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

This is actually a very good question and something that needs to be answered by M$ because you can clearly see substantial performance hits when using hibernate and sleep with an SSD. I think it has to do with the advancements that are required for TRIM to be functional with modern SSD controllers.

3G SSD controller manufacturers have already stated that TRIM is irrelevant to 3G SSD'S

 

Actually.....should I jump on this????

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...&PID=749547&SID=forums&nm_mc=AFC-C8junctionCA

I just got a 32gb sd card in the mail which makes up for my need for a larger drive in consideration of the price. Is this the newer Intel version ssd?

And Tomy....spent 3 months in Zagreb in 92. Even with the war....loved the countryside.

 

looks like the gen2 80gb. the 160gb has a bit higher write speeds, but otherwise it's a nice drive. i have two of it.

if you want, why not? should work fine (i hope, else i'm in huge troubles, having a furious canadian behind me.. i can't return to that country anymore, then )

 

My case proven that I don't need Intel because I'm not doing anything that will make that difference feelable, maybe someone with different needs will feel it.

And don't get me wrong, I agree that Intel is faster then Samsung, but not in all tasks. For example parallel read and writes with low queue depth which is proven with that unpacking of .7z file and with "winsat disk". I hope that You accept "winsat disk" results.

I would "jump on it" if I have a cash. And yes, it's newer version (SSDSA2M080 G2XXX).

Yap, Croatia is a nice country, as many others, but for Croatia that's all about it, just very nice. Sad but truth!

 

i sure do. what i'm mostly saying (to les) is that he a) looks at the wrong numbers, considering stuff important that just doesn't matter, and b) fails to accept that, even while intel don't have to be best everywhere, they are one of the best choices around.

as you said, in the end you didn't notice much difference, and the intel worked fine even while being the tiny value one. surely, the 80gb or 160gb shows better results (we could try those once with some equal data.. hm.. something to do at the weekend? do i have you in msn?).

 

i have both sammy(corsair P256)(WEI 7.4), intel x-25m 160 G2(WEI 7.8), x-25v 40G(WEI 7.6), i can feel most time intel (even with slowest x-25v) is a tiny bit faster than sammy, but x-25v has no difference with x-25m in my apps including windows bootup in terms of real world speed.

 

Why over weekend? That's part of week I don't have too much time (cleaning, sleeping, going around...)

Just post links and testing methods and maybe someone else with some other SSD will try it. I'm quite sure tilleroftheearth will try it on his VRaptors just to make fun of SSDs.

BTW: and I could try it on 5400 rpm HDD just to see "power" of different technology that can fit in 2.5"

 

when ever you've time.. (for normal people, that's on weekends )

 

Yeah, geeks with SSDs are just average people

If You have some links and methods just post it and I'll try it.

Going to bed now (12:50 AM here).

 

we try to hide inbetween the ordinary mob...

while setting up rss auto downloader for youtube channels, ted.com etc so that my home server automatically downloads the newest episodes from ted, from latelateshow, etc.. and i can then watch them directly on the media center..

we TRY to be normal (btw, the ted rss feed is 21gb worth of information, or 90hours of watchtime )

 

Go for it. Intel G2 drives at $2.75/GB are priced lower than the Vertex and Agility lines from OCZ. You'll never miss the 180 MB/s sequential write on Samsung drives because you'll probably never be writing anything that large sequentially. And performance under ~ 16K dominates the competition. The 160GB drive is actually priced even lower at $2.68/GB (USD on both of these).

 

I always like to refer back to this Tech Report review: http://techreport.com/articles.x/17269/6

Summit has its places where it can outperform the X25-M. And against the Vertex, even though the random write MB/s numbers is lower and latency on "dirty" state is higher, its generally faster than the Vertex.

IMO, Samsung may not be up to Intel standards, but they know how to put that theoretical numbers they can pull to actual use. Same with Mtrons. Their random write numbers are low but perform very well.

Food for thought: I play BFBC2 but noticed rather long load times before actual map is shown and "play" button is pressed. I was surprised when it took me 3 mins to load the map and my friend with a Core 2/2GB/WD Raptor 150GB/GF8800Ultra took only 10 seconds to load.

People like Dave: "Woah, SSDs are amazing, how did I live without them?"
Me and few others: "I don't see a huge difference, but when I went back to hard drives it was slow so SSDs are still all very good."

 

Maybe a dumb question.....

Looking at the Intel 160Gb 34nm Gen 2 on Newegg canada and there are two diff versions, one being the oem version and the other the retail. The retail costs like 60 bucks more.

Is there a difference?

Here first two drives...ones mainstream oem one is retail...

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...EPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=intel+160gb

 

Retail comes with a 3.5" adapter, if I recall correctly. OEM comes in a box with padded foam and a sticker that says "My SSD Rocks!".

 

Retail has 3.5" adapter & SSD sticker. Oem has only SSd sticker no adapter. Not Worth an extra 60 bucks....Oem and retail both have 3 yr warranty

 

"every shrink in process geometry will shorten the average life span a a block."
"3x (30-39nm) process geometry the write endurance is declining towards 3-4000 P/E cycles."
http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//...ask=view&id=72&Itemid=46&limit=1&limitstart=3

 

what would you guys recommend for a g73jh (laptop) as a windows boot drive in the $150-200 in the ssd department

 

For those of us who aren't "smart", could you explain real world relevance of queue depth? I just don't understand how it applies to the discussion. Much about benchmarking confuses me, honestly. That's why I find the random write speeds of the Intel fascinating.

 

depends on what makes you notice a system is slow, and how much you care about it. but definitely anyone using an ssd for some days, having to move back, notices how it feels sluggish. but not everyone notices the speed gains in the first place. then again, people can watch movies that stutter, or have audio/video shifted, etc and such, not noticing it. i notice that stuff very very well. similar like for my hearing, my eyes behave the same (it's a brain thing). always focussing on the noise, not what i try to target. so i notice any stutter, no matter how tiny, and it pisses me off. can't change it.

yeah, both have the sticker, so it's not worth to pay extra

the real world relevance of que depth is this: imagine some downloadprogram running. it slowly writes data to your ssd. maybe windows update besides, too. another slow write. you browsing the net, filling your temp cache with html pages and pictures and flash and all. all random writes. none of those has to be fast per se, but each should happen rather quickly, without delays.

if you don't have the queue depth deep enough, then those writes have to queue behind each other, each waiting for the other to complete. and there, suddenly, write latency starts to build up massively, creating the same slowish feeling like a hdd.


how do you experience that best? download some big app (take an adobe suite ), start it's installation. and while it installs, browse your files, try open movies, programs, and all that. the system will be MUCH slower in a lot of cases. those parallel lines are for read AND write, and the setup will fill those up for write-jobs most of the time, delaying read-requests, blocking the system.

on an intel, most of the time, you have more free lanes than apps (even some in parallel) use. and even if all are in use, chances are quite high that one of the 10 'just finished one job', free to toggle writes and reads f.e., to still deliver adequate performance.

a hdd in essence has (even with NCQ) one such lane. if you install something and try to do something else, it will be very slow. it would need multiple freely movable heads to handle that.

the samsung performs very well as long as it has it's (4?) lanes under control. once those are filled, though, it falls down rather quickly.





NEWS AT 11!!

Vertex Limited Edition
100GB ($399.99) and 200GB ($829.99)

now those are good prices, aren't they, les?

 

I like the looks of that however no tests yet or release date...If your a good hunter, find me availability on that drive or the Vertx Pro 2 which they also speak of.

I am prob going to grab an ssd within the next 2-3 weeks. I am already trying to negotiate a best offer on Kijiji for your fav 160 gen 2 where he will let it go for 425 and I am trying for 400...That would make me happy as, well, the difference in space available is a bonus with that drive.


The difference on this Sammy 64Gb is going to be amazing regardless of what I get I am sure....And to have the best ssd going into an 11.6....beautiful!

 

hehe i guess it won't be available soon, if at all really.

in other news, i coded an rss downloader which downloads all new www.ted.com presentations to my home server so i can see them directly from my media center. with twitter update when new episodes got available..

yeah, i'm a geek



just had to get that out

 

I am not sure what math you are talking about, but the one I am talking about shows 16k random read performance hit that takes time to recover after resuming from sleep. I have tested it on my system that only supports S3 sleep. After resuming from S3 sleep, my Summits 16k random read performance will drop from a little over 100mb/s to 38. When I had TomyB's 40gb X-25V it showed similar behavior although it was able to recover faster using the SSD toolbox. The Summit takes about a week to recover it's 16k random read performance. The testing was done by running winsat disk.

 

ah okay that.. hm.. haven't noticed similar behaviour here, but i don't sleep often.

any special driver installed? intel drivers, or such? there might be a reason why it's still not officially released

 

I don't think it just my system because someone tested it with a Intel chipset desktop and got similar results from resuming from sleep. Someone said something about the bitmap getting out of sync with the controller thats why I said I thought it was a problem with TRIM and sleep mode that MS could fix. Either way, the Gen3 SSD's will not need to rely on TRIM to maintain performance.

 

Question about the intel toolbox. How long does it normally takes to run the toolbox? I have mines set once a week. Last night, it took 19 mins to run. Is this normal? I read that some say it takes less then a min to run. I have about 55gb of free space on my 80gb.

 

should run in much less, but can sometimes run for quite a while.

55gb free is more than enough. at 80% full you might run into issues.

 

Dave...you r kinda the guy with all the answers...

How about getting me some complete test results for the OWC as well as OCZ Limiuted Edition as well as anywhere available... Heck I would settle with the Vertex Pro 2....

 

anyone heard of Corsair Reactor Series? the specs look good a newegg...
250 read, 170 write. not bad.

 

And how would u cmpare that to the Corsair Nova which has better read writes/yet half the cache at 64mb v ice the 128mb of the reactor.

 

PCPer review of the Vertex LE with Sandforce controller (Limited edition because OCZ dropped the SF-1500 controller for consumer drives because they were too expensive, Vertex 2 will ship with SF-1200. These have the SF-1500 and have limited availability.)
Anandtech review of Vertex LE, C300, and other drives

It's pages with results like this one that are why I continually recommend people should get Intel drives: IOMeter Average Transaction Time On every IOMeter test, on every queue depth they test, the X-25M G2 barely goes higher than 0.2ms latency. I like knowing that no matter what is hitting my drive in daily operating system usage, my drive is never going to take longer than 0.2ms to process the request. Compared to the other drives (Indilinx, Samsung), there is absolutely no competition in that aspect, especially when you look at the Price/GB ratio. This is why daveperman, myself, and others so strongly recommend Intel drives for the way they feel faster than any of the competition, and these numbers back it up. The Sandforce drive performs almost identically to the Intel in this aspect, so it's in my mind the first legitimate competition that gives you everything Intel does and more, without sucking in some area.

 

I will concede that the best drive in any tests thusfar but all seem to relate the same with respect to its sequential write...its horrid. In most cases its about one third of all others in real life use. Now, the question I then have is what else would this affect except the downloading of large files.. In fact, how would the loading of large files such as video be slowed....or should I say to what extent?

I am curious to know where else this would be important in real worl use.

Having said that, I'm the first to admit the drive i am closest to grabbing is the 160Gb Gen 2...but I want to cover all my bases.

 

latency, multi-thread 4k r/w weight more on real world performance. in my current systems, i put two x-25m 160 G2 in two prime workhorse, two x-25v in two apps-only laptops with little data stream writes, one x-25v in netbook, two P256 in two data processing laptops.

 

How often do you copy 4GB ISO's around your hard drives? How often do you copy 16GB .MKV's over from your home media server to your laptop? Those are the kinds of questions you should be tossing around when trying to determine what effect it will have on you. Even then, there's no guarantee it will be purely sequential. Downloading of large files doesn't apply either because your browser / OS is not writing them sequentially. Loading large files is a read operation at which the Intel drives are leaders of the pack.

That's about the extent of the large sequential writes your drive will ever see that the 90MB/s on the 160GB G2 will remotely be slower than a competitor's drive. As far as loading large files goes, my 80GB G2 even virtually saturates the SATA2 interface on sequential reads, so that's a non-issue. It's not an exaggeration to say that sequential writes are, of all the types of reads/writes your drive will encounter, the most infrequent.

 

I want to buy 2 Vertex LE's. Any idea where is the best place to get them? I want the 100GB. The egg already has the 200, but they are a bit steep, even for a profiteer like me

 

Hey guys does turning off the indexing feature matter for SSDs? I know for HDDs it reduces the activity a bit and puts less stress on the drive.

 

I've kept mine on, and when I did turn it off for a day I didn't notice anything.

 

i don't know the owc really, yet. the ocz limited, i would NEVER buy. why? see the amount of warnings anandtech has there? i would never buy a limited drive, big chance of issues, of not thorough testing and validation everything works. what if it dies after half a year? what you get, then? even with warranty.
it's a device you can't trust in (and the company, you can't trust in that as well, they lied and cheated on their customers more than once). and you can't trust into that controller, still unproven to be reliable by itself (a tiny company, a first big ssd controller.. a complex piece of hw).

and besides, as i said before: the sandforce chip is CHEATING to get to it's performance numbers. it compresses data to have less data => higher performance in benches. what this means? if you do f.e. sequencially write a huge blank bitmap (all white, all 1s), it will be very fast. but how often to do you write a multigigabyte uncompressed image on disk? i tell you which files, that are big, you might write to disk: movies. h284 compressed movies. they ARE allready compressed, and thus they WILL write slower. this is a chip written for nice benchmark numbers, not for nice reallife performance (but it's still nicely delivering obviously, as it's a fast thing). and they rush out products as fast as they can to make money.

these are just too much points to not trust it. selling/firmware writing company, limited edition, chip company, chip technology. rush to market.

and anands statement about being priced similar to the intels? was he smoking at that point? the 160gb costs around the price of the 100gb vertex le. that is not similar $/gb ATA LL.

multithread 4k FTW (oh, and lowest latency FTW, too )

see my post to less. you don't want them. not you, as you want to rely on your hw, doing business on it. for playing around, yeah, why not. but not for the price .)

don't. doesn't matter. doesn't gain you something. you
a) turn off the legacy indexing which isn't in use anymore, and is just in the filesystem for backwards compatibilitys sake (and puts 0 strain on your system)
b) turn off the new search feature. which you shouldn't, instead you should explore and learn it. then you'll love it, and understand how much you could hate yourself for considering turning it off.

and no, none of both will "gain you anything".

 

Don't forget what Intel did with G2 and FW, OCZ do it all the time.

 

BTW, once you've read anands article, you find his conclusion, which shows up points i try to make since long:

so if you have 6gbps sata, get it. if not, not worth the price.

and we talk huge. see my list of reasons why to not get the drive in the post above..

the thing les didn't got, ever: the price premium of intel WAS worth it (and doesn't exist much anymore). the price premium of nowadays drives don't give you any perceived gains.


so anyone wanting something reliable won't jump onto the new drives. indilinx based or intel based it is, mostly, then.

they do take their leader selling product away from marked for half a year because of some tiny bug that most likely never affects anyone? nah.. i've seen the cores, ocz sells anything unimportant if it sucks

 

Dave ...respectfully....

People come here to draw on your expertise and get drawn away from your "Intel is God" complex. Please don't take this as an aggressive attack on you, but rather, from someone who is trying to find away to draw from your knowledge on reasonable alternatives.

There are many people who simply do not like the low sequential write of this drive as much as you would like to try and minimize it; it is a factor

There are also many who don't like the premium we get soaked for this drive in the US/Canada. Yes it may be the retailers and not the company but it is frustrating as heck. Just this morning NewEgg bumbed up there 160Gb price from 465 in Canada to 522....for no reason other than the fact that they sold out of their 80Gb models which were on sale. Do they not know its a weekend?

I was an inch away from grabbing that today! Now I may as well go to the new model Sammy 256Gb on Ebay for $530!!

So...we are trying to get from you exactly what is next in line and how others rank.....

If their was no Intel what would you be looking at?

That draws people here....to learn from your expertise.

 

no offense. you just said you don't consider to get an intel ever, as you hate intel. and i said you then drop one of the best choices of ssds.

most people don't ever understand that no matter what they do, it most likely never is a factor outside of benches. this is what i'm discussing and fighting for. there are VERY few people that ever trigger any drives sequencial write speeds. and it's NEVER the measurement for "woah that thing is fast". snappiness is what humans experience as fast. sequencial write speed never matters for snappiness.

well, newegg for doing this. this is NOT intels fault. you try to make it intels fault.

right now i'm looking at those new drives, seeing how they in most real life situations don't really beat longtime existing ssds like f.e. the intels, but are from quite unreliable sources, and cost MORE than the intels anywhere on the world (except where you life. but newegg is known, esp. in the canadian land, to have unfair pricing).


so the point i wanted to make to YOU, was, you can get an intel, you won't lack anything cause of the "slow write speed", instead you'll most likely get an ssd that dances around your samsungs you like so much (and your mtrons and memorights). and it will be in the ballpark of the newest ssds still (check anandtech. the new ones most often are within 2-10% faster than the intel, if at all.

do you really want to buy a new one from a tiny company that has no reputation? most customers won't.



so, in essence. yes i like the intels. no i don't hail them. i see them as the best overall customer choice right now. why? they are WITHIN the best ssds. and they are proven to be reliable, have great customer support, and are business ready.


all i did was you off because you don't like them. but one day you might understand that.


and that's why, still, i suggest anyone to get an intel. you quickly notice how the slow writes don't matter. even the V, with 40MB/s max write speed, often is in a similar ballpark than other "non-V" ssds. and other intels go up to 100MB/s, so more than twice the speed of the V.

you bash intel for stuff you haven't even tested if it matters. get your facts straight. please.

 

Thats weird, Newegg Canada has the 160gb Intel OEM for $522 and the retail version for $518. Newegg U.S. has the OEM for $429 and retail for $499.
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636 50001157&name=Intel

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636 50001157&name=Intel

 

newegg sucks?

427$ here. (switzerland, recalculated for us$. 445 cad)

 

This is your best bang for the buck right here Les...
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227395

 

Ok....lets get this straight...I dont hate or dislike intel in any way. I hate how the consumer gets sucked into paying a premium because of a products name and popularity...

I, most likely, will get an Intel at the end of the day. Why? The fact that it blows away the competition in every area except one (seq write) helps...but I also believe it is capable of the fastest startup for my system and that is important. How much faster is probably next to nil as I am around 24 seconds now eheh.

Truth is...I have had that Newegg add in myu favorites along with the 80Gb one for days. The 80gb was 234 and I would have jumped except for its size. As soon as it sold out...boom up goes the 160Gb.

I have also been watching the vertexes very closely as they appeared, through testing, to be the closest competitor to the Intel. I was partial to the Summit because of this:

http://www.techspot.com/news/35472-ocz-summit-120gb-ssd-review.html

but ya great deal except.....the rebate is infinitely slow with many complaining they never get it. Also...just got a 32Gb ssd for 25 bucks so the 4Gb one is not really any use at all.

 

lets do the math of the 3 quotes above:
the vertex is 389, has 120 gb. the intel is 518, has 160gb.

389/120*160 = ? indeed 518.66666

so the intel is MORE CHEAP (by 66 cents )

tell me, again, where that price premium thing is.


math helps you to understand the truth.

and the fact that in NO real life test, the seq write did ever matter. see recent anandtech benches. in no reallife-style tests, the intel dropped back.

as said, and i repeat it with love and passion: newegg sucks. esp. newegg ca.



just in case, the intel 160 can be bought for 470$, not 520 like newegg sells. check here:

http://www.shopbot.ca/pp-intel-x25-m-160gb-intel-price-161284.html

 

Yeah, hold out for the Intel 160gb, it should be coming down in price with the Sandforce and Micron drives hitting the market. Enthusiasts will buy those simply because they are currently "the best" instead of Intel. Sandforce 100gb @ $399 =$4/gb -- Intel 160gb @ $429 = $2.68/gb and that should be closer to $2/gb in the weeks to come.

Did you not see the $50 rebate?

 

oh crap. no (rebates don't exist over here. so i'm not used to them.)

then again, have you seen the last part i afteredited? namely: you can get the 160 for 50$ less elsewhere? fighting your rebate with another shop option

 

I appreciate your help guys. I am probably buying in the next week or so as its not feasible to keep waiting for ever. there is always something better and cheaper around the corner in technology which keeps the best of us from getting what we want when we want.

I have a guy on Kijiji about an hour away who has two sealed gen2 160Gb's he will let go for 425 each which means I save on the price, taxes, and shipping...

I just wonder if there is any Intel warranty buying from a non-retail source as such.

 

yeah, i got over that myself. i just buy when i like something i know i'll pay less tomorrow than today anyways.

a fine price.. but.. =>

that is a good question. no clue myself...