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

Yep. The capacity boost is significant to me though.

 

Nice! Thanks for all the info

 

\v/TF happened to Dell 256GB SSD price?? It was $470 something a week ago and now it's $790!!!

 

IS it the same samsung?

 

^ I've no idea, but it looks like it. They've not changed the pic.

 

Here are 5 different sets of results for the Samsung 256GB PB-22J.

What these fail to show is the low power consumption. Tom's Hardware made some measurements: Idle, maximum and video playback. I've not made my own direct measurements, but I can see a lower power drain when running on battery which could translate to up to an extra hour of run time.

And there's definitely no chance of using the palm rest as palm warmer in the winter.

John

 

Huh? I've been using 1st gen Samsung SLC and no stuttering what so ever. I'm no sure what stuttering you're talkinng about there zephir.

 

+1. My Samsung SLC (OCZ SATA II 64GB) even feels "snappier" than my Intel X25M (G1)...

 

Well, have you tried replicating my typical work environment?
-Document editing via Word
-Spreadsheet editing via Excel
-Programming via Matlab
-Firefox with 4+ tab opened with one of the tab playing HD video
-Multiple explorer windows opened
-4GB+ file transfer from external HDD

And even then, I'm saying that there's a slight stuttering with maximizing/minimizing windows. It's not a complete system halt, unlike JMicron drives.
Also, I perform enhanced secure erase on my Intel drive once before and never fill the drive up past half its capacity, that's why it's still very fast.

 

It is slower than the recent crucials etc with barefoot controller. Considering crucial backsup her SSD with a 5 year warranty I can;t see why people would buy the samsungs any more.

 

One of my considerations was low power consumption. I knew from the Tom's hardware measurements that the Samsung delivers in this respect. Also, since it has been around for some months, it has been debugged.

The Crucial SSD looks very attractive but isn't yet on the shelves in the UK.

John

 

The samsung made sense when Dell was selling them for $480 minus whatever discounts or coupons you could get. Now at $790 for the Dell or $700 for the Corsair P256, I definitely agree.

If I didn't get my Dell order in before they hiked the price, I'd go for the 256GB Crucial M225 or the 160GB Intel at this point in time. The Intel 320GB drive will be awesome, but I expect it to be around $849.

 

Too bad you won't see Intel's 320GB drive til the end of the year.

 

Actually, Q1 of next year with the "Postville Refresh".

 

I stand corrected, but that's even worse

 

John, I've heard (can't remember where) that the mechanical harddrive component of a laptop accounts for only a small portion of overall power consumption, like ~15%, and pales in comparison to things like the CPU or the screen's backlight. If this were the case, then you would need to be getting around 6 or 7 hours of battery life in order to notice an hour increase, even if the Samsung SSD consumed no power. (1 hour = 15% of 6.67 hours) Have you actually noticed a gain of this much after switching to your SSD?

 

Les has noticed a big dif if you read his review of SSDs. The only difference in his system is his Sandisk 32GB SSD vs. 100GB 7200RPM HDD, he got 4 hours 47 min w/ SSD and 3 hours 35 min w/ HDD.

 

Mechanical hard drive had improved its power consumption generation by generation. Especially on young product like 2.5" 7200 rpm. I don't know what model is the 100GB 7200rpm HD that is used in his review. If it is a early model like Hitachi 7K100 or 7K200, its power consumption is about 20% higher then 7K320. Seagate's newest model 7200.4 has lower power consumption then Hitachi 7K320. (from spec doc, it is lower about 20%).

SSD like sammy or Intel still has advantage of power consumption over newest mechanical hard drive. But the gap is on idle power, not max power. Fortunately, idle time is much longer than seek/read/write time for normal disk usage pattern. So we still benefit in power consumption from SSD. But if your usage pattern is different, the benefit may disappear.

 

Also you will notice more battery gain if you have a low power consumption notebook to start. Running an atom and IGP is goin to see a lot more time when using an SSD rather than the quad core SLI gaming notebook.

 

As the G2 Intel drives appear to be backordered for quite a while, do you think getting the G1 drives at the same price of the G2 now is a good idea? How significant will the G2 be in terms of overall performance. How significant will the lack of TRIM support be?

 

lack of trim is unimportant, as an ssd should be good at cleanup by itself without the help of the os. imagine how an ssd else messes up if one day (by some bootdisk or what ever), a trim command might have been missed.

so a g1 for cheap is a good thing to get.

the performance difference, don't know. the g1 performs great for me, the g2 should be better..

 

Part of the reason a good SSD gives you better battery life is because a task is completed faster and it can idle faster. And "idle" doesn't mean doing nothing. It can be even while performing a task, the period of low activity.

That's why I don't take too much into low power components with equally low performance. They'll even out.

And BTW, it seems I can't really fill up this X25-M beyond 75%. It does not seem to care that I have put extra registered space for the drive. I really am going to reparition the drive back to full 80GB next time since having 17GB free space left over but being unable to use since the degradation is bad is kinda inhibiting. I had games freezing in the middle of loading and FF tabs being unresponsive for a good 30 secs which didn't happen 5GB ago.

I'm anticipating Braidwood even more now.

 

The reason I asked is because my X301 performs wonderfully with the standard Samsung SSD even without TRIM support, but I notice performance degradation when my drive is 90% full.

 

I would say why buy the old tech for the same price as the new tech!? Have some patients, man! Unless you NEED it RIGHT THIS SECOND, why would you spend the same amount of money on something not as good, especially since we KNOW it is only a matter of days or worst case weeks...

 

Well, it's months before the 1.8" versions are released anyway. Either way, I'm just going to wait and observe. Saving up until it hits widespread availability as it is annoying having to deal with the excessively high demand for these SSDs, thus causing resellers reluctant to drop prices any further.

 

ah yes... the elusive 1.8" drives...

 

they are for the really cool guys

 

What's your source for this, newegg says august 28 = ETA.

 

If by 'cool guys' you mean the kind that like to buy over priced and under stocked notebook components, then you're right on...

 

If you're talking about this review, I actually haven't seen it before, so thanks for referring it to me.

It seems though that in addition to the SSD/HDD difference, his SSD laptop also has an LED backlit display, which would also account for some of the difference in battery life. But I do agree that's a pretty big gain to see from those two changes.

Maybe I never noticed a huge difference in battery life going from an 80gb WD Scorpio Blue to a 60gb Vertex because my disk usage is usually pretty light in my normal operations anyway. Or maybe the controller in the Vertex is more power hungry than most.

 

by cool guys, i mean can have my laptop in about every bag existing, i can write on it with a pen, great for quick sketching of ideas, i can turn around the screen for presenting others stuff, it is portable and flexible for djing, working, at home, in the car, in the plane, train, what ever

overpriced? i got the 3000$ version for <1000$, so, no.. (and i saved enough to buy the intel ssd 160gb afterwards )

 

vertexes are quite hungry afaik. then again, the mtrons are, too, but i never noticed it as i used it on a laptop without a working battery

 

Tablet properties are cool but you still can't game and i can take my 17" notebook anywhere you can and have a lot easier time typing on it and to keep this on topic... fit not one rare mini 1.8" ssd but two full size 2.5" ssd's. and because i am a cool 'guy' i can handle the xtra 5-10lbs

 

Don't know if it's been posted yet, but I was browsing Amazon.com and noticed you can a 120GB OCZ Apex for $190.56.

OCZ OCZSSD2-1APX120G 120GB SATA 2 Apex Series Solid State Drive
Seems like an excellent deal.

 

You might be new here in this thread, but you should know the Apex has the Jmicron controllers in RAID, and well frankly, they suck. Definitely not worth $190.

 

It would seem so, but with other reasonable price 'non-Jmicron' drives out there, i wouldn't wanna go that route... (maybe for just a storage option for some, but i wouldn't)

 

I know the JMicron controllers are pretty bad, but had heard that the RAID versions in the Apex series and the G.Skill Titan, improved their functioning quite a bit.


They list the 60GB version of the same drive for $199.

Seems like a pricing error or something of that nature.

 

No all the prices are probably going to drop soon once intel G2 80gb hits the shelves for only $229. They are better performing with the jmicorns in RAID0 but hotter and more power consumption and still have some of the stuttering issues and struggle with many applications...

 

Actually i would love it if the standard Laptop drive dropped to 1.8in

Imagine 15in laptops with 2 Drive bays standard and 17in with 3-4 bays.

With SSD's finally breaking into good data densities and the prices coming down, all we need is for the mechanical drive gys to focus on decent preforming and capacitied 1.8in drives and we would be set.

[dreams]
2 RAID 120GB SSD's in bay 1 and 2
2 x 320-500GB mech drives in bays 3 and 4

Ah now thats a dream

 

ah, I think you dreams are pretty low... 4x512GB SSD in Raid 0... now that's the way to go

 

you can't take it around the way i do. in one hand, with two fingers, hanging around.. just like a big cellphone.. no sir, i know 17" laptops, they are nowhere near that flexible and mobile.

and you're no cool guy if you can lift it around. i'm a cool guy as i don't HAVE to lift it around

different needs, different laptops

oh, and my keyboard is fullsize, so it's about the same as yours, and just as easy to type on, thanks to this. actually, it's a business keyboard MADE for typing, so with a big chance, better than yours for typing.

but now imagine that you could have 4 1.8" drives in your laptop instead of the 2 2.5"..

 

I agree diff notebooks for diff needs.
all i'm saying is 1.8" are harder to get and usually more expensive and HDDs underperform.
Now if 1.8" were mainstream sure smaller is almost always better when offering the same performance and functionality.

 

Any ideas why the Intel G2 160GB drives are showing as unavailable (as opposed to back ordered) on NewEgg and Amazon?

 

firmware issue theyre fixing.

 

There has been firmware issue regarding setting password to hard drive in BIOS. they were pulled like the first day of sales and should be back the end of the month. a very popular topic on this thread and any other site discussing ssd

also now newegg isn't even listing the 160gb. maybe the delay will be even longer for the 160s

 

the 1.8" should've been by default the standard for ssds. anything bigger: extrapackage. would have been fun (as one could use it in a lot of mp3 players, subnotebooks, all netbookies, etc)..

and due to the small size, a lot of manufacturers would have made some space on a 17" laptop for a "system disk @ 1.8" extra", or so.

they are really tiny, if you can hold one in a hand, you can feel the potential of having that as the default disk format (imagining servers having such, etc).

2.5" is big for system drives once you met 1.8"

and they require lower power consumtion lanes, which allows them to be used on a single usb power connection by default. 2.5" not always.

 

I hope more <15" notebooks start having 2x 1.8" drives in them since it would fit about the same space as 1x 2.5" drive. 2x X18-M 320GB

 

they could even fit 3x 1.8" for sure, 4x would go into the bigger ones.. would allow funny storage solutions

hp elitebooks, you got a new job to do!! (the smaller ones can right now have two 1.8" or one 2.5", there.. not mine, as it's tablet.. but the non-tablet version can).

oh, and a 17" laptop could then have 4x 320gb in (in january), allowing for over 1tb storage, AND all in raid0, up to 1GB/s data rate, if the raidcontroller can handle it.

for highend systems, that would be the way to go..

 

Yes, I know that. But now Newegg says deactivated item where before it siad ETA of 8/28.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167017

The 80GB model is still shows an ETA of 8/28.

I'm just wondering if anyone had heard of any further issues (besides firmware) for the 150GB models.

 

Wouldnt that be freaky... where the computer is now the bottle neck for the hard drives