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

Is the cavalry a rebrand of that same drive? Your original link was to a Cavalry 32gb on amazon, not a gskill.

 

I'd venture that even if it isn't the exact same drive, it'd be something similar... like every other MLC drive not made by Intel or Samsung. If it didn't have a JMicron, I'd be surprised. I'm also surprised that nearly a year after the launch of the original Core, no one has developed a controller to replace the JMicron in these cheaper SSDs.

 

i am sure i have a samsung unit for my SSD.
i was sent an email some time ago from AW when spec'ing my unit and was told they use samsung or sandisk.
i have not opened my unit since i put the updated memory in it and have forgotten since. but at the time i was glad since it was a brandname unit (samsung) vice one i never heard of (sandisk)

 

Yes, but the person responding implied that all jmicron based SSDs were to be avoided... but some of them, like the 64GB g.skill one I linked to, has a very good rating and was selling for $120 the other day. It might be great for certain systems. For my main system though, I'll get a non-jmicron controller, but for an older notebook, I'm thinking the g.skill might work well for the price. If it comes back down to $120 or the Cavalry I posted comes down into the $70-$80 range, I may buy one and try it out on one of my older systems.

 

FWIW, the cavalry one from Amazon was only 32GB rather than the 64GB gskill...

 

Yes, I know... I only need 32GB for this machine... but if I could get that highly rated 64GB G.SKILL for $120, I might get it anyway... but then again, I'd prefer to buy from Amazon in case I want to return it... so I will wait for prices to drop again. Amazon.com did previously have an OCZ Solid 32GB in the $70-$80, and Newegg recently sold that G.SKILL for $120 shipped the other day... so I will wait for one of those deals to come back and then try my luck and see how it will work in my older Windows XP notebook... unless something better appears while I'm waiting.

 

TidalWaveOne: Going over the reviews, it still looks people suffer from stuttering and slow writes on that drive. If you could tolerate that then go for it, but I'd personally avoid the hassle.

 

But with such a high overall rating, those issues must not be that bad... at least that is my thought.

 

My main concern is not stutter since EWF will solve those problems. My main concern is battery life, it just happens that the jmicron drives have crappy battery life compared to samsung or intel.
But if i can put the drive in a system where battery life is not a concern, i.e. a desktop, i can just go with a really cheap one and take advantage of the high sequential read and low random access. 32gig is fine with me, with a bigass HDD as data drive (think say 2TB), and short-stroke the first few gigs as swap.

 

define stutter....
define EWF....

do either of these show up in all the tesing you all provide? or is this real time usage stuff?

 

@Tidalwave

THIS!
And be mindful of ... "corporate users" leaving reviews.
OCZ has been extremely active spamming forums.
I wouldn't put it past them (and others) to leave friendly reviews.
ALL jmicrons stutter. The drives that don't stutter are WAY MORE EXPENSIVE because they can!
So stop arguing!

 

Not to nit-pik, but that's a 4 star review. Only 65% of the 51 reviews rated the drive 5 stars. 35% rated it 4 stars or less.

Just thought I'd clarify. Perhaps you misread the rating system or the rating changed since you posted.

Of course, Newegg's reviews are 'general public' and can be dubious-at-best, but I admit I often do allow them to have some sway with some of my personal buying decisions (but usually only on inexpensive mundane products, like removable media or cables, for example). Otherwise I generally prefer respected forums or review sites (and there are very few I respect out of the many, trust me).

 

I think a better way to look at is is that 90% rated it 4 or 5 stars. That's a very good rating! And it's from 51 people (a good number)... so unless there is a significant amount of fraud involved, it seems like this G.SKILL would be a good drive for the money, even though it may stutter once in awhile. I can't imagine the stutter would be that bad with such a high rating... but you never know.

Seems people don't like jmicron, but they are better now than they have been in the past and there are some users here who seem to really be happy with the TITAN.

 

O.K., fair enough.

I'm generally wary of Newegg reviews. The reviewers range from 11y.o. script-kiddies, to seasoned I.T. pros. But you present a reasonably coherent, cogent, argument.

"You pays your money, you makes your choice"

Good luck.

 

Would putting multiple "cheap" single Jmicron drives in RAID0 help with anything, since the internal "RAID0" dual Jmicron drives seem to be a "success"?

 

I've used the OCZ Core V1 and V2 which have the single JMicron controller and although battery life might not be as good as say the Intel, it's still pretty good. My Corsair SSD whicih has a Samsung controller gives me about the same battery life on my 1000H as with the OCZ drives.

You have to remember that the Titan employs two JMicron controllers in RAID 0, offering very different real life performance compared to the SSD you linked to which has a single JMicron. And even people who gave it 4 or 5 stars made note of the stutter.

 

If you're using onboard Intel/nvidia RAID, it helps a little but doesn't completely eliminate the stutter. If you're using an aftermarket RAID card with onboard cache, then yes, stuttering is completely eliminated and you get fantastic performance from the SSDs.

 

There's not to many APEX fans here but there was a significant price drop on newegg for the 120gb version

EDIT: The 60gb dropped as well (although for some reason write speeds are spec'd slower than the 120gb and 250gb)

 

So if i get two jmicron drives put them in my notebook in RAID0 it would reduce stuttering and double the performance?

 

I still haven;t found any tests or reviews regarding the
PHOTOFAST G-Monster V2 2.5' 256GB Flash SATA SSD Drive, anybody?

 

Reduce stutter yes, eliminate stutter no, and I'm not sure about double performance in read/writes.

 

Pretty sure a re-branded Titan again. Possibly different firmware?

Also, if firmware is the only difference between Titan and Apex, could I theoretically flash Titan to Apex or vice versa?

 

exactly what i was thinking with that price drop... if the apex doesn't perform as well as the titan y not make it a titan although the comparison in that article was a 256gb titan vs 120gb apex havn't seen a review on the 250gb apex yet... or 120gb apex Vs 128gb Titan...

 

I just want to clarify something about shuttering. I experience a huge "pause" when I was installing application, copy my backup back to my laptop and installing application. I'm sorry if my experience of my Corsair SSD somehow offended you IntelUser.

 

I would define stuttering as:
- the computer becomes absolutely unusable and freezes until the process has ended (and finished all its random writes who are probably to blame)
- it is a process that takes longer with a SSD than with a HDD (e.g. when I experienced stuttering with a Patriot Warp v2 it took 20 minutes to install a windows update vs. 1-2 minutes with a HDD)
- you will notice it BIG

 

My opinion is that G.Skill Titan and OCZ Apex reduce Your battery life because there is "two SSD in one", so they need twice more current, and with same voltage it is twice more power consumption.

 

It's worse than that... not only do you have the two JMicron 602 controllers and associated flash chips, you also have the JMicron(?) RAID controller... so it's two drives and a RAID controller packed into the space of what should be a single drive.

 

I believe I am going to buy a Apex 120gb and compare with the Mtron Mobi SSD I have now, new egg's price is reasonable enough.

 

Here are my results of the corsair s128 from diskmark 2.2.

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 99.517 MB/s
Sequential Write : 74.409 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 95.928 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 61.410 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 14.719 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 4.676 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/02/09 18:19:40

 

Another request for people using Crystaldiskmark

Please sit through the benchmark process and write down all the 5 values for

-Sequential Write
-Random Write 4KB

 

Who the heck is Cavalry Pelican and what are the down and dirty details if their 128GB on the Egg? Price is good, any real reason to get it?

 

Doubtful it's anything more than a rebrand. But a rebrand of what is the question? I'd stay away from manufacturers like that, it's doubtful the firmware or support are as good.

 

It's worse. It's a rebrand of the Solid or Core V2. But he won't listen ... just as he apparently is unable to read this thread.
Really sick of these people dropping in here, posting a question like "should I buy XYZ?".
do they think we have been discussing the previous hundreds of pages?

 

Well, that is true, but they probably have half the memory chips per controler. So power consumption might not be double or more, or perhaps they could because of the raid controler. I wonder if a raid controler knows when to power down or if drives plugged into raids are always running.

 

The titan is not a rebrand of the solid or the core. Where are you getting this from.

 

Not sure if this s/w product has ever been posted here:

EasyCo's Managed Flash Technology

It seems to convert random writes to sequential writes (similar to MS Steady State?) but is designed specifically and exclusively for SSD small random writes enhancement, generally in pro I.T. server environments (there is a laptop product, too).

Anyway, I found it interesting.

 

Yeah, has been posted. And the price is preposterous.

 

I read the entire thread a while back, but hadn't seen it.

$110 USD for 128GB, and $180 for 256GB.

Might be worth it if it can cause an inexpensive higher capacity MLC to perform well in excess of an SLC (as claimed).

No idea if it's snake-oil or not.

"If it sounds too good to be true...etc.," comes to mind.

 

That was a reference to the Cavalry drive, not the Titan.

 

It's been refered to as MFT. Last time i checked them out, they couldn't make it run on an OS partition yet. So it's pretty useless, unless you're a server or something.

 

If this is still true, then yes. Agreed.

 

Help us pick The Current Best SSD deal...

Our first Toshiba R600 ([email protected]) will arrive soon, with a 160GB conventional HD and Vista. Soon after arrival, we will install a SATA 2.5" SSD and then XPPro (accelerated by a few functionality deletions).

But what SSD? Only a year ago this was a well-defined market, but today it's very confused by rebranding, specs that don't convert to real-world performance, retailer-invented claims, and other ambiguities.

We need at least 32GB (no music, videos, games, etc.). Reliability is the most important single factor, but speed is #2 and #3 is, of course, $$.

So... Intel, OCZ Vertex, Mtron, Solidata, Samsung?

Thanks!

 

I don't know who is rebranding who, but the Titan and the Apex are the same hardware. I have no idea if the firmware is different.

I come to this conclusion based on these reviews which dismantle the drives and look at the actual internal parts:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/01/20/g-skill-titan-256gb-ssd-review/1
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=290&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=3

 

Too early to tell on OCZ Vertex, as they're not out yet. Based on track record, I would avoid until there have been thorough tests.

Both Samsung and Mtron have good track records, power consumption on the latter notwithstanding.

Personally, I'm a fan of the Intel X25-M, and with the recent price drops, they become even more enticing.

Right now they are the MLC performance leader, in my opinion.

 

^^

Dovetailing into notaguru's question and heavyharmonies' response:

I had earlier decided 128GB =< $300 USD for a dependable, smooth drive, was going to be my trigger point.

But now, after thoroughly reading Anand's X25-M/SSD Article and seeing the X25-M's recent price drop at Amazon, and taking into account Amazon's liberal return policies, Im getting a really itchy trigger finger.

It does appear Intel 'M' series may be the WTG, IMHO, w/o having to pay the full 'SLC tariff'.

But I really don't think I'll be happy with only 80GBs in a single drive, dual boot config.

Bah.

 

Wow they sure are, though you could be super technical and point out that they're 2 different revs (0851 and 0852) of the board, they're clearly made by the same ODM for both, which may be neither of them.

 

The X25-E (Extreme) is Intel's SLC solution. The 32GB (enough for us) product is not that much more expensive than the larger MLC product. But it would be great if we could find something as reliable and fast for significantly less money. Various brands in the $100 range offer good specifications, but what can we believe?

 

With reliability #1 and speed #2, I'd have to say Intel.

 

Get nothing from the $100 range if you're looking for consistent performance, nothing. The only way you'd make those drives usable for every day use is through Windows SteadyState, you can read more here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47183

But instead of putting yourself through that hassle and giving up a chunk of your already limited disk space, spend the money necessary for a decent SSD. You're not going to find one below the $300 range except maybe for OCZ Apex's 60gb: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227410

For guaranteed reliability and speed, Intel's X25-M and G.Skill's Titan 128gb are your best bets.

 

Well it still seems like the Titan is up in the air as far as reliability being a #1 conscern