The SSD thread (prices, news, benchmarks)

It seems that things are evolving quite fast around SSD's.
Just saw in another thread in here an announcement by samsung for a faster 64GB 1.8" drive.
So I thought it would be easier if we kept all news, prices, benchmarks in one single thread.

 

Oh, you did, did you?

 

Samsung 32GB SSD tested on a samsung laptop

http://www.hwupgrade.it/articoli/st...isk-ssd-32-gb-primi-test-prestazionali_3.html

 

SSD from SuperTalent

http://techreport.com/ja.zz?comments=12029

seem to be much slower than the samsungs. Will need to look carefully what to buy.

 

NewEgg selling Samsung SSD 32GB for under $500.

 

And a test for the above drive
http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism_uk/index.html

 

I would consider one if it was $500 for 64GB.

 

I suppose that is because you don't have a second bay for a another HD in your laptop ;-).

I can easily go away with a 32gb SSD (windows and applications) and use my current Momentus 160GB as internal storage in the second bay.

 

Nah not because of that... You're paying a huge price premium for only 32GB and the whole point is to have everything fast not just the OS. I mean if I had 32GB I would like to store the OS, applications, games, documents, videos etc. This will enable me to do multiple things at once especially things like sypware scan, virus scan, defragmenting etc. which is intensive on the hard drive and causes slow downs when doing other tasks. This also cuts out the option of having a 2nd OS such as Linux on SSD.

Don't forget windows vista ultimate takes 15-20GB without anything installed. That doesn't leave much room left as this does not include windows system files such as swap file, restore points, system indexing etc.

It's about value too, spending $500 for 32GB is just not worth it unless you're rich where money is no object.

 

Well Vista Ultimate AFTER installation needs only 10GB INCLUDING a swap file (I have 4GB of memory so I could easily go without a swap file), pagefile etc. I have installed Vista Ultimate+Office in a 15GB partition and still have 3GB left.
And I am sure you will NEVER be able to store EVERYTHING in a SSD drive. These drives are made for SPEED not for storage (do you know anybody using a Raptor for storage?).
I would easily invest $500 for an SSD which will definetely make my system much speedier than any processor upgrade.

 

If you want to argue about value, I'd agree with you. It's still a leading edge technology and you'll pay a big premium for the performance.

On the other hand, arguing 32GB is not enough to make a large increase in performance... well... the things that tend to take up a lot of space like videos / multimedia / documents but are static are almost certainly better off being stored on a 2nd drive at the moment. Not only that, but drives that only contain videos or archived stuff really don't need a spyware/virus scan... and also, they shouldn't need to be defragmented much at all since they usually consist of a bunch of large, contiguous files if copied properly.

The important stuff to defragment and scan is the operating system and application files, and those certainly fit within the 32GB, including a couple of games. You can save space by turning down the size of your recycling bin and system restore... features which aren't used that often as it is.

If you pay that money, you're still going to get the performance, and everything will be fast... as long as you organize it right.

 

I totally agree with you.

 

What would you think about an 160GB SSD?

http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/news/2007/02/26/Adtron-Announces-Record-160GB-Laptop-SSD/p1

 

It can happen in 6 months... Thank you Moore's Law ^_^

 

Well, if I ever want to buy a hard drive with the same MSRP as a Lexus, I'll know exactly which model to get...

 

http://www.dynamism.com/g1/pricing.shtml

For an extra $200-300 you get a SONY Vaio with an 32GB SSD.
Not bad at all. This is going to be a very hot summer.

 

Still too expensive for me. Value for money is still a bad ratio, but it will change soon! I hope at least!

Cheers,

Ivan

 

If you had something faster to compare you could argue the value for money.

 

Anyone who has bought any of these SSD? Would be nice to have some first hand testing and comparisons to desktop drives.

 

any idea when 64GB will be out and resonably priced for a SSD drive? soon I hope. finally get rid of those crazy BF2/BF2142 load times.

 

Lets see. A Raptor costs x8/GB compared to a 7200 drive and everyone buys them because they believe that the extra speed is worth that extra amount of money.

So I would expect that a price around $600 would be a very good deal.

 

What do you mean "fast"? it transfers at 50 Mb/sec, when a SATA transfer at 300 Mb/sec.
Am I missing something?

 

Yes you are.
In fact you are missing two things:
1) Access time makes the difference
2) Having a circuit where you can do 300mph doesnt mean that you will be able to do 300 with your Ford Escort.

 

Lets think

How much faster than a raptor would an SSD be?

 

But for instance, a pen drive has a similar storage system than this SSD, but the bottleneck in the USB (which it is around 50 MB/sec) makes it terribly slow compared to the internal hard drive.
Or is this SSD radically different to an USB pendrive?

 

It is. Do you want to try and see the access time of your pen drive? Try it with HDtune and post your results.

 

Here is an image from an excel sheet I made some time ago. It might give some insight to the access time vs bandwith issue. I used it to estimate which drives & RAID configs would work best for me.

Drive transaction time estimates

 

Very interesting. I did the same one. Did not have the transaction times though. What do they mean and how to they get into the calculations?

 

Wow StefanHamminga, that is an excellent work.
So I guess it's pretty clear that when managing 2 MB files or more, the difference among Hard drives and the SSD is not very significant, but it is when handling small files, under 100 kb.
Then, is SSD worthy? Are there cases where is really convenient to have fast handling of small files (from the HD and not from RAM)?
I checked in my hard drive for places with high relative concentration of small files and I found that most correspond to DLL files of windows subfolders.
I don't know much about this so I ask, will they make the difference? Is the hard drive accessing them so often, that it is worthy to have them in a faster system?
Because I would have guess that any programmer will do so small files that are accessed often will be saved in the RAM, wont he?

 

I am not sure if the graph corresponds to the transaction time table. It seems there that SSD's are faster all the way.

 

For clarity, I put the excel file online here.

The transaction time is an estimate of the time needed for the total read transaction, from the moment the read command is given to the moment all data is read.
The graph is displaying the table values (as can be seen in the excel file).

About the usability: The SSDs are blowing the harddrives away when it comes to OS related work (booting, starting programs, etc), but the harddrives still are king for moving large amounts of data with your favorite CAD/video editing/audio recording/Photoshop/etc program. Untill the moment comes the SSDs are cheap enough to use a couple of them in RAID0. My conclusion: Use an SSD in your notebook and/or as a boot/OS/swap disk in your workstation for a very fast responding system and use a RAID harddrive set for your working data (CAD files, ISOs, photos, etc...)

 

Check this out! -> Sony & Sandisk announce SxS memory cards

An ExpressCard 34 ssd! Some quotes:

 

800mbit=100mbyte

 

Dell offering now SSD with 420 and 620's.
Still waiting for the 64GB SATA Samsungs as most of todays laptops use a SATA interface.

 

Actually Dell is including a PATA->SATA adapter...

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=341-4872

 

Any new actual benchmarks from SSD's?

 

Can this drive be used directly in a laptop's "older" PATA bay without the use of adaptors?

Edit: Nevermind. Looks like the Sandisk SSD uses some zero-insertion force ribbon attachment thingy. Looks like the answer is no.

 

http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2007/06/14/Samsung-32GB-Solid-State-Drive/p1

a review comparing with desktop drives and a 7200 2.5" drive.

 

and finally the 64GB SATA SSD I was waiting for

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-047-SA

overpriced as usual in the UK but will get it at a fraction from abroad on my next expedition (not USA ;-))

 

And a benchmark from our friend flamengo who is using a sandisk ssd which are not supposed to be the fastest of the lot.



http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=10243&d=1189289907

 

Sorry...I should posted the results here. Actually, I will show the difference before and after I installed Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

My review of the drive is on my sig block and, I believe my opinion is pretty evident... Love It!!!

 

It looks like this thread mostly concerns internal SSDs but I was wondering about using one of the external Express card based SSDs. Would I be able to install Windows on an external card? This might be kind of a newb question but I wasn't sure if the installer would recognize it as a bootable disk.

 

I have read articles outside the forum that have discussed this thought however, nobody has yet to get an external or express SSD to boot a system.

 

64GB Samsunds showing in the UK!

http://www.sub.co.uk/index.php?sec=...SATA&gad=CMePkPsBEgi_PJ_0q7gH-Ri0mZL_AyDj2ZcR

 

Are the 32GB Sandisks available in Europe? If so where?

 

They are in the UK.

 

Do you have a specific store that sells them?

 

quite a few
overclockers.co.uk
scan computers
sub.co.uk

 

Thanks but none of them have Sandisk SSD. I was not looking for Samsung.

Does anyone know where they sell Sandisk SSD in Europe?

 

Sandisk instead of a Samsung SSD?
What exactly does Sandisk do that Samsung doesn't do better?