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

I'm surprise people are still buying OCZ SSD when G.Skill Titan and Corsair are stepping in with 128 GB at reason price range. I think people should spread the word that OCZ SSD is horrible and should be avoid at all cost.

I don't think we are hard enough in terms of OCZ SSD drives. Why release a product and have the end user spend the rest of time configuring / optimizing, so it would perform at its rated specification. Just look at the OCZ forums and the amount of tweaking require for just so the hard drive can get it up to speed. You have to go regedit and million other properties just to get it up to speed.

Lets not forget that those OCZ guys have been in the NAND memory business for years.

 

So what is the deal with the OCZ Vertex? Wasn't it suppose to be released by now? Has it been pushed back again?

 

Excellent post

 

Well low performance isn't a defect. RMAs are for defects. If you are buying a 4 year old system from Newegg and you complain to them I want to return because its too slow...

 

how is the corsair s128? really interested in getting one.....

 

Should be a re-branded Samsung. In other words, pretty good. I think the Samsung MLC drives actually have performance comparable to that of the Samsung SLC drives.

 

I would love to see some tests.

Unless the intel drops to a competitive price, the corsair is the #1 drive IMO.
It might have a slower top speed but it seems to me that benefit is like buying a car that can do 300mph for city driving ... the top speed doesn't count. It's fast breaking and acceleration that are key.


Update: this was the best test I could find for the Samsung MLC SSD - http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/743/

 

I think the point here is that most people buy SSD drives for the loading times and boot times. If it doesn't give much benefit they don't care, all others are secondary, reliability, actual file transfer times, etc.

This also gives bad news to the SSD industry in general. The SSD manufacturers think like the graphics manufacturers. But unlike the time when graphics cards first came out where it accelerated games a lot, SSDs already bring much benefits of the technology even on the low end ones.

The SINGULAR reason people don't want the low priced SSDs are the so called "stuttering". Once they get that lowered down to a point where users don't notice it, then they won't look at any faster drives.

(Majority of people looking for faster loading times in programs should just look forward to future versions of Turbo Memory technology. I think Calpella's Turbo Memory will satisfy most users. The integrated NAND controller and 16GB capacity would mean most of the benefits of SSDs people are looking for will be given)

 

I have my eyes on Corsair 128 SSD.

I think its one of the "affordable" SSD that offers good speed and non Jmicron controller. Just don't understand why they pick MLC over SLC.

 

I posted this xls of SSD benchmarks a couple pages back... there was a 128GB Samsung MLC on there. I think most importantly it's something like 5MB/s for CrystalDiskMark random 4KB writes as opposed to the 1-2MB/s you get on JMicron MLC drives.

 

The bad MLC drives get anywhere from 0.06 to 2MB/s. The differences are of course steady-state performance vs. fresh state. Remember, you can't get 2MB/s when its getting 10 IOPS at 4KB file size. Number of IOPS multiplied by the file size is your actual throughput.

If you look at CrystalDiskMark scores when its benchmarking, you can see the flaws of the benchmark. The benchmark runs each test 5 times and only shows the HIGHEST out of the 5 score as the final score, just like Vista shows highest score of the multiple components. What they should have done is average it out.You can get 40MB/s in 4 tests and 80MB/s in one of them, and the score is 80MB/s.

 

A little off topic.

Anyone try Diskeeper 2009 defrag software? Apparently there is something call Hyperfast for SSD user that speed things up.

http://www.diskeeper.com/hyperfast/index.aspx

 

If what they are talking about are true, Hyperfast should work, but it'll benefit the cheaper implementations most.

Same with Managed Flash Technology. They sound so similar to what the new controllers that's in FusionIO and Intel drives are doing. Unless they are made to work well together though, the best solution is having a dedicated controller to do it on the SSD, not seperate software.

 

tested it here, haven't had any measurable gain. uninstalled it again.

 

I have my eyes on that one as well, though I think it uses an older generation Samsung controller even though it recently came out. If they update the thing to the new Samsung speeds and it is the same price or cheaper, then I'll probably make that my first SSD!

 

You just doubled the cost to manufacture as there are twice as many cells in SLC vs. MLC for any given capacity.

If you double the cost to manufacture, guess what that does to the retail price?

 

I was wondering about such a tool. I understand one of the big performance problems on SSDs is having to erase existing data, that brand new drives seemed really fast, but once a disk had been used a while that because of the need to erase with many writes things bogged down. I was wondering if some maintenance tool could just keep "abandoned" cells erased so erasure would seldom be needed. I wonder if DiskKeeper does something like this.

 

As I understand it that is what the intel controllers do as well as software solutions like MFT

 

I wonder how many people on here complaining about the jmicron mlc drives have actually owned or tried one?

 

i touched one once. never want one. not even as a usb stick.

 

I have, it's not the worst thing ever (Supertalent MasterDrive MX V2), in many situations it's great. Has very subtle and occasional pauses, but nothing I can't live with and not that much worse than a hard disk, other than its a "harder" lock up, you wouldn't be able to use a HD in these situations either, you'd just be able to do more with the desktop etc while you waited for it to do its thing. That said I paid 80 bucks for a 60gb because thats what I felt it was worth, not disappointed in what I got for the price.

 

Tried a Warp V2 ... horrible.
Worse than the worst HDD.
You can't even install a windows update without the computer being unusable for 20 minutes.

 

I actually tried a 30GB MasterDrive MX V1, and I tend to agree with Big Mike in that it wasn't really all that bad. This was just after the release of the X25-M, and I never really put any intense loads on it (aka Windows Update XD) so I'd go so far as to say that the "subtle and occasional pauses" may have been psychological. Nonetheless, I ultimately didn't think it was worth what I paid (just under $100 for 30GB?) so I returned it.

 

Trying to equate the Intel X25-M with the OCZ Core SSDs is so far off the mark it's not even funny. The number of, and magnitude of, problems with the Intel drives is TINY compared to that of the OCZ drives.

I have. I have a 64GB OCZ Core SSD and the Intel X25-M. I've used both drives in a Dell Latitude E6400. The OCZ drive is horrible with respect to stuttering, latency, and system freezes. The Intel drive has had none of these problems. Software installs on the OCZ are painful.

In my opinion, OCZ doesn't "get it" with respect to their customer service. Pointing to tweaks and workarounds in their forum is NOT an effective solution for the mass market. Sure, hardcore tweakers will go through the steps and tweaks, but your average consumer cannot and will not. Align the partition by taking the drive and putting it in another computer and... ???

Currently, OCZ products with the JMicron controller are not, in my opinion, fit for consumer use. That is not the case with other SSDs. Will the Apex and/or Vertex series be effective solutions? We won't know until there are real-world tests and user experiences; OCZ marketing spiel doesn't count.

 

The only Jmicron drive that I own that is bad to use a OS drive is a Trandscend 32 GB SATA drive.

1. Ritek 128 GB SATA 2 worked as a OS drive now use it as a huge flash drive
2. Supertalent 120 GB and 128 GB pretty good drive(both external drives)
3. OCZ Solid Series 250 GB(haven't tried it as a boot drive but the read speeds were pretty good, now it's in an enclosure).
4. G.skill Titan 256 GB is boot drive pretty fast no stuttering.
5. Supertalent 256 GB Masterdrive is in Ultrabay slot of my thinkpad
6. Still have my 64 GB OCZ SLC drive.

 

Holy crap jedisolo.... lol.

 

I've tried both the OCZ Core V1 64gb and V2 64gb which have the JMicron controller and the G. Skill Titan 128gb which has 2xJMicron controllers in RAID 0. Aside from a software solution like SteadyState which was annoying, due to long boot times and taking up a large chunk of the already limited HD space, there is simply no workaround for the stuttering. Even with all the registry tweaks and partition alignment, it still stuttered to the point of frustration.

I've recently used the Titan for about a week and the experience is the complete opposite. Using all the OCZ provided tweaks, and no software solution like SteadyState, the drive performed beautifully and at rated specs with 0 stuttering issues. I've posted up benches at ocforums which is where I normally post, and can paste them here if anyone likes.

My one complaint about the Titan is that it uses more energy compared to the Core. It knocked off about an hour of battery life on my 1000H and is considerably hotter. It's a good solution for a desktop, but I'm gonna try something else for my 1000H. I'm putting the Titan up for sale and just bought the Corsair 128gb SSD which I'll bench and give impressions of tomorrow night.

 

Btw does anyone have an XPS 1730 or have bought the Samsung 256GB SSD (w/ speeds supposedly at 220/200 MB/s R/W)??

 

Question about stuttering and why we don't see it on mechanical hard drives.

Its my impression (correct or not) that the stuttering is due to bad controllers and slow random writes?

I tested my 7200rpm 7k320 with crystalmark disk, and random 4kb writes are like 0.3mb/s. I couldn't find any ocz comparisons, but I'm assuming its not lower than that. So is it that the slow random writes aren't the problem, is it something else?

 

I have an XPS m1330 arriving with the Samsung 256GB SSD on Wednesday. I'll post benches then.

N

 

Anandtech did a great article a while back explaining the issue. Here's the relevant text:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/Intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=10

 

Thanks!
/////////////////////

 

I emailed supertalent and they replied back saying their new drives should show up on Newegg later this week.

 

My G.Skill Titan seems to be malfunctioning. I had it configured for Mac Boot Camp dual boot with Vista. This morning it wouldn't boot OSX all of a sudden. And something was wrong in Vista. I thought the problem in Vista was the VM I was trying to run. It seemed fine until I started the VM, but then it would act like it was a 5mhz processor, with incredibly long stalls in operations, however CPU usage was very low. Then Vista started failing to boot. It's been working fine, used it all week in OSX and Vista. The VM in OSX, too. The new things I did were install AVG, Skype and VMWare in Vista. I did have one problem last week where Vista reported some drive corruption. I ran the disk scan utility and that seemed to fix it.

 

I've had a couple cases with this Titan where I tried to reboot and got a very long pause before the BIOS/boot prompt appeared. Dunno what it's doing there, but eventually it got underway and then everything booted fine. No other errors yet.

 

Can't find it.

 

so I'm waiting on you to buy the Corsair 128GB one to write a review on it ... since you seem to have like every SSD that is on sale today .. lol.

 

http://colette.trianglesoft.net/2009/doc/090122a.xls

 

thank you.
(the search function on this forum is horrible!!!! after trying to find it with 6 searches ... and all the waiting that entails ... I had given up)

That is a great dataset. I would also like to see IOPS results ... and then it should be mandatory for everyone in this thread to add their values.

Maybe we can even add it to wikipedia? this is an invaluable tool.
Commander Wolf, you want to add it to wikipedia? Maybe underneath their SSD article? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive)

 

I originally wanted to add IOps... but there were only like two or three people who posted IOMeter benches...

 

I am using an ocz core v1 for my os drive. I have disabled indexing, prefetch, superfetch and moved browser cache and temp folders to another drive which is also my data drive.

Those are the tweaks i've done and I'm very happy with the results.

 

I love mine. I have never, ever had any problems. It simply does not lock-up.

 

I just bit the bullet and bought the Corsair s128. I am new to HD benching so what are the recommended programs? I just downloaded HDTune and ATTO. Are there any other programs I would need?

 

^use HDtach, Iometer, Crystal mark.

 

I'm guessing supply and demand. They were probably being picked up a lot faster at $400.

 

It's still at $400?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167005

There's even the Kingston re-brand... also at $400?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134885

 

Probably because Mac isn't compatible. Buy the SSD they use in Macs.

 

In any case, it is $399 at Amazon and Amazon has a better return policy.

 

Or...sell the MacBook and get a PC notebook. I've ordered a Dell Studio XPS 16. We'll see how things fair with that. I had hoped to have one notebook "to rule them all", but that's not working out. I'm going to try running OSX in a VM on Windows next

Something really weird is going on with VMWare in Vista on this thing. Up until I start a VM, it runs smooth as butter, then both the host and the guest start acting like they are 386's, but the task manager shows 96% cpu idle. VMWare runs fine in OSX on the Titan. I think the drive issues and the VMWare issues are different. I'm not going to investigate it further, though. I can limp along a couple of weeks until the Dell gets here.

 

HDTune.com

.. and run it.