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

i do care because it means more space for other stuff.. more powerful small systems (including netbooks), and more support for it.

1.8" sas drives for serverblades would be cool, too..

and last but not least, it would drive down prices for 1.8" components, which are very high right now (but not in the ssd market, which is nice).

i'd like to have one day 1.8" for notebooks, and 2.5" for desktops. would allow nicer formfactors on each ones.

and bigger notebooks could have 2 of them, to allow for raid1 configurations in business, raid0 for the gamer, or fast ssdforos+bigslowssdfordata for the ordinary consumer. what ever, flexibility in smaller space.

anyways, yes, currently 1.2ghz c2d, very fast for that matter (beats quite some coreduos which are not ULV...). next'll be 1.86 c2d on the 2530p.

/me likes tiny

 

1.8" high-capacity drives are a MAJOR development for UMPCs.

 

Looks like the pre-Christmas promise by OCZ isn't going to deliver for the OCZ Vertex.
The few shops listing the Vertex all are pre-order only.
This shop at least has an ETA ... of Jan. 2009
http://www.xpcgear.com/ocz-oczssd2-1vtx60g-vertex-ssd.html

 

Anyone know anything about the PQI SSDs that have just popped up on newegg? They're relatively cheap for a SSD, and under features it says "Intel MLC"; I wonder what that means...

 

Very good question.
I fear though that they are like the OCZ disks ... the Intel MLC probably refers to the maker of the NAND chips (in this case apparently intel).
The big questions are:
- what controller do they have?
- do they have any kind of cache that might diminish slow random write performance?

I was unable to find a lot of info on them.
(Apparently they are called S525 by PQI ... a bunch of press releases but not much info)

 

Sorry if this has been addressed already at some point, but will Windows 7 be optimized for SSDs?

 

From what they've (microsoft) has said not really. It basically just stops the defrag cycle and minor things like that.

But according to iata it appears win7 runs even lower quality (OCZ cores series) like a champ with out any issues so far.

Seems promising

 

It does but that may be due to the fact that I'm running it as a non-member disk of my onboard RAID. When Windows 7 Beta 1 comes out I will try it in non-RAID mode (with AHCI disabled) and see how it performs.

 

i think it's more the raid controller than win7 (but it would be cool otherwise).

 

In stock here:

http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=372890&menu1id=12&menu2id=78&menu3id=25
http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=372893&menu1id=12&menu2id=78&menu3id=25
http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=372885&menu1id=12&menu2id=78&menu3id=25
http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=372888&menu1id=12&menu2id=78&menu3id=25

http://www.mindfactory.de/product_i.../searchbutton_x/0/searchbutton_y/0/act/search
http://www.mindfactory.de/product_i.../searchbutton_x/0/searchbutton_y/0/act/search
http://www.mindfactory.de/product_i.../searchbutton_x/0/searchbutton_y/0/act/search
http://www.mindfactory.de/product_i.../searchbutton_x/0/searchbutton_y/0/act/search

 

I wouldn't trust this Canadian store and the German store further than I can throw them.
They might "have them in stock but won't ship until end of January" ...
Germany => UK is not to far though (no tax/tariffs) ... you willing to pull the trigger and test them for us?

 

I would have done but I've just bought my OCZ Core v1 128GB for $195 and it's running absolutely perfectly.

 

as i only consider the ocz for storage (as i have enough system disks currently, now slowly want to change the storage part to ssds, too, for quietness and just the general coolness of it, they're quite expensive.. 250gb for 1255$

i continue to buy ****loads of 1.5tb disks then

but i can't wait for first tests of the vertex ones.

 

Vertex will be very interesting. Does Intel have some competition? Or not?

 

For laptops probably, dunno if I'd be that comfortable with a 32MB cache waiting to unload on a desktop unless it was well built for fault tolerance and had a UPS to ensure that the writes get committed in the case of a power failure...Price to performance it's hard to beat, but I think data reliability would still be a lot stronger on the intel disk in most situations.

 

And for laptops nothing beats the 150mW active/60mW idle power consumption of the X25-M .

 

Yeah, but with the price difference, i might as well buy an extra battery and still have spare change left over. Not to mention that with all the power saving the intel drive has over a normal HDD, it only manages to extend by 30min-1h, really has you thinking twice.

 

In a money no object world it's definately a plus, but for me I'd get the cheap SSD and upgrade to a P series chip from a T series for less bucks, but that's the kind of budgetary constraints I live with, if I could drop 3-4 grand on a laptop i'd be thinking seriously about it.

 

You're not concerned about HDDs' use of cache? 32MB cache is common on big desktop drives.

 

I'm not concerned about a hard drive crapping itself waiting to flush said cache, OCZ's SSDs write speeds *SO FAR* have been abysmal compared to even low end mechanical hard disks, especially on random writes. I've bombed my outlook PST file once on a mechanical hard disk, it'd be REAL easy to do on an SSD as outlook is one of the apps they seem to hate from what I've read.

 

One of the points of the ultra portable laptops is the *portability*. It is not cheap of course and same is with X25-M. Of course with normal users its not 100% attractive. But there's also performance to boot.

The two extreme ends of the computing platform will find these devices attractive, the high performance, and the portable one. Users who can afford the fastest laptops will probably try to snap one and so will the portability conscious users(the ultra portables aren't exactly cheap in most cases).

 

My OCZ Core v1 runs absolutely perfectly. By far the fastest storage medium I've ever used. I also run Outlook and that too runs perfectly.

 

Did some swapping back and forth with the Intel X25-M (without SteadyState) and an OCZ Core 64GB SSD (with SteadyState) in my Latitude E6400.

No contest. While the SteadyState improved the OCZ performance, it still was FAR behind the Intel as far as system responsiveness. Furthermore, SteadyState just got plain annoying. The amount of time it spent upon bootup committing cached writes to disk ALWAYS added a good 15 seconds to the bootup time, regardless of whether I had actually done anything that needed to be written or not, e.g., boot to desktop and then do an immediate reboot and it still took a full commit task.

I don't have any benchmarks to provide, just hands-on usability and responsiveness is soooo much better with the Intel.

I'll keep the OCZ around just in case (for some reason) I need another SSD for something, but for now it sits in a box on the shelf.

If SteadyState had been usable I had been planning to put the OCZ in the E6400 and try out the Intel as the boot drive in my desktop (XPS 410). However, I think I'll wait to see what the forthcoming Toshibas bring to the table or wait for the Intels to drop in price. Unlike most users, I don't need a humongous drive in my desktop (only using 38GB) so an SSD would work nicely; I keep all my data on secondary and external drives anyway.

 

I wold be most interested in a mini review of the Intel on the desktop. Especially if it was cloned over. I too could get away with an 80GB as I have about 70GB now on my desktop.

I tried cloning it to a OCZ V2 or equivalent, and it was horrible. I was not willing to try a day or two's worth of tweaks to MAYBE get it to work. A few tweaks here and there, sure. But a reformat and re-install would have taken too much time. Dave

 

Love to hear more about your experience with the two ... do you have any more quantifiable data?

 

Intel Ships 160GB X25-M SSD

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9124177

 

*sweet* espencially the 1.8" release 'soon'. the 1.8" on a ion mainboard from nvidia (with a dualcore atom i hope) would be one heck of a snappy tiny machine..

 

Very true.

 

(you know my next plans by now.. )

an ion as media center, an ion with 6 s-ata ports as home-server. that'll be a small fast ssd for the mediacenter, a big enough ssd for the homeserver system-drive + 5 1.5tb disks.

two tiny systems (except the 5 3.5" drives) that'll be from that moment on the system for my whole life.

but notebooks and ordinary pc's i'll update once or twice a year. 2530p is another target but they're not really awailable in good configurations around here sadly...

 

Well x-mass is almost here and not a single OCZ vertex review by professional reviewers nor a single early adapter.

 

My Intel 80G runs perfect in my Thinkpad X61t, also I did some tweak from OCZ website. However, i did a few test ,and I could get the read performance at 250MB/s. the result is only 120MB/s reading, and 68MB/s write. Is there any other thing I need to tweak?

 

as zephir reported, lenovo are limited therefore you wont see the full speed unfortunately

 

Ronan, I found something that might interest you. ( LINK) Someone over there said that:

"erik mentioned in another thread that the X61 has a hard drive interface bandwith limitation that seems to limit the maximum sequential read speed to around ~110-120 MB/s. Perhaps this could be the culprit?"

I don't know if this is the case, but I had similar thoughts in my mind before googling. If "Erik's" claim is true, then it sucks to be you. :-( (No offense!) I have a similar problem as my MBP's SATA is supposedly maxed at 150... if I am not mistaken.

EDIT: Too slow.

 

well looks like thinkpads are limited to SATA 1 standards ... for some reason.

this is bad.

however, 100mb/s read/write with 0.1uS access time is sooooo fast anyways

 

My point is, the SSD don't make enough of a difference in terms of extra online time to justify the price difference. See, intel's 80g ssd that consumes 0.06W idle can only extend usage by maybe an hour, while costing maybe 5 times the ocz vertex that consumes 0.5W at idle, if it would expand say 30min of usage time. Not enough of an all around good deal to justify.

(i quote idle because that's the most relevant for me, who spends most of the time in class running word or pdf annotator, on top of having ewf on top of my os partition, so i don't have much disk access)

 

SSDs offer more than just battery life - access times, read/write speeds, lower temperature/noise/heat (though not all of the above may necessarily apply to a particular model). Since the consumer market is still new to SSDs, prices are higher but justified. If you aren't willing to be an early innovator, then don't buy it now.

 

Since I had nothing better to do, I decided to swap an Intel X25-M into my desktop and see how it compared to my boot drive, a Western Digital Raptor 160GB (Note: NOT a velociraptor).

I used Acronis TrueImage Home to save the state of my boot drive and then clone it to the SSD.

While I was at it, I also ran the same benchmarks on my data drive and an external USB drive.

I'm not an expert at this whole benchmarking thing, so please bear with me.

The System is a Dell XPS 410, E6600 CPU, 2GB RAM, Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Drives:

1 - Western Digital WD1600ADFD (160GB, 10,000RPM, 16MB cache, SATA, 1.5GB/s)
2 - Intel X25-M SSD
3 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (320GB, 7200RPM, 16MB cache, SATA 3.0GB/s)
4 - Seagate Freeagent Pro (500GB, 7200RPM, USB 2.0, eSATA)

Benchmarks run: Atto, HDTune, HDTach, Passmark

ATTO

1 - Raptor




2 - Intel




3 - Seagate 7200.10




4 - External Seagate




HDTune



1 - Raptor




2 - Intel




3 - Seagate 7200.10




4 - External Seagate




HDTach


1 - Raptor




2 - Intel




3 - Seagate 7200.10




4 - External Seagate




Passmark


1 - Raptor




2 - Intel




3 - Seagate 7200.10




4 - External Seagate

 

Pardon my ignorance, but as someone who doesn't know much about benching, what exactly is moved? Do you make a designated folder of compressed files or something? How big? How many clusters?

 

@ heavyharmonies

Your external HDD benchmark is useless, since the speed is capped by the transfer speed of USB port.
However, thanks for the benchmark.

 

I thought it was eSATA?

 

eSATA with speed of around 25 to 30MB/sec?

 

The external drive has eSATA capability but it is connected via USB 2.0. My bad.

 

Actually, the OCZ Vertex might not have any advantage. The mobile hard drives have 1-1.5W active power consumption. The Vertex has 2W active power consumption. Hard drives have developed enough that the power down control is good enough that most SSDs do not have an advantage even for power consumption.

 

^ true. However, if your 1W HDD is active for 5 min vs. the 2W SSD being active for 1 min to load the same stuff, you still end up saving power

 

Specs rarely are good indicators of measurement since they are not calculated evenly across manufacturers and also don't represent typical usage. I'd wait for real user reviews.

 

That is, until you are doing something that starts stressing the SSD(moreso than HDDs) like write operations.

Specs matter, but not with the small info they give. Overall the Intel drive has definite advantage over any other SSD because the active and idle are both really low. The power management features matter too but I haven't seen manufacturers give that yet.

 

I never said specs don't matter, I just said they aren't good indicators of measurement. That means you can't really compare that to other manufacturers and say since X has a lower power consumption it must be better.

 

I thought write and read operation on SSDs are the same power wise.

 

write ops should use more power as they have to rewrite a whole cell while reading means only that little bit of data.

and write ops may be read a cell, modify in memory, write to another cell. so each write is at least a read + a write in reality

 

Ah makes sense now. Thanks dave.