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

Yeah I use that, I've had alot better reliability with Vista 64 than XP 32, specifically that issue.

BTW, just a tip, if you like persistency and do get that sometimes with the drive not properly saving/restoring during shutdown you can run a msbackup scheduled at night or whenever you like.

I wouldn't do it on a laptop necessarily but I do that on my desktop where it is often a week between reboots and if I have a hang at shutdwon and lose the ramdrive I don't have to worry about data loss. I just recreate it on reboot then restore the data and there is no big loss.

That problem with XP hanging on shutdown and not saving properly sometimes is the only niggling issue with ramdisk I have, hopefully it gets fixed.

 

yeah that could have been a contributing factor as well.

I guess they might have just pulled it instead of dropping the price.

lower prices = more sells
more sells = good
therefore lower prices equals good

Oh well i'm still waiting on a capacity increase, as i need the storage. But it is getting so close I can taste it. Next round will be 512ish GB drives; I drool thinking about that kind of speed with that kind of storage capability.

Please Mr. Samsung give us 512GB drives... please

 

I just ordered a new laptop which is on its way and almost pulled the trigger on the 80GB x25-m to put in fresh when it gets here. The recent price drop makes it more enticing, although still quite expensive. I really don't need a huge hard drive, but I would have to clean out my current 200GB 7200 drive to get everything fitting on the new drive. 120 - 160gb would be ideal.

Decided to wait and see how the Sandisk G3 drives stack up. If they perform nearly as well as the x25-m and it is only $200 for a 120GB drive, it would be worth the wait. I believe these are shipping in some of the Dell XPS laptops. Has anyone gotten their hands on one of these and run benchmarks?

 

If the site would like to invite me to submit reviews for ssds again, I would be more than happy to renew some old contacts and see what I can get my hands on.

We used to be the TOP source for reviews at one time. All in all, its good to see this thread still going strong as a result.

 

YOU'RE INVITED!!!!!!

 

I have the Samsung 256GB in my MacBook Pro. How can I get my drive back to a factory-fresh state? Can I:
- Erasing and write zeroes with Disk Utility
- Use Disk Utility to "Erase Free Space" or
- Do I need to flash with new firmware (which, as far as I can tell, is not available)

I've been moving around a lot of files to account for the smaller capacity (256GB vs. 320GB) and my drive is slower than a month ago when I installed it. I'd like to get it back to it's normal speedy self.

Thanks!

 

I don't understand why your drive would be slower? Its not a hard drive and, therefore, the means of storage is completely different.

Many would argue, in fact, that defragmentation is useless on the ssd.

Hmm...

 

LES!!!!

we've all missed you very much, please come back.

I offically start a petition for NBR to ask Les to reup his Reviewing

 

You are welcome to start that petition eheheh. (jk)

I have never quite figured out why but was politely told that my reviews had surpassed their time and that further reviews were not welcome.

This was less than a month after I turned down a healthy offer to compile ssd articles with Anandtech, and what eventually appeared to be my last article here.

I was really turned off by this as I believed that, at that time, our coverage of the ssd was untouched by any other. In fact, several large companies were regularly checking out the site for articles as they had played a large part in most of what I learned.

This is probably alot of the reason now why I am so happy to see the many here still pushing this along. You really have no idea who is still watching the thread...

Most would be surprised.

 

It's not a fragmentation issue. It has to do with writing to all or nearly all portions of the drive. Erasing files on an SSD doesn't really erase them, so when you go to write to that same area, the data must be removed before it is rewritten. This slows things down.

 

SSDs have become much more mainstream on this site, I'd say it's definitely safe to jump back in the water.

 

To get a fresh start with a SSD (as if it were new), can you simply reformat and reinstall OS/programs, or must you actually "wipe" the drive to delete everything?

 

If your goal is to regain that initial, short-term performance boost then a simple reformat and reinstall is insufficient. You must "wipe" it using tools provided by the manufacturer, or a 3rd-party tool such as Secure Erase.

Before doing this, however, consider this... do you really wish to wipe and reinstall every month or so to maintain that initial short-term performance boost? Recognize that the initial performance of the drive is not its normal performance. Think of it as a short-term "gift" that you receive for having paid so much for you storage medium. The lessened performance after the first month or so -- or however long it takes you to write an amount of data equal to the size of the drive -- is the "normal" performance. That's how SSDs work. And that lessened performance is still generally much faster than a mechanical hard drive, so this isn't really much of a disadvantage.

 

Yeah, that is a good way to look at it. They all will degrade a tiny bit normally, what was abnormal was the Intel X-25M degradation, that's the only thing to watch out for which isn't happening any more. Normal degradation isn't an issue worth concerning ones self with.

 

LES! How are you doing? WOW! I have read virtually EVERY post since the beginning. What a wild ride it has been! So much info has been learned and taught here it is truly amazing. It is an objective look at SSD tech as exists on the web today. thank you! Great to see "you". Maybe get a domain name and dedicate it ONLY to SSD drives like StorageReview was to spinning drives years ago?? And a Forum dedicated only to SSD's and their variant brands. I bet SSD companies would love a place to advertise a la WHT. Just my 2 cents. BTW, I have not sprung for one YET, can you believe it? I got snakebit by a cheap Jmicron drive which I forced NewEgg to take back, and decided to let the dust settle a bit before plunging in again. Dave

 

Thanks for that info! I have a Dell Studio XPS 1640 and wondered if there are programs that work in DOS mode to erase? I believe my BIOS doesn't have an IDE mode option, so I wonder if DBan and others would work?

 

I'm all for this. I was someone who never really thought he needed an SSD until I picked one up for a price I couldn't pass up, and now I'm completely sold and as big a proponent as any.

Lets spread the fiyah!

 

same. I picked up the Apex 120 from egg for $219. It's hella fast and quite especially on a laptop.

 

The OCZ vertex actually has a beta TRIMM function which will help keep speeds in top top shape. The reduced speeds after your drive fills is not a consequence of degrading. In order to reduce degrading, the drive tries not to delete anything it "erases". It wants to spread the information around to reduce the individual wear of each cell.

However when there is no more free space, it needs to delete information in order to write, resulting in slower speeds. The drive is doing two things at once. First, it is deleting stuff. Then, it is writing stuff.

 

Yeah i wouldn't worry about the degradation too much if you think it's a little slower now do to TONS of small writes eventually you'll work them out just as they were worked in....

 

Why dont SSD's just go ahead and erase the data to begin with?

Erase now or erase later it really wont matter... and surely the controlers are smart enough keep a track of how ofter the cells have been written to and erased so it still wear levels correctly.

Erasing a Picture from the drive when i ask it to instead of 3 days later when i need the space seems like it would stop the preformance hit that SSD's seem to take once they get full.

I mean if the 1,000,000+ hour MTBF is correct then who really cares about the erases... 100 years of average use isnt a problem. No one is going to have this generation of SSD's in use in even 10 years i wouldnt think so eating up a bit of the 10,000 or 100,000 cycles to keep preformance up to snuff isnt really going to effect anyone

 

Yes from what i've read (from OCZ themselves) the latest firmware for the Vertex drives has TRIM functionality...and there is a little utility tool called wiper (still in Beta though) that you can run ever so often if you choose to help with this delete/write issue that SSDs have. I can't wait to get my 60GB OCZ Vertex drive in hand to throw in a Netbook...already ordered. $199.99 shipped

 

It does matter whether you delete later or at write-time(deleting blocks as other blocks are being written). The OS is not aware of the filesystem on the SSD. It doesn't know at all where the deleted data is, zilch. And when you are normally deleting, its not physically deleted, HDD OR SSD. That's how there are programs out there to find your "deleted" files back.

Commands like TRIM are a way for the Operating System to tell the controller where the invalid files are so the SSD can delete. Currently, the OS does not know the difference between rotating HDD and flash SSD. Its really the OS that tells the controller where to write. The controller just has a table for physical to logical adress translation, and algorithms that tries to ensure reliability. It's really the OS that has the intelligence.

On current OSes that doesn't have TRIM support, its up for the controller to ensure reliability. You can have the blocks deleted as user deletes a file, but then what's gonna happen is since it has no clue where the block is anyway, its merely going to waste a write cycle(which is NOT desirable on flash memory with limited write cycles).

 

Your first scenario is exactly what Trimm does! It deletes all the "erased" data in order to keep write speeds healthy.

Also, I'm not sure that the 100000 hours is entirely accurate. IIRC, they(companies like Intel) sugguest to OEM partners(like dell) that the drives will last for 3-5 years at 20gb a day.

 

I under stand that, i was getting at isnt the controller able to "sort" through all of that for the drive independent of the OS?

Why would the drive need the OS at all to control its own wear leveling. Just have the drive take care of the erases and have the drive tell itself where to store data as to not kill the write cycles.

Maybe i'm asking too much of the controler, but it seems like the drive should be able to take care of itself with out the OS getting involved.

I know, but "why is it required" is kind of what i'm getting at. The Drive should take care of itself. It seems like a band-aid to have to have to OS do this with a program instead of the drive taking care of it internally.
I might just not understand why its not possible... i'm just saying it seems like it should be how it works

Yeah the 1,000,000 was just what everyone seems to list as their MTBF, so thats all i have to work with, but 3-5 years at 20GB a day is WAY longer than 3-5 years, buecause most "normal" users never come close to writing 20gb a day

 

Yea you ARE asking too much from the controller.

In HDDs, the controllers are really dumb. In essence, SSDs are supposed to replace HDDs eventually, but its only pricing that will do it. You can get 1TB SSDs, but you'll probably have to put a 2nd mortgage on your house to get it. Doing all those features only increase the cost.

I believe the biggest thing that will allow SSDs to come down to HDD price level is using a simpler controller, and eventually not having one inside the drive at all, except the bare minimum. Tell me, what's the difference between fast relatively expensive Samsung chip, Samsung SSD and a stuttering but cheap Samsung chip, OCZ SSD?? It's the controller!

See if you want to keep track of all the data, you need a log table on the controller to do that, which involves a storage system. If you want to keep track of everything, you would want it big, and if you want it fast you'll need to use DRAM, if you use DRAM, you'll lose data on reboot.

And that's merely for keeping track. The future is not on making it more complex and putting more dedicated hardware, its about simplicity and more integration.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13439&Itemid=1

 

The drive can't erase something unless the OS tells it to. When you delete a file, the OS does not (currently) tell the drive that it can erase each and every places/block where the file is stored. It only tells the drive to change the index, allocation table (or whatever you call it) to indicate that the file should no longer be listed in directories. When this happens, the drive still treats the blocks that contained the file's data as valid data since it doesn't know that the file that these blocks belong to was deleted. Treating data as valid when it really isn't is a waste of resources. What this new command would do is tell the drive it doesn't have to manage the data/blocks from deleted files as valid... then the drive's controller can act more efficiently because it wouldn't waste time and resources managing deleted data which it still thinks is valid.

 

Ah, ok. I suppose that does make sense. I guess it just seems backwards to me. But hey its still a new tech so i guess its going to take alot of tweeks to make it universally usable at a good price.

I guess we are still waiting on memrestors

I appreciate the explaniation, i was honestly thinking the controller would be able to handle that as its basically just a file allocation tree covering all of the blocks. Good to know they are working on a solution for the degradation even if its not onboard the drive.

I believe that is a fault of the OS then. I dont see the problem of the OS issuing an erase command instead of a change of index command. It just seems innefficent. I understand it just might not be possible yet, but with computers as powerful as they are now, it seems like alot of the things we do "because its always been that way" should be looked at to see if its really necessary.

 

Can't you just use a program like eraser to wipe the free space while windows is running?

 

I guess that's y they're implementing TRIM going forward. SSD's weren't a thought when Vista was developed now they are. So they are working on taking care of it moving forward

I personally really hope intel (and others, but mostly intel) upt the controller on the chipset then you just basicly buy a bunch of flash in a case and have super fast ssd for super cheap i wonder if they could even just designate a CPU core to the task of an SSD controller

 

I can't decide between these two setup ideas: Which ever one I go with, all drives will be encrypted with Truecrypt in case the laptop is lost or stolen.

X25-M 80GB: W7 & Applications w/ external USB HDD for storage

Samsung 256GB: W7, Applications, and storage

Do you think keeping storage separate from the OS drive will improve performance? It just seems to me that using an SSD for storage and moving/updating/deleting files would decrease performance?

 

I think most here would say if it's a stationary PC external storage, but USB is slow, go esata.
Alot of guys here started with the old 32GB and 64GB SSD's so they are used to running external storage.

 

I'd go with the samsung 256gb. How much are you buying it for?

 

Thats exactly what OCZ is doing right now with their vertex line.

 

Not exactly. The "eraser" software that has been mentioned doesn't actually erase anything, and won't help SSD performance. It's just a secure file overwriter. You wouldn't want to use this with an SSD as it'll waste a significant number of the limited write cycles available with most flash media.

OCZ's utility, however, is a true "trim" utility.

 

Les, I'd love to see more of your reviews. Your articles were some of the few articles I've read on this site, and one of the very few intelligently written and worthwhile reads. This site seems very mismanaged, but hopefully they get a spark of brilliance and get you to submit more articles for them. The only reason I really waste my time with this forum is because I like the tabletpc sister site. If this site doesn't post your articles and you post them elsewhere, I'll happily go there to read them if I know where to go.

 

This thread is so long and drawn out, I have the posts on max and it's still at 110 pages..

Can anyone point me in the direction of SSD vs HDDs in regards to speed numbers?
All the reviews compare SSD to SSD, but I want to know if that 120 read, 80 write SSDs are noticeably faster than my spinner. I read rave reviews on how the 300 Read 250 Write drives are the best ever, (Vertex for instance) but I don't wanna drop 300 on a Vertex, when I could also grab the infamous Intel SSD, but I don't know is the Intel's speeds are good enough...
My HDD is 20 MB Write, but I read reviews saying that my HDD is supposed to be like 60 write or something..

I've literally read this entire thread too. It's come down to the 500GB Spinner, at $80, VS the 60-80GB SSD, at triple the cost, plus I'd be tethered to a HDD that will fail because it constantly gets thrown around or falls on the floor in it's case while writing... Plus I'd have to re think my constant bittorrenting...

 

Heres one way to look at it.
SSD's have a latency of about .1ms your hard drive will have a latency of 12+ms so by the time your hard drive has even started to spin to find the information the SSD has already found it, displayed it, and is awaiting further instructions.

Yes they are that much faster.

I have 2 of the 500gb mechanical drives in my rig right now and they are very smooth operating and IMO the "snappiest" laptop drives available. Best thing is i only paid 200 dollars for 1TB of storage.

On the other hand a friend of mine has a 128gb Samsung and while he can carry next to nothing on his hard drive (comparitivly speaking) when we both try to pull up a 60MB PDF file hes already reading the document before my drives have even started opening PDF reader (and i'm using ext4 which is quite a bit faster than NTFS)

On the other side of your post... maybe you need to be a bit more careful with your hardware. just "throwing it around" is never a good idea.

 

Search function:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4756511&postcount=1089

compared to a slower/older (but still very good SSD)

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4368

As you can see the SSD outpaces any HD across the board by 1.5x to 40x. Though the most significant benefits are not really seen there, but access times are also about 100x lower (from 10-20ms to 0.1-0.2ms), better shock resistance, higher reliability (and longer lasting), and power consumption is lower leading to better battery life (30+ min extra), less heat and noise. Though this isn't representative of all SSDs, getting any SSD w/ an Intel, Samsung, or Indilink controller will give you similar results - if not better than the ones above.

 

Does anyone know what controller the Corsair 64GB SSD would use?

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=38468

 

HOT DEAL NOW!!
Buy.com - Kingston SNM125-S2B/160GB 160GB M-series 2.5" Solid State Drive with 2.5" USB 2.0 enclosure & 2.5" to 3.5" drive bay mounting kit on sale for $349.99 plus FREE shipping. That's the lowest price we found.

 

I think Corsair uses Samsung, but I'm a bit fuzzy on that.

 

I know the 128GB uses the first gen samsung controller and the 256 the new samsung controller. That's why i'm not sure which one this uses, the speeds don't match either controller.

 

It should be a Samsung.

That is a great price! Probably a mistake though, hope they still honour the deal. Anyone purchase it??

 

http://www.buy.com/prod/kingston-16...tel-x25-m-sata-solid/q/loc/111/210995519.html

 

I want it, but I am short of money now~~~

 

I already found it but I'm in the a similar situation. I can't justify $350 for a SSD still.

 

Looking at that, it has to be a price mistake. If you're even remotely considering an SSD, buy it because if your order actually goes through, you won't see another deal like this for over a year. One shot opportunity.

 

Exactly...I think that's a good price...the write speeds are kinda lacking though.

 

buy.com checkout is under maintenance. The only thing not greyed out is ebillme "cash checkout" whatever that is.

Despite the "only" 70MB/s sequential write speed, it's random write speed destroys every other MLC SSD out there - which is much more important for the OS.