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

.. well i hope (and believe) that it's a great mlc drive. not one that catches for records, but one for stable continuos performance in all situations.

i really hope it is. it would be nice.

 

There's a guy selling 256GB SAmsung SSD on ebay now:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Samsung-256GB-256-GB-SSD-Solid-State-SATA-2-5-Laptop_W0QQitemZ120367143081QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item120367143081&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1234|66%3A4|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A200

$900, what a rip off. Hmm, may be I should buy a M1330 just so I can get the Samsung 256GB SSD for $400

 

Hum... indeed you are right, looks like it's MLC. Well, at least we know it's not using a jmicron controller. Someone back quite a few pages had tested one they got from dell and said it was pretty good. Can't remember the name. I was thinking that samsung's new MLC drive had reads in the 150MB/sec though.
I'd really rather a 64gb drive for half the price though. Don't know if corsair is going to market that one.

here's a review: http://www.behardware.com/articles/743-1/samsung-64-gb-mlc-ssd.html

 

Whoops, looks like the Corsair is NOT SLC, darn. It just has a different and SLOWER controller. So, it may stutter, it may not, WHO KNOWS?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14025

 

I think i'll wait for sandisk's G3 mlc to see how that one fares. It also doesn't have a jmicron controller. Just wondering what's the power consumption figures for that one.

 

Well, I was excited to get my new g.skill titan 256G SSD today....after 6 hours, the excitement is gone.

No matter what OS I load, on 3 different laptops, I get the same results..it takes the OS Load (64bit Vista and Centos 5.2 Linux), and after rebooting, it says:

No boot sector on internal hard drive.

If I hit F1 to continue, it loads the darn OS just fine. I ran the vista bootsec /fixboot and /fixmbr, didn't help. I loaded linux and erased all partitions to make sure nothing odd was going on. CentOS loads fine, and when you boot, the same message.

I tried this on a Dell M2400 and Dell E4400, and an IBM Thinkpad T400 - all the same results.

If I got a bad SSD why would it still load the OS without errors, and after hitting F1 to continue or space, it finds and loads the OS each time.

Argh! long night.

Tom

 

That Cosair/Samsung drive seemed pretty intriquing. I went as far as going to NICX a couple hours ago to see what shipping from Canada was going to be. It wasn't as bad as I thought, still going to be around $350-ish. That would have been incredible if it were SLC. Nearly 50% of the cost of the 64GB one. What's the old adage- If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Yeah...

Still not bad I guess. Not something I'm buying, but we know it's not going to perform bad.

Does anyone have and idea what the power consumption figures on the GSkill Titans are?

 

TomK,
Did you do a fresh install on your new G.Skill Titan? Here's a new user review of 2 G.skill 128 GB Titan's in Raid 0. http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=215259.

 

If it's anything like the OCZ Vertex, it's 2W active, 0.5W idle.

 

About 30 of them, all sorts of combinations, loading achi driver, without, etc...I have use many ssd's in the past with Vista and OSX, this is the first one that has ever given me trouble loading an OS.

Tom

 

TomK - you have a dud.

 

Sure sounds like it! At least I'll get to test G.skills support tomorrow and see if I can get an RMA.

Tom

 

Ever heard of PhotoFast? Seems like they're about to release a 128GB IDE SSD. Too bad it's 2x more expensive per GB than the Transcend.

http://conics.net/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=404

http://www.bestgate.net/ssd_photofast_pf25p256gssdide.html

 

There's no way that is typical...I hope. I pick up mine at the PO tomorrow morning. Won't get to play with it all day.

Here is the G.Skill forum: http://www.gskill.us/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=9

 

Samsung has two versions of the 128GB MLC drive now. As for MLC vs SLC debate I think its pretty much dead now as nearly all future consumer based SSDs will be MLC. The performance differences between an MLC and SLC flash chip is not important enough yet.

Previous issues with MLC drives (OCZ core series etc) seem to have been taken care of atleast by Samsung and Intel(?).

Anyways, back to the Samsung Drives the original 128GB version (a 64GB version was also available) has a read/write of 90/70 (consistent with my own benchmarks, no degradation with SDD capacity used to 50%). The newer generation (available in 256 and 128GB flavors) has a rated read/write of 220/200. The 256GB version was on ebay earlier for ~$800.

What I'd really like to see is a 64GB SSD with RW:220/200 available for ~$200. I think that would hit the sweetspot for most consumers.

 

It does seem like the SLC is dead in the water, but it also seems like no matter what they do, MLC is still a workaround of sorts. I have my life on my laptop. I kind of do not mind paying a LITTLE extra for smoothness and overall peace of mind. And of course it has to be fast also. I would really hate to see SLC disappear entirely.

 

have you the most actual bios for your system? may help.

 

DON'T SAY THAT!! i have to rely on stable performance. MLC doesn't deliver that yet. I can't have to see SLC gone. *gasp*

 

You are preaching to the Choir I am waiting for the first company to come out with a big enough 128GB SLC at COMPETITIVE/AFFORDABLE prices. That will be a big milestone.

 

Samsung 256gb ssd availabel on ebay..

this is the only place i have found this drive available for purchase...

http://cgi.ebay.com/Samsung-256GB-256-GB-SSD-Solid-State-SATA-2-5-Laptop_W0QQitemZ120367143081QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item120367143081&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50


anybody else know of where to get it...?

 

I think 128GB is the minimum HD space these days for consumers. 64GB is nice, but many of us today like to carry our music and media files and they can fill up relatively quick. And not all of us want to carry an external drive or have dual hdd's to play with in our laptop.

Even then, 64GB at that speed would be really nice. I don't travel much and would consider using that for my OS, programs, and some games. The rest can sit on my external.

 

the problem is, i guess, the bigger the drive, the better the overall performance, as it can do much better wear leveling. it looks like, for mlc, it may be really needed to have big storage.

as always, all of this is out of my ***.

 

Yes, for all systems.

Tom

 

crap. then you have to contact support, yes. possibly a firmware update/refresh can help. possibly you'll get a new one..

i wish you the best..

 

Titans are back up for grabs!!!

 

FYI, the SSD I received is a G.Skill Titan 256GB. This appears to have similar hardware as the OCX Apex but I haven't seen confirmation that they are in fact the same hardware.

At any rate, I installed it in my Late 2008 Macbook Pro and installed OSX without incident. I did have to use the Disk Utility at the beginning of the install to set the partition table as GUID. I'm not sure if you always have to do that, but it seems to me like the OSX installer would attempt to do some kind of default install first, and perhaps this failed because of the drive type. I'm not a Mac expert in anyway. I chose the HFS+ Journaled format. It's just a fresh install and I haven't really "used" the mook yet so I can't really report on reliability or speed.

Here's the initial XBench #s:
Disk Test 77.08
Sequential 99.45
Uncached Write 264.52 162.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 244.18 138.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 34.70 10.16 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 283.33 142.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 62.93
Uncached Write 18.23 1.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 155.89 49.90 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1147.87 8.13 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 700.34 129.95 MB/sec [256K blocks]

I shall now attempt to install Windows 7 in boot camp.

 

does anyone actually know anything about the solidata ssds?

http://www.dvnation.com/SOLIDATA-SSD-Solid-State-Disk-Drive.html

they have the X series, which have slc for horrendous prices (but maxing out your s-ata port), and mlc for acceptable prices, nearly maxing out the s-ata port (beating the intels).

they as well have the K series, which sound quite nice and cheap. 128gb mlc for 461$ (160MB/S read, 90MB/S write).

the slc's are definitely much more expensive than f.e. the ones from mtron, but the mlc sound quite fine. google doesn't reveal much to me.

 

Late 2008 MacBook Pro + Boot Camp + Windows 7 + G.Skill Titan = OK!

All hardware present and accounted for and functioning. Virtually 0 installation problems or extra steps.

Now to see how it actually runs...

 

it would be quite interesting to see how xp behaves (as it has unaligned partitions), and how vista works (as it uses more resources and disk accesses than win7). all ssd's should work well in win7, as well as all should work well with osx. they both behave exceptionally well with ssd's in general. vista does so, too, but is still more demanding. only xp is a strange beast

 

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14004

JMicron says those drives have two JMF602B controllers + JMicron's RAID controller JMB390.

 

It has aligned partitions if you use a Vista disk to partition the drive before installing

 

i know. still have to get it to work on the asus eee, though..

 

Interesting news. I have a unibody also with the Apple SSD, but I'm looking for more capacity. The scores seems a bit faster than the Apple (Samsung) 128GB SSD but not as fast as some numbers I've seen for the Intel X25-M 80GB SSD.

 

Keep us posted on how it runs (i.e. stuttering issues). I'm looking to get the same ssd for my early 08 mbp.

 

I'm starting off by using no tweaks at all. And I don't think the partition aligning thing is possible, or at least possible with my inexpertise with all things Mac. Is there anything in particular I can do to try to trigger the stuttering to see if it is still an issue?

 

Run multiple things in parallel, such as multiple file copies. The stuttering on other drives is caused by the controller not handling multiple requests well.

 

I just did that in OSX, several gb from one partition to another. I didn't notice anything except fastness. Will do more in Windows.

 

Heh, the SLCs are $5.5k, that's on the expensive side, in particular if you are looking for a two-SSD RAID0 config, like me...

The MLC is still more than a grand a piece for the 256GB model. Acceptable? Maybe, yes, but what bugs me with this particular bleeding edge is that I may find out that I could have gotten a faster drive for half the price two months from now. Who knows what will happen if Toshiba starts selling their 512GB SSDs, and announces their pricing for those.

What to do, what to do? I (like most people I guess) do not strictly need the SSDs right now, but when should I pull the trigger?

 

Found an article with the specs of the new Samsung MLCs: http://gizmodo.com/393198/blazing-samsung-256gb-ssd-is-the-one-weve-been-waiting-for

 

Exactly... so much new stuff and price drops. Rarely does anything evolve so quickly like SSD is now, even in the computer world.

I will just have to live with my VelociRaptor awhile longer until I am ready and comfortable with the current SSD situation (price/performance). I'm at least waiting until the other new SSDs are on the market... and probably for those 3.5 SSD RAID boxes to be available and reviewed.

 

Check this out:

http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009/...howComment=1232641080000#c2426226911238149372

Runcore 1.8" SSD

4k random write:
total I/Os per sec: 469.4 (4X more than Samsung SLC, almost half of Intel's)
total MBs per sec: 1.89 (4X that of Samsung SLC, still lags far behind Intel)
average I/O responce time: 2.15 (4X quicker than Samsung SLC)
max I/O responce time: from 24 ( short test ) to 1060.5 ( longer test period )
Test was done on HP Mini 1000, XP, on C drive.
..and yes, it has JMicron's chip inside.

Considering the rock bottom prices of these drives ... is it a game changer?

RunCore 64GB Pro 1.8" 5mm PATA Zif Solid State Drive SSD - $200

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/Ca...se+By+Brand:RunCore:RunCore+1.8+inch+ZIF+SSDs

 

as it doesn't run here, it's no game changer for me..

 

Those 200/160 speeds are exactly the same as those of the 256GB MLC G.Skill Titans. Do these drives have the same hardware?

 

Well, the max I/O responce time is bad ... but everything else is pretty good.

 

i can't install a windows on it. no matter wich one. i have the pci version for the asus eee.

 

The 200/160 specs were the initially released ones. However my understanding is that the controllers were further improved and now read 220/200. However without a reliable 3rd party benchmark we can't be sure those are actual numbers.

However Samsung has previously been honest about its numbers. so..

 

While I disagree with you in that SLC is worth the little(double?) extra cost. (Also for the "smoothness" there are no issues with current Samsung MLC drives with regard to "smoothness". In fact currently Samsung's MLC drives would offer better performance to their mainstream SLCs (SLC drives are not actively being developed, other companies' SLC SSDs offer better performance than most MLC drives)). I believe SLC SSDs will always have a place in the SSD world, due to the 10x endurance and slightly better performance.

However, as development will focus mostly on MLC, the price difference between them will increase more and more... making the gain in performance, and lifetime too costly.

 

You didn't say that. so the article/test is pure hype and the worst case is the reality?


Also ssems like not everything is well in g.skill-ville:

http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/gskill_titan_256gb_ssd/index7.php

The last three benches are writing access times.

Avg. write access time is 100x SLOWER than the intel
Min. write access time is 25x times slower than the intel
Max. write access time is 1.5x times slower than the intel (and 20x times that of a Western Digital HDD)


And these ATTO tests also do not bode well:
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/gskill_titan_256gb_ssd/index14.php

 

PSA: G.Skill Titans are available on Newegg again

 

What exactly is partition alignment i hear about? Is it just to make sure your partitions start with a sector 1 and end at a sector 64? If that's it, i have unknowingly done it for years by default with ranish partition manager.