Win 7 checks to see if your particular SSD needs those services and enables each one as needed. So far, I don't know of any consumer SSD's that Win 7 will disable those services on (i.e. they're not fast enough yet).

As for disabling disk defragmentation, Windows 7 will disable that during Win 7 setup for an SSD. So although your conclusion is the same: 'Don't 'tweak' anything for Win 7 + an SSD', just wanted to clarify for you the finer points above.

With Win 7, TRIM needs the SSD's firmware to be TRIM capable and it also requires the proper SATA drivers to allow TRIM commands to be passed from the O/S to the SSD. In addition, your BIOS settings must be in AHCI mode (as opposed to IDE) too.

The default MS SATA drivers pass TRIM successfully to the drive. The Intel Matrix Storage Manager Drivers do not (all versions afaik). The Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers also pass TRIM commands to the drive and also give an overall better benchmark result (for most people) than the default Win 7 MS SATA drivers do.

So, enable AHCI in your BIOS and either stick with the default MS SATA drivers or try the IRST drivers to see if they improve performance for you.

Check/update your firmware, make sure you're running the latest and also download the Intel SSD Toolbox and after you have installed your O/S and your programs, run a manual 'TRIM' once, to synchronize the O/S with the SSD's controller. You should thereafter never see a performance degradation due to the normal creating, copying, moving and deleting of files.

Congrats on your purchase.

Cheers!

 

tilleroftheearth,

Thanks very much for your reply (Apparently I need to spread some reps before given more to you again).

I should have the drive on Thursday (or latest Friday). This will be my weekend upgrade. In the mean time, I'll check the points (e.g., BIOS settings, etc) that you mentioned in your post.

Since the heat generation is not an issue, I should be able to place this drive in anywhere in the case, right (without blocking any air flow for other components of course)? Too bad that the "silent" nature of this SSD will not be beneficial in a desktop setting, but the speed increase will make it all OK

 

Hi, how do I run a manual Trim with the SSD controller? thanks

 

JMicrons new SSD

http://www.micronblogs.com/category/ssd-concepts/

 

If you're running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 and the NTFS file system and not running in RAID mode, and have an Intel G2 80GB or 160GB SSD with the latest firmware (v1.5), then download the Intel SSD Toolbox from here:

See:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18455


Once installed and your SSD is correctly identified in the Intel SSD Toolbox, click on Intel SSD Management Tools and then select the Intel SSD Optimizer option and click run.

Trust me, it's easier to do it than it is to type it!

Cheers!