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

Hmmm.. hopefully it won't hurt my performance very much.

 

Tour of Intel and Micron's NAND factory

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358632,00.asp

 

TweakTown’s Solid State Drive Optimization Guide

 

Newegg -- free X-25V 40gb Intel SSD with purchase of X-25M 160gb SSD for $549 ends 2/8
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167024

 

I saw that. Not worth it, IMO. Especially considering the $100 markup on the 160GB in the first place.

 

I secure erased the SSD, and the problem is currently gone. Kind of obvious, because all the flash cells are empty.

I will try to fill the SSD with random data and delete that to see if the problem returns when it's in used state again.

But damn, that thing is lightning fast again at the moment!

 

What do you guys think about this: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3116/tweaktown_s_solid_state_drive_optimization_guide/index5.html

 

Like I posted as a comment, Superfetch should still help SSDs......

~Ibrahim~

 

Great Tweaks!!!!!!! Oh actually.....Great Tweaks but surely capable of creating some passionate discussion. Add to that shutting down pagefile to force your physical ram to do its job and a feud could result!!!!!

I shut my pagefile down and did some tweaking a few days back and when I followed Tweaktowns Optimization Guide along with the SSDTweaker Software, I definitely notice a visible improvement in system response....

Maybe its just me...

 

has to be you, as none of the tweaks really do something.

i officially grew out of the tweakers-teenage.. plug in, install os, use. done. i pay for the ssd to NOT have to tweak to get great performance. and that's why i, for now, will stay intel. no need to touch them at all.


just in case, turning off the pagefile means nothing on vista or win7, f.e. only when ram is low (which it most likely never is), it will use it. and then, you'd love to have it, instead of apps starting to crash.

edit: none of the advanced tweaker options have anything to do with ssd, or performance. only with crippling the system to prepare it to suck if you use one of those components one day. disabling aero is a performance LOSS actually.

the other tweaks are disabling stuff that is allready obsolente, or, if still used, gets TESTED in win7 if it's useful, and auto-disabled if not.

so none of those things should matter at all. as i guessed before reading.

 

Under normal usage conditions in a raid0 setup with Intel G2 drives, should you need to unraid and TRIM every few months to keep them running smooth?

 

don't do a preemptive strike on them. just wait and see. after a few month, check if they got notable slower (means not just in benches, but really slower).

i'd say you need to, AT MOST, trim the drive once a year. at most.

 

I still have all G1's and while they slow down, it's not much... not enough to justify the cost of replacing with G2's, I just installed my m-18x G1 in my desktop with a 2.5inch adapter... the price was great! 200$ shipped for the SSD, adapter, and a USB hard drive enclosure!

 

I just updated the SATA drivers to the latest Rapid Storage drivers. The random slower boot time problem I had is gone! And it takes about a second from Win 7 load animation finishing to seeing the desktop!

 

Possibly new J. Micron Drives?

I suggest the possibility because controller isn't known and they have the USB adapter that the updated J. Microns had...

 

Has anyone tried this or know any info on it: http://www.diskeeper.com/hyperfast/index.aspx

 

which one is it? websearches are a mess

 

I don't know. Just the latest one. Umm let me check.

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

 

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227476
Is this a good deal? Or should I wait for the new gen to get release and price to go down?
I'm not in a hurry.

 

No, that is not a good deal -- the Solid series is Gen1 SSD without a cache. The newer firmware fixes the stuttering but the random write performance is poor. Many early adopters of those drives are now using them as read only data drives.

 

Ugh, I see! Thanks

 

this one is better:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167024

 

This is the Solid 2 Series. It uses an Indilinx controller just like the Vertex drives. It uses slower NAND to bring the price down. Lower performance than the full fledged Vertex drives but I do not know how noticeable that would be in real usage. I have not seen any reviews.

It could be a good value. I think it depends on the random read/write performance which I have not seen.

Don't be so quick.

How is a product that is twice the price a better value? I imagine if he is able to, he would be better off with two of the drive he is asking about and putting them in a RAID.

 

Can you RAID different size SSD's on a notebook like you can with desktops or is that only possible with hardware RAID?

Heres some benchmarks of the Solid 2, it is faster than Samsungs at random 4k writes.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...ormance-review&p=485297&viewfull=1#post485297

 

Here is a link to a slickdeals discussion for this SSD:
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1844797

apparently it is available for cheaper with a free 8GB SDHC as well. There is some discussion about the Solid 2 series including links to some benchmarks on the OCZ forum.

I'm thinking if you are looking to spend that amount of money and want an SSD with that capacity that it is a fine value. I don't think there is a lower price/GB available right now but I could be wrong.

 

Will this SSD work in my Sony FW285? Thanks much.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...7017&cm_re=intel_x25-M-_-20-167-017-_-Product

 

Didn't find to much details about FW285, but if it's using standard 2.5" SATA drive, then it should work.

 

Vaio FW is a standard 2,5" SATA drive.

 

I have a sony VPCCW1Z4E that i bought yesterday. i have been and got a intel x25-v SATA 80GB ssd drive for this to upgrade but i am not sure on the cw vaio laptops were the hard drive is. Does anyone know if this is an easy one or do i have to take the keyboard off.

many thanks in advance

 

Ask in the Sony forum.

Either you have a flap on the bottom for the HDD - or you have to take off the palmrest is my guess.

 

When you people say you use the standard MS drivers, do you just uninstall IMS/IRS and let the drives install by themselves, or is there something different?

 

Just uninstall the Intel driver

 

Okaydokes.

The only little quibbleI'm having with myself is that I lose plug'n'play capability with my eSata if I do that (With IRST I can turn on my eSata enclosure in windows and it gets detected. When I tried out the regular MS drivers I had to restart with eSata on to get it detected. And it seems eSata slwos down my boot).

 

What's a good program for OSX to benchmark a SSD? Also, does anyone know if there's a similar program like Intel Matrix Storage Manager that will let me view all of a SSD drive properties (make/model/firmware/etc.) in OSX?

 

Bad news on this article ,prices will probably stay the same

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/01/imtf_25nm/

 

Looks like the Intel gen3 drives will be completely saturating 3g SATA interfaces at 400mb/s. Are there any notebooks with 6g sata ports?

 

Wow. Nice. I wonder how fast it is where we stop starting to be able to notice the performance increases?

 

^ wouldn't that depend on file size? if someone is working with blue-ray ISO's or something like that - i am sure the would be using full advantage of the pipe....

surfing on the internet and playing movies in media player - you would hardly notice a difference after getting anything more than a 1st gen ssd drive l0l

 

I guess it depends on what you are using it for, some complex business applications will probably never be fast enough. I think price and capacity is the major hurdles, performance to some extent in enterprise apps but mainly capacity and price/gb.

 

Didn't we decide that SATAII is maxed out at around 270MBps, hence why no drive is getting anything higher than that, read-wise? I would think that SATAII would be completely saturated by the gen 3s, not allowing it to reach the full 400MBps until SATAIII is supported.

The pricecut part really sucks. They at least need to drop the prices once this year by at least $80 or so dollars like they did last year. I can't imagine paying for a 320GB Intel drive that MSRPs for $850-$900, simply doubling the price of the 160GB.

 

I'll believe it when I see it. Plus, I really don't care about sequential read numbers. Let's see, if I read a 100 MB file into RAM at 400MB/s it takes 0.25 seconds, and at the current 250 MB/s it takes 0.40 seconds. That kind of upgrade doesn't exactly send chills up my spine.

I wonder what the 4k numbers look like? That's where it counts.

 

as you know it's intel. they so far haven't failed to balance out to perform well there where it's worth it. so you'll get what you want if they jump from 250 to 400MB/s, then, most likely, the rest jumps in the same scale. i hope they get latency down even further..

 

Yeah, I think like that too, ever since I heard of RAID setups that could fully saturate 3gbps I think, "yeah, but what about 16k and lower random reads and writes?" We are a long way from saturating 3gbps SATA ports in that regard. While the die shrinks inherently bring performance gains, I think they will try to adjust the controllers to maximize capacity and reduce prices rather than try to push further the envelope of performance

 

Sata 6 support will be introduced with Sandy Bridge in Q1 2011. Link. This is why it is good to skip Arrandale. Sandy Bridge brings the goodies: Sata 6, USB 3.0, Lightpeak (maybe), a full 32nm cpu/gpu integration for lower heat, and graphics with 2x the performance of "Intel HD Graphics".

 

The "400MBps" figure they are talking about is SINGLE chip, using the ONFI 3.0 specification. Currently they use the ONFI 1.0 spec with each chip capable of transferring at 20MB/s. ONFI 2.0 raises that to 200MB/s, meaning they can saturate the SATA2-300 port with single channel, compared to requiring 10 today.

 

I really like the idea of SSD's. However their price makes them prohibitive in many cases. In my opinion, at the moment a ~250GB drive is a good size for a general use drive. When do you think an average 250GB SSD will reach the $200 mark? Right now they're over $700 which I find absurdly expensive. I can see the use in a dual drive laptop or desktop where you have your boot drive using the SSD and for other tasks that a fast read time would really benefit. But as a single drive, it makes it unlikely that anyone would want to spend that kind of money for general use.

Thoughts / Ideas? Sorry, I haven't kept up on SSD's a whole lot.

 

We will see capacities and performance go up but every time credible analysts have predicted lower prices/gb they have been wrong. I would expect the second gen Indilinx, Samsung and Intel drives to come down in price some but generally, prices will be exorbitant. Don't expect gen3 drives to be cheap, just be happy to get the "hand me down" gen2's at a reasonable cost.

 

Either it means the SSDs will be vastly faster in Gen 3, probably to compete with the Sandforce, or price will go down.

Prices should go down. Probably not as drastic as G2 did, but then again G2 raised in price after demand went up. I don't believe they'll price their 600GB for $1600+. It won't be competitive at all.

 

I don't think vastly faster, just larger capacities mainly.

 

So in other words, it'll be a while, as in a few years most likely?