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

I'm at work right now, but when I get home tonight I'll bench mark the Titan.

 

thank you.
Especially IOPS are key!
and you should also use it as your system drive to see how it performs.
(me believes benchmarks lie)

 

Yes, clone the drive and have at it! Maybe share specs before tweaks and after tweaks. Man I would love to love that Titan

 

Don't clone the drive, do a fresh install on it. I remember someone who cloned a drive on here a few months back did a fresh install and the difference was amazing in disk performance.

Greg

 

How come clones work differently than fresh installs? Is it because of the bloatware?

 

I've always thought that if you take care of your machine and control startup procedures, performance should be identical to a fresh install. Anything buggy possible during the cloning process?

 

If you subscribe to the partition alignment method clones are less likely to actually work with the alignment (vista/win7 align partitions by default when they format, xp doesn't though) Also clones tend to throw the files wherever they were thrown on the host drive, fresh installs get all the files back in order where the SSD wants to put them and allows your updates etc to go with the rest of the system files before you start installing junk on top of it.

 

That makes sense. I guess I kinda' assumed one would defrag stuff before making an image.

 

I just did a fresh install and I am not willing to do it again. Way too much work So, I was hoping a clone would be possible. It may be that it is simply not possible to get a properly performing clone to an SSD. I have cloned to my last 5 or 6 hard drives and just gone merrily along over the years. Yes, little problems here and there, but I cannot prove that it was due to the fact it was cloned, software and operating systems seem to have a mind of their own no matter what the circumstances

 

Here are the Hdtune, ATTO, Hdtach scores on my G.skill Titan 256 GB SSD. This drive is running as the system drive. Even though HDtune reports the drive as having a temperature the drive doesn't feel warm. I installed adobe reader 9 and it took 2 seconds to install. I was playing a game and running fraps and I didn't notice any stuttering.

 

WOW, thanks! 2 seconds for Adobe, sweet! That software is a big fat pig. What about say, a spyware scan and also web surfing at the same time and maybe listening to itunes? That brought my 64GB forget the brand to its knees, in case it was not already there. Sometimes just Outlook alone wold kill any action on the drive and I would have to wait 2 minutes. Of course, I am guilty of cloning at that time. Also, this time i have a very fresh install of Vista as opposed to XP so maybe cloning would go much better. Thanks for the info! Dave

 

Dave,
I'm running a spyware scan, and I have 20 tabs open in firefox and listening to some MP3's, no stuttering. I'm not sure what type of controller this drive is using.


Maybe I'll try Windows 7 on this drive.

 

Looks nice to me... so what are your overall impressions? Any problems? How's your computer running? Is there a big difference?

Imagine putting a couple of those in one of those upcoming RAID boxes.

 

Moving along... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10144985-64.html?tag=newsLatestHeadlinesArea.0

That is GREAT news about how well it is running. I would be getting the 128GB which I figure should be the same.

 

jedisolo,

can you start Outlook and see if the SSD has any problems while running it and say couple of tabs open on your brower ?

 

At this point, I would like to pause, and tip my hat to the man who started this thread, Mr. Les Tokar. Les, I thank you. This has been one of the most interesting, educational and informative threads ever. Wherever you are, I hope and trust you are well. 228 pages and still climbing rapidly

 

I think this is a good drive and I haven't had any problems with it.
It seems more responsive opening programs.

Miro GT I don't use Outlook as a email program but I do use Thunderbird.

 

Any word about the specs of the SSDs Dell is putting in their notebooks? I don't see specs on Samsung's website.

 

yeah, he started a now famous thread

 

Hey, thx for the benchies!

Just wondering: Should we assume the ATTO results are sequential? Is there any way to do a random R/W test?

Also, since this is a fairly large SSD, it might be interesting to see what the tests would look like after some period of time passes in order to have written to the entire SSD. Perhaps a week, or so, later. Tho maybe all your testing has already filled in the entire card. I dunno.

Anyway, TY again for posting this. Looks good so far, IMHO (awesome considering the price point, if it don't stutter).

 

++1

FWIW, I saw a recent post of Les' in one of the Windows threads.

 

Yeah these prices are getting insane. I mean I knew they were dropping, but not this fast. I'll probably wait a few more months before making a move, but it sure as heck is tempting as it is now.

 

Windows 7 BETA vs Windows V1sta SP1 SSD Performance Compared

 

Can you measure IOPS for the g.skill ... probably the best way to test for stuttering.
Another good test is usually running windows updates during install. If a single one takes abnormally long, you have a problem.

There also was a test unzipping lots of small files from a zip a short while back in this thread.

 

my assumption would be that if this MLC drive is not having on board cache memory then it will have same problems like the other drives. But we are yet to find out, right

 

Hey guys, I just did a little bit of testing of my own because I just bought an OCZ 64gb ssd. I put it in my XPS M1330 and tested both the old and the new hard drive. I got this drive off of newegg for about 120.00 which was an amazing price for an SSD I thought...


Anyway the old drive was a seagate 160gb 7200RPM hard drive, and here is how it did with crystaldiskmark 2.2:




Then here is the OCZ drive:






As you can see, big improvement in read times, very slight improvement in write times. I noticed much faster boot times and quicker application access times. For 120 bucks, its worth it.

 

Wowwww. Write times are sooo similar. Thanks for posting.

 

Here are the crystal mark score for the G.Skill Titan 256 GB. So far I haven't run into any stuttering problems on this drive.

 

Can we get some IOPS tests?

 

I downloaded Iometer but what is a good config to use to test the IOPS?

 

Is there a reason SSD's advertise RAID support? Shouldn't all of them work with RAID? How would the drive know it was RAIDed or not?

 

All of them will support RAID, the big deal is the new batch coming out that is internally RAIDed (so you get 2 drives in a single package, or two controllers for a single drive) those seem to be the next big deal and worth advertisement.

 

iometer instructions

 

There has been quite a lot of compatibility problems with first generation SSDs and hardware RAID solutions (MTRON and JMicron based SSDs to mention but a few). For example, the MTRON's, who are very nice stand-alone SSDs seem to have quite a lot of problems even with high-end RAID solutions.

 

Thanks... so they are advertising RAID to say that the drives will work due to the previous problems (not talking about the internally RAIDed drives). I suppose it is fairly safe to assume that all current generation SSDs work with RAID?

 

well the mtron mobi had problems with raiding, but i currently have 2 mtron mobi 3500 (the newer ones) in raid0 with 2x performance, no issues at all.

but no clue if others may have issues.

 

Here are the Iometer results for the 256 GB G.Skill Titan. Some of them are Random write and sequential, I forgot which ones. I don't know if those numbers are good or not but having used this SSD for 4 days now I haven't experienced any stuttering of the sort.

 

Gotta love using instruction for IOmeter from 1 SSD manufacturer being used to test another manufacturers drive.

Don't Gskill support their drives?

 

I checked out the G.skill support forum and it sucks.

 

if those are the numbers from the lowest iops possible (which normally is random write 4kb ), then they sound great. the drive is +- exactly what my raid0 of mtrons is (except it's slc, and 128gb total).. so it'll should perform great.

 

320GB Intel SSDs using 34nm technology is slated for introduction in Q4 of this year. Current Intel SSDs are using 50nm process. Apparently there will be total of EIGHT drives available by then. It wasn't clear whether there will be 8 new ones or 8 total.

 

So... 80, 160, 320GB MLC 2.5" and 1.8", 32, 64GB SLC 2.5", that's 8 lol.

 

http://www.dvhardware.net/article32719.html

It sounds like they might actually have 8 new drives. You mentioned the 64GB SLC drive but on their roadmap it indicates >160GB sizes for MLC and >64GB for SLC on the 34nm technology.

Maybe they are gonna work it out like their CPUs and chipsets and introduce smaller capacity versions later that's more mainstream. 40GB MLC would be quite affordable .

 

I think it's more like a whole bunch of people realize that your drive sucks, and they try to compare the result of a new drive to yours using the same instruction to make sure that it doesn't suck.

On topic: Got my Samsung 256GB SSD today, very fast as expected.

 

Later tonight I'm going to install Windows 7 on this drive and see how it performs.

 

The Titan is looking pretty good so far...

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=214428&page=3

Dave

 

hm, the use of two JMicron controllers aim to have fixxed the slowdowns of a regular non-cached MLC drive.

Nice

 

I installed Windows 7 and the longest part of the install was the uncompressing of the files. After it installed the only thing I turned off was the disk defrag utility. I did a fresh install of Windows 7.

 

hm it should actually done that by itself. looks like it didn't recognize your drive as ssd?

i haven't seen improvements with win7 on my ssds (fresh install, too). then again, they're slc, so they work great in vista, too..

i switched back to vista now btw. but this is an offtopic discussion