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

If you install programs onto a drive that isn't your os drive, they should be able to run no problem after a reformat, etc.

 

Not always, there's can be files that will be thrown into other places like common files folder, windows directory, plus registry entries that are created.

 

OCZ Summit and Vertex on sale at circuitcity.com

If you're in the US, you can now pick up the OCZ Vertex 60GB for $137 from circuitycity.com after rebates and cashback. The 120GB is $263.

There is a 15% Bing cashback, a $20 paypal cashback, and a $30 OCZ rebate for the 60GB version. If you want the Summit, the 60GB can be had for $127 after Bing and OCZ rebate. See this slickdeals thread for details:

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=45936&t=1528921

 

how long is that going on for? for $100 less than the g2, it does look attractive.

 

Just to confirm, the Intel G1 drive sold here, despite being part of an HP bulk order, will still work in other computers, namely a Thinkpad T500, correct? I may decide to get this...

 

As I can see from HDD product number in Your review of T500 it is using 2.5" SATA HDD, so my opinion is that 2.5" Intel G1 SSD should work fine in T500, probably better, much better. :yes:

 

well, you can find some of popular portable apps here

but, also, you can try to find photoshop and other popular stuff on some torrent sites ( as I did ) and you will be surprised how much soft can be made as portable

and yes, portable apps can be used on usb stick, so, lets say portable firefox on usb drive is great stuff if you wanna to have one same ff on your work and home computer

back on topic...
those apps very often need more loading time, but, as ssd-s mostly have insane loading times, it will lunch very fast
I would like to have os partition just for os, and one partition for apps, and one for data...
in that case, I would be able to reinstall or change my os only, and keeping my other programs as they were with all settings and tweaks and stuff...
that would be very cool in situations where some different beta os versions are released every two weeks, like windows 7 was

 

Yay! See See in the end I was right lol but yes you won't be disappointed getting a vertex theyre really fast and ocz support(forums) are cool too.

isn;t too shabby imo and I've seen some people running it a bit faster too firmware might help (they're gonna release a new firmware in about 2 weeks).

 

in a few days the photofast v3 1.8" zif pata should be available in the german market. has anyone already made experience with the 3rd version with 64mb cache and indilix controller?

 

How much space did you lose with the firmware update?

and I guess they are shipping Gen2 now?

The HDX18 owners have Gen one and when converting to W7 the install would trigger the lock.. BIOS lock when upgrading..

I am curious about the size of the firmware fix.. If you know great if not no biggie..

Are you and Intel owner? I am on the fence.. I was going to buy the Intel and on the day.. I was going to buy I googled one last time and saw the

Minor Hiccup on New Intel SSDs
July 24, 2009 – 4:23 pm by William George

http://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/

So that spooked me.. I have spoken to a nice guy / gal here Lancorp.. and he / she has a Samsung 256gb that has garbage collection which is supposed to be the difference between good and not..

The... OCZ Technology Unveils the Agility EX SLC SSD Series is coming out soon.. and is supposed to be great.. but everything is until real people review it. I do like the OCZ support forums.. but I have that here already so...

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6403/

I want to add raid to my HDX18... so I have been stalking this..

http://www.photofast.tw/eng/SSD_G_Monster_V5.html

It is a little pricey.. that does not bother me as much as not having a real person here do a review.. I like to hear what normal people have to say more than just the corp. swill..

If anyone wants to help me with any of these issues.. God Bless You and many thanks..

Be well all, JW

 

Just in case it got missed, does anyone have more info about the SSD in Toshiba's R600?

http://laptops.toshiba.com/laptops/portege/R600

I'm mighty curious

 

It's probably the same Toshiba SSDs in Lenovo's T400s. The link was up a while ago regarding the release of the new Toshiba SSDs. Still no clue on the controller (maybe the new Jmicrons?) but benchmarks in the Lenovo section are very good, around the level of Samsungs and Indilinx.

 

I dont understand why you guys keep posting benchmarks of new MLC SSDs that you just installed ... as clearly this will not be the speed of the SSD after some time.

you all should know that when all of the pages of an MLC SSD get used once, in order for the information to be written on top the process becomes much more time consuming, as the page has to be red first, then erased/modified, then written again ... which slows the SSD like big time. This doesnt meand that the SSD has to be full - no, the ssd will use empty pages while there are any, so even if you have say a 10% filled up SSD, it may be out of unused pages after say a week of usage.

the Vertex for instance slows down as much as 3 times. And while somebody will jump on and say that this is only the case when a write needs to take place and not a read, I'd say that reading and writing occur all the time all over the place, so this surely affects the performance as a whole.

Intel drives slow down also, but not as much as Indilinx based SSDs, which tend to suck at this moment, at least under XP. Some say that this can be due to the XPs default 63 sector ofset, while an MLC SSD block has 128 pages. And an MLC SSD writes in blocks.

Samsung slows down about twice, but keeps steady.

I can post the link of the whole review, if anyone is interested.

 

yeah ill take that linkage

 

Isnt that where the "background garbage collection tm" in the newer firmware for ocz vertex comes in?
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ocz-indilinx-firmware-ssd-trim,news-31665.html#xtor=RSS-1415
I believe Ocz owns this technology

 

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16979

 

that means 640GB X25-M is on the way, too...

 

If it werent for the 1500-4000 dollar price tag those would be the god SSD

 

they still are the god-ssds by then god doesn't mean cheap

 

Yeah, but i want 640GB for under 1K

 

All I need is a good 64GB for the main drive. Just need it to be $100 or less and I'm sold.

 

so, in essence, you want both the same

 

Also see AnandTech's essay here. It's a bit dated, but still very informative. That article specifically is what pushed me over the edge toward the Intel.

 

with background garbage collection in fw1.30 and up for the ocz vertex the speed degradation problem
on the vertex is now (as good as?) gone (don't know how/if intels speed will degrade).
At least that's what numerous sites report, I guess we all have to find out.
I think it's cool that the drive does it's garbage collection without external software
that's some fine firmware there.

 

^^^ I know right.

The final version of the firmware 1.4 is still in the works though (then the drive would truly be maintenance free)...can't wait to upgrade to it.

 

According to the following report, the Samsung-driven SSD self-trims: http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=766&type=expert&pid=11.
For graphs on comparative slowdown over time of various SSD's see http://www.techspot.com/review/181-solid-state-drive-roundup2/page14.html.

 

just wanted to drop by and say my crucial M225 has been running great

although it has not lowered HD temps it boots everything amazingly fast and the durability of the HD makes it a worthwile investment for me. I just love how i can launch PS right after i log in with almost no lag.

 

new anandtech article is up. likes intel and indilinx. does not like samsung

 

Dave, ya beat me to it! Anand has done it again! Nice job!

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

 

I just read Anandtech's review. I like how they expose the detailed elements rather than simple benchmarks:

Anandtech agrees with me idle garbage collection might hamper with battery life:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=14

"Presumably this isn’t without some impact to battery life in a notebook."

"While Indilinx is following in Samsung's footsteps with enabling idle garbage collection, I believe it's a mistake."

I don't like the power consumption tests too much though:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=26

Looking at pure max TDP and idle power numbers and concluding the power consumption based on those figures are wrong.

Look here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=16

Modern drives quickly reach idle even between times where the user don't even know and at "load". Faster drives will reach lower average power because it'll work faster to get to idle. This is why the X25-M with much higher active/idle power figures got better battery life than Samsungs with less active/idle power.

 

Good article but I'm happy with my Samsungs.

 

i really need to say this...
the last page of review....
I mean, sorry anand but, you are full of sh**...
ANYONE who read this thread know that samsung had some fw upgrades and that they all were done by end users them self, so, the part where anand say:

is nothing else but one big LIE

so, if they lie about that, I don't really se the point of trusting them

and is that 4 time smaller 4k random write ?!?!
I drive my sammy for 7 months now and random writes are still same as they were first day, so, anand, get real and stop writing BS

 

darQ96, those are pretty harsh words for mere misunderstanding.

BTW they are testing the NEW Samsung drives. The old Samsung drives were all SLC and their IOPS and random writes didn't fluctuate but were very low to begin with. The NEW drives are MLC and they fluctuate.

If anything I'd say you are full of....

 

Except that my battery life with Intel or Samsung is nearly identical. Believe me, I monitor power usage of my laptop very carefully, and the wattage is even nearly identical, with the same laptop.

 

offtopic: what software do you use to monitor wattage?

 

Sigh.

Wattage numbers=useless

You need to measure battery life. If you didn't get that on my post you obviously skimmed through it.

 

yeah, well, my drive has label that says 2008.04.19
so, it is around 1.5 year "old"

also, my brother is driving 2nd gen 64gb mlc sammy, so, as you said, it should be "new" drive...
he is using it last 2-3 months, and, 4k random writes were never 4 times lower than the first time we benched it
and we tried some various iometre ssd fragmentation setups, the only thing we managed to kill was sequential r/w-s, but randoms were nearly same all the time...

so, no sir, I'm not full of it, I may not have experience with intels and indilinx, but, I have some experience with some sammys and I can see when someone is writing something that I have not experienced with my drives...

and, at the one point of the article, anand said that vertex fw upgrade went all with no problems....like hell it did...what about those users that lost all their data and other that made drive image and after upgrade were not able to load it back couse drive capacity was smaller ???

 

Not everyone shows the exact issues like compatibility and data loss. There will be people that won't have a problem on even what's rumored to be a very bad product.

Plus, you aren't benchmarking the same thing Anand does, and other sites also show slowdowns.

 

well, I think I am, couse, my sammys has all LBA-s filled with data more than ones, and, I still have not experienced that kind of performance drop

and what kind of compatibility issues exactly are you talking about ?!?! as I recall, first few vertex fw upgrades made ALL drives blank, and some of them reduced drive capacity
so, I had feeling that early vertex users were actually bunch of beta testers...
trim fw made things more ok, but, early ones, as I recall were not good, and anand wrote opposite of that

 

Let's see some pics then.

It was a response to:

AT has never said they didn't lose data on the Vertex when they updated the firmware. In fact, that's what's expected on the Vertex. You lose data when you update firmware. Big deal. Inconvenient, but that's one reason Intel fetches a premium isn't it? Yea, of course it went with no problems, just your data clears, I'm pretty sure they know this!

 

Guess what happened to my Intel SSD order. I was initially allocated a unit out of the 40 or so they have, but when my reseller asked the distributor to dispatch the unit, the distributor said they had to sell all they have on hold to other resellers who are offering prices above the initial $440 price tag. What has happened is that scrupulous distributors and resellers are now engaged in a price auction for these drives as there is so much demand. Is there any legal recourse I can take? I'm told that I will get the drive at the price I paid, but they will have to secure the stock from the distributors and the distributors aren't willing to sell at the original price they quoted since there are others offering way more for it. This is ridiculous. I'm not going to pay a cent more for a commodity that will experience significant price drop in the next 6 months. I just want a reliable, fast SSD for my work now, but this SSD-hungry enthusiast market is driving me nuts!

 

This is why I decided to just grab a G1. it's a littel cheaper, and I get it NOW!

give it 1 or 2 months and Intel should have caught up with demand.

 

pisc posted something like month or two ago
search is your friend

ok, so, if intel got a premium, than, why AT wrote that sammy is worst on in case of fw upgrade ?
my fw went, just like intel users reported, with no problems ?!?!?!

 

The problem I have is that the distributor is practising unethical business practices. They chose to not honour the pricing and allocate their stock to the highest bidders. That's how blackmarket works, but this is just an innocent Intel SSD, not some contraband!

 

Is your brother able to update FW on his second-gen Samsung MLC? I have not heard anyone being able to do that...

I have a gen-1 Samsung MLC that came with the Dell E4200, and there is absolutely no update available.

 

According to this Italian site ( www.notebookitalia.it) the 300GB Intel SSD 2nd generation is almost out!

Read the following link:
http://notebookitalia.it/intel-ssd-x25-m-300gb-34nm-6367.html

Very strange though they mention that the new drive is 300GB not 320GB as expected.

 

well, the italians must know

i don't care about those 20GB, if it's out then it's fine for me

 

The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD

The third major SSD article on AnandTech is here. We go back and try to better understand how these SSDs...
August 30, 2009

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

 

^^^ Dang....27 pages...get the coffee/tea out.

 

I'm brother!

I can't update FW because there is no update utility to do that for Samsung SSD with RBB controller, but for some Samsung SSDs with RBX controllers You can update FW because Samsung released it and I think it has something to do with Dell.

Probably Samsung didn't release FW update for RBB controller because there is no need to update FW like on Intel and Vertex SSDs.