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

In the details Dall states: Manufacturer Part# J246M

(as opposed to: Dell Part# : 341-8981)

Google turns up nothing I can see.

 

I just placed my order, the final price after 25% coupon is $623.32.
Wish its Samsung SSD. peace
right now my order is being reviewed, once i get the drive and confirm its Samsung SSD. I will let you guys know.

 

Check here

http://www.samsung.com/global/syste...oduct/2008/10/29/14116725_SATA_30Gbps_SLC.pdf

100/80 speeds for the SLC model.

 

Nice review at Tom's of the Intel X25-E.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-x25-e-ssd,2158.html

 

Isn't that a different HDD than the regular version? It says "enterprise".

 

Yeah, yeah, the official specs are 100/80, but I've seen some places list 90/70 so I just pulled the first number I could think of out of my... err, yeah.

If by "regular" you mean the "mainstream" X25-M, then yes, it's a different drive. There's nothing really irregular about the X25-E, though; it's the same drive with SLC chips instead of MLC chips; I do believe the controller, and DRAM are the same.

 

No, not the X25-"M", I guess I just thought they were saying X-25-E-E, but I guess it's just one E and it stands for enterprise while I was thinking it was for extreme lol.

In other words, I thought there was an extreme version and then this was the extreme enterprise or something, lol my bad.

 

I was set to get the X25-E, but I keep finding reviews talking about after your rewrite to a previously used space, the speed bites the dust and drops about half speed. Is the X25-M better in this regard?

Here is one review:

 

The new Samsung 256 GB SSD Review here.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9128755&intsrc=hm_list

Its a really short review and they didn't post any write benchmark. I don't think its a really good review.

 

I got my Samsung 256GB drive yesterday (ebay purchase) and put it in my Dell XPS M1530 and installed Vista Business 64 bit last night.

I used ATTO and got pretty much the same numbers, especially the 180MB write. Reads were all over the place from 170 to 199MB/sec.

No stuttering and I measured a boot time of 26 seconds.

 

That's BS. MLC does the same thing but even worse. It's how the Intel controller works that causes it to drop.

Don't ignore it this is how flash memory works.

After you write to it, you have to read the content, store it somewhere else, erase it, then write it back. The controllers have "wear levelling" so every place of the drive is written equally(for example, so block 1 written to 1000 times and block 25 written 1000 times).

It does not matter whether its SLC or MLC chip, its the nature of how flash memory works. MLC is actually slower in this regard because MLC chips use extra care to make sure data isn't corrupted when storing two states on the transistors.

E actually stands for Extreme and the M is mainstream. They just call it enterprise drives because they don't have true SAS offerings yet.

 

The older MLC version is 90/70, the SLC is 100/80.

 

Thanks man. Hmm.. I wonder if SSD is even worth it.

 

oh yes it's worth it. i couldn't switch back to hdds anymore after using them some days (now some months).

and no, inteluser, it doesn't have to "write back". it can just read from a cell, combine with new data, and write to a new cell, forget (and mark as deleted) the old cell.

ssd's don't have to arange the data 1:1 the way the os thinks it has placed the data.

 

So I assume that if you have more space it will be a while before it has to rewrite over the same space again The new SSD from Intel now has 160GB of space and thew SLC SSD from Intel now has 64GB of space.

I am wondering just how long it will be before they have to rewrite again.. I have a 32gb Mobi 3000 in my Fujitsu and have some stutters once in a while but in general it is quite quick.

 

With a 32GB drive it won't be too long before the drive has to start rewriting blocks. Nonetheless, the loss in performance from having to rewrite an SLC block shouldn't be as great as the loss in performance from having to rewrite an MLC block; in other words, there shouldn't be that big of a decline on your Mtron.

That being said, the Mtron isn't known to "stutter". What's your definition of stuttering here?

 

I guess I'm getting a X25-E soon (as I hear that is the best) to go in my 1640 2.93ghz lappy with 4GB DDR3.

My question is, should I use this MFT and/or Ramdisk?

Ramdisk:
I use Firefox and my user profile is about 50mb, if that matters for the ramdisk. Maybe my Thunderbird email could go on it too since my profile for that is about 55mb. I have a 16gb OCZ usb flash drive, does that have anything to do with this ramdisk?

I just don't know anything about this MFT or ramdisk yet, lol.

 

now...which one best ssd ? samsung 256 gb or intel 160 gb ?

 

Not quite familiar the the details of MFT, but a ramdisk allocates a portion of your memory for use as a pseudo-SSD. For example, you could create a 1GB ramdisk on your 4GB of memory and install a program onto that 1GB which would load pretty much instantly.

The only real downside is that memory is volatile and you will have to save and reload the ramdisk every time you shut down and power up the computer.

If you ask me: Intel 160GB (X25-M, I presume?) > Samsung 256GB. But it really depends on the price and what you're looking for in an SSD.

 

I'm curious why you feel that way. The Samsung has a much higher rated write speed. But I've not seen enough benchmarks to know how difference this makes in the real world.

 

Too bad rated specs rarely reflect real world performance... sequential speeds might be higher, but random speeds are just as important (if not more important) and they're pretty low. Plus I believe the Intel has lower latency and power consumption. Still, I feel that SSDs aren't ready for the mainstream market as their price, capacity, and optimizations need much more refinement. But if you really need the performance and/or reliability and cost is no issue, SLC SSD is still the tried and true solution.

 

I know that. Generic way of explaining to people don't need explanation of every little minute detail.

And once its fully written, some place needs to be erased anyway. It doesn't have to be the deleted block, but it does.

 

A little OT but: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Ar...ntel-going-after-arms-smartphone-business.htm

"He dose not, apparently, regard NAND as an important business for Intel. “NAND in the platform is strategic, NAND as a business for Intel isn’t,” said Otellini."

 

When opening up Microsoft Office it now lags a bit. It used to open up really quickly with no issues but now it seems to lag a bit when opening. My Belkin USB also seems to lag before opening up for wifi connection. These all used to be super quick but now require some time before opening up.

 

Is there any way to avoid this from happening? Like not using to much of the storage on the HDD or something?

 

It's hard to say exactly what his problem is in the first place. Maybe the Mtron does have significantly poorer steady state write performance than I'd think, but that should not make programs open any slower... since you're largely only going to be reading from the disk when you load an application.

In general, there probably will be a benefit to not using up your entire disk space, but how big that benefit is probably varies.

 

I just swapped out my g.skill Titan for my corsair s128. Anyone want to buy a 1.5 month old 256 GB Titan?

 

The Intel X25-M 80GB has the difference of "1024" and "1000", which is 5.5GB dedicated for controller duties.

The X25-E 32GB has much more space left in percentage terms. There are actually enough chips in there to make a 40GB drive but they use the 8GB space for controller duties, not to mention even more space due to the 1024/1000 difference.

Here's what using an SSD feels like. Hard Drives are like going at max speeds of 100km/h in a regular sedan with not much traffic and stops. SSD feels like a racecar that's in a road with lots of traffic and stops.

 

Are you saying that the race car is as slow as the old junker next to it in overall practical terms?

I'm not being tongue-in-cheek or anything – I just wonder, since I will buy an SSD down the road, and from reading a third of the long, long thread, all I get from it is that things are far from clear cut, and with samsungs new 256GB offer, it seems like MLC have somewhat caught up with the SLC-offerings out there at the moment. Or in short: The confusion is abundant, as you can tell.

 

So is my newly ordered 7200RPM HDD a Sports Sedan???

 

Can you be once a little less pessimistic? I haven't found any traffic or any stop yet on my road, so the race-car performs much better. And actually, an SSD is much better at stop-n-go anyways

 

It depends on the OS and the system's fucntion. If you have a *nix implementation, and the box is lightly loaded there's almost no disk utilization.

My storage server (running Solaris) is such a machine.

Cheers,

 

That just tells me with "creative" usage it will stress ALL SSD implementations out there. Just that not everyone uses it to the same extent. Some extremely rare people might not notice even with the OCZ Core.

BTW I wanted to ask. You have the X4500MHD with an SSD drive. It might not be a benefit on fast discrete graphics that has own memory but on an integrated system the benefits of a fast disk might be noticeable. So, what do you say to that?

 

I don't think it matters, really. Not with the X4500MHD which is plenty fast for every day tasks. Heck, you barely notice the performance boost with a GMA 950 that is prevalent in today's netbooks. I think, for most of us the benefit that SSDs provide, by themselves, is fairly tangible (irrespective of onboard graphics).

 

I never did anything graphically intensive on my NVS160M, which is why I'm switching to the X4500. Heat, noise, battery life are all much more important to me. That being said, I think the SSD had the same level of benefit for me on both systems; they were both markedly quicker in select disk-heavy situations, but more importantly for me, noise was heavily reduced in both cases. It was definitely worthwhile, if that's the point?

 

Help, my samsung slc used to bench at reads of ~110mb/s on my desktop when it was attached as a secondary drive to transfer my system partition from the HDD. Now in the laptop it's benching at ~50!!! What happened?! I have a x61t.

 

is that one of those with the speed cap? that's what i wanted to say: maybe it sees s-ata1 and throttles all it's performance to half. sort of.

but i guess you should be able to change it..

 

That would be quite weird, even sata-1 can go up to 150. I just tried disabling AHCI and performance went up a bit, but very variable, and still ~55 average. I just don't want to do a fresh install right now.

EDIT: actually, AHCI seems a bit better, give more consistent results.

 

Have you considered updating the chipset drivers?

Can't hurt.

 

Actually, i did. I think i updated the intex matrix storage driver after i put the SSD in, i didn't bench before. I'll take another look see if there are updated drivers for the chipset, i think there wasn't last time i looked at lenovo's site.

 

it's not that it can go up to 150MB/s, but it's that it's half the speed of s-ata2. it's like if you clock down your processor to half.

I just always assumed this could result in such strange behaviour. But I hope, with driver updates and config changes, you'll get it done better.

 

Yeah, can't hurt.

I usually just let the Intel .inf utility do it's thing and see what it finds.

 

my intel 80G in x61t is around 130/70

 

In fact, when I updated to the latest intel matrix storage driver I had big problems with my SSD (totally blocked/frozen, the SSD(HDD) LED was on and I had to do hard restart of system). When I uninstalled it, the problem disappeared. Now I'm using just the original WinVista drivers. Is that bad for something?

 

got a 128gb 1.8" ssd from samsung, micro s-ata for below 400$. together with a 1000$ reduction for a 2730p that I should recieve soon, I hope that'll be quite a nice package

 

Check the intel website not the Lenovo website for drivers; they're better/ newer

 

Alright mate, i'll do that. But usually, if it's on lenovo it's cause it's been tested and supported. It was my rule of thumb to take drivers from the manufacturer first.

EDIT: Still no luck. I don't want to try reinstalling windows and find out it's still performing like that. Oh father, let this cup of suffering pass from me!
EDIT: I just tried the drive plugged to my desktop and benched it. Now reads are ~75 average with some few peaks and plateau at ~120. Seems like my drive's performance degraded over time or something! Someone else with a samsung SLC bench theirs?

 

Hmm... difference between new and steady state performance, perhaps?

Mine seems to have slowed down a little, but it's only a couple MB/s in the sequential figures. Will try to bench it regularly and see what happens...

(Also, I did watch the five tests in each category; the difference between the slowest and the fastest result is only 1MB/s to 2MB/s in the sequential figures)

New:

Sequential Read : 94.794 MB/s
Sequential Write : 86.774 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 92.378 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 68.579 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 15.583 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 5.387 MB/s

Now:

Sequential Read : 90.838 MB/s
Sequential Write : 82.813 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 88.700 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 65.236 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 16.703 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 5.170 MB/s

EDIT: HDTune actually shows a bit more of a performance degradation; average transfer speed has dropped from 83 to 67, average access time has risen from 0.3ms to 0.4ms, and CPU usage has risen from 4.3% to 21.1%. Quite interesting indeed...

 

Sequential Read : 90.851 MB/s
Sequential Write : 81.563 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 87.004 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 70.363 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 12.920 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 5.612 MB/s

HDtune is the problematic bench for me. Those results i quoted earlier were HDtune results.

 

Ladies!!!
Vertex is officially in the US market now.

http://search.zipzoomfly.com/?Key=ocz+vertex&Category=00&x=0&y=0

30G is out of stock in 1 hour.
60G and 120G are still in stock