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

I'm confused. Why is anyone considering ANYTHING other than the new Intel? Seriously, what's the point?

 

no clue so they can get an intel later and have 2 amazing performance gain steps? like hdd -> ssd, and then ssd -> intel?

 

The Intel is currently unavailable and some drives offer more capacity (or are slightly cheaper).

 

the old intel is still available and performs still better than all the others, and is quite cheap nowadays. trim is unneeded on an intel, so gen2 has a bit better performance, that's all..

and "unavailable at the time". it's not like you need the ssd today.. else you would have bought it months ago. it will be back available in some days..

 

i had to laugh. agreed.

 

i'm sometimes not really nice, not?

 

Because Intel has no product aimed at the price point between their 80GB and 160GB drives and maybe some of us want a middle? $230->$450 is a large price difference, not to mention 80GB->128GB. That extra 48GB is the difference between keeping Ubuntu, virtual machines, music, etc on it or not. Intel has helped lower prices with their new second generation models but it's not any sort of gamechanger technology-wise.

Plus, most drives being compared, especially the Barefoot ones, come within seconds or fractions of a second both ahead of and behind the new Intel in benchmark reviews.

 

the firmware fix has been released, link below
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/fil...erating+Systems&lang=eng&strOSs=All&submit=Go!

 

here's the benchmark i'm getting, anybody have any ideas? my numbers, especially the 4k random read/write numbers, seem a little low. system specs below. i'm running on windows 7 RC, which might have something to do with it?

 

True... I like 128GB size for my main computer... so I am not sure if I'll get the 160GB Intel or a 128GB drive when I build my next machine. 128GB should be plenty for my needs. Of course I'll have at least 1TB of HD space for storage!

 

good so maybe they can start to ship them out to us now! (and at the same time cause a huge drop in SSD prices)

 

Why not Intel? Because their $/GB premium isn't worth the small gain in random write speed. And because frankly, I don't wish to give any more money to a company that has been convicted for monopolistic business practices all over the world.

256GB for $480, better sequential write speed, lower power consumption: Samsung wins, in my book. Since I've got my filesystem cache already tuned for a long writeback delay, most of my writes are sequential anyway. The Intel drive may be optimized to perform well on an untuned operating system, but that tradeoff means you cannot extract maximum performance out of it when you've tuned your OS. In other words, it's over-priced and aimed at ignorant consumers, and it's just not a good choice for an educated consumer.

 

Ouch! I think there's thinly veiled insult in there.
That's ok. I can take it.

 

I decided to get the Dell/Samsung 256GB SSD for some of the same reasons you mentioned above. I will be installing it in a Studio XPS 16 when it arrives in a few days.

How did you tune your OS to optimize write performance on the drive ? I'd like to do the same.

Also have you had any problems with performance degradation ? This was my only concern about the Samsung drive since as of now there is no firmware update available to support TRIM in Win7. My plan was to install it, make a single ~ 250gb partition with quick format, then do a fresh install of Win 7 RTM. If and when it starts to slow down, I'll back up to eSATA drive, run HDDErase, then restore.

 

I agree. I doubt that anyone will notice the difference between the well performing SSDs. The differences are too small.

I don't think anyone will notice the performance difference between 4.2 or 4.5 seconds for example:

 

And don't forget that for some extremely budget-limited consumers (yours truly included), there is an absolute price difference between a $160 64gb non-Intel and a $225 80gb Intel, that matters. If you just need a drive for an OS and a few small programs, its doubtful that the extra speed or extra space will be important, making cost/GB arguments less influential.

 

QFT.
Crucial Indilinx-based is $165 for 64GB, the Intel 80GB G2 is $259. The G1 is 249.

 

I wish that were the case, but if I wanted to benefit from the SSD performance the program has to be installed on the SSD. If I used a seperate HDD for game storage, I can't benefit from the SSD.

It looks like there are lots of users there that would have wanted 60GB and a 120GB option over a 80GB and a 160GB option.

I think on the next format I do I'll repartition the drive to get the 74.5GB back again. Currently the drive is formatted to be roughly equal to how the X25-E is formatted(40GB chips but 32GB), and was done for performance but with the firmware update and such its just robbing me of extra 13GB of space.

 

Yeah i like the over all lower prices. Intel is great and the performance is awesome but now if we can get more 64gb ssd's in the $100-150 range i will happily buy two and raid0 them than just one 80gb intel. which i hopefully will be doing once g2 hits the market for real and prices drop. C'mon samsung or sandisk G3!

Then the wifey can have ssd power too! (my "old" sammy of course)

 

heh. you should get one. you wouldn't talk that way, then..

edit: you know that i have sammies, and i dropped them all, not having one in use anymore, because i got my intel. sammies stink, compared to it.

and yes, firmware update is out. can't wait for the prices to finally rumble

 

I ordered the 64GB Crucial M225 (Indilinx) drive from Newegg yesterday for $160. It seemed like a good deal.

I plan to couple it with a the 12.5mm 1TB WD10TEVT.

 

I can take it too I am going to buy an Intel SSD as soon as I can. I tried a Summit Series with the 2nd generation controller. Was not really that much of a speed boost. I am hoping Intel will be faster, smoother, or something that will give me the boost I have been led to believe an SSD wil bring. Maybe I should have tried the Barefoot instead of the Samsung.

 

The Crucial M225 seems to give the actual best price/performance ratio. Don't know if they have a good customer support though (firmwares update, trim tool...)

 

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,9768.html

 

give me all that in a nice little 2.5" package with low enough energy consumption and heat to be used in a notebook and a host standard that can transfer 60gb/s... then i will " "

 

You know we're going to be laughing about this in 10 years...

 

Something tells me we'll be laughing more at the wait time for the SATA III standard than we were for the next best thing in SSD's.

Honestly, I think I'll be laughing at all of it as I waited for my bank account to build up enough so I could afford 20-30 GB of RAM to use as a RAMDisk. But a man can dream

 

Hmm....Happy with my 256Gb ssd that came with my Dell XPS1340...the difference is still a world from where we were.

 

Has anyone posted this?

OCZ clean up SSDs with new firmware
Written by Andreas G 11 August 2009 20:58

OCZ has announced a new firmware for its Solid State Drives of the Vertex family. Together with Indilinx, that developed the flash memory controller, it has come up with a new beta firmware that will "clean" the memory cells. The problem spawns from the fact that memory cells, that stores the data of Solid State Drives, become filled with garbage data, which forces the memory controller to rewrite the whole memory cell when data is stored, which could result in noticeable performance hits.

Windows 7 with its TRIM technology will limit the problems of fragmented flash cells but while waiting for TRIM OCZ has released the beta 1585 firmware for the Vertex series, which operates in the background with cleaning up the memory cells. A bit like Corsair's solution with Samsung's NAND flash memory controller.

At HotHardware and PC Perspective they have tested the new firmware and the results clearly shows that there are significant improvements after longer periods of use thanks to the new garbage cleaning technology. This is even more important with the RAID-based SSD, which OCZ has a couple of.

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,9767.html

 

Anyone up to date on data recovery when it comes to physical failures on SSDs?

I know for mechanical drives data recovery is a big deal when there's been physical damage, requiring you to ship the drive to a repair center and pay hundreds of dollars. Is the high cost also the case with SSDs?

 

The idle garbage collection will hamper with the idle power a bit.

Anyways, I'd think being a precision semiconductor chip, data recovery on a physical damage on an SSD is much harder than with a spindle HDD, or even impossible, say when the chip breaks in half.

 

True.

Suppose damage that was unrelated to the chips then, ie. something wrong with the SATA data or power connections?

 

My two cents: I've heard a memory cell in an SSD will fail on a write operation before on a read operation. Therefore you should always be able to read your data off a bad cell, obviously barring physical damage. I'd be impressed if you somehow physically damage an SSD in normal usage.

 

dsknight: You also have to take in account as the write cycles decrease the data retention capacity of the cells also decrease. For example, the data retention capability on a fresh, Intel drive is rated at 10 years, but at the end of the life cycle it might be 1 year.

So even though you will be able to read it, after few years it might become mumbo jumbo.

 

Well dsknight, prepare to be impressed. :/

My x200 out of the nowhere froze completely today. I did a hard reboot and received a disk error message upon booting. When I got home I unscrewed the drive compartment, made sure everything was hooked up properly and turned the laptop on once more. No dice. The BIOS recognized the SSD but that was it. It wouldn't load Windows and, when I ran the BIOS hard drive diagnostic tool, it didn't move past 0% completed.

Not sure whether or not this was a laptop problem or a SSD problem, I brought the SSD over to a PC. When connected via a SATA port, it wouldn't finish loading into Windows. When connected via an external USB enclosure, upon powering on the Device Manager saw the drive for a moment and then didn't, as if the device was turned on and then off (it wasn't).

My last attempt was to boot using a Knoppix Live CD and attempting to see whether or not any files were accessible and, if yes, to recover them to another drive. Again no dice, the SSD was unmountable and the files completely unaccessible.

The only thing I can conclude is that somehow there's been some sort of physical damage to the SSD, either by my doing or a manufacture defect that finally manifested. I'm thinking/hoping, based on the behavior noticed while trying to access the drive through an external USB enclosure, that it's only the SATA power connection that's messed up and not the flash chips themselves. It doesn't look any different from the outside.

I perform daily backups so I'm not in too much trouble, but I did some work today that's fairly critical and am willing to dish some dough for it if I can get it back a reasonable price (couple of hundred). Last time I checked in on data recovery was early 2007 and that was for a 160GB mechanical drive. I was quoted roughly $600 and above from various data recovery vendors. I'm hoping, since flash is supposed to be more convenient to recover data from and since it's been more than 2 years (and considering the economic climate), that the cost won't be that high.

I checked in with NBF to see if I can get an idea before I make some calls for quotes tomorrow. I'm on the stock 160GB 5200rpm drive that came with my x200 now and... it's not pleasant.

 

Holy crap! Color me impressed, ashura. For your sake, too, I'm hoping it's a power failure. You might encounter high prices only because SSDs are new tech and repair shops might not have too many people trained to repair them. I'd put money on the fact that your data is still being held by the cells inside, I guess it's just a matter of figuring out where along the line some hardware went bad.

It should be a fairly easy fix if it's the power connector. Let's hope it is.

PS - Good for you for making daily backups! I realize you lost a bit of data but nothing near the amount most people would lose in your situation. I only do backups about once every two weeks - guess I should change my habits before I plunk some cash down for an SSD.

 

Sorry to hear that ashura. The same thing happened to me a few months ago. The Intel drive froze and I couldn't install Windows on it. I ended up able to restore the drive using Enhanced Secure Erase function in HDDErase.
After this experience, I don't think I'll ever buy another Intel drive again. I've used a Samsung drive for a whole year before switching to Intel with no problem.
Also, I forgot to mention the most common and famous problem with Intel drive: the capacity is reduced to 8MB and you can't even initialize or format the drive.
Let davepermen stick to his Intel drives and hope that they don't fail at one point or another

 

Two things:

1. Your prior problem wasn't the same as mine since being able to HDDErase it means you were able to access the drive long enough to complete the operation.

2. I'm pretty certain this is an isolated incident, no company can guarantee 100% that every drive will be perfect and I haven't heard of anyone else having my particular problem. Not to mention that we don't even know if this is a manufacturer defect or something that I did wrong.

Considering the quality of the drive while it was good, I'm still willing to stick with Intel. You can count me in with davepermen.

My next drive will most certainly be a 160GB X25-M G2, whether or not I'll be able to recover the data from my 80GB.

(if the second drive fails on me somehow someway, then I promise I'll be hopping mad though!)

 

I actually can't access any data at all. The only reason why I can do secure erase on the drive is because I unfreeze the drive first using HDDerase. You can probably try that, and then try to access the drive.
I also haven't given up all hope with Intel SSD, I'm still using it right now. Base on how it performs from now on, I'll give one final judgment on it. That's why I have a little smiley face at my last statement
I sure hope that this is just an isolated incident as well, but I do have a few other kinks with this drive as well, albeit they're minor and I know how to fix them up.

 

Thanks for the update T61.

 

Regarding the recent backup issues and losing data discussion...

I use a program called FolderClone that clones my important data folders to a backup drive at set intervals. Very handy and very fast.
http://www.folderclone.com/

 

wrong thread?

 

No, even with SSD's you should use backup!

 

That looks expensive

 

sure, that's why you should have a windows home server like i do, that does it all without me having to think about it. still, it came so randomly out of nowhere, while there is an actual thread about how to backup in the windows section that i got irritated

but yes, backup rules it makes you feel fuzzy and warm inside

 

just a bit big to fit into my laptop..

but it would be nice for my home server as storage

 

eh... If you don't mind me asking, what are you going to do with 100TB storage?!?

 

i'd download the internet


(yep, just right-click and "save all...")

 

LOL... let me know when you finish.

A quick question, I'm looking for a 100GB+ SSD, the Vertex looks reasonable, what's the price for the 120GB version nowadays?

 

finished.

you don't believe me? prove it!

but on a more serious talk, my dad records tons of stuff on hd-tv channels. and we have tons of bluray to rip. and he has a hd camera with wich he records holidays and events and such with full 1080p.

so no, we won't need 100tb of storage, but we're at around 1 tb of data right now, and that with only half a year switching to full hd everywhere .

so the 100tb disk would be, sort of, a lifetime thing. but it's not far off that we could fill it at least half, or so?