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

Nah...walk into any Apple Store...

 

no, you have to wait some <=60 days till you see their BIGGEST one

 

Ya agree totally with that. Gotta love that ne Ipad Maxi! My guess is huge...HUGE.....failure because of its limitations. Its simply a glorified Touch with a document reader.

Anyway...back to my concern with respect to the Sammy 256 Gb I posted about above. I guess, Dave, there is really no need to worry about buying an older Sammy 256gb because of the way they are built then...even thought they are not TRIM capable.

Am I wrong to believe that even with any ssd performance degradation, they would still be much better than the present Intel with TRIM???

 

well, you buy old crappy slow tech, but otherwise, no worry, no

 

Yeah, I'd not heard about that "pre-crapping" the Samsungs, either, but whatever they do, it mostly works because I have an early 256GB Samsung (VBM15D1Q) in my Dell 1640 and performance on that has been (seemingly) every bit the same since the day I put it in...

But, with TRIM, wouldn't all those "pre-crapped" cells get wiped out and then wouldn't we have even faster access, because the need for an erase cycle is now gone?

 

AFAIK, the only thing the Samsung is faster than the Intel is at those headline 512k sequential write benchmarks. When and where do you realize performance benefits from faster 512k sequential writes? The answer is not very often.

 

Sorry, I forgot to add some notes.

Post updated!

 

how did you change from TRIM to non-TRIM? by changing driver from m$ to IRST? i noticed max latency inflated with m$ driver somehow.

 

indeed. trim does not reduce performance at any point. it, at best, increases it.

if there is a decreace, then it's because of the driver.

 

In Command prompt to enable TRIM type:

Code:

fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0

to disable TRIM type:

Code:

fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 1

to check is it disabled or enabled:

Code:

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

if:

Code:

DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)

TRIM doesn't decrease performance, but in my case it didn't help to keep drive in "like new" state.

When I disable TRIM performance increase, which is obviously from numbers I have.

Driver version for ACHI is: 6.1.7600.16385, but it says: "Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller" and I think it should be ACHI 2.0 for TRIM to work.

 

well, maybe trim didn't work? just telling windows to send trim doesn't mean it gets trough down to your disk

 

There is definitely something going on with Samsungs latest firmware 19C that supports TRIM. On my system I have to disable TRIM with the command prompt to get GC to work like it did with 18C firmware. I don't think TRIM is quite ready for primetime at least with certain systems and SSD's. It is the way to go but I think it has a ways to go.

Is it possible to setup a software RAID without BIOS support options?

 

oh it is ready for primetime. just samsung isn't ..

yes, but not really something you should do. why? cause it's slow, and has a high cpu overhead. sort of.

 

Not RAID 0 (Spanning). It's easily setup in Disk Management and has zero overhead (practically). RAID 1 (Mirroring)...haven't tried but since there is no parity calculation, I cannot imagine that reading and writing from/to two SATA channels simultaneously can be very taxing...

Can you elaborate as to what you are seeing, and how you can tell what GC is doing and what TRIM is doing to your Samsung's? I have three 256GB Samsung's and would like to know what GC is actually doing for me!

 

it's actually documented by microsoft to have quite some overhead, as, to work without flaw, it always has to verify what it has written on both ends, and such.

well, i never tested it..

do they work? do they work fine? then don't bother. that's what ssds are about..

sorry to interfer here but in the end, all doesn't matter. if they work. if at one point, one annoys you for being slow, stuttery, or something, THEN one of those fancy words failed to do it's job.

 

Reboot your system and leave it at the logon screen...

± 1 ~2 minutes, you'll see your disk's lights kinda going crazy; this is ITGC in real action.

 

When on 18C I would use defrag C: /X to consolidate free space then run AS Cleaner with FF checked>shutdown(not restart)>cold boot>S3 sleep just long enough for everything to shutdown>resume to logon screen. While idling at logon screen after resuming from sleep mode and running AS Cleaner with FF checked I get alot of HDD activity light activity indicating GC is working and can be verified with benchmarks before and after. On 19C I still get HDD activity light activity after this procedure but the benchmarks remain the same unless I disable TRIM with the command prompt prior to resuming to logon after sleep mode. Ideally your system should be set to ACPI 2.0 and S1 sleep supported for TRIM to work. My system only supports S3 sleep. You can check within an elevated command prompt type powercfg /a

 

Ths is almost interesting; I got my 2 PM800 from Dell, I never updated their F/W, my drives are (obviously) NOT TRIM enabled, still their stock F/W # is VBM1 9D1Q... TRIM is greyed, and I'm sure it's not working anyways since I'm on raid and the nvidia raid controller knows siht about TRIM... Almost interesting, indeed...

 

What do you mean, "it's setup easily within disk management" -- can you give some instructions? What about RAID drivers, am I going to setup the RAID 0 in disk management, install RAID drivers, cross fingers and hope it boots after a restart?

 

Next edition of flash in the works.

Intel & Micron Announce 25nm NAND Flash Production, SSDs to get Bigger/Cheaper in Q4

 

@ sgilmore62: if You set "RAID 0" in Disk Manager (software RAID) You won't be able to boot from it, not even windows installation can see it, so can see much use of it.

If You need help just send PM, was testing it few times.

 

25nm Intel/Micron SSD's on the way, aka Intel Gen 3 coming fall/winter this year (I'll be getting another ssd when Intel gets to Gen 5 in 2012).

 

Q4?! What shenanigans. Anandtech said mid-year. :/

~Ibrahim~

 

Would you rather have two Intel 80gb G2 in Raid0 or just one Intel 160GB G2?

 

2x80gb RAID 0 FTW

 

I guess no need for TRIM? Or just manual TRIM after things get messy?

 

yeah, if performance drops image the array and run ssd optimizer on them one at a time as secondary data drives from a separate windows installation on a mechanical drive or something. put the array back together and re-image. Intel should have some drivers eventually that allow the trim command to be passed through to a RAID setup.

 

That's so far away

The only thing that's preventing me from buying an SSD is the limited space. I'm waiting for at least a 320GB SSD, but now I guess I might as well wait till the 3rd gen.

 

Let me guess the pricing on the 25nm Intel SSDs.

80GB-$110
160GB-$200
300GB-$380
600GB-$740

I'm assuming that the 300GB and the 600GB models will be having faster speeds due to having greater reserve capacity. At this point I might be eyeing for the 300GB version to take over my 80GB as the main boot drive while I relegate the 80GB as a secondary one.

 

Yeah. I really want to just hold out for the 300GB one too.

 

Chances are they'll probably hit the market in 2011 anyway. The 320GB gen 2 was supposed to be out by now

 

Ugh, don't say that! Anandtech says Intel is looking for a mid-year 2010 launch.

~Ibrahim~

 

Volume production isn't the time where you can purchase a product. The way they are talking about, we might not see them in 2010. Volume production-->Product shipment-->Release date

The "Postville Refresh" or whatever it might be, should be coming around springtime. LOTS of devices are being released around that time.

 

What are you doing that requires super-fast access to hundreds of GB? I'm sure that most people have similar needs to mine - fast access to the OS, Program Files and the data I'm currently working on. For that around 100GB is planty. Older data and stuff that doesn't need super-fast access (who cares if an MP3 starts playing 0.1s or 0.001s after you click 'Play') can sit on a high-capacity, slower, drive.

 

Then I shall wait for the Postville refresh.

 

I think it will come before the third quarter is over.

There is too much selling opportunity and they are never going to get the high prices again like they are when they first begin selling, so they may as well get started as soon as possible.

 

Doesn't matter if your laptop only has one hard drive bay. Need space and speed in a single package, thank you. And I know someone will say it: I'm keeping my optical drive; I didn't pay $$$ for BD-RE for nothing.

~Ibrahim~

 

home server FTW

 

not sure if this was posted before, but:
http://www.overclock.net/ssd/656984-how-get-your-kingston-40gb-ssd.html

guide how to flash kingston 40gb with intel fw to make it to support trim

 

It does matter actually. My experience plugging in a laptop drive as a secondary drive for brief amount of time suggests even on a seperate port it'll slow down the entire system down. Largely negates the SSD upgrade.

Not only that, games take so much space nowadays. Using an expensive storage like an SSD for only speeding up boot time is a complete waste. With my new setup, it boots no faster than regular hard drives anyway!

 

Networked Storage FTW (i think i repeat myself )

 

Exactly. I see no point in spending hundreds of dollars just to speed up one part of my system.

 

then again, spending hundreds of dollars on something that won't speed up your system at all doesn't make sense as well.

a full-hd movie file will not play back better from an ssd, f.e.

 

Your link is just repeating the same specs available from any other new site. The listed sequential read speeds being in the same ballpark as a mechanical drive tells you little in regards to performance for random reads and what you could expect in terms of real life performance.

 

What's the easiest way to reset my X25-M G1 80GB to fresh, all zeros state? I know there is something called Secure Erase, or Sanitary Erase.

Could someone please give me a short overview? Thanks...

 

X-25V 40G MIR $109.99: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10011743&ps=weekly_10011743

 

You do not want all zeros on an SSD, you want 1's. Sanitary erase is a proprietary tool for Indilinx drives. HDDErase is recommended for resetting G1 Intel SSD's although some users report that Tony-TRIM works.

 

I only have OS,program files and games on my SSD, game loading was the biggest reason I bought one, my cad files stay on one of modular hard drives, as does multimedia, it doesn't make a difference to me if they don't open instantly.

Boot times are only improved by 4 or 5 seconds with XP in my case, the big difference is that it takes no input from me to keep the same boot speed with the SSD, a hard drive goes backwards to the tune of a couple of seconds longer each day with no defragging and keeping boot files in order, this is one of the things I like the most about my SSD.

I only have a Kingston V+ series, but its built in OS independent "self healing" works perfectly at maintaining the same performance, the only time it got messed up was when I started playing around with tony trim.....I leave it alone now and as long as there is certain amount of idle time, it's good enough to sort itself out.

 

Hmm... so if I've got a 160gbx2 raid0 SSD setup in my Envy 15 and run a 1TB USB 3 HDD (yes it has USB 3.0), that will slow the entire system down?

 

That's the thing. If you need lots of space, its either you completely splurge on an SSD or opt for a hard drive.

Yea. Diablo 1(don't laugh ) for example, spins up my hard drive when playing sometimes even though its installed on the main drive, the SSD. Weird, isn't it? For some reason there are some operations that still hit the drive that is not installed on.