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

I'd put my money on Samsung.

 

A fairly new SSD review with Intel, Samsung, OCZ V2 and Supertalent:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/...el-ocz-samsung-silicon-power-supertalent.html

 

That looks like a very well done review. Nothing new in terms of the OCZ performance, shows a few weak spots in the Intel.

For the record, my OCZ V2 shows increasing sequential throughput with increasing read request size, but even at 4MB per request it only reaches 133MB/sec. With a 32KB block read it's at 70MB/sec. Quite a bit short of the 170MB/sec they claimed.

 

I read people who had some sort of caching in conjunction with the OCZ were getting good results and no stutters. Most of the people had Raid cards with onboard memory. I'm wondering if my laptop has Intel Turbo Memory, would this effectively eliminate and stutters on the OCZ?

I've searched around but i don't think anyone has specifically addressed this possibility yet. Thanks guys.

 

1) What is turbo memory?

2) Are people adjusting cache size via the My Computer/properties tab? Setting it to 1/2GB?

 

1. Intel Turbo Memory came out with the Santa Rosa platform. http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/itm/sb/CS-025759.htm It's a little memory module that is installed inside your laptop using Mini PCI-E slot. It's original purpose is to increase perfomance by caching traditional hard-drives. It was Intel's alternative solution to Hybrid Hard Drives, which other manufacturers were making. Whereas others were working on putting large flash based caches on the physical hard drives, Intel was using a module that could be used with any hard drive.

So I believe this should act much the same way as the raid controller caches that people are finding success with on high end raid cards.

2. This has nothing to do with the Windows caching. Which AFAIK people recommend you completely disable. I brought this up to ask if anyone has had success being that Turbo Memory should be very similar to hardware cache for the SSD.

 

No. The way turbo memory is handled by vista is that it's using it not to cache writes but to cache common reads from the HDD. It does the same thing as a flash memory stick you'd plug into USB and enable the readyboost feature.
I don't see any advantage to have it on top of an SSD.
Then again, even the flash cache on hybrid disk are not used to cache writes either, if i remember correctly.

 

If you remove the optical drive will you get the full bandwidth?, I believe the optical drive is connected via Internal USB?

 

HI thinking about ordering this with for my Sony TZ, but since it has U7600 1.2GHZ C2D wondering it won't use the SSD to it's full potential, what is the spec of your laptop and what was the original 1.8" HD in there?

Do you notice much difference with your SSD, is the boot time twice as fast or 3 times?

Finally, any chance you can post the HD Tach/Bench scores for the SSD including Random, Sequential, Average, Maximum Read/Write...

Many thanks, want to compare it with my 1.8" HD and see if the upgrade is worth it..

 

I'm referring to this post, it's not going to be redundancy, since I noticed it has been mentioned in previous pages. Intel 80GB x25-M
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=44484

 

can you stop posting this around everywhere? it's a bug in outlook and documented as such.

 

I have not experienced freezing in outlook using Samsung 128GB SSD.

 

I posted everywhere to share my experience about intel SSD, since there are probably only few people owning intel SSD.

and I think this news is very important because I don't have a deep pocket unlike some people. Therefore spending USD$650 + tax + shipping and experiencing freezes is a pure pain!

Honestly if someone in this forum already posted something about intel SSD freeze with outlook, I would be thankful, because I would then save my money and wait.

The fact is all the reviews I read about intel SSD, didn't seem to encounter any problems whatsoever, which encouraged me for making my first move in outset.

If the moderators here are not happy, they are more than welcome to delete either or all posts.

Trust me, if there were more people already own intel SSD and posted about their experiences, I wouldn't have posted anything. As you may see, I'm an old time member with notebookreview, but I don't usualy post. I'm only a loyal reader, as posting takes too much of my time and effort.

I hope you get my message across.

PS: Another thing is, as I posted this message, my computer was paralyzed for 5minutes. There you go, not only with the Outlook.

 

Thanks for sharing this info. jlingo...it's a good thing you're doing by notifying prospective buyers like myself.

 

May I know what is the size of your .Pst?

Here is what I have done so far:
Moving my 1.5GB outlook.pst file into an ultrabay drive which is a regular HDD 200GB 7k200.

Archiving my outlook.pst into a smaller file - 600MB and then compacting them. Now I need to have two harddrives running on my laptop.

Anyhow, finger crossed I hope this helps.

I still leave prefetch and superprefetch on because I found that my computer was running a lot snappier with them.

Indexing for my work is also very important especially using Outlook to search through my emails. Unfortunately, my line of work requires me to retreive email as fast as possible in response to client's phone calls.

Aside from that I LOVE MY INTEL SSD, it booted up SOOO FAST. No Stuttering which would be the worst could happen. Only when it started to freeze for couple of minutes during my time-critical work, I would then SCREAM outloud.

The following not sure if this has already posted(moderator, feels free to erase replication)
"Are you running a computer that has a Solid State Drive (SSD)?
If you are running Outlook 2007 on a computer that has a solid state drive (SSD), you may experience frequent pauses when you perform typical operations in Outlook. The Outlook product team is aware of this issue and is investigating solutions for a future release.

If your computer is running on a computer that has both an SSD and a non-SSD (rotational) hard disk, you can reduce the frequency of the pauses by moving the .ost file or the .pst files to the non-SSD drive. For more information about how to move your Outlook Data Files, see the following article, "Introduction to Outlook data files," on the Office Online Web site: :
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ou...102499831033#2 (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ou...102499831033#2)"

But I think there is a problem with using browser as well? because the last time I posted here my laptop also frooze for couple of minutes. I was using Opera browser at that time. I might be wrong.

The thing is, it happened so randomly and it was very hard for me to replicate the incident

But if you read from ocztechnology websites, it seems that problem possibly cause by many factors including compatibility, ICH type being used, Intel Matrix drive, etc.

From Behardware.com:
"And what is there to say about the Intel solution? A real treat on paper, the Intel X25-M literally knocked us for six during the first tests! However, the dip in performances recorded when the SSD is submitted to varying workloads is quite worrying, even though Intel says this phenomenon is to be “expected”. It is one thing for performance to dip and it may be acceptable as long as their starting point is so far ahead of the SSDs of its competitors. The problem is that in certain cases, which are, it’s true, very specific, performance is recorded as being lower than that of a 5400 rpm disc, particularly during file copying. It would be great news if Intel could find a solution allowing it to retain high performances whatever the workload of the SSD, even if this means losing something from maximum performance.

For now only Samsung is really managing this. Whether on PC Mark Vantage, file copying or IOMeter, performances do not disappoint, without, it is true, attaining the levels of the Intel X25-M when at its best. There is a price for all this unfortunately, with the Samsung SLC (or its exact OCZ copy) coming in at €800 for 64 GB. The icing on the cake is that it is the most economical of all the SSDs tested."

 

Not EVERYONE experiences the same problems. Not everyone using the OCZ Core experiences freezing.

But the fact that the Outlook 2007 freezing is documented must mean its frequent enough to be Outlook 2007+SSD interaction fault, not the differences between SSDs.

Looking at all this, I wonder if hard drives will be EVER replaced. I think they might stay with us longer than we think. There is no miracle technology, only reasonable advances.

 

Anyone try Intel 80GB SSD2 yet?

 

TURN OFF Enable Write Cache and Outlook 2007 will NOT lag... try it - Outlook has too many small writes that SSDs cannot handle with cache...

 

How to disable write cache with intel SSD drive? I went to Device Manager and unchecked the Write Cache option. Everytime I hit ok, it kept on coming back checked again.

They didn't let me change.

 

Might be the version of your driver. Some AHCI has the capability to change. I did just what you did and was able to turn it off. Device manager-hard disk-properties-policy and uncheck...

 

I checked in the registry and it showed UserWriteCacheSetting=0x0
meaning the write cache is already off. But strange thing is that on the device manager the Write Cache is still ticked , and I still experienced freeze.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4035474&postcount=1247

here you should find your answer. it got posted before, and the solutions are there, too.

i understand your problem of paying much and then having issues. but believe me, outlook since years is an issue-bag. i have to rescue ones' mail about twice a year because it somehow messes them up. it's a very write intense application. and very different forms of issues as everyone uses it in different ways.

oh, and about your "it does still stutter while outlook is closed". outlook.exe doesn't stop running while you close the window. have you actually killed it from the taskmanager? if you killed it there, you should not have _any_ stutttering any more.

there can be just one issue: the intel ssd learns about its environment. may be you have to remove outlook for some days so that it starts to learn normal behaviour again. maybe, maybe..

 

" http://forum.notebookreview.com/show...postcount=1247 "
Actually that one was my post

And yes I have killed outlook through a task manager.

Perhaps freezing could happen with Opera browser(8 tabs open) also? I'm still investigating the cause.

I also read about Intel SSD that it is actually learning the environment. I found that to be very amusing yet disbelief. I'm still not very clear about this feature and the kind of advantages being brought to the table?

 

well, one simple idea of learning:

it has (say) 10 slots to allow writing or reading trough. depending on how often you write, it preserves a certain amount of them for writing, the rest for reading. that means in a readonly environment, you get full bandwith for reading, but it'll take longer to write. in a writeonly environment, it dedicates all it's slots for writing by default.

it's like you defragmented and reordered data on a harddrive for fast performance, but now directly on the disk.

i'd love to test your problem out, but i don't have one yet. and i never use outlook as i desperately hate it. it's like a truck, when you need a bicycle. ugly, fat, much too much stuff for the 1, 2 mails per week. the rest is done over forii, gmail, msn. so i can't really test it out. but i hope you get it sorted out.

oh, btw, try it without superfetch for a while, if that solves your problem. problem is, superfetch learns a lot about behaviour, too, and can get horribly in the way if it learned something stupid. i'm currently working with microsoft technicians about bugfixing that. (it learns, f.e. that a torrent file neads fast caching as i write and read from it a lot => it tries to prefetch a say 10gb file into my ram, much lower than 10gb.. or it can block the pc completely when starting a virtual machine as it learned "now you have to prefetch the virtual disk" (which may be tens of gb, too, again, doesn't fit in the ram).

so the best bet would be a reinstall, and forgettting about outlook. then, everything should work perfectly. then make a system snapshot for fast restoring, install outlook, try all the fixes given in the ocz forum and such, and look at the behaviour.

that's the problem with all the "intelligent" features nowadays. they can learn to do dump stuff and they learn it well

 

first check out what sort of harddisk you have in. if it is a disk with ZIF interface, you can consider an mtron 3000, else not. if it has a micro-sata you can consider all of the new ones like the intel one, or samsung, etc.

if it's micro-ata (not sata), then i don't know out of my head which one you'd need.

so.. if it's zif, then yes, getting an mtron 3000 made a huge difference in my case. it doesn't run at it's full potential in my case, because it can not run in ultra dma mode 6. it can only run in dma mode 5. still, it's much faster than the 4200rpm disk i had in before.

you can see how fast my notebook boots up here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neSA8FYVdIs and compare it to your notebook boot time.

the biggest gain in my case is firefox. i have around 10 - 30 plugins in there (changes from time to time ) and it takes about one minute to load on the original harddrive (THAT BAD WAS THAT DRIVE!!! ). now it boots in about 2 seconds.

 

It is Zif, and Intel 945 chipset, how do I know what i the highest udma it will support for the zif hard drive?..

and hd tach and hd tune benchmarks would be appreciated

 

i guess it's the same as mine.. have to set up some benchmarks now... uhm not now actually, it's late saturday night here i'm playing a bit in ableton live right now.. but i'll sure get the benches laters.

 

Thanks Davepermen,
I really appreciate your explanation, it's very thorough. I will try to disable superprefetch and prefetch again today.

I guess you are right about the 10 channels dedicated either for writing or reading. The freezing mostly noticeable when I did multiple tasking at the same. For example: downloading a file in the background, while browsing the internet, and at that moment you also press send or receive in outlook.

Also my outlook used to always undergo send/receive in the background while I was browsing away, and this sometimes caused a freeze. Now I have disabled the auto send/receive. Let my blackberry does the job notifying. Anyhow, after I compact and split the outlook.pst, moved it to an ultrabay folder, the problem seems to be better by a mile. I wil see next week as I usually do a lot of multi tasking during weekdays.

My case is pretty special I guess, I have too many other mini programs running in the background like jeyo, Norton Antivirus 2009, Thinkpads mini softwares in the taskbars, IMs like MSN, skype, which I don’t think helping.

Apart from that, I was expecting a better performance without tweaking, because really if you buy an SSD for its performance, but then you had to strip down all your softwares, change your outlook, etc, it’s kinda irony don’t you think? Like me, now I have to use my ultrabay with mechanical HDD(This is where my outlook.pst file now), which really defeats purpose of Power Saving SSD bonus. It’s like stating with Pentium III you may also get very good performance with Vista but you have to strip down the aero and among other things eyecandy features, index off, superfetch off, it’s like not buying a Vista.

I wonder if Samsung 64GB SLC would not produce the same problem?

 

disabling superfetch should really do the trick.. hope it does.

and i try to get rid of those issues together with microsoft (on ordinary hdd's, superfetch can really mess up as well).

by default, slc's are much better at writing issues so it shouldn't be a huge problem for them. haven't had any issue so far with my mtron..

 

Hi Davepermen,

Do you disable the prefetch too, apart from the superfetch?

Thanks

 

prefetch doesn't work in vista anymore, it's only superfetch. just disable the service. no registry hacking needed.

(on how to do this)

rightclick on "my computer", choose "manage", accept UAC, go to the last one "services and applications", then "services", find "superfetch" (type "sup" while being focused on the service-list. open it's properties and choose starttype "manual" or "disabled". doens't really matter.

restart.


btw, you've done that:

mentoyed somewhere on page 126.

and as stated before, if it all doesn't really help, do a full reinstall (i know that sucks), make sure that update never gets installed, and it should all be well (dunno).

but, fixing the bug in outlook and disabling superfetch should do the trick.


oh, and to quickly disable superfetch just to see if that helps immediately, open a commandwindow in adminmode (type cmd in the startmenu and press ctrl-shift-enter, accept UAC), and then type net stop superfetch. to start it again, yes, net start superfetch.

no need to ever touch the registry.

 

I think someone needs to create a nice guide w/ all the SSD tips, tricks, guides and tweaks that should/could be performed on a computer's OS that's running an SSD.

For ex. this superfetch thing, outlook issue, write-caching etc.

It would be very helpful to put all this info. in one place where everyone can locate it instead of having to browse though posts to see what to do.

 

the only tweak really needed is disabling any form of defragmenting.

disabling superfetch helps if superfetch messes up (which it sadly does too often in vista, that's why i try to solve this issue once and for all with microsoft)

fixing outlook helps if outlook is the buggy thing. fix, as described, is getting rid of a hotfix. and microsoft will deliver another one.

so the only real thing is to disable automatic defragmentation.

oh, and, another typical thing on vista: disable system restore. this is a tweak for all the small ssd's.

list: done

 

copy: that

Question: What's up w/ System Restore?

I'm guessing seeing that the SSDs size is small it might be taking up too much space or something?

 

yep, system restore uses a lot of space. if you have some other backup-sheme you don't need it really. it's great to have it on by default (cause you can use it on any ordinary pc where somethings' messed up and solve all their problems thanks to it).

but for anyone who has a great other backup system (windows home server rocks) it is just a space hog, a thing that creates tons of fragments, should be disabled everywhere (ordinary hdd's, too).

i have disabled it on all my systems, but not on my parents ones. even while they do homeserver backups, too.

it's espencially needed to be disabled on slc ssd's, as they're really tiny. i mean, i currently have about half my 32gb ssd filled. if i would have left system restore enabled, i would be close to the limit right now.

 

Superfetch and prefetch turned off, system restore off, Auto-defragmenter off.

Last Night, I was copying 4GB worth of files from my 7k200 HDD Ultrabay to external USB harddrive, while my C: drive was rebuilding its index. The minute I opened Opera Browser, the whole system froze for about 4 min, and after 4 minutes the browser finally was open. The freeze itself is still in consistent.

This morning, I finally decided to disable my indexing option for the whole week. I just would like to see if this would solve the problem.

My problem is unique, when it didn't freeze, it didn't freeze, when it froze it would take over 3 min. That's a long time for a pause. It would help if the pause was only 15sec or a minute the longest.

Another thing is, when I open my indexing options prior disabling it, Indexing showed 38950.

 

I start to believe your disk is buggy. Or your installation.

This really sounds bad. I'd love to just get hands on the issue myself. Now it's eighter Opera, your installation, or your disk...

 

Worst comes to worst yes it's the disk itself is indeed buggy. It can't be just the opera because Internet explorer also triggered such symptoms.

The hard part about my SSD if it's buggy is that it ran all the tests fine. So it's going to be very discontended for any supplier to accept an exchange for the disk.

Worst comes to worst I would have to live with it for a long time at least until the 160GB intel SSD is released or better yet x25-E.

Anyhow, I wil see how it goes with the index completely turned off.

Maybe since intel x25-M has it's own algorythm for its writing may be it's not that perfect after all? Depending on a certain combination it may cripple the computer, so I would hope for better drivers or firmwares?

From reading Tomshardware and Behardware review, it seems that intel SSD couldn't satisfactorily cope with a sudden change in data transfer, and required few minutes before it would be able to manage itself accordingly?

If my freezes were gone for the next few days, then it would definitely be the indexing problem in Vista. I love the outlook indexing very much though.

 

Do the drive reset as said by above.

 

That means I have to erase every single data in my harddrive?
I guess that's what I would do as the last resort.

In the mean time, disabling indexing in Vista seems to have solved the problem. But I will wait for few days before drawing any conclusion.

Now I have to find an excellent 3rd party File Search tool. Windows file search built-in seems lame. Any recommendation? I am looking at EFS - Effective File Search since it supports saving your search preference into a template.

 

I think the biggest advantage of Intel X25-M over other cheap MLC drives currently shipping is:

1. Onboard RAM Cache
2. Custom controller, tweaked for MLC timings and not for mechanical drives

See, if you open X25-M you will notice that apart from the Intel's controller. and MLC chips there is a Samsung memory chip as well - this chip is most likely used for caching the write requests before they get written (although Intel denies that, claiming that it would not be "secure" - all harddrives have onboard cache as well, yet they are as secure as it gets).

Also, the Intel's controller is most likely engineered for MLC in mind, so the logic probably knows what to do in case of sudden burst of random small writes - cache them in RAM and write in background later without stalling the SATA interface and forcing the OS to block your application.

This IMHO, is the biggest difference compared to all other cheap MLC drives - unlike Intel, they use standard JMicron controller and no cache at all!

This is making them slow in random writes - because MLC takes a lot of time to get written, internal 16KB cache in JMicron controller gets saturated quickly and all it can do is to issue "busy" status to the SATA controller which means - delay for your application.

I think the solution for this is very simple - put some extra RAM cache and tweak the controller for the timing properties of MLC chips. I am quite sure that the next generation of cheap MLC drives will come with onboard cache.

RAM chips are not expensive at all nowdays - I think the reason for failure of current cheap MLC SSDs is plain stupidity and reuse of one single failed system design, used by all of the cheap SSD vendors (OCZ, Transcend, Patriot, etc...)

 

intel supposedly claimed that the chip is not cache, but is memory required to handle their implementation, probably the remapping of certain blocks and so on to facilitate the random->linear write translation

the way its used though may end up being like cache anyway (although typically cache refers to read cache, not write cache? maybe this is why theyre saying its not cache, it may be write cache)

but for sure intel designed their ssd with knowledge of the physical format in mind (which all drives should do, but thats a significant cost for R&D) and the result is it doesnt suffer the same random write performance that has been pretty much the main letdown of mlc drives so far.

 

Ok with defrag off, index off, Outlook PST on Ultrabay HDD, prefetch off, superfetch off:
My computer only froze once for the past 12hours, and it only froze for a little bit over a minute instead of a 5 full minutes. I guess it's a progress.

It froze when I was clicking on a website. Only two programs were open at the time: Opera browser and Outlook. Today, my Outlook has been open pretty much all day.

My next try is to close the outlook completely and leave it close unless it's needed. and hopefully this would eliminate the problem entirely.

Does anybody know if Google Desktop Search works well with SSD?

Update: Arrrghh! I closed off Outlook, it didn't close off automatically, I still could see it in the taskbar. Right Click -> end task and now when I re-opened the Outlook, it was check for data error due to improper outlook close down.

 

Thanks will keep my eye out of them, also you mentioned you had trouble fitting the mtron?, is it too wide?.. do tell..

 

problem is, it fits perfectly into the specs. but hp didn't care about the specs that much, as they knew exactly which harddrive they had put in. and the mtron has a thicker edge than the original one, so it didn't fit for 1mm at one edge because of that thicker edge. stupid, i know

besides that it was hell to fiddle around with those disks. zif is terrible to plug in

 

No, there are two ways listed on my post. Do the first one using IOMeter.

Well look at Anandtech's article. It claims it also has 256KB cache in the controller in addition to the 16MB DRAM.

 

I may have a defective harddrive.
I used thinkpad Harddrive diagnostic but reported no problem.

This time without Outlook opened and only opera browser on.
I was transferring outlook.pst 700mb, archive1.pst 700mb, etc from mechanical 7k200 to SSD total 3.5GB completed in 1min 10sec(50-60MB/sec write). Then I go to C: SSD drive and deleted them. and then when I go and open recycling bin, I selected these files and right click, my laptop frooze for 4min. after 4 min then the explorer menu appears asking me what do I want to do.

I often have that problem too with mechanical harddrive, when I right click on a big file or big folder it would hang for a bit. but 4min is just unacceptable.

Update: I have been trying to replicate the problem and it didn't reoccur.

 

sounds really bad

 

Yes it did sound really bad!! That's why I have formatted this afternoon, and now installing every single thing one by one.

So far it performs faster than before. I have been doing software installation through CDROM, Transfering data from one USB drive to this drive, Downloading windows update, Chatting msn, Posting notebookreview.com, essentially all the multitasking you can think off without any freezes. That's a progress with a formatting pain. A pain but I guess it's worth the pain as long as the problem completely solved.

For others who are using intel SSD and no freezing problem, do you guys still have prefetch, superfetch, and indexing on? I'm just wondering. At the moment I will leave only the indexing on, since I'm really hoping I could use this drive with indexing. it's very helpful with outlook.

Presently, it's a lot more responsive and snappier, therefore I will leave the prefetch and superfetch off. Thanks for everyone taking their time replying to my posts. I really appreciate this.

I will come back in a week touting about Intel SSD and my happiness. Hopefully my dream is realized!

 

i wish you good luck.

i know why i never use outlook, though... *smile*.

be sure to not install the update that you'll have to remove to fix the outlook bug in the first place..