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

It is the sammy 2nd gen. Dell is a little on the slow side when it comes to getting their product pages right

Dell just dropped that price recently - last week it was at $699. The rebadged Corsair P256 is the same drive and still sells for $659 so yeah it's a good deal from Dell.

I would wait for a 15% coupon to show up... Then it would be a STEAL!

 

Thanks for all your suggestions!

 

Anyone has more details on this:the Crucial M225 series ?

http://www.crucial.com/newsletter/2009/UK/Jul_09_UK.asp

Is it a rebrand from sammy?

 

Finally we cross the $2/GB line for a quality SSD.

 

Nice. That Samsung is my #1 choice right now. I just need the price to drop a little more.

 

Doesn't sound like one... (by the specs at least)

 

NAND prices are going up again. I just ordered the Dell yesterday.

 

Anyone know when the scheduled date is that Intel is supposed to announce new info regarding SSD's?

 

I don't think there is a set date. It seems to just be speculation that it will be "soon". I'm awaiting it anxiously because I have decided to get an X25-M, but I don't want to buy it one day to find out the very next day that its faster, higher capacity and cheaper successor has been released. Hopefully, we'll all be put out of our misery tomorrow.

 

the rumour talked about this week. lets see.

i hope so

 

hm, for work, it supporter. besides work, network admin at home and at my fav. club/bar/lounche, and dj / producer (learning), and such. and else about everything with pc and electronic music.

 

would be fun to meet up with all of the guys in here anyways

 

the x25-m you looked at has 160gb, not 128 (120 really). so you're looking at a 375$ price (if you could buy a 120gb version of the intel).

have today read a review of the V-Series of Kingston, and it looks like they finally fixed the jmicron stuttering. But it's obviously quite a bit slower. I'd like to try it out, though, as it's <2$pergb it's quite .. tempting

 

I think you wouldnt like it since it is only a firmware tweak and no major change whatsoever.

 

as a data drive, maybe?

according to one review (random internet googling), it didn't stutter at all during the testings, including heavy multitasking. so maybe after months and months, they finally got the firmware to work around it's issues?

maybe nice for some netbookies? i'm mainly interested if they really finally solved the stuttering with some firmware..

 

Did you see this thread, Dave?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=390350

 

yep, but only in it's earliest state, haven't followed it. it's... interesting. a bit random, but interesting. it's no intel, that's for sure

still waiting for intel to drop the bomb...

 

The Samsung sold by Dell that I posted earlier is <$2/GB and a heck of a lot better.

 

as said before, the sammies aren't "better". but they're fine, and have a great price/performance ratio.

 

You can get a 64GB MasterDrive SX with Gen 2 Samsung controller for $173, so that's currently better than any JMicron drive, even a re-tooled version.

 

that's true

 

I'm not comparing the Samsung to the Intel, but the Jmicron Kingston. The Samsungs are better than the Jmicron Kingston at a similar price point, hence the better price/performance ratio.

256GB Samsung for $480 = $1.875/GB
64GB Super Talent for $173 = $2.703/GB

 

Another day, another lack of Intel announcement.

 

I have it on good authority that the announcement will be made on or after July 21.

At this point, I'm on the verge of caving in and just going for an X25-M. I would imagine that the only major improvement with the new SSDs will be a much faster sequential write speed, to bring it in line with competitors' products. I'm not too worried about the price, and large capacity is not something I look for either. I don't do a lot of (large) file manipulation so a faster sequential write speed is inconsequential to me

I just hope Intel gives X25-M owners a break when Windows 7 is released and releases an updated firmware implementing "TRIM".

 

agree totally...

 

Mh. I need the space/the price. The 80GB X25-M is the only thing near my price range, and even that's too small.

 

so it'll be in a week.. *waiting*

 

waiting waiting waiting.

 

Just got a Newegg email that the Corsair P128 (Samsung latest 128GB MLC) is on sale for $285 after rebate. There is a 3% cashback also from bing.com.

$275/128GB=$2.15/GB. Not bad.

 

Maybe M225 hints to the next intel drive..

 

Well guess what, a "M225" is - googled it - a Crucial SSD:

http://vr-zone.com/forums/455422/lexar-readies-the-crucial-m225-solid-state-drives.html

http://www.dvhardware.net/article36734.html

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,9614.html

I haven't been following this thread, and (unsuccessfully) tried a search for Intel to find what might have been posted regarding an Intel announcement, but here's another link: http://www.nordichardware.com/news,9543.html (Said to be a 320 GB model!! Wow! ^)

More: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ssd-toshiba-solid-state,6913.html

http://www.hardware.info/en-US/news/ymiclZqUwpyaapY/New_Intel_roadmap_shows_320_GB_SSD/

 

Yawn. Nothing new here. Guess I'll just have to kill more time until the announcement.

 

4 days later and Dell still hasn't shipped my order out. So much for "most orders are shipped the same day" ...

 

It took a week for dell to ship my two samsung drives.

 

remember the whole reason why SSDs > HDD? access time.

no a single 0.1ms or whatever makes no difference, but in an application that has 10000 x 0.1ms or similar accesses, small differences do add up.

its like someone saying 'whats so bad about 10ms HDD? do you really notice the difference between 0.5ms and 10ms? you must be superhuman to notice that!!!'

treat any specification favourably in isolation and you can try and justify just about any drive being not much different from another (well aside from jmicron 250ms access time....), but we all know no one ever uses their drive for a single read or write and thats it.

 

Another Samsung from Mushkin:

http://vr-zone.com/forums/456677/mushkin-announces-the-europa-iii-250gb-ssd.html

The thing with Samsungs is that they're all the exact same...

 

jup, and everyone wants their piece of the caek. cake, sorry


btw, i've done something yesterday: my pc (mtron raid0) acted strange since some time.

it got a slow boot-up (after logon it took very long till the desktop was accessible (startmenu was instant), and network available and wlm online / homeserver available.

it often freezes (pc works as normal, but no audio anymore, and not even a reboot possible). looks like the audio driver sort of freezes.

different audio stutterings.

different write-freezes (f.e. downloading a track on itunes goes very fast thanks to vdsl, but integration into the library then takes half a minute).



so, what did i have done yesterday? updated ccleaner, updated defraggler. i cleaned up all crap, and then, i defragmented. you've read it right.

i did NOT do a disk defragmentation. i only scanned the disk, selected all fragmented files, and defragmented the files. no reordering of freespace, or what ever. that wouldn't really make sense on an ssd. but having all files all the time spread over all the disk (selecting a bunch of files always resulted in a full red disk, meaning each file was spread over the whole disk in sometimes thousands of fragments) still is a problem. after making sure all files are "in one piece", I've done the "defragment boot files" script from this page (ProcessIdleTasks and defrag c: -b or something like that).

now the pc is snappy again, very fast. after logon, i'm quickly online, and desktop is immediately accessible.

still, it hasn't fixed my random audio problems and it's related issues.


the result: maybe, defragmenting can help. but only on a file level, obviously.

oh, and, defragmenting an ssd is FAST (and the system still 100% responsive while doing it )

 

Why would you defragment an SSD? (and yes, you sorta are defragmenting it seems)

 

because file access is sometimes horrend slow. i don't defragment the disk, only individual files. a fragmented file still means tons of more individual accesses trough the filesystem structure (which means >1 random read everytime).

not sure if that was what helped, or ccleaner, or all together. but it helped.

lets see about the future, if it may help others. this pc gets quite chaotic uses and abused => the file system has constant sufferings.

 

My opinion is that defragmentation of individual files didn't help at all. OS think they are fragmented, but they aren't because of wear leveling on SSD.

 

hi guys, now that the supposed bottleneck (I/O access) is overcome with the influx of SSDs, would network connection be the new bottleneck?

I realised that connecting to wireless network, for example, could be the factor that determines how fast windows finish loading.

For example, if i'm on wired LAN, the desktop shows up fast, but on wireless, it's considerably slower.

:\

 

are you basing those results on wires vs wireless on the same machine? if not then the difference is probably due to them being different machines of course. i wouldnt expect wireless to slow down anything much except accessing the network, though depending on what wireless client etc you're using it could well do that.

the main bottleneck i now have on my dell 6400 with x25-m is the 2ghz core duo - most apps that were previously disk bound are now CPU bound for the same operation (i.e. cpu is at 100% compared to being at 10% due to waiting for disk IO operations).

 

And now presenting... SMLC...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-21546_3-10287689-10253464.html?tag=newsLatestHeadlinesArea.0

 

until fusion-io actually make a bootable, hardware drive (not the software based ones they have now with the 'super wow big numbers'), i take any of their 'publicity' as nothing more than attempting to lift brand awareness etc to get more investment and/or be bought out. drives arent so useful to consumers if they cant have an OS installed on them cause they arent bootable.

 

The defragmenting question has arisen again... Tackled this long ago when i passed on the information learned from companies such as STEC with respect to wear levelling in all ssds. Defragmenting is useless.

Its a given because blocks of information only fragment as a result of the hard drive activity which isn't present.

 

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,9468.html

Just looking forward to the day when you can have raid1 in a laptop using only 1 bay. Heard that they are tinkering to customize the raid controller. RAID 1 with 512GB SSD, anyone?

 

The link says RAID0 (but w/ Indilinx controller). They already have RAID0 2.5" SSDs (w/ Jmicrons). I perceive power consumption negating a lot of the positives that SSDs bring, despite having the performance benefit. If they can do RAID0, then RAID1 is easily done as well in one 2.5" drive.

 

true that.

Just thinking of SSD with switchable raid modes in my laptop is making me drool for it. But the heat and power consumption will prob drop the battery life by like 10-15%

 

but the file access is still more complicated, because the has to go trough much more hops to access the file. the result: much more random read accesses on the disk. while physically maybe at the same place, the os doesn't know, and performs tons of useless individual accesses.

and as a second thing: the file may be fragmented on the ssd, too. by rewriting them somewhere else in one block (what defragmenters do), it will at least get collected together into one place on the ssd as well.

i'm only talking about file defragmentation, not disk defragmentation location of files is 100% unimportant. but splittering of files both on the ntfs level and on the ssd level means overhead. smaller, but it did result in a big change to defragment my ssds after half a year of filling the disk several times to 90% and back, having different huge software packages, file collections etc comming and going.



just a placebo? i don't think so. but i'm unsure. i need a file fragmenter to test

 

Corsair's coming out with the extreme series of SSDs, faster reads slower writes. Seems like no one is willing to try and break the 256gb barrier or come up with something that can match Intel's 4K speeds.