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

Wanted to let everyone know that I (finally) got my 8GB of RAM for my VAIO!

I certainly use it (multiple photo editing applications) and I knew what performance boost it would be from my desktop which also has 8GB of RAM too.

The problem is that on the notebook I don't have an X25-M (or the VRaptor I have powering my desktop), so having multiple programs running right now is, uh, 'painful'. Whoa! I didn't see that coming.

I can actually make the notebook come to it's knees (unresponsive to mouse and keyboard) and there is still plenty of RAM free (2GB+).

I searched a little on the web and came across eBoostr and downloaded not the current trial they have, but rather the v4 Beta.

This 2.5MB app gives you up to 4GB cache on each different device (USB stick, RAM, ExpressCard SSD, etc.) that it supports.

I tried it with 4GB of RAM cached on my Win 7 Ultimate install.

Zowie! This is what 8GB of ram should feel like!

(Remember, this is with my 5400RPM 500GB Scorpio Blue HD).

Everything is very responsive and as long as I don't fire up every single photo editing program like I do on the desktop, the 4GB left over is more than enough for those programs to fly.

Now, I'm wondering how floored I'm going to be when I finally get the X25-M in this notebook.

So, has anyone here used eBoostr and do you think it's worth the price? Any compatibility issues?

Oh! Before I forget, with eBoostr, I was able to run the computer on battery for 1 Hr and 40 Min (with 8GB of RAM), whereas before I was able to run for about 1 Hr and 20 Min (with only 4GB of RAM).

This is simply email and web browsing, but I've never seen it run this long before (and I'll test it without eBoostr to see if just the 8GB of RAM is making this 25% difference - will let everyone know).

If anyone has any experience with this eBoostr program, please speak up!

 

I knew I'd feel the wrath of the gamers here , but notebook makers make too many tweaks to the drivers so that they are better suited to their version of the hardware.

A true gamer would keep pursuing different drivers until they found the performance and/or the stability they want, but for normal people it's easier to say 'stick to the notebook manufacturer's drivers'.

 

I don't know if this is where he got it from but I placed an order yesterday for a 160GB G2 in that price range from ShopBLT. They're supposed to be getting a ton in stock today.

http://www.shopblt.com/cgi-bin/shop...300000U0123_BBC4879P.shtml&order_id=433841110

 

Sometimes M$ will have the best updates and most stable/compatible drivers on their site.
After all you are using Windows so I think they know a little about what will work with their OS. lol
I wouldn't update video drivers from Win Update, but def other drivers.

Anyway, my original problem isn't video driver related. It happens with the Vertex and not my Seagate 7200.4.

 

your "the talk" doesn't fit in general. in general, taking the windows updates is the best thing, really.

but there are some pcs and laptops, where the actual certified drivers from the manufacturers (because THATS what you get from windows update) fail to work. but i don't call those pc's or laptops, i call those craptops, as they fail to work as they should.

and this has nothing to do with tweaked drivers for the laptops, windows update detects that.



and btw, your problem still doesn't have to be vertex-related per se. at least, win7 did the same on my laptop after standby, and i have a x25-m. but vista doesn't do it, and i'm glad anyways to be back to vista

 

Alright now my babies are running strong!

Does anyone have RAID0 vertexes to compare?

 

Nice! Did you simply enable write caching?

 

Just an update on battery time with 8GB of RAM.

In my previous post with a 4GB eBoostr RAM cache and 8GB RAM I achieved 100 minutes on battery. (That's 20 minutes more than I was getting with 4GB RAM).

Uninstalling eBoostr and running a similar test (email, web browsing) I am back to my previous 4GB RAM battery run time of about 80 minutes. So it seems like eBoostr does cut down on power usage (as it claims).

Doesn't seem too popular here though? Oh well, I guess I'll have to test it for myself.

The current beta version (v4) offers full functionality until Oct 31, 2009... is anyone else willing to try it along with me?

http://beta.eboostr.com/download/

Edit: As I was typing this (but before I posted it), my computer hibernated. Actual run time with no eBoostr and 8GB RAM was 73 minutes. (7 minutes less than with no eBoostr and 4GB RAM).

Thought:
So double the RAM (4 to 8 GB's) only uses 7 minutes of battery or about 9% worse in my system. That means that eBoostr actually gave me 27 more minutes of battery life (with a 4GB RAM cache) or almost 37% better battery life. That's not too bad for the asking price of $39 USD.

I'll keep testing this interesting software (now, I wish I could have 12GB+ in my notebook).

 

Out of curiousity I wanted to see how quickly the Intel G2's were selling on ShopBLT.com. When I ordered there were only a few left. Then yesterday afternoon the inventory jumped up to 200. Now it's down to zero but with 300 coming in.

http://www.shopblt.com/cgi-bin/shop...300000U0123_BBC5240P.shtml&order_id=433841110

Looks like it is still the best deal on the G2, now at $254 including shipping. Amazon had it yesterday for $269 plus tax and shipping, not bad for Amazon. Newegg is still seeking foolish or uninformed customers at $380.

I remember that Intel was charging $225 for these drives in bulk, so I guess Newegg would rather make $155 gross profit on a few unsuspecting souls than $30 on lots of customers. Newegg leverages its brand and customer loyalty to make big profits; ShopBLT uses this chance to gain new loyal customers.

Ah, capitalism.

 

yup! that's all i did since the last bench...

the only thing i did along with the fresh install that might be considered a tweak (of course i disabled defrag and restore) was align the partitions to 128kb because i read a lot of people having trouble with there vertex in RAID0 so i thought i'd try that to be safe. in theory it sounded good but truthfully i don't really know if it makes a difference, but my agilities sure are running great!!!!!

 

haha newegg origianally was selling them for a mear $229.99. by your numbers, that's only a 4.99 profit...

 

From what I've read (OCZ's marketing department posted this on XtremeSystems), Vertex drives use Samsung NAND, Agility drives use any one of a couple other manufacturers. Usually the NAND is slower, which is why the drives are priced lower, but there's also a chance the non-Samsung NAND will be faster than the Vertex -- so Agility as a whole is a slower drive, but there's a potential for it to be faster all around than the Vertex series.

 

yeah Anand's article said it either uses 50nm intel or 40nm toshiba, and the toshiba is faster than the intel

 

It's interesting to see your write speeds so high up there with the reads. I can't recall if this is because of the controller or the RAID alone?

 

Mormegil83, can You post Crystal Disk Mark results?

Thanks!

 

My ATTO scores are all over the place...

 

What is the best SSD for my money right now at a reasonable price (64GB and 128 GB)?

 

Is that just one 60gb summit??? Something looks really wrong there...

When I get a chance, I'll download crystal mark

 

yeah 1 ssd...try this benchmark

 

OCZ Agility

Last I check it was $150 on Newegg for 64 GB (60GB in their marketing sizes), and $270 for 120GB.

 

Depends on where you are. In the US, the best deal is the OCZ Vertex 60GB from circuitcity.com for about $137 after bing cashback, OCZ and Paypal rebates. Their 120GB version also has the same cashback and rebates.

 

Damnit, shopblt pushed back all of the ship dates for the 160GB G2!

 

Should be very close to get the Vertex from Circuit City.

They have Rebate + 15% Bing Cashback + $20 off paypal cashback, and free ship.

Puts it like $270 or a bit less after tax. I am kinda tempted

The $60gb is not quite as good of a deal, it has a respecable $30 MIR, and it has the 15% cashback but they want $190 for it.... But I guess if you did the math its still a good deal and since the $30 is a MIR you should get the extra $20 paypal credit also.

 

As I posted several messages up, the Vertex 60GB goes for $137 after all the cashbacks and rebates. It is a great deal.

There was a great deal yesterday. Buy.com was selling the 80GB Intel G2 MLC for $227 on eBay. There is a 8% cashback to lower the price, but we in California have to pay sales tax. That sold out today.

 

Yeah, I jumped on the circuit city vertex

$137 was a good price-point for me for a 60GB SSD...

 

Tax for the Vertex kinda made it not so good of a deal for me.

Also sometime between last night and now the 15% cashback for CC just dropped to 10%

Im just gonna sit tight for the G2 160gb intel, thats what I want and if something comes out that is better during that time its all the better for me, or I assume when they are readily available we will see some nice price cuts on the competition.

 

Photofast V2 IDE 50 pin 1.8 drive in a Core Solo U1400 2GB laptop.

Promised speeds are Read upto 85 MB/s Write upto 50 MB/s. Access times are 0.4. The laptop is fast booting up and in use.

However, write speeds seems nowhere near the promised 50MB/s. Read speeds are close enough. I have seen it top 70MB/s.





I do have a Samsung SLC drive in another old ultraportable but I don't have the time to run any tests on that right now. This a fairly new drive the Photofast one so i thought i would post some results.

 

I just think it's funny how much the G2 Intels are going for nowadays (I guess Newegg is the highest) when pre-release it was thought the 80GB would be ~$229. I'm probably going to end up getting a Patriot or Crucial 64 or 128GB Indilinx drive soon (or failing that an OCZ Agility.) Really trying to hold out as long as I can til the Win 7 release because I know new models may come or prices may drop.

 

A new operating system that has good rep like win7 will promote upgrading to a point, the TRIM support might even increase the demand, but who knows for sure, but my guess is that upon release its gona be more expensive and harder to get. But then again there that saying "Good things come to those who wait" i just never could be one of those .

 

I guess you missed it. The 80GB gen2 x25-m was on sale yesterday for about $210 on buy.com's ebay site.

 

Start-up Claims SSD Achieves 180,000 IOPS just for your info

 

180K IOPS is insane, but for a heavy server environment it will rock.

I wonder if the next round of SSD's will be focusing on the channels. It seems like the controllers are really good right now, and that the amount of available channels are what could possibly be what increases performance so much.

Intel is getting its amazing IOPS using 10 and Indilinix is currently using 4 or 6 (cant remember) Wonder if moving to more channels will greatly increase performance.

 

It says Pliant Technology is using two SLC drives in RAID 0. What would two Intel SLC drives do today if Intel used the SAS interface? Is this Pliant Technology announcement really that big a deal?

 

I am new to SSD but I am looking to possibly purchase one since the prices are looking a bit better, I didn't see anything about Kingston SSD in the OP so I was wondering if you guys had an opinion on these (lowest priced ones)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...421430849&Description=kingston ssd&name=128GB

 

I would think that it's a little too soon to ask for such specific since the market for consumers SSDs is still relatively new.

In the beginning, there is always going to be quality--for a price--and then budget for everyone else. For the quality it's best to look to Intel and Samsung. But be prepared to pay significantly to get their performance advantage. In the case of some budget priced SSDs, there may not be any increase in performance at all.

From what I've been able to glean, there are still many variables to be overcome at this point. Nevertheless, a lot of the advantage of SSDs depends on their application.

 

2x Intel X25-E in RAID0 max out at 70K IOPS for random 4K reads and 6.6K IOPS for random 4K writes. Don't know sustained IOPS.

 

well, in switzerland, the 160gb intel ssd just dropped that night below 500sfr (around 500$). now, for 498.52 sfr

but at least, in around a week, it dropped 30 sfr.. hope it continues like that

 

What happens with an SDD when you restore an image of its initail state? does it return to how fast it was or you still need to do the HDDERASE before your restore the image?

 

With older drives you would need to HDDErase it again. You won't need to with the SSDs that will support TRIM in a few months such as Vertex and X25-M G2 as long you don't mind waiting for TRIM support to become available (it already is, I think, with the Indilix drives).

 

the v-series is jmicron with new firmware as I understand.

A better value would be 120GB OCZ Agility

please note the $40 rebate making this an excellent value.

 

Restoring an image will not change the cells back to a "Like New" state. It will simply make the data that the computer reads from the drive match the image.

I hope others can understand that...

 

Yes. The image is merely an asbtraction of the data on the drive. What happens on the cell level is not so much a one-to-one correspondence to what happens on the general OS GUI. So, even if the image is from a computer that was JUST recently HDDerased, the cells won't be like the original image.

 

Intel® X25-M 80GB 2.5” SATA SSD Solid State Drive
Total Price: $249.99 Usually ships within 8-9 weeks lol

 

Not a bad price, but man 8-9 weeks before it ships is insane. I'd rather just wait until the next gens are just readily available.

 

Hi i just placed best ofer on Samsung 128 GB
I might have it for 175 pounds
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Samsung-MMCRE...5ee265654&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14#ht_1677wt_1165

I think this is very good ssd speed 220 read and 200 write ..

 

The Intel G2s are available now. I ordered mine last Friday 9/11 from BLT for $250. My first time with BLT so we'll see how it goes, but it is supposed to arrive tomorrow. Availability changes often so check back a couple of times a day.

Real time inventory link: http://www.shopblt.com/cgi-bin/shop...1300000U0123_BBC5240P.shtml&order_id=!ORDERID!

 

If you've been following this thread at all, you'd know that the sequential speeds doesn't make a SSD good. But at least the Samsung controller is very conservative power consumption wise.

 

Heres an 80gb gen2 in stock $248
http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=SSDSA2MH080G2C1&vid=211&src=F

Edit: when I posted @05:46 the link showed 216 available, now @ 07:41 it shows 79.

 

Heh, I wonder if it's because of actual end users or ebay resellers looking to make a quick buck off of the high demand.

 

That's not a bad deal (I bought one for $230, or ~120 pounds). The best thing going for Samsung is that they have very low power consumption. My battery life increases by 2 hours compared to a normal HDD, a 25% increase.