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

For laptop use, I think the Corsair s128 cannot be beat. It provides ample space, is pretty darn fast, and it doesnt stutter. I cant imagine anything being more "instant."

 

Yes, that is very tempting... but I'd hate to buy one and then a week later they update it with the new Samsung controller which is much faster.

 

Like everyone keeps saying, if reliability is your #1 don't go MLC Jmicron. an intel MLC or Samsung MLC will suite your needs but most RELIABLE are the SLC's. if i were you i would consider the Mtron mobi 3500 32gb SLC from rocketdisk.com for $219US.

 

I have given up at this point.
If these people keep insisting that the jmicron drives might be just as good as the intel or samsung drives ... then fine: GO AND BUY ONE BUT PLEASE STOP POSTING ABOUT THESE PIECE OF $H!T DRIVES!!!!!

 

ummm... i said DON'T. man sitecharts you need to be on some meds... you get pretty worked up over some small stuff in life. questions are what these boards are all about

 

sitecharts:

It's an excellent point of discussion. If you aren't for discussion of relative merits of various products, then perhaps a forum isn't the best place to be ;-)

Personally, my G. Skill arrives today and I'll be copying over to it and installing it tonight or tomorrow night.

The Intel is too much for too little storage and I know what the limitations are for the G.Skill. I've already tweaked most of them on my mechanical drive in preparation for the install.

 

Good post. Nice insight. Thank you.

I felt Anand, though, did explain the write/read/leveling (and "filling-up") processes reasonably well in his Original X25-M Article

I don't know if he did any purposeful "pre-loading" of the SSDs while testing, since his testing was so exhaustive in duration.

Sadly, I also gleaned this from the first of your links as well (very rough x-lation via Google):

+++

However, the SSD??SAMUSUN, in Japan and sold only to corporate customers, sales to individual did not go. Therefore, MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB also, Samsung plans to sell directly to individuals is not likely. In addition, it is not about price or ship date for the enterprise. SSD to be attractive as it is, that there are no plans to market the individual is very disappointing.

+++

Edit: +rep for a well supported post + adding original insight

 

I think he's actually agreeing with you.

Sorry I missed it, did you get a Titan or non-Titan G.Skill?

 

I don't recall anyone saying jmicron "might be just as good" as Intel or Samsung. People know they are better if price were no object... but are they worth the extra cost? That is the question and depends on several factors specific to the user's requirements.

 

Is it really much of a question though? The stuttering of an SSD can make one feel like they're still stuck on a mechanical hard drive slower than 5400rpm. That alone should discourage purchasing unless you're willing to go the SteadyState or aftermarket RAID card route.

 

I have read that the stuttering can be pretty much eliminated... either by making changes to the system, aligning the partition, or using a good RAID card. I am waiting for a deal on a cheap 32GB SSD (like an OCZ Solid) to try on an older Windows XP system. I'm anxious to see if it stutters after making some simple config changes and aligning the partition using the info on OCZ's site.

 

Anyone have any good links that offer good prices for the new Samsung 256GB SSD's?

 

Heh, deja vu. I just had literally this exact discussion on another forum a few minutes ago. Here's my response:

http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=5981946&postcount=45

This is more a hardware issue than anything else.

 

Can't buy them individually, except on ebay for outrageous prices.

 

What the heck. I ordered a 60GB OCZ Solid from Amazon.com with overnight shipping (only $4 with Amazon Prime). Should get it tomorrow. Total was about $136 with shipping and there's a $20 rebate.

 

I did some research and find out that there is two versions of Mtron Mobi 3000 1.8" 32GB with ZIF.

Does anyone know is there any difference between MSD-PATA3018-032 ZIF1 and MSD-PATA3018-032 ZIF2, except thickness (first one is 8 mm, second 5 mm) and price.

Is there some reason for MSD-PATA3018-032 ZIF2 to be cheap?

If someone can recommend any 2.5" SSD with 44-pin IDE or 1.8" with ZIF just let me know. 32 GB is just enough. I had Samsung 1.8" with 50-pin IDE, but it was 16 GB (around 15GB actually), so 50-pin IDE will work too.

 

Loved my Amazon Prime when I had my free trial over the holidays.

Good luck.

BTW - Did you verify the 30 day refund privliges? I assume they are in place for SSDs but never checked. I did check laptop refunds over the holidays and Amazon held the no-questions-asked 30 day refund intact, but added an automatic 15% RMA fee for laptops, so apparently their policies can vary (info supplied by phone rep).

/me gazes again at the X25-M

 

No, didn't verify... but hopefully I won't be returning it anyway.

OK, I checked and it seems it is a 30-day return... as long as I don't send for the rebate and remove the UPC. Unfortunately OCZ only gives you 14 days from purchase date to send in the rebate.

 

Yes, but that's still excellent news. There's very few quality vendors we can turn to for SSDs at reasonable pricing, where we can easily RMA if not satisfied.

Perhaps ZZF and NCIX(US)?

Anyway, thx for your checking, and your response.

GL

+rep, too ('cuz I'm easy today!)

 

i emailed the guy and he basically orders laptops with them (samsung 256gb) and then takes them out for sale... crazy stuff..

 

The only difference betweem the ZIF1 and ZIF2 is the height. The ZIF2 (5mm) is being produced for regular orders by Mtron, so you will find this easily available ( http://rocketdisk.com/index.php?cPath=15) but the ZIF1 (8mm) is only being produced for OEMs and other special situations.

There is no reason for it to be so cheap, other than good value

The performance is really awesome & as you have probably seen on notebookreview.com there are lots of happy customers!!

 

I got a Titan. Getting ready to hook it up to my machine and copy!

 

Oh geez, I just realized. I'm pretty sure you bought that Titan from me!

Although you should see good performance regardless of how you get your OS on there, I wouldn't advise copying over. A fresh install that includes setting a partition alignment offset of 256k would be best, especially if you're using XP. You can read more about it here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48309

The thread title says XP but there's a link to Vista steps in the first post too.

 

I'm going to do that when I get my Solid series. I am using XP... but I am hoping I will not have to do a fresh install. I use Acronis True Image... so, after I create the aligned partition, I assume I can restore to that partition using True Image... does anyone know if this is or is not the case?

 

I believe when Acronis clones disks, it destroys whatever partition is on the new drive so the clone won't have the proper offset.

EDIT: Just found this. If cloning is a must, then try following the instructions in this thread: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50603

 

If you have another computer, just hook up the old drive and the new drive and copy paste from the old parition to the new partition in windows. That's how i've been doing things for years. Your new partitioning will remain as you've set it, and the files will be defragmented in the process to boot. Don't forget to set windows to show all hidden and system files, and that the two hidden folders "recycler" and "system volume information" cannot be copied but will be recreated once you run your windows.

 

Doing this won't allow him to manually set the partition alignment offset which is what he wants to do. If he simply wanted to clone, his Acronis solution would've taken care of it.

 

Yes it does. You can create the partition with whatever utility you want, i use ranish partition manager. Then in windows you copy files over, leaving the partition alignments intact.

 

... and as long as we're rehashing old history , I might as well chime in with my experience that while using SteadyState (see OCZ forum for this touted panacea) did make the OCZ Core drive behave better, I found the additional 1-2 minutes that it added to system boot-up (regardless of whether there was data waiting to be committed to the drive) to be an annoying and unacceptable pain in the a$$.

OCZ acts as if all these workarounds are normal and just part of living with SSDs, when nothing could be further from the truth.

 

If you have enough memory, but who doesn't these days, I propose everyone look into EWF for an alternative to steadystate. No additionnal 1-2 minutes to bootup.

 

Interesting... I think I will try that. I've got two handy drive docks on my main computer. Then I suppose I only need an MBR fixer.

I might try robocopy. Probably less chance of problems.

Or I may just use Acronis. I think it has the option to restore only partitions instead of disks, and I hope it won't destroy the alignment if I only restore a partition and not the entire disk... but if anyone knows for sure, please do tell!

 

I've run into problems copying the user document and settings folder once probably because i encrypted it on the original computer. But aside from that, never had a problem.

Anyways, i found out mostlydigital.ca that listed the imation ssds at incredibly cheap prices made pricing mistakes. I'm not gonna insist they respect their duties cause it's kinda abusive when the real price is 30x higher!
So i was wondering if anyone has a used SSD they aren't happy with and want to get rid of for cheap?

 

Huh, sounds like that might work. Have you tried it and checked the offset on the new drive?

 

I did read about the review, but still, it doesn't expose everything. The PCWatch shows more about SSD problems than Anandtech review does. They wonder why the X25-M performance went down(which is still a problem because he doesn't know), but at least they tested it. On the Anandtech review, it talks about Intel's features and such, and showing why OCZ Core stutters etc etc, but do they know about "steady-state" performance? No they don't. 11K IOPS in random write 4K figure means the drive is fresh and not steady-state.

They blame on the JMicron controller for perhaps the lack of cache or whatever, but even for the JMicron based devices, if the drive is fresh, the performance will be significantly higher.

 

Yes, i know it doesn't change because if it does, the next partition that's right after it, my data partition, would corrupt if it does change. In fact, i note down all the cylinder, head, sector information down on paper as backup.
It's useful when you multiboot because when you install windows XP it deletes all your MBR entries of other partitions that you didn't mount. You need to point back at where it's located with the cylinder, head, sector info you noted down. But that's a whole other story. The nice thing about ranish partition manager is that by default all the partition it creates starts with a sector 1 and ends at a sector 63 so it's always aligned. You could specify otherwise of course.
Here's a screenshot as an example: See the first partition, it automatically skips the 0,0,2 to 0,0,63 because if your windows parition started there it would not be aligned.
Downside of ranish partition manager is you need a dos bootdisk, not everyone has one of those anymore. I use a windows 98 install CD.

 

I was just wondering, Samsung and Intel drive require partition alignment? I try searching on google but no answer. Intel and Samsung dont have any shuttering issue, so it doesn't really matter right?

 

No, they don't require it... neither do the other drives... the question is how much does it improve performance... that's a good question. People say it can make a big difference on the jmicron drives... but what sort of difference does it make on the other SSDs? Any at all? I'd like to know.

Also, I think partition alignment is mostly beneficial to XP... as Vista and Windows 7 already align the partitions by default... or something like that.

 

Anyone have any good readings on steady-state on SSD's? Want to brush up on the subject.

 

All this information seems to be pointing to Intel if you want a smooth fast 99% stutter free drive, now about that price and SPACE Intel, let's bring them down and up respectively!

 

Agreed.

I could even live with the current $369 USD price for the X25-M MLC, but can't quite reconcile myself to living comfortably with 80GB, total, for my laptop. I'm now somewhat sorry I didn't buy a dual HDD capable machine.

An Intel X25-M for boot + Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200R 16MB for data, would make a great reasonably future-proof notebook storage solution for an even $500 USD, IMHO.

I once had an old machine, quite a while ago when I was a starving student, which was tight on storage space. And it was a royal PITA. Never want to go back to that again.

 

Yeah, Vista says i am using 65.7GB now. So i COULD do a Intel 80GB but even though i could probably weed out another 2 to 8GB of crap I do not need, it would still be... well, at 60GB I guess it would not be so bad. room for downloading and trying stuff out. My actual DATA of word docs and web sites is nothing. So, I guess I coudl manage it possibly. BUT, I just feel that is too much $$$ for too little space. If it was a 126GB I would fly for $369 and free shipping. So, although I almost just talked myself into it, the smart money says wait for at least ONE MORE go around and see what happens. I have a laptop as my main computer so only one drive plus backup external.

 

I'm kind of in the same "boat" as you with my main computer. I would go for the Intel now if it were 128GB... but I'm waiting. I like the Corsair but want them to update it to the new controller. Things will only get better with time... and probably pretty fast too. I look forward to the Vertex and Sandisk offerings that are yet to come.

In the mean time, I bought the OCZ Solid to "play" with on another computer to help hold me off for awhile on my "main" purchase.

 

Intel to Launch New 64GB SSD This Month
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-SSD-X25-E-X25-M,7011.html

 

Yep, and that's exactly what I'd like to avoid: The constant pruning and playing around to keep free space. Been there. Done that. It's tough to pony-up paying nearly four bills for the privlige to revisit those days.

My current dual-booting my OSs and a rekindled interest in torrenting isn't helping me move quickly to SSDs, either.

 

Why don't you people buy an external enclosure for the HDD you have to remove? All the media and the such things that take up a lot of space but is rarely accessed. You could also put your download folders there. Who's really gonna download stuff unless they are home, so an external HDD wont be a problem then.
I could do by with 16gig. 32 would be comfortable. More is ideal, but price will determine what is optimal.

 

That's what I love about Thinkpads they have the utlra bay option that you can put another drive in place of the optical drive.

 

Yeah, that's what I've been doing since being limited to single drives for my 1000H. Most of my data is kept on an external 1.5TB, only OS, apps, music, documents and whatever I'm currently downloading are kept on the SSD. 64GB for my OS drive is good enough for me.

Spare Tire, I'm not familiar with the partition manager you used. Can you point out where on that screenshot the offset is indicated?

 

Amen Strat cat! I have a wd BLACK 320GB for my laptop now and you know what? It is every bit as fast as my old desktop 640GB System. Granted, that system had been cloned and cloned again into at least 3 computers, so it was a bit SLUDGY

 

And if you don't need a bunch of space you could always go with a USB flash drive (one or more) for some extra storage... they're getting pretty big now.

 

I have an sata docking station so I wold probably CLONE the old drive and keep it as a spare. I cannot afford to be without a computer for too long Your idea is good too. But, then, as mentioned, there is always the additional task of what goes and what stays.