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

Yeah if hdd's never existed i'm sure 1.8" or smaller would've been the standard for ssd, but with HDDs coming first and the 2.5" mainstream for notebooks and the option to cheaply mount a 2.5" drive in a desktop (3.5") it was the most profitable and reasonable solution

 

ok, I still thinking of get an intel... and newegg has a great deal now on the 80GB G1... It's 239$ CAD + free shipping and a free 16GB SDHC card(which I'll use alot). I just want my thinkpad to boot as fast as possible. is it really worth waiting likely another month to get my hands on a G2. (NCIX's stock isn't gonna last long and canada is put on the back bench when it comes to tec.) ?

I also kinda need to do it before school, as I need a little more than 64GB. and the speed would be nice after 8month of a jmicron. in terms of boot speed does anyone know how much faster the G2 is?

 

IIRC, ssds don't shave off that much boot time vs a regular drive. it's like 45secs vs 52 or something in that ballpark.

 

... jmicron vs 320GB 5400RPM HDD made a HUGE difference. from like 3minutes to only 1, I have a huge amount loading at start up(I need it).

I think I'm gonna get the G1 I'm tired of waiting.

 

Is Mtron ever going to release a new series of SSDs? The 3550 SLC 64 GB broke some price barriers and outperformed ye olden gold standard Samsung SLC (though obviously not the Intels). The 3550 was/is too rich for my blood, but if someone could come out with a reasonably priced SLC drive (more in line with the current price scheme) perhaps I'd like.

Also how much worse in comparison to the Samsung and Intel was the Mtron as far as power consumption went? That was another thing I was worried about. Mtron's listed stats made it seem like no better than a regular hard drive

 

It appears Intel's SLC line has fallen off the radar. Any word on the SLC G2's?? Is it even gonna' happen?

 

We might see them in 2-3 months. The MLC and SLC aren't scheduled to be launched simultaneously.

 

Even Intel's SLC drive consumes a lot power... I wonder why? Is it the optimizations for better server usage?

 

The Intel MLC drive, the X25-M is at most of the time idle. That's how they get the 150mW power from, not the 2.4W burst power when its actually executing code. If the drive is at idle less, then the TDP will increase. That's the reason they don't do idle GC like the new Vertex firmwares do.

Higher power consumption is one of the reasons the X25-E is faster. Likewise, Mtron's negative for being fast for being such old tech could be the higher power consumption.

 

yeah, i was just referring to what i saw here. http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-x25-m-g2.aspx?page=7

 

I've used Intel SLC before, and compare to Intel MLC, my laptop's battery life stays nearly the same. I guess you can't just depend solely on the power consumption rating for the drive.

 

Yeah that's what Sony Z already supports. 2x 1.8" in 13".

 

Are you referring to the time from when you press the power to the Windows Logon screen? or from the power until the system is inside windows and is usable?

I've found that in the first case, it's not a huge difference. In the second, it will be a difference, though not as big as what you saw from HDD to SSD.

 

Have to say, power consumption is not a worry for me <-- am on 24/7 AC adapter.

 

depends on the drivers that get loaded, the hw that has to be initialized etc. obviously, the ssds only help if they're the slowest part. it's always the slowest part, which is the bottleneck.

in my case, boot time is <30sec on one system at the default installation. no os fiddling and tweaking.

 

then you don't use your laptop right (posting in my bed right now, just got up)

 

they stated later.. i guess next year, with the mlc gen2.5 or what ever they get called said different: with the 320gb disks.

 

I timed from after the BIOS finished posting to a useable windows enviroment. the Disk that shipped with my Thinkpad was a piece of junk, that's likely why I saw the speed increase.

Edit, Oh, and Ubuntu went from about 10 seconds to like 3.

 

The former case doesn't test your disk drive because its a fixed timer by the BIOS unrelated to the drive. It's not really loading anything so you can't speed that up by getting a faster drive. The second time is actual OS loading time which can be improved.

 

Oh I think I know why random write is sooo much more important than most people think.

Remember dave how you said hibernate on Intel drive is faster even though the sequential write is only 1/3 of other drives...

See on any DECENT SSD the controller will spread all the data out evenly in order to ensure that no one part of the drive fail before others. Doing that also helps out performance as there will be more part of the drive to work with.

Because of the "spread out evenly" part, the data is everywhere. Depending on the user pattern, the data might be really random. There might be some places that are still sequential, but most are not. On a fresh drive most of the time writing on high sequential write drive would be faster. But as the drive gets used, and depending on the "randomness", a drive with high random write speeds like Intel would win out.

On the other hand sequential reads are different because reads are much faster than writes. The difference between random and sequential read speeds are minimized because of the way reads are handled on an SSD. Random reads are not important as random writes and sequential speeds on reads is just as important as random reads.

 

Any Idea when the price on these are gonna drop. I've wanted one since April, but prices have dropped maybe $100 since then. My 320gb HDD at about 25% now, and adding more HDDs will make my notebook run hotter. I could care less about the speed increase, I just want more space and my notebook to stay cool.

Was looking at the 256gb models and their still over $500.

 

get a 500gb hdd and drop the old one if you don't care about the speed, much cheaper.

 

Well I was hoping for 1tb HDDs to come out before I started outright replace my current one.

Edit: I've got 3x hard drive slots.

 

Capable of supporting 12.5mm height? Cuz then you can have your 1TB drive

 

don't think so, lol.

 

somehow sad, not? the first thing i'd build in when i would create a huge fat laptop that is about 3-4 times as fat as my laptop is building in support for 12.5mm high hdds. it's not like the space wouldn't be there..

anyways, i'm impressed by the specs of that biest i have that as a desktop

 

really there isn't space for bigger hard drives... He needs a hell of a cooling system to keep SLI 9800m GTX and 3.0ghz quad core (desktop!) CPU functioning... but what are your temps now? i thought sager did a damn good job with heat displacement... you should have no problem throwing in two more hdds if you don't care about speed...

cooling is way over rated IMO unless you actually have problems with temperatures going up into the danger zones. otherwise it's fine that's why they say this temperature is unsafe and this temperature is safe...

 

most of my systems are passive cooled *runs away*

but yes, just drop in another 1 or 2 hdds. batterylife is unimportant on that beast anyways, and heat/cooling shouldn't be an issue. noise, maybe.

 

My Dell 256GB SSD is being delivered tomorrow after a two week backorder. I ordered before they jacked up the price.

Anyway this will obviously be the only drive in the laptop as there is only one bay (except of course when the 500gb eSATA is connected). I am running Windows7 x64 and have 4GB of RAM. I was going to disable hibernation, system restore, and defrag. Also will minimize use of temp internet files.

Should I also disable the Windows paging/swap file ? It shows as a single big file on the drive but I believe the O/S does a lot of small random writes and reads to it... If not turned off, would it be better to have a dynamic swap file managed by windows, or a fixed swap file ?

If I had 8GB RAM I definitely would disable paging, but am waiting until 4GB SODIMMs drop in price.

 

You can do any of that. But you dont really have to.

The onlything i did with mine was to make sure the defrag was turned off. Other than that even with limited write cycles, i figure i'll get more use out of the drive than the notebook its in

 

How do you turn off defrag?
I have disabled the defrag schedule task, but when I leave laptop idle the Defrag.exe process starts every time.

There is a flamewar on this topic in every forum. Better don't ask, use search as it was already discussed 1000 times on this forum.

 

Your jumping into a vat of boiling water with that question... Myself, I have been running without a pagefile for about 2 years, first with Vista and now with Win7. I run with 4Gb ram and have never had a single problem and have pushed my system plenty of times...never a crash, failure or loss of information. I also run a system monitor on my screen which allows me to always watch ram usage.

I would dare say that my system gets used much harder than the typical, more so before than now but, even now...she gets a good running.

I also run a 256Gb ssd.

Pagefile is a funny thing, in that, even if you have lots of ram, the system cache still works. It would be nice if the ideal of a system cache could be shut down completely until ones ram got low and then the pagefile would activate.

As it stands, the only way to disable the cache is to completely shut her off.

Having said all that, I would never recommend shutting off pagefile unless its on a newly formatted system where the ideal of information loss does not exist. I would also monitor my systems ram usage closely for a few days/weeks before making the jump just to ensure that there is no risk of a crash or low resource warning.

"Now he ducks to avoid the onslaught of native spears rapidly making their way toward him..."

 

just to change the topic.

I'm gonna sue you!! all of you!! you didn't talk me out of an intel!!





'
Ok, I'm just kidding, I'm really happy I did. I got a good deal and also got a external CD drive for my thinkpad.

(yes, I got the 80GB G1)

cheers!

 

I thought windows 7 recognized SSD and turned off defrag automaticly. along with who knows what...

Edit: BTW grats!

 

If you clone a hard drive to a ssd, do you loose any speed over a clean install?

 

so what does your system do when your battery is low? mine hibernates till i find the cable, plug in, and continue my work. oh, i actually never shutdown, i just hibernate all day long.

so you have an automatic daily full system backup that you can rely on? i have, thus i have disabled system restore. do you?

yes (don't forget in the taskplaner to check)

don't take care about this.. it's a quartertera ssd, it won't bother with some kilobyte-files.

you think wrong. most of the time, the file will not get used. but when needed, it will. xp was bad at it, but nowadays on vista/win7, just leave it on. it might save your one day, it allows bug reports, and it prevents apps from crashing due to low memory (while unlikely, when happening, very annoying).

just let the os handle it, it knows best (And thus, theoretically, it could grow to any needed space. in real, it won't really grow.. but it could.. just in case of need, one day)

no, you still wouldn't. it is just there AS A FALLBACK. just let that fallback exist, it's there for a reason.

 

try to sue me! i live in illegal bank account land!! you'll never get me

edit: have fun with your drive

 

yah, you may be harder, I guess I have to get on the plane to settle this one

thanks so much! common UPS! Speed! D-6 days

 

I've been running without a page file on my Thinkpad T400 and it has never crashed on me.

 

nice for you. i never had a car accident. so i don't need seatbelts as well.

it's there for you instead of a crash. it's there for you to log a bluescreen to report to microsoft so it gets fixed (and it does get), etc etc.

just let it on, it never hurts, espencially definitely never on an ssd. but it might one day save your ***. i've seen crashing pc's due to lack of pagefile. can be quite ugly. espencially if it's a half a day project that afterwards has a corrupt on-disk-file so that you can't even start "at the last saved place".

now that's fun, now is it?

just enable it and never think back.

 

Sorry, but that's a bad comparison. Seatbelts are for human safety. People don't die from a lack of page file.

People seem to over-react on the page file issue. If you don't care about being 100% stable, then it's not a big deal. I do nothing on my pc that requires me to be 100% safe.

 

OMG, it's out! It's out! My supplier apparently has it in stock. $481.94 including shipping to AU. Can't wait to get it.

 

Right now the temps are good. In a moderate environment (~80F) it'll run games at 60-70C. If the AC dies (happens a lot here) it'll sometimes spike to ~85F. That's the GPUs, nothing else comes close to over heating. I've just heard a lot of problems running 3x HDDs because 2 of them are stacked on top of each other limiting airspace. And yes, this thing's a beast <3.

 

Depends on the original installation on the hard drive. It will be cloned the way it was.

If the original installation was clean, the one on the SSD will be as clean.

 

well, my work (and my private work) is worth me something.

it's not a bad comparison at all. it's a simple savetyguard that normally never hurts, but in the cases where it comes up, it can save your ***. so why can't you leave it on? it does NOT hurt. it did in xp days as the memory manager of xp was an utter failure once you went over 2gb (even over 1gb it was quite annoying). on vista/win7, an enabled pagefile never hurts. never. espencially not on an ssd.


you know, i see enough people crying around how their pcs are instable and stuff, and all bla bla. those are the people that disabled the page file "for performance reasons, and as it's useless, and as they know better". braindump morrons, they are, yep.


first, prove that the pagefile hurts, then, maybe disable it. as long as it doesn't, leave it ****** on.

it's that simple.


and yes, i'm not nice about such stuff. because people sometimes have to be beaten in the head (verbally) to understand how their logic is so flawed, it's terrible.

 

they're stacked on top of each other? so you're sure a 12.5mm 2.5" hdd wouldn't fit?

 

yeah, in about a week, it should (finally) be available anywhere. i wait and want to see how pricing behaves after that. i'm in no need of another ssd right now anyways

 

some shops in Europe have listed Intel G2 320Gb. I think it means that Intel will ship them sooner than expected.

 

and that would change everything... hm no, not really, as it would be too expensive for most, i guess..

any pricings listed yet? haven't found it myself.

 

Yeah i'm hoping the 160gb Intel drives down the 120 and 250gb indilinix and samsung model prices.

It'd be nice to be able to pick up a good 250 for a decent price.
Has anyone figured out why intel sells in such weird capacities?

If the intel 320 comes in at under 800 i might pick one of those up. Wouldnt be a bad price, but still not going to make it worth using as a storage drive
But you could use it as an OS/App drive forever and never worry about cell death