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

Considering that on an even faster machine Dell M6400 8GB RAM and Quad Core Extreme CPU a Samsung 128GB SSD scores 5.4 on WEI and yours is 7.9, I'd say you're good!

Also, don't forget you have an O/S installed on yours and most reviews show benchmarks with the drive used as a spare.

Enjoy!

 

I can get two 1.8" Intel 160GB G1's for $330. How much do you guys think I could sell them for on eBay? Is this worth it?

 

G1's? About $330?

If you want to play the futures/commodities markets, then you have to play with more than a pair (of anything).

 

Whoah, where do you get it at such prices? Is it $330 each or $330 for both, meaning $165 each?

 

It's both included for $330 ($165 each). I just wanted to know if this is a good deal and if I could turn a decent profit from selling them on ebay.

 

That's a pretty good price.

 

You think I could get 530 total for both on ebay?

 

Here they say that 80GB Intel G1 X18-M goes for 340 $, so my opinion is that for two 160 GB X18-M You should get 700 $ easy. Good luck!

 

Seriously, what channels do I have to go through to get X18M's at decent prices? Knowing Paul Otellini?

 

Wow...so ZZF is not as helpful as they originally made themselves out to be.

ZZF gave me the option to exchange or refund. I told them refund, they said they forgot to mention the 15% restocking fee when they initially made the refund offer. Uh....no....you sent me a defective drive.

They offered to waive the fee if any only if I purchase another OCZ Agility from them. I thought you said there was a unconditional 15% fee no matter what? Yeah, liars.

I filed a PayPal claim and outlined ZZF's communications with me. PayPal is giving ZZF 10 days to respond to the claim, so I imagine I'll be waiting at least that long to see what happens.

Should have ordered from NewEgg, price gouging or not.

 

PayPal will make it right with you but it will take nearly 30 days. I bought 2 American Eagle 4 coin gold proof sets a couple of years ago and the seller never delivered. PayPal ended up refunding every dime even after telling me for the entire 30 days that I was only covered for the purchase price of 1-4 coin proof set because I combined the purchase and the shipping. The seller had built a rep on alot of small dollar sales then failed to deliver on some big ticket items.

I have bought about $20,000 worth of items with Paypal and that is the only time I have had problems and even then PayPal took care of it.

 

Oof. I've only ordered from ZZF a couple times for some smaller items. Everything else, usually through Newegg and I've pumped over 6-digits worth of business for almost 8 years. It's sad that Newegg is playing the "gouging" game with SSD's but... that's capitalism unfortunately

Cheers,
Kermee

 

Finally got around to putting in the Kingston-branded X-25M 80GB G2 into my Acer AS1810T... Here's what it looks like but it is showing up as SATA/300 (SATA-II)...

NOTE: Windows 7 was Ghosted/Cloned from the old WD 320GB Blue Scorpio to the new SSD. 21.4GB (19.9GiB) of the 80.0GB is already in use. Hibernate, System Restore + Images and Pagefile.sys have been turned off in Windows 7.







Cheers,
Kermee

 

You should also disable scheduled defrag if you haven't already, otherwise, this looks good. As the Acer 1810T is brand new, it should support Sata2.

What do you use this notebook for and do you feel you got your money's worth in regards to performance with the $$$ for this SSD?

 

Forgive my nooby-ness:

Even if I can't boot from my "full-speed" SSD can I get a significant performance gain by installing my games on the SSD?

Or does it all go through the OS on my 5,400rpm drive anyways?

 

If your O/S works on your HDD, you can install the game on the SSD and run it off of that.

 

can someone give me a complete noobs guide to SSD's? i can put computers together, and know the gist of a lot of computer stuff from back in the day, but the last couple years ive been focused on other stuff and havent kept up with new tech.

all i know is that SSD's are basically gigantic flash drives (RAM?) you cram into your computer somewhere...

what kind of performance increase do you get by using one of these over say a traditional drive like my 5400rpm 300GB? help me understand the numbers of how hard drive performance are measured, and what the real world performance looks like.

i understand that they are still very pricey. are the speeds relatively the same (since its supposed to be FLASH boom instantaneous?) with prices being contingent on how many gigs they can stuff into the drive measurements?

is now a good or bad time to by? where has the tech come and where is it going? whats around the corner? those of you that have them, are you glad you got it, anything youd do different?

EDIT: so no one wastes their time, I've looked at the other faqs about them on this board and they refer to info thats like a year old...

 

Yup! Already disabled scheduled defrag. Judging from the benchmark tests, I'm definitely at SATA2 vs. SATA1.

I'm using this notebook as a "netbook" replacement (ASUS N10J-A1). Primarily it'll be used for e-mail/IM/web/Office but it'll double as my iPhone (Dev environment in Snow Leopard running as a VM) and Android development machine on the go (and when using my ASUS G51Vx-X3A is not available). Having the SSD in there will help heavily in that department. I have litterally "tens of thousands" of source files in which small random read & write makes a *significant* difference when using an SSD, especially ones with the Intel controllers.

Granted, SSD's are an expensive option but it's one of the most noticeable enhancements to the experience you receive in Windows or any other OS for that matter. Near instantaneous responses are nice.

-- I'll probably re-enable the Pagefile at a later date after I see how much space is left on the SSD. I'm using the "Tony TRIM" method until Intel "re-releases" the Auto TRIM firmware.

Cheers,
Kermee

 

Thanks for that Kermee. Could you put a % estimate on the performance improvement in your throughput with Dev environment usage?

Also, does Tony TRIM actually do anything for you? Others have stated that they do not see an improvement with TT.

Also, I would certainly enable the pagefile (SSD's are 'made' for Pagefile usage patterns - search this thread).

 

kermee, you don't need or want TRIM right now because it does not work properly--everyone thinks and is hoping for an OS based solution but right now controller based GC is the best. GC FTW!

 

Why are you saying it's not working? I've seen some websites do tests to show it works.

 

Hi guys,

I have been using a Gen.2 160GB in my MBP for the last month or so, and it's been great!

Now, I have a question for a "future purchase". I am interested in hearing your opinions on adding another 160GB Intel SSD to my current setup as RAID 0, or waiting for the 320GB Intel SSDs for 3-4 months more. The advantage that I see in two 160GB is I can put it together now, and it "may" be little faster than the 320GB drive. However, I'll be losing the Superdrive. In addition, this seems little more costly (~$1,000 for two 160GB SSDs). While I am sure that the 320GB SSDs wont be cheap, it will still be under $1K, right? Besides, I can always sell the 160GB if I decide to just get the 320GB when it's out...

Thanks very much for your time and any insights in advance!

 

RAID0 2x 160GB Intels will be twice as fast as the 320GB Intel for the same price.

 

TRIM works but not as well as garbage collection. from what I have been reading TRIM and garbage collection do not work together without data corruption problems so it's either one or the other. TRIM is supposed to be the way to go going forward but it isn't there yet from what I have been reading.

The Kingston badged Intel drives do not support TRIM but they do have GC that works very well so they are not missing anything with TRIM in fact the preliminary testing I have been reading shows GC to be less problematic than TRIM. For one thing TRIM only works with Windows 7 right?

Samsung is supposed to be producing a TRIM firmware at the end of this month but I don't plan upgrading to it because the beta testers are saying GC works better. Hopefully they will produce a flasher that will have either GC or TRIM but I doubt it.

 

where did u find the source saying kingston SSD has GC ?

 

It is an Intel drive--it even shows up on crystaldiskinfo as Intel. The Intel drives have had GC for a while now haven't they?

 

I did not know Intel drive had GC feature.... really???

 

I don't think they call it garbage collection anymore than Samsung does. Indillinx uses the term garbage collection to describe the process that erases and consolidates deleted blocks while the drve is idle. Samsung supposedly invented GC and is the slowest in actually implementing it.

 

I try to follow this thread, but now I'm confused. Should I buy a G2 or Vertex?

Running Windows 7 x64
Use: 50% Gaming/50% Audio Creation

 

ok im more or less up to speed now, but a couple questions i still have.

in your standard HDD performance speed begins to decrease once the drive is about half full and noticeably once the drive is near full, is this true with SSD's using TRIM?

I have a traditional 300GB HDD but i avoid putting more than like 200gigs or so on it, if SSD's arent slowed by how full they are, I'd actually be gaining capacity in switching.

is it possible that this TRIM technology could have military applications in that it does actually remove deleted data rather than simply letting it be written over? or would data that has been erased through TRIM still be recoverable?

how far away are things like SLC and 320GB drives? how long til a 320GB drive is close to a $1/GB ratio?

 

SLC=Not worth the price over the good MLC drives unless you are running a server

I'd think for total data clear you'd want to run the Secure Erase command rather than TRIM.

Standard HDD performance decreases as the drive becomes full because files become fragmented and outer edges take longer to access.

SSD performance decreases as drive becomes full because it needs free space to do "performance maintenance". I'd think the rule of thumb is keep 15-20% free from advertised capacity(meaning on an 100GB drive go up to 80-85GB, you don't need to compare using the "actual capacity" as it shows in windows). You can go full if you want(in reality you won't be able to be truly full as there is reserve drive space, meaning 80GB Intel drive reserves 5GB reserve space), but it'll slow down.

TRIM is another thing. More like defragmenting has to do with standard HDDs.

 

Whichever is the better in terms of GB/$.

 

No. There are in fact military grade SSD's in use for about 9-11 years now that use fancy hardware tricks to compromise data once and for all. Things like blowing fuses and sending a surge of electricity through the controller so it's rendered defective.

As far as software options are concerned, military applications are still lacking.

 

But if TRIM isn't working on the intel drives... there's no wiper right? That's a abit of an issue.

 

TRIM is working on the G2 Intel drives.

 

You can manually TRIM any SSD by using AS-Cleaner. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=64753

 

I experimented with that and it works but my drive didn't need it because it has background GC that automatically erases and consolidates deleted blocks. Using the consolidate free space with perfectdisk 10 prior to AS-Cleaner helped also.

 

Is it just me or does farting around with AS-Cleaner to do a "manual TRIM" defeat the purpose of an SSD, that is, higher productivity through saving time?

 

It takes about a minute to run and is recommended once a week and only for drives where either GC or TRIM is not functional such as with RAID arrays, unsupported os's and lack of firmware.

 

Ah at last I found what I have been waiting for and they have 3 of em, mini pcie ssd's that fit a laptop. http://www.runcorestore.com/ProductDetail.jsp?LISTID=80000017-1234802357

I'm getting one of these for christmas to pop in one of my open pcie slots. Was watching how the turbo memory would turn out but thinking for not much more you can get a 16GB flash over the 4GB intel turbo mem. Use that for a readyboost or get the 64GB and maby use it as a main drive with a HD backup if the chipset will allow it as a bootable device. Anyone try these chips out on their system yet?

 

Do you plan on manually running TRIM every minute? Every second?

 

OK, just upgraded to Win7. How can I tell if trim is working on my Intel G2? Or is it totally transparant?

 

I tried OCZ method on my Samsung SSD, it didnt work at alll....

 

You can get 320+GB SLC drives now, but they won't be $1/GB for a long time. Most of them are $10+/GB now. Even MLC drives are still cheapest around $2/GB... Hopefully those will halve in price within the next year or two.

 

Hang on, so anyone with the money / power of will to run SSD's in RAID is screwed unless the drive has firmware enabled GC, and Indilinx based SSDs + Samsung ones are the only products with that feature. Intel tried but failed miserably (for now) am i correct?

i'm sorry but keeping up with this is pretty hard. I'm planning on getting three drives (yes, 3) for my notebook in RAID after the holidays and i still have no clue which to get.

 

Are you positive this card works solely over the PCIe interface and does not require a PCIe port that has a direct sata/ide circuit (like the netbooks do)?

 

But it was you that said that trim isn't working on the same drive, two pages ago. lol

This is why I'm confused.

 

we should say G2 support TRIM feature if you upgrade to the latest firmware, but the last firmware upgrade didn't work at all, and brick ur SSD

 

I did not say TRIM was not working on the Intel drives, I was saying that the Intel controller is already handling erasing and consolidating deleted blocks very well, better than TRIM. It is said that TRIM is the better way forward but the controller based erasing and consolidating of deleted blocks is better right now. Since you can't have both controller based handling of erasing and consolidating deleted blocks it would be better to stick with controller based until the bugs are worked out. The 160gb Intel G2 gets better sequential writes with the TRIM firmware but their is a risk of bricking the drive.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667

To be honest I am ASSUMING that the Intel controller even the G1 version, handles erasing and consolidating deleted blocks. My assumption is based on the various SSD benchmarking that is around the internet. Could be that degradation isn't much of a problem with the Intel drives because of their high 4k random writes. Both Intel and Samsung are tight lipped about their proprietary tech with SSD's maybe because they have seen alot of their R and D go out the door and show up in places that are not tight lipped about their tech?(Indillinx?)

 

What firmware version is on your Samsung 256gb drive?