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

I'm using the latest FW1.3. The drive came with it. I guess it could be the laptop. Quite a few people are getting similar numbers as mine, although there are people who get much higher numbers, too.

 

Is it me or crucial just went to rise up their ssds prices ??? The 64 GB version cost 140 euros last week and now it's 160 on their official website.

 

I'm a bit confused. It seems that quite a few people with SSDs do a lot of reconfiguration of their systems to minimise the number of writes to their drive, trying to restrict any degradation in performance.

So why do they then spend a lot of time running disk benchmarking programs - which do loads of writes and erases?

 

well, there are two things happening:

1) they want to see everything's fine with their investment and want to brag with it

2) they are paranoid that their investment doesn't die => they want to save it from any harm

1 and 2 together result in that funny behaviour.

and, 2 is completely useless. that's what the spent money is for, actually. to get a device where it doesn't really matter, where one doesn't have to manually care about it at all.

 

Tom's Hardware has a new article up.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-x25-m-vertex,2399.html



Shipping time 3 to 7 days @ $5.95 US I think this a fair deal, Provantage has always been good to me in the past.

http://www.provantage.com/intel-ssdsa2mh080g2r5~7ITE90LM.htm

 

Yep. they raised the CT256M225 price on their website from $599 US to $649 US within the last week or so. About the same time Crucial raised their price, NewEgg did the same.

I got mine for $550 US shipped from another reseller right before the prices went up. One of the few times my timing was right, rather than wrong.

 

Tom' Hardware testing doesn't jive with the results I've been getting from my Summit. Maybe the one they tested had the old firmware or something, mine gets a consistent +21,000 overall HDD suite in PCMARK Vantage.

 

Little rascals. Such low prices were too beautiful to last. Luckily for me i purchased mine before.

 

what's the matter about xp? vista/win7 are only some gb bigger, not much on a 160gb ssd.

 

Hello guys is this SSD good to buy even 128 GB?
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/2846/crucial_m225_256gb_solid_state_disk/index.htmlod

 

Evoss-X,

Since it is based on the Barefoot controller, I would say it would be worth considering. However, because the article you linked to above says it does not have the pins to do a firmware upgrade, I would be a little cautious. Of course, it may already have a firmware version high enough that it doesn't need the pins - but just pointing it out.

Another point is that since you are considering the 128GB size, it might not perform as well as the 256 sample in the article.

Price is what it always comes down to, but this could be a good drive to consider (taking into account that Indilinx and Intel are the two 'recommended' SSD drives currently), just make sure you've done your homework and you will be happy with your purchase - at least for a few months.

What do I mean by 'homework'?

Well, make sure that the benchmarks where the drive excels in are the same type of scenarios that you will be using the drive for.

For more information, see the Anandtech article below:
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

The article is long, but I've read it twice so far and have retrieved more information each time.

 

so, when will anandtech test out barefoot controller based ssds?

waiting for the 4th article

 

I too am waiting for the 4th article from Anand, but as far as I know, the Barefoot controller is the same Indilinx controller found in OCZ's Vertex line of SSD's.

I have a feeling the 4th article from Anand will be featuring Sata3 drives and 3rd or 4th generation drives from each of the leading manufacturers... I wouldn't expect this article too soon - but we can hope.

 

rb89509,

That is a great price for the 80GB G2, too bad I couldn't find a price for the 160GB (G2) version.

I read the Tom's Hardware piece almost when it got posted, but compared to Anand's SSD articles it left me starved for information like an overclocked Extreme Quad Core processor running on a generation 1 JMicron based SSD!

 

Didn't he test the Vertex?

I am a bit confused by your comment. lol

After all, you seem to know a lot about SSD's

 

Hahaha... I think he's testing us!

 

no, barefoot is a different controller from an own, other company. it's a competitor of the indilinx controller.

 

Wait... Indilinx makes the Barefoot controller...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indilinx

At any rate, I wanted to know if anyone could confirm or deny that this drive has an Indilinx controller: http://cgi.ebay.com/RunCore-32GB-Pr...rnal?hash=item2ea77b1f05&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

I'm under the impression that all Runcore Pro IV drives should have it, but I wanted to be absolutely certain before buying some JMicron junk.

 

woah now i have to move back and rethink a lot, looks like i messed something up very badly..

sandforce, i'm thinking of sandforce.. right?

... oh crap..

 

Dave

You just dropped down on my list. lol

Sorry, man. You gotta do better than that!!!

 

haha.. well they do use stupid namings.. indilinx, barefoot, sandforce.. after some long day, one can mess that up

i'm so sorry.. i'm going to hide now behind my intel gen1...

 

Then why Crucial has released a firmware upgrade if it's not possible ??? It was defective under windows seven and will be released fixed later but we can affirm firmwares upgrade are possible on these M225 and seems to be very simple to do if you look at the guide. This firmware upgrade was supposed to support TRIM if you look at the release notes :

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

Also, what would be the performances difference between a M225 64 GB and the 256GB tested by tweaktown ??? Not that huge i hope ?

 

Kallogan,

I didn't say a firmware update wasn't possible. Just pointing out what the article said - just make certain that before putting down your money, you know what you're going to get.

As to the different sizes of SSD's and the performance differences between them, I would say, yes, the differences can be huge. This is because on the lower capacity models, the controllers support much less cache and therefore the performance suffers.

 

difference can be that huge, that half the size means half the speed (latency stays the same)..

that is, if they can fully parallelize the accesses, it would mean the other way around: adding twice the flash allows twice the performance due to parallelization.

i think samsung has this, where the 64gb version performs quite a bit more worse than the 128 and 256gb versions..

if intel would put out a 40gb version, it would quite likely perform worse, too..

 

wow Newegg.ca has listed the G2! wow is it ever over priced. I bought 2 G1's for the same price a couple weeks ago... G1 80GB 234$ each, G2 = 379 for the 80GB!!!

unbelieveable.

 

Yeah you're right. On the official website we see :

CT64M225
Read speeds up to 200MB/s

CT128M225 & CT256M225
Read speeds up to 250MB/s

Well, it won't change the fact that it will be way better than my actual crappy HDD. I'm not that exigent anyway.

From 45MB/s to 200MB/s, the difference is obvious cause it's a 400% improvement but from 200MB/s to 250MB/s i'm not sure you'll see it unless you're benchmarking.

 

Yeah the difference between te 64gb and 256gb version may be slightly noticable but as far as I can tell affect writes more than reads and the 256gb will not be anywhere near 2x as fast.

 

That may very well be true when they're new, but I consider the manufacturer's specs as the Maximum the drive will deliver, so in a used state, the difference between the smallest to the largest may very well be half the performance.

Since the 'used' performance is much lower than the new performance, I think anyone will be able to feel the difference between a 64GB and a 256GB drive, especially as the 64GB will more than likely be used in a more 'full' (greater than 80%) state than the larger drive will be (at least initially, anyways).

As usual, it depends on who is using it and how they're using it!

 

Well as far as I know the only difference in the perfomance of the 64gb and 256gb regarding uses status would be how soon the degradation will be noticable. Aka how long it will take before the entire drive is written to. Once that happens to both I think the difference in performance will again be minimal. And anands article seem to say indilinx drives had the least to gain from trim beacause they handle the degradation fairly well

 

Actually, the way I read it, the Indilinx drives do have the least to gain from trim (as you stated), but their random write performance drops from 44% - 60.5% (depending on specific manufacturer).

With such a huge performance drop, I think I'll stand by my original statement.

(For reference, the Intel G2 Increases it's 4K random write performance).

Edit: Remember that the Indilinx Rnd/Wrt speeds already start at less than 14MB/s (New), and they drop to less than 8MB/s (Used), but the drives that Anand is showing us are all 128GB drives and larger (except for the X25-E, which still kicks A**).

 

I'm waiting for Colossus.. "about 2 weeks" was the official word as of August 3rd. Almost 5 weeks now so we should see it any day.. Also, anyone know what controllers these are using? Supposedly NOT JMicron, although that's what was originally stated.

 

do SLC SSD cells need to be erased on blocks, like MLC cells ??

 

Solid 2 is what I'm really waiting on, although if Colossus is priced properly it's a very attractive solution.

 

What are the pluses of the Solid 2?

 

Intel 34nm flash (Low cost), Indilinx controller. Should result in a very competitively priced drive. Speeds will be in the 100-120 MB/s range which isn't blazing fast, but it's intended to be a low-cost drive and as it is that's faster than any mechanical drives out there. All the positives of a SSD (Access times, multi-tasking, small file access) with none of the negatives (Cost). If OCZ launches it at or around the $2/GB price point it should be a huge hit.

 

yep, sounds nice.. espencially interesting to raid0 them in a pc or bigger laptop

 

I still stand by what I said as well. the only major difference will be in how many gigabytes it will have to write to get to the degraded state but either way, indilinx drives have the wiper tool and will have trim support so the 4k random writes will be at peak anyway...

 

Man, I can't make up my mind about the X25-M SSD I use. Even with the 8820 firmware, once I filled it up to 70%, its having issues which I have to say its related to the SSD. It's weird. It does not happen on my Atom 1.33GHz UMPC with a 3600RPM HDD but this Core 2 E6600 desktop with X25-M it happens.

I can't use Firefox without major annoyance. I have to use IE sometimes because FF consistently freezes for 5-6s every time I open up a tab or a website. And I know its not the browser, because when I used IE exclusively, IE lagged out while FF didn't. It's like the system knows I use a certain browser and ONLY lags out that one. I tried to see using benchmarks, but they are way too stupid to know what's the real culprit. Showing 50MB/s in sequential and random write 4K in CDM does not tell me why frequently used browser freezes.

The only way I figure to fix this is to to HDDErase and reinstall everything. It's like a Defrag but worse! I have to erase everything everytime I do a SSD-defrag!

Seriously. I want a RAID-0 HDD with Braidwood, thanks...

Those non-Braidwood believers:

Unlike Turbo Memory, Braidwood will offer FAR higher throughput. While Turbo Memory barely reached 35MB/s with sequential read, Braidwood is supposed to offer at least 200MB/s. Some diagrams I have seen suggests a multi-channel link with 133MB/s EACH! If they use the same 34nm flash with similar algorithms(but optimized for caching), we'll have the best of both.

 

Have you tried peacekeeper browser benchmark?

 

They better make it so i can use it for as high a storage capacity as i want, otherwise i'll just stick with SSD's. I want my games to be able to fit on there too. not just the OS and a couple small apps.

I was looking for that more recent braidwood link from a couple weeks ago, but couldn't find it. Does anyone have it still? I have time to read it now or any good source on it...

 

Update, maybe its not the SSD. Sigh back to work from beginning. Ignore my rant earlier(BTW Braidwood is supposed to able to give users all the space to act like a 16GB SSD if the user wishes). XD

 

I missed something. What is this 16 gb you're talking about?

 

To all
interesting article : http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-x25-m-vertex,review-31671.html

 

I'm pretty sure Colossus is a 3.5inch drive. so if I'm wright it definatly won't go into any notebooks.

 

Braidwood got cut out of the entire P55 platform so seeing as Intel has their X58/P55 roadmap planned out until at least late 2010 (Westmere, Gulftown, etc), you won't see Braidwood before 2011 if it comes out at all.

 

If you read the original source it says they might just resort to a software rather than hardware solution. P57 is supposedly scrapped but H57 and Q57 is not so what to say to that?

 

None of the 5 series Intel chipsets are getting Braidwood.

 

yeah BUCK braidwood if it's only gonna give me 16gb!!! intel needs to just throw their ssd controler on the motherboard and connect it to a pci-express slot, then all we gotta do is buy neatly packaged flash chips however big you want, FOR CHEAP, and enjoy us some nice intel ssd random write speed!!!

 

The "FOR CHEAP" is the problem. they make far more money by making the controller and chips as a combo.

 

restart-time