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

So it looks like the controller is the main issue (with MLC).... Anyone know which controllers the newer 64GB and 128GB Samsung MLC SSDs are coming with? (from Dell etc)

 

All I have to say about the Intel drive is..... RAID 0 anyone?

 

OCZ core v2 has the same issues as v1..see ocztechnologyforum

 

now i can't wait for the SLC version. not that i'll buy one of those ever in life, but, you know...

then again, if the SLC's get out as 1.8", i may get interested in my next small notebook for the ultimative speed

now, close to 100 pages after starting the thread, we're close to the perfect ssd. now we'll have to wait for lower prices and higher capacities. and, for s-ata 3

 

So Intel goes "way high" with the number of controller interfaces into the SSD and comes away with stellar performance results.

This is with "slower" MLC and it smokes just about everything out there in performance. Not bad for a first attempt.

Yes, the Intel drives are expensive, but they also have a history of dropping price and increasing performance. And since they're the king of the performance hill they can price at the high end of the market until someone betters them.

Cheers,

 

so, the big question now: where to get them??

 

And how much will the cost?

I've seen $595 for 1000. How about just one?

 

the OCZ core series SSDs are all on clearance now with manufacturer's rebates. 32gb for $99, 64gb for $179, 128gb for $374, 60gb for $219, 120gb for $439.

Mwave

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=50001550%2040000636&Manufactory=1550&SubCategory=636&SpeTabStoreType=0


The patriot 64gb is $199 after rebates too.

So, are they worth it? I don't remember what the problems with the OCZ core series are, or if there is any way to circumvent the problem (ie. RAID).



edit: would they be worth getting for my desktop? I just lost my main boot drive for my desktop this weekend. >_<

 

lets buy 1000 together and resell them.. hm, isn't that the job of resellers?

hm.. can't wait.

 

No, the OCZ/Patriot/Super Talent MLC drives are not worth getting. There are numerous articles outlining the deficiencies of these drives.

 

In anandtech's review of intel's SSD, it shows the OCZ Core getting worst battery life than a seagate 7200.2 notebook drive. If there's any reason i'm getting an SSD, it's to improve battery life, close second is bootup time. And if it can't deliver that, it's not worth it.
I don't mind the write stuttering, since i put a write filter on top of the OS partition anyways. At current prices, i would have gotten the Core if not for the crappy battery runtime. Hopefully the samsung SLC drive will come down in price to compete against the intel.

 

Might as well forget about the ssd then because you probably won't achieve any noticeable battery diff. As for the infamous 'pause' you would have to experience it to understand how much it would get under your nerves. I did for a short period with one of the Sansisk 5000's I was testing last year.

From what I am continually seeing, I don't really understand why there is even talk of the mlc drives at this point and time. The Samsung I would be curious about if anyone wants to pipe up and give some test results and opinion. Dell has been very hesitant to send me the much promised Samsung mls ssd....and I have a pretty good guess as to why. One thing I have always been is impartial and honest.

 

All the next generation of SSDs with higher capacity will have to be MLC.
I don't think there are real efforts to produce SLC chips beyond the 16Gb densitities. Although theoretically you could always get an SLC with 1/2 the MLC capacity by just using each cell as SLC. Anyhow MLC is the only real solution to density issues.

 

Well, the intel gives some 30mins of continuous extra time. Since i don't use my hard drive in a continuous fashion, it becomes significant enough that i wait for one that is both energy efficient and cheap.

 

I guess people are talking about MLC because the best SSD available this week appears to be Intel's new MLC.

From the Anandtech article and other reading it's pretty clear the main performance issues have been due to the JMicron controller on OCZ and other MLC offerings, and it's obvious that Intel has done a much better job, with an on-die buffer big enough to handle random writes.

We have yet to see it go head to head against the Samsung MLC, but maybe Dell just doesn't want to send you a drive cause you are always tooting your own horn and reselling the drives here.

 

eheh good one. I never believed that I toot my horn but, oh well, to each their own I guess. If it appears as such apologies. I come here for only one purpose now adays and thats to help where I can.

As far as what people are talking about, it is the mlc solely because of the size capacity and price together. SLC is, without a doubt, the better drive but the consumer just can't afford it.

The intel drive, as with all other mlc's, will undoubtedly only be tested in the hands of the consumer which again is a risky proposition.

Nice to know I got the ears of such an avid contributor though....you seemed to be thanking me for my posts in your past posts eheh.

 

Les...please, just continue to share your insights w/ others and myself on NBR about what you believe to be the best performing SSDs now and in the near future; backed up by good sources and testing of course; and I shall listen to your call. I shall hearken to your voice when you speak about SSDs. You have alot of familiarity and understanding on how they work etc. I trust your judgment and w/ that I shall decide on which route to go with. If you say SLCs are the best, **** it they are the best! I'm not the average consumer....If it performs well...imma get it. I said this before and i'll say it again, if it wasn't for you and NBR I wouldn't have known WTH SSDs were. Now, they are an option in the latest models of laptops being built by manufacturers such as Toshiba, HP, Dell and IBM.

 

Les, I respect your opinions regarding SSDs you have provide probably what is the most comprehensive information available anywhere on the web. As for the MLC vs SLC debate. MLC is the future. With respect to practical scaling SLC has already reached its limits. MLC currently using 2 levels per cell will scale to 3 then 4 levels per cell.

With respect to the writing issues this is not a limitation of MLC NAND Flash. Only the controllers. Consider the max. access times for SLC and MLC flash (samsung) are 25 us and 70 us respectively. Typical page program times are 250 us and 1.2 ms respectively as well. It's pretty obvious that the controllers are the botttleneck here. Once that issue is taken care of then SLC would still be ~4 times faster than MLC. However at this point the speed of either type is cell is more than sufficient. (I am disregarding that MLC controllers may be slower than SLC controllers, and they probably are due to being more complex).

With controller technologies advancing (within 1~2 years?) SLC will probably be obsolete from the consumer market. (there may still be special applications with data reliability which make SLC better). MLC will provide nearly same speeds as SLC chips (within ~a few percent) while giving you double the density at the same cost.

Also note that drive reliability increases with increase in density (at the same data write rate per day). So once we reach 512GB+ MLC reliability will be more than enough for anyone (50+ years?)

Most of what i'm saying is based on work and research I have done while working on next generation memories (RRAM).

 

Very interesting, dseo80. This is just the type of info I was looking for. Bottom line, should I get the Intel MLC 80GB when it comes out? Capacity is third with me after reliability and SPEED. I still get the feeling that MLC, for whatever reason, is possibly not RELIABLE enough. I do understand that your post tells me I am wrong on this, and I hope I am. Still waiting, Dave

 

if the drive is for consumer purposes and you're not going to be read/writing to it non stop 24/7 then sure. its likely youll upgrade to something far bigger and better and quicker in a few years anyway. really i wouldnt give it a second thought, assuming you can afford the drive. of course like everyone you should backup critical data routinely, but you shouldnt be more worried about the drive dying in 5 years than you are of your current drives dying in 5 years.

 

**** it...dseo80 looks smart in the avatar and seems to know what they're talking about. MLC, SLC, MLC, SLC....enee, menee, minee, mo!

 

newkleer, got it! I agree! And although I canot afford it, Master Card can! Life is short.

And makaveli72, just noticed your avatar and it ROCKS. That was and is a **** fine movie Dave (world's oldest teenager

 

If you need to write and rewrite ALOT of data (~1TB/day) very often then No. Regardless of what intel says one disadvantage MLC will have at these small densities are limited endruance (the number of times the same cell can be written to).

However consider: if you rewrite your entire 80GB SDD every day. It would still take 10,000 cycles or 28 years before the flash failed. If wear leveling is implemented very well as in the intel drive (as i assume it is), the drive will be obsolete technology long before failure. Also note as the density of drives increases (128GB, 256GB, 512GB) for the same usage lifetime increases. The small endurance of MLC cells only becomes an issue when densities are small (think back to 1GB, 2GB USB flash drives). Then its likely you could write and rewrite these drives many times per day. For massive SSDs (64GB+) i dont really see an issue in reliability.

In conclusion: should you buy the drive? If you have the money and dont need large capacity drives then YES. The intel drive looks to offer a substantial improvement over previous SSDs as well as all conventional HDDs.

Personally I think the drive its too much right now, if it was 120GB at that price I would be very tempted to buy one. However the samsung 128 GB SSD (which has yet to prove itself ofcourse...) offered in dell laptops is only 450$ (with so many dell coupons its actually less). Thats ~30% more storage for ~50% of the price (again i stress the performance of the drive will be very important). Even if it offers performance near the current 64GB SLC SSD from samsung (and i believe it will, samsung's philosophy isn't release of "budget" class devices that suffer in performance for gain in price) it seems like a better buy than the intel drive.

Unfortunately the same 128GB samsung drives seem to be on ebay for much more (~$1000).

*I neglected to mention anything about what happens when a failure actually DOES occur, you lose 2 bits in an MLC but only 1 bit in and SLC and this makes correcting the error much easier in SLC devices, however probability that First a failure needs to occur, Then it has to be recoverable in the SLC device but not the MLC device statistically small enough to ignore.

EDIT: I would also like to point out that when I previously said MLC is the future of SSDs I am talking about MLC in future SSDs and Intel's SSDs. Les's opinion regarding current MLC SSDs using Jmicron controller (OCZ Core, Ridata blah blah) are 100% on the mark in regards to speed and performance. In addition reliability in current Jmicron controller based SSDs seem to lack reliability due to some issues with the controller as well (data corruption being reported in both dell and ocz forums).

 

Thank you. I have been folllowing this thread since its first post, and there is an amazing amount of information here. This Jmicron controller issue does bother me. All along, it was said that an SSD would be a better safer place to keep your data. It is hard to remember the last time a spinning drive corrupting data was mentioned in any sort of widespread form. Can you say Deskstar???

I am going to keep a sharp eye out for Samsung and Intel, and see if I can strike! I just do much surfing, emial, web design and mesing around in general, so no worries here about too much writing, I will be dead before it wears out

Dave

 

I somehow doubt that each cell will fail on write 10,001 on a consistent and repeatable basis. That is likely a "safe number" based on large numbers of cycles.

So individual cells will vary with many (maybe even all of them) enduring beyond that threshold.

Best,

 

dseo80....

Thank you. Your knowledge is very apparent and it is nice to see that here. I can't recall the number of back and forth conversations I have had regarding calculations of ssd life.

If I can ask just one thing??? Stay please. Your a welcome resource.

 

That is correct: 10,000 is the minimum number of cycles for ~99.9% of a number of given NAND flash cells.

 

Thanks alot Les coming from the NBR expert on SSDs that means alot!
Just glad to be on board!

 

Let's say I wanted to buy the Intel 80GB SSD NOW! Where would I get it? When could I get it? Who will be the first to have it?

Way too many secrets about this type of thing, let's get this info out so we can be ready to POUNCE!

Dave

 

That's what i'm talking about Dave..let's get aggressive!

 

Does anyone know if this SSD is MLC or SLC?

G.Skill FS-25S2

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231186

 

Slc I think, but slow slc

 

The GSkill is rebadged samsung second gen SLC. Review at hardware canucks was glowing.

 

At $290 for 32GB, it better be SLC lol. It might not be the fastest drive there is, but it's not slow by any means.

 

i now ordered a 32gb mtron for my notebook. sometimes around next year i'll get the next version of the 2710p, the 2730p, together with a nice intel in there by then

but yes, i want to know where i can buy one now (the intel ssd). i'd put it into my pc..

 

and while we're at it. who knows a slow, cheap, non-blocking ssd for something like a windows home server? it doesn't need 100mb/s. 30-50mb/s would be more than enough. it should be more than 65gb for the first drive. no blocking artefacts like the ocz. cheapest possible.

 

If it's just the OS, why isn't 32-64GB enough? Especially if you turn off the page file, and load up the machine with the maximum possible RAM?

Then you use all of the big "cheap" spindles for the content you're serving up.

Cheers,

 

it's because windows home server wants 65gb or more as the system disk..

there are technical reasons for this. one: it's the "landing zone" if you copy files onto the home server, they get placed there first, and resorted to the other storage disks automatically then laters..

but non-the-less, it's just a given requirement.. (quite bad as most ssd's are 64gb they all don't work.. )

oh, and i've just ordered a 1.5tb disk for the data storage.. so, yes, the spindles are the cheap place to go to store

 

I just thought that I'd post a quick question here. My father has a Sony SZ420N and he was interested in putting an SSD in it. I've read that Sony's are a pain to get a SSD working with, is this still true?

Thanks,
Greg

 

More SSD reviews here: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/FourWay-SSD-RoundUp-OCZ-Super-Talent-Mtron/?page=1

 

and we are on page 100... (next task, post 1000 )

 

How is the speed on the new Patriot SSDs?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220342

Between the Patriot on or this G.Skill drive, which one would you guys buy?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231186

Thanks

 

http://acenet.blog86.fc2.com/blog-entry-702.html

says jmicron controller so it may have the same issues as the ocz and other jmicron mlc drives

 

According to a post on Patriot Forums, the V.2 SSD will not stutter like the OCZ SSDs due to a different controller. No news on what the exact controller is yet.
Post: http://www.patriotmem.com/forums/threadp.jsp?threadid=2632&catid=1
Also, so far, the reviews on NCIX, newegg, eeepc forums as well as youtube is positive. Looks like I'll be getting it soon if the reviews remain that way

 

Im pointing an eye to the patriot one .

 

So far I have only found one notebook that has announced it will have the new Intel SSD: the HP EliteBook 6390p (with 24-hour battery life?!). Will launch in Oct for $1800, which is $600 more than the non-24-hour version at $1200. The extra $600 gets you an Intel X-25M, LED display, and huge extended battery. The point here is that the Intel X-25M is not going to cost $595 as an upgrade. Let's figure the LED display costs an extra $50 and the huge battery at $150. That means about $400 for the SSD. Reasonable.

 

I would likely go for the G.Skill, since there is a high probability that it actually is a Samsung SSD SATA-II drive inside, which is one of the best SSDs available today (and recommended by Les).

In Anandtech's review of the new Intel X25 SSD, they are benchmarking a G.Skill/Samsung drive. If you look at this picture from the review:

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/Intel/SSDlaunch/images/gskill.front.jpg

and read the product name, you will see that it is the same 64 GB G.Skill drive as newegg is selling:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231187

Also, if you look at the bottom of the picture from the Anandtech review, you will see a sticker saying Samsung and another product number. That product number corresponds exactly to the product number of the following Samsung SSD:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147054

That Samsung drive, is the SLC-drive that Les is recommending and is one of the best SSDs available today.

On G.Skill's web site, only two SSDs are listed (the same product numbers as on NewEgg) and they have exactly the same performance rating.


So .......... it is very likely that the 32GB G.Skill is also the latest version of the SLC-based Samsung. If that is correct, the G.Skill 32GB is indeed a good buy.

 

Is patriot a good brand?, I would like to test the ssd, is very tempting because is cheap and 170mb of reading sounds interesting .

Btw 1000th post .

 

****, just wanted to do the 1000th post!! and wanted to ask the same..

would definitely be more than good enough for my server.. possibly for the pc, too

 

I'm really curious about this Patriot SSD. It is priced as an OCZ Core but maybe it does not have the same problems. This mini review says it does not suffer from slow writes like OCZ Core.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gPcGb_Hdyg