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

Why would Intel drop its price just because it is higher than the cost of production? Would you ask a lawyer to charge you half his rate because it is really higher than "cost of production"? Or ask a doctor to charge less because there is no way it costs him that much to "produce"?

You don't realize how expensive it is to build the kind of production line that makes these chips, or to build the kind of engineering team that can execute these designs. Why shouldn't Intel make money from its investments?

We have been spoiled by the rapid decline of hardware prices. You know how much blood, sweat and tears go into making these SSD's, a technological marvel, a reality? At this stage of the game, Intel should try to stay with high prices as long as they can. The profits drive further development of amazing products. The high profits make it worthwhile to be a technology company. Intel is not making commodities that anyone can make, and it should be rewarded.

And there is probably a practical issue here, too. Intel is probably production limited, and is selling all the SSD's that they can make. So selling them cheaper may not even increase their revenues that much.

 

I have to agree with the two last posts...From what i've read and researched. SSDs > HDDs

And lately alot of HDDs around me have been failing...from various people including myself. SSDs are much more reliable than HDDs and the speed is just an added bonus. This is precisely why i'm never using a typical HDD in another computer I own as the primary storage device. They just aren't reliable anymore; For the peace of mind and feeling confident in a storage device the cost is priceless.

PS: The prices are bound to come down in time...it's the technology.

 

Because mainstream still aren't prepared to pay that much premium for merely storage? greater rate of decrease in price will accelerate the distribution process, to a point its benefitical to both parties? To the point where more people will genuinely consider it a worthy invertment; also lower prices will likely to encourage innovation and competition, instead of merely rebranding items; while the manufactures can sell more, to generate far more revenue.

I do realise this. However, imo this technology still is not near the stage where it can replace my HDD, this is my usage only. The speed does excell, but they merely offering a fraction of storage for similar price, is one of the reason they still marked more as ostentious consumption, rather than necessary purchase.

Beside, the fact intel utilise huge economics of scale should allow them to quickly recover initial investment, while developing and selling in sustainable manner.

Price falling is good, but not if your an early adaptor. And we are far from the point where the price of SSD are stabilised, until then, the investment in getting a SSD is slightly single sided.

I love new technology like the next guy here, but I just wish Imagine that we can quickly get to the point, where SSD offer similar price/gig as traditional storage. Thats too much to ask I guess

That may be so, but selling mainstream SSD at premium, especially in economics recession isn't going to increase the demand for them.

Beside, If there was sufficient demand, Intel wouldn't have reduced the pricing for X25 so much.



On a side note, I found HDD reliable enough so far. I only had run into one broken hard drive, which was due to problems with my power supply.
I normally just leave my laptop on a desktop, while switching off when moving. Also I've mainly used thinkpads, in the past, which had APS hardware, while the drives in my XPS has accelermator to detect shock. I'm probably very luck though.

 

Is ther Vertex really worth it instead of the X25-M? Like 60gb vs 80gb?

 

This may always be the right answer in the Michael Scott school of economics, but it is only one solution to a particular set of requirements.

Who cares what the mainstream wants if a much smaller segment will provide just as much profit per unit? Would Ferrari lower their price to $50k per unit so they could directly compete with the Corvete? Hell no. They'd have to sell tens, even hundreds of thousands of cars per years instead of just a couple thousand. No, no, the benefits of selling small quantities of product with a large profit margin are quite nice.

 

So you think you know more about marketing than those people whose job is marketing at Intel? Generating revenue is good, but generating profit is even better. At this stage of the game, production capacity must be limited. Intel obviously knows supply and demand as well as you or me, and they price the SSD's at the best point for Intel.

Of course prices will come down. When they feel they can ship in high volumes, they will go after what you call "mainstream". But Intel must understand the dynamics of product penetration vs profit. They don't get to be as big a force as they are for making poor marketing decisions. Same reason why Samsung does not price their SSD's any cheaper than what they are now.

 

Quicklite:

Have you used a good SSD, or any SSD? I get the distinct impression you've never used one and are talking purely on what you've read elsewhere.

 

You agree to their TOS by simply making a purchase on their website. Make a purchase, and you sign the agreement. It's legally sound. However, I think they will give you the option of returning the product before charging your card. I am sorry if that wasn't clear.

TOS from the HP checkout:

This is something assuredly approved by HP legal. I am sure they are quite confident in the validity of their argument. Anyway, my point in the original post was that the 'pricing error' ride is over. And it still stands.

 

lol exactly what i asked (last page). I wasn't a believer til i switched a couple weeks ago. I went for the Apex, which is not even top of the line stuff and it's unbelievably fast.

 

tats the may reason why I put all SSDs to my laptops. fast fast fast. even my tablet is SATA1.

 

a laptop would really benefit from having an SSD. Even a jmicron one if your usage is limited to just websurfing and emails on a netbook

 

For windows, sadly not, but I did use Macbook air with them for two weeks. the first gen 128GB samsung one. I take it the difference would be much bigger in windows OS.

 

Actually those are two of the main things that jmicron fails horrilby at

 

My OCZ Solid Series works pretty well for me in two notebooks I have... but I would not recommend them anymore as the price seems to have gone up and better drives are not that much more expensive now.

 

yeah it's pretty odd how that happened... the crappier drives almost doubled in price and the good drives dropped in price dramatically. I've seen a lot

people are saying the solid series is descent, but from what i read most jmicron drives have problems with that stuff unless tweaked a good bit.

 

mine is fine so far. so I am not complaining. I turned off Journalling for my mac to get the true speed of the drive.

 

What is journalling??

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_filesystem

 

I suspect part of why flash memory prices aren't plummeting is that much of it is made by the same people who make dram chips. I'm sure it's all too clear in their memory the several times that they had to sell product below cost to move excess inventory and keep their factories running. Especially in these economic times I'd imagine they'd shy from overbuilding capacity when the market will bear current prices with enough volume to keep them working. Certainly you don't want to lose market share, but by the same rate you don't want to end up with 3 factories that build product that competes with 5 other manufacturers with 3 factories a piece and end up having to wage a price war to keep volume up. While they were hauled in for price fixing early in the game I wouldn't be surprised if they're still complacently creating a fixed price for the product by limiting the supply rather than colluding on price.

 

Well.. If you want to go to the extreme, you can try disabling file last accessed time (noatime)..

http://beyondabstraction.net/2008/11/06/noatime-mount-option-in-os-x/

Personally, I did not do both since I use Intel SSD and I don't see any point in doing that
and I want to be safe in case of system freeze because Journaling will protect the corruption of filesystem.

Some benchmarks regarding Journaling and noatime (on ext4 filesystem though...)
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/01/ssds-journaling-and-noatimerelatime/

Quote from the article conclusion..

 

That is a risk that I will have to take, unless I can find cheap alternatives to replace the current 2 drives. There are not that many PATA SSDs around and those I can find are usually jmicron. Photofast has it but the pricing is not attractive at all.

Poppap: Thanks for the info.

 

So journalling is logging changes to the system state that can then be called upon similar to system restore? I read the wiki entry earlier but I guess never hearing about it until now makes me think this was supposed to be new and different...

 

Journaling is features of Mac(hfs+)/*nix(ext3/4) filesystem.

More info can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2355

Not exactly at the files level as Windows' System Restore but it works at filesystem level to restore the disk to the last known good state upon system restarts.

 

Updates in buy.com price mistakes deal...

I chose the free shipping so it's scheduled to be delivered on 5/7/2009

 

Awesome...I hope you and the other guys who ordered get it with no issues...I didn't think there would've been an issue seeing that it's not a noticeable mistake that a warehouse packer or sales team would notice. It could pass for that price.

 

someone on hardforum.com claimed their ssd was shipped as well. They had 3-5 day shipping though.

I did the free shipping. Hope it ships soon.

As for warehouse people noticing, seems like they might notice a bunch of SSDs going out at the same time lol. Of course, they might not care unless they monetarily benefit by flagging it.

 

I'd be more worried everyone will get the 80gb drive and the description was wrong. The price would make total sense for the 80gb unit. It wasn't worth it to me to take a stab at it, but might work out for everyone if it is the 160, if it's not, good luck...

 

Well.. If I received the 80GB then it definitely heading back to Buy.com for a full refund. If they won't give me the AMEX will...

 

AMEX is very good about disputing charges. Don't mess with the AMEX

 

there's ebay selling Intel 160gb ssd @ $599.99. Is it a good buy?

 

I definitely have not read all 558 pages in this thread, so please forgive me if this has been brought up and resolved already.
SSDs are said to take less power, but is this actually the case? An article I found says otherwise. I realize that the article is dated, so is it even still relevant?

 

If it is Buy It Now, You could get addition 8% cashback with live.com cashback program..

Go to www.live.com
Search for "Macbook pro"

Click on banner that said You may get 8% off with PayPal if eligible...

 

But wouldnt it be better for top up 30dollars for a brand new piece from Newegg? You rest easier knowing that your purchase is coming and guaranteed too.

 

make sure they ship to Singapore.

 

yes they do... the person ships globally. just want to check with pals here whether the price is reasonable, since there was a recent announcement of Intel slashing ssd prices... so to confirm, does any folks here know what elsewhere is selling the 160gb intel ssd for? USD 599.99 seems reasonable to me.

 

Most of the top end SSD's use next to no power compared to a rotational drive. But some of the older ones or the midgrade Drives do use ALOT of power (Titans and the like with dual controllers)


Just like hard drives there can be a pretty big variation of power consumption, you just have to look at the individual drive to make sure what it uses

 

Sorry if this has been posted already

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

 

interesting. at least on vista, superfetch still enhances the performance on my raid0 with two mtrons. have to try out win7 how it performs on it sometimes..


i like that they make the choise based on measurements, not on "it sais it's an ssd, enhance!". that's nice. bench and then chose. nice done.

 

so, even microsoft says it. leave a page file on (that got stated tons of times before) and let it on the ssd, the ssd is great for it.

 

AND, they also say that disabling prefetch, superfetch etc. on SSDs is a good thing.

 

depending on measurements. they measure and if they see no gain, they disable it.

and obviously that makes sense, even now. but so far, i've noticed quite a gain on all ssd's i've had. so i let it turned on.

 

When I Installed Windows 7 RC1 on my Thinkpad, ready boost was turned off because Windows said Ready boost is not enabled on this computer because the system disk is fast enough that Readyboost is unlikely to provide additional benefit.

 

has anyone received their intel x25-m 160GB from buy.com??

 

Hey everyone, Here's an SSD I came across...never heard of them but the company looks like they re-brand Intel drives. if you go to the manufacturers website you'll see what I mean. I recently ordered from Mwave so I got the ad via email...Very good price IMO....I paid $200 for the Vertex 60GB a couple days ago...so this is a very good deal IMO.

 

that's no intel. not 80 / 160gb, and has an usb port on it. it's some rebrand of some of those that ocz sells, too. maybe an apex style one? would have to check the performance numbers to know..

 

The one linked from Mwave part number starting with DK9xxxx is definitely not Intel. I think it's one of the Jmicron...

The one from PQI that is Intel re-branded part number have to start with 6526xxxx

 

makaveli72, speed of that PQI SSD doesn't really match neither intel M nor E; could it be a second gen Samsung controller?

Power Quotient International Co., Ltd already have X25M rebrands I think:
http://www.fareastgizmos.com/comput...eed_of_250mbsecand_write_speed_of_70mbsec.php


The intel rebrand is just X25 M, where as this is their S525 SSD?

http://www.pqi.com.tw/product.asp?cate1=195

 

I previously posted about some software that works like Steadystate called FlashPoint. It converts small random writes to large sequential writes and is intended to be used with first-generation SSDs with poor small random write performance like JMicron-based drives.

It was originally just for XP but the latest beta works with Windows 7 also. In my experience so far it significantly improves small random write performance - seemingly to a level where stuttering is a total non-issue. I have yet to experience any bugs with the exception of the system stalling after running an intensive small random write benchmark. No "real world" bugs though in my use.

If you have a JMicron drive - you need to try this out! It won't work miracles, but it substantially increases performance with no downsides that I can see so why not?

OCZ Solid 60GB
Windows 7 beta 7077
ATTO: queue depth = 4, total size = 128MB
IOMeter: queue depth = 4, 8GB section of disk, 100% random, 4KB, 3 minutes

Before FlashPoint:

​

After FlashPoint:

​

Real-world Test:
I installed SP2 for Office 2007.
Without zFP: 3:45
With zFP: 3:10

 

I am messing with Windows 7 RC and am tempted to get a new SSD and install it in my notebook while keeping my old SSD with Vista on it so I can switch back if needed... so... any good deals out there on 60-80GB SSD's?

What's the best deal out there now? Don't think I'm ready to spend $320 on an Intel... but $200 or less for a 60GB Vertex or 64GB Samsung based drive might be temping enough...

 

how about a 30gb version? just for testing that's more than enough, not?