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

Tell your friend that everything is faster. Apps open more quickly, databases fly, even Microsoft Outlook works well. I used to think that Outlook was the world's slowest database. I have one search folder that aggregates content from several folders. Previously it took 20 seconds to generate the screen. Now it takes two.

Even my Dragon NaturallySpeaking is more responsive. This is odd to me because I thought that Dragon loaded all the necessary files into RAM at startup. Apparently not. By the way, Dragon loads in half the time.

I would love to see someone do a test and put an Intel G2 into an older laptop and compare it to a brand-new laptop with a Seagate 7200.4. Maybe a first generation Intel dual-core processor at 2.0 GHz compared to a brand-new dual core at, say, 2.6 GHz. Same laptop manufacturer, use the same amount of RAM, etc. For typical office productivity, database and internet I bet the old laptop would feel more responsive and do tasks faster.


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I need something to show him. He's one of those friends that doesn't believe anything you say, you must show him. Not a real great friend now that I think about it, but I do want to spite him with evidence.

 

I'll make video of opening few programs on SSD and HDD, and test reboot time with SSD and HDD on same notebook.

I'll let You know when all is done.

 

Why not just show him HDTune and Iometer charts that constantly show that a single SSD is typically faster than RAID velociraptors

Also let him know that with .1ms access time that alot of jobs that a Hard Drive does are finsihed on a SSD before the mechanical drive has even gotten through with its 12+ms access time

Or you could always youtube the Samsung video that shows the SSD's installing Office 2007 before a similiar disc can be dropped and hit the ground

 

I can not wait to have an SSD for my desktop or laptop. I just need the price to drop. Unfortunately they are still too high. Any word on a price drop?

 

No 'official' word at least, but my guess is that distributors will keep the prices as high as possible for the holidays, drop by a few percent for the official sales (Boxing Day, etc.), then the real savings should be realized around end of Jan beginning of Feb 2010.

In other words, business as usual.

The only bright spot on the horizon is that there were a few 'new' SSD's introduced in the last few days so hopefully, these will further push the prices down on all SSD's - once, of course, there is enough inventory from all manufacturers so that they feel they 'need' to move it - and move it quickly.

 

SSD's are not new but consumer level affordability of SSD's is. Heck it hasn't been many years that todays several hundred dollar SSD would cost several thousands--even 10's of thousands. The HDD is easily the weakest link on a computer system with nothing faster than the CPU. RAM is extremely fast when even compared to the fastest SSD's let alone a mechanical hard drive. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU and RAM is if your overall system performance is bottlenecked by the HDD.

 

How about this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Po_OUhWqo

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJMGAdpCLVg&NR=1

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elujjdo_8XU&NR=1

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmtRIrlUIks&feature=related

or

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ssd+vs.+raptor&search_type=&aq=f

If he doesn't believe after a few of those, then just how much of a doubting Thomas is he!

 

So with the Win7 official release, do the Trim is supported by X25-m or will we have to wait for a firware update or windows update?

 

We still need the firmware update Intel has promised for the G2's.

 

Cheers guys,

 

Reboot time with HDD is 81 sec and with SSD 35 (average after three reboots).

Opening nine programs (Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Firefox, Dev Cpp, Photoshop CS2, MS Visio 2000, MS Visual Studio 2005, Adobe Premiere CS4, Google Earth and Macromedia Flash 8) takes 3 minutes and 6 seconds on HDD and 56 seconds on SSD.

Notebook is Dell Latitude D620, Intel Core Duo T2300E 1.66 GHz, 2 x 1GB DDR2 667 MHz running XP Pro SP2.

Download here.

Here is one video too.

 

Hey guys....the highest capacity Intel MLC SSDs I see right now are 160GB. Are we going to see a 250GB model or higher anytime soon?

And just to clarify, Intel is still considered the best right?

 

yes, intel is considered the best overall performer for consumers. 160GB is the largest current intel drive and they announced 320GB models for the end of this year but im not sure when they will ACTUALLY come out

 

Question for those who are/have putting SSDs into their notebooks:

-How are you getting your OS back onto it? Cloning? Recovery Discs?

-I've heard on stuff like cloning can be messy with SSDs because you have to align the partition even with w7, is this true? Is this dependent on the SSD drive?

-Used state performance: say I buy a drive without trim support, for those who own drives with moderate-heavy use and wont have trim support is there actually ANY real world performance decrease?

-Most laptops outside of IBM look like they use SATA-I still, will I be bottlenecked in read/write performances?

 

Pretty all current notebooks use SATA/300, so you won't be bottlenecked at all. IBM doesn't exist anymore in the notebook world, now they're notebooks are sold under Lenovo (which ironically had a big issue b/c they only supported SATA/150 in their last generation).

 

Ok thanks. And when are the 3rd gen MLC drives coming out? Why is it so hard to find info on these?

Also, is it worth upgrading to the X-25E series if you've got the cash or is there very little performance difference?

 

Depends on your usage. They do offer better performance in certain applications but they also have a significantly higher power consumption.

 

I hope you guys dont mind I go off topic for a sec.

Anyone in this forums with first gen samsung SSD having huge shutter problem? My Corsair S128 aka Samsung 128 is lately having huge pause.

The shuttering is killing me... makes me want to get a Intel Gen2.

 

Putting OS on SSD is same as putting it on HDD, so cloning will work.

It's good to have aligned disk, because it will improve small writes (4 KB writes), but if disk is unaligned You can align it without doing fresh install and without loosing any data(it worked for me).

With my SSD I can see that it's slower then it was just when benchmarking it, probably I don't feel it working on notebook because I'm not heavy user.

 

hello guys, i got a ssd (intel postville) and win7 x64. The defrag got disabled automatically but superfetch is still enabled. shouldnt it be disabled as it writes/deleted alot on the same one sector? Or will this sector live long enough so its not needed to be cared & disabled about?

thanks

 

Your controller will make sure the same sector isnt written to everytime. Plus i think we baby SSD's a bit much. with 10K write cycles these drives have a HUGE lifespan already, we'll be using SATA3 drives long before this current generation of SSD's finally start to die off due to cell death.

So just leave it on if you want to. Its not as helpful with a SSD due to the insanely fast speeds we have, but it still will show some improvement in OS usability

 

Every time I have installed Windows 7 superfetch has been disabled. If I run the troubleshooter in control panel after install it says superfetch is not running. I click next and it asks me if I want to fix this "problem" as an administrator. I always do and don't notice a difference.

 

I wonder whether this is a big issue or a nano-issue. I haven't seen anyone hit the SATA I bandwidth limit in a real-life test with any SSD. A person would have to be copying a sequential file from one SSD to another SSD (how in a notebook?) for it to hit the SATA I limit, and I haven't heard of anyone doing that. Plus it would have to be a really large file (> 1GB) for it to make any real world difference.

 

I'm not 100% sure, but i'm pretty sure i've seen it somewhere along the line... back me up if anyone recalls anything specific

 

T61, X61, generation has SATA capped to 1.5

 

Check out the Lenovo thread, even speeds well under the SATA/150 limit are capped for some reason (ie. random read/writes).

 

Ryder @ OCZ support forums says they have the new Samsung MLC firmware but Samsung isn't authorizing release to public until end of November.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61515&page=12

 

Looks like Samsung is getting ready with a new version of their SSDs:

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/flash/ssd/2008/product/pcLineup.html

With a typo for their current 5128GB SSD (128GB)

 

Before I bought my Lenovo I learned that they chose to underclock the SATA bus to improve battery life. There is a whole thread on the Lenovo forum where a couple of guys are so upset that they want to start a class action suit. I still haven't seen or heard how it will make one whit of difference in real life. Does anyone here copy > 1GB files to RAM on a regular basis?

Let's think for a moment. Opening a 100MB file at 260MB/sec is 0.385 seconds, and at 140MB/sec (my Lenovo with Intel G2) is 0.714 seconds. And that presumes the file is a sequential read (not likely with a 100MB file). Plus it would be a pretty odd program that doesn't need to read a few dozen other small files along with that transfer. So I'm not quite sure what the fuss is all about.

 

The G3 Intel SSDs won't be out for a while huh?

 

its all depends on the end users. I have 60G files on my hard drive, if I back up all the files by SATAI, it will take forever to do it...

 

I back up my 200GB HDD every few weeks. Takes frigging hours (overnight), even over eSATA.

 

should come out q1 2010 according to the roadmad

 

Back up to what though?

If you back up to a hard drive in your notebook, then no hard drive comes close to the SATA I limit of 150MB/sec. The bus speed isn't the limitation.

If you back up to an external drive, then the speed is limited by USB or Firewire. Neither comes close to the SATA I limit.

A person could back up an SSD to another SSD connected by eSATA to the optical drive bay. Then the speeds would be limited by whether the files are sequential or fragmented. Since a pure sequential read over 60GB or 200GB is pretty much guaranteed not to happen, then the SATA I limit is not likely to make much of a difference. I've never seen a test.

Besides, don't you back up in the background? Please tell me you aren't sitting there with a beer watching the hourglass.

I'd like everyone's input but I can think of only one scenario where the SATA I limit would matter: if you open gigabyte-sized files (data files, not programs) into RAM, and the files are sequential on the drive, and the program opens nothing else with the data file.

 

Lenovo said that SATA controller is SATA 300 capable, but it isn't and reason is lower power consumption.

That's what the fuss is all about.

 

I love my ssd, but there's one thing that is becoming very hard to overcome... space! With all the great game sales lately, I have been buying a lot of games. But with all my data files, my 128gb ssd can't take it. I even bought a 48gb expresscard ssd, but I still need more space. Does anyone know of a magically super compression program?

 

get 2 256G SSD from DELL, its on sale for $460, if you can find a coupon, it gonna be cheaper

 

Depending on what you mean by "3rd gen". If you are looking for the TRUE 3rd generation aka "Taylorsville", that won't be for a while. But the 320GB update to the X25-M along with Postville-derivative should be out sometime around next year. I'm thinking somewhere around Late Q1/Early Q2. The Postville-refresh should be the real deal with performance improvement focus(rather than price as with current Postville G2).

Being an extremely competitive market, any future roadmaps or indications of future products will be heavily guarded secret for most manufacturers.

 

My take on this is that Intel will release the G3 SSD's when it 'has' to.

So far, it can't even supply enough G2's and even the original G1's are still regarded as 'the' drive to have for a workstation user (assuming the price is right, of course).

I think that Intel could have supplied us with the 320GB SSD's when the G2's were announced, but again, they didn't have to.

As a company, I can see them getting some of their initial investment/research back with these G1/G2 drives and holding the G3's for if and when they need them.

They seemed to release the G2's just when the Vertex drives started getting good (via firmware). I suspect the G3's will be offered (at higher capacities then what's available currently) when the G2's are actually sitting on store shelves (virtual or otherwise) waiting to be purchased (at or below their introductory price of lots of 1,000).

I hope I'm wrong, but like I said, as a company/business you can't really fault their thinking.

 

has anyone ever used windows compression on the entire os drive? I don't care about performance, but if it saves a lot of gb, I would do it.

 

So with a 56% increase in sequential reads and a 74% increase in random reads, this looks like an awesome introduction of a new SSD controller, but when we consider the access time is 60% higher (0.16 ms vs. 0.10 ms) there still seems to be some work to do on the newcomer Marvel SSD controller.

All above comparisons are based off an Intel G2 SSD.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/6-gb-s-sata,2457-2.html

 

Also, have to see how power consumption is...

 

As long as the idle power is similar (or better) the overall power consumption should be lower as the higher performance should lead to even more time at idle than SSD's now enjoy.

As for peak power consumption, I would expect it to increase as these new SSD's should be better able to feed the CPU and keep it pegged to 100%.

I think that version 4 SSD's should have this 'power' issue under control while delivering even more performance than what is now promised - but I hope to be proved wrong and v3 SSD's offer these power benefits from the start.

 

There are several enterprise drives that have this performance (SATA/600 or SAS) but even those that don't have extremely high power consumption relative to their consumer parts. For example, check out Intel's X25-E power consumption. So we'll see whether or not this makes it into the low power envelope of consumer drives.

 

new trim firmware for intel G2 SSD's is available

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20091026comp.htm?iid=pr1_releasepri_20091026m

with a performance boost to sequential write speeds for 34nm X25-M 160GB (up to 100MB per second)

which is imho unfair to the 80Gb G2 users

 

I can't really agree that its unfair, as all SSD's at the lower capacities of each manufacturer's line is rated lower than their bigger capacity models.

I think it has to do with a decrease in life expectancy, the higher the write speed (and the smaller the size/capacity) of the drive.

 

oh Samsung, where is your new firmware??

 

Here is performance brand new:


Here is performance after one month of usage:


Here is performance after firmware upgrade (it is not clear if I successfully ran the TRIM tool because it seemed to only run for 1 second and then said "passed"):

 

Looking good!