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

just finished reading article, now I've got it, about that trim stuff

 

This is a really great roundup, everyone paying attention to this thread should read it.

 

Very interesting SSD stuff here

 

Great link Ashura, thank you for sharing! I was wondering what was taking them so long.

 

Great article.
Anand really sets the bar high for other test and benchmark websites to follow.

 

intel x-25m is now $343 on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-SSDSA2MH080G1C5-X25-M-2-5-Inch-9-5mm/dp/B001F4YIYY

 

80GB is the same price ($343) at Newegg.com
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167005

160GB price at Newegg.com dropped again to $689
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167015

But 160GB at amazon is still $820 though..
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001MTJYC8

 

Do you guys that run ssd's disable page file? I keep reading that it wears them out quickly. Just curious I am new to the whole ssd thing

 

WOW Great price now

 

I'm actually kind of surprised at the samsung slc results. I know it has slower sequential read/write speeds, but I was kind of surpirsed at the random write speeds and random write latencys. It seemed like it was in the range of the junk drives. The author didn't really explain this, and I was wondering with these numbers why don't samsung slcs stutter and suffer the problems that drives with the same random writes experience. It just doesn't seem like the real world performance of the samsung slc's match up with what the benchmarks would predict.

 

I think it's because the Samsung drives all have a sufficiently large cache of some sort, be it the SLCs or the rebranded MLCs like the Corsair S128. Stuttering is caused when the onboard JMicron 16KB cache is overloaded with small writes, causing a queue that hangs the machine. The X25-M by comparison has a 256KB cache. The Samsung drives probably have something in the middle along with a better overall controller design so that even though the actual random write speed is small, the cache is never overloaded.

But I could be totally wrong about this, someone correct me if I am...

 

After reading the anandtech article, I don't really feel like waiting much longer for an ssd.

If I had the money ...most important for me is no stuttering, the resulting speeds of the SSD's capable of that is enough for now.
I wholeheartedly agree that you notice the bad more than the good.

In order of importance to me :

For an IBM x60t Vista buisiness
- Instead of the 2.5in 500GB western digital / SATA I (gimped...)

since I only have SATA I speed.... Samsung 128GB 2nd gen MLC or the corsair equivalent,
looking at the samsung 1.8in 128GB ssd as well since they can be had for a good price even with an adaptor.


Use a 500GB portable HDD with the rest of my files (docs, music,itunes,zune etc...) with both the sony and IBM.



For a Sony TZ 240 Vista buisiness
-Instead of the 1.8in ZIF PATA 100GB HDD....

I would keep it for storage, put things like torrents and the firefox cache to alleviate the SSD.
the MTRON 32GB is too small for my taste, the runcore 64GB is backordered and is too unknown, the samsung 64GB is just too expensive.
It does not seem cost effective to purchase a 1.8in zif pata SSD, though i did find a 1.8in to 2.5in SATA adaptor bay to use in the futur.
Don't see any way of adapting the 1.8in microSATA SSDs.


It would be nice to have a 64GB 1.8in SSD with a 500GB HDD on the sony.



-Transformed the optical bay to a 2.5in HDD/SSD SATA bay

The best choices are the OCZ vertex, intel x25m and samsung mlc 2nd gen than 3rd gen.
Minimum of 60GB, 120GB would be better and help offset the long term performance degredation among other things.




For a desktop (theoretical)
- I would say that 2-4 30GB ocz vertex in a RAID 0 would be very cost effective.



Is my reasoning sound ?

On another note, I am surprised that (until the anantech review came out) so few have talked about the samsung 256GB.
Since we know that it can be bought for 600 + tax through dell (20% coupon), giving it a 2.34GB/$ ratio, makes it a better value than most drives with some serious performance.

 

Yeah. But Amazon is actually the much better store to buy them.
1. return policy
2. 30 day price matching to Amazon after purchase

 

Me too. I got really excited when he said he would delve deeper into the Samsung drives at the beginning but then he only lightly touched on the Summit.

I would have thought the SLC would do much much better in the random read/write area.

 

Nobody is going to notice 0.53MB/s as being slow. JMicron drives are at 0.02-0.03MB/s. 0.53MB/ is in the level of platter hard drives. You don't notice them stutter do you? That's why once it reaches certain random write performance anything over that won't benefit you much.

 

I'm kinda sad that the Anandtech article didn't have any info on the forthcoming Super Talent SLC drives.

 

After I saw the inside of OCZ Summit here:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=22

I'd like to confirm that it look "EXACTLY" like the inside of Samsung 256GB SSD that I have.



But the Summit is an early sample though, anything may change before it hit the market.

 

I had the pagefile in my old TZ with 32 GB Samsung SLC (first gen) - after ~1 year of usage there were no problems...

Now I almost always turn it off, as I have 4 GB of RAM.

 

Me too. I rescanned the article, thinking I had missed a page or something.

The Samsung SLC in my desktop here feels plenty responsive. Is it as fast as my home machine with a pair of Intel X25-M in RAID 0? No. But then again it's an apples-to-oranges comparison as my work machine is a C2D E6600 and my home machine is a Q9550. My work machine has a 3-year-old XP Pro installation and my home machine has a 3-month-old Vista installation... we all know how bogged OSes can become over the long haul.

At the end of the day though, the litmus test is "how fast does the system feel?" The upgrade from a 1st-generation Raptor to the Samsung SLC was considerable. Read/write speeds be danged, on an OS drive it's all about random access speed. Even the (as the Anand article implies) comparatively subpar results returned by the Samsung SLC drive are more than an order of magnitude better than any conventional HDD.

Now that the 64GB SLC drives are out of stock at the $179 price point would I buy one at the $300-500 price they are listed for everywhere else? Heck no, for that money I'd get one of the new drives... but we're talking about a completely different price/performance strata at $350 versus $175.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...NEFL031909-_-SolidStateDisks-_-L5C-_-20227393

What power saving features is he talking about? C1??

 

Amazon doesn't have price matching anymore unless they brought it back and I missed it.

 

Sale on vertex 30gb on newegg.com

Product page: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393

Promo Code: EMCLPMX37

That is a $25 off promotion and free shipping! And they still have rebate!

puts these drives under a hundred dollars, about $83 a piece. In for two.

 

This all just put a hurting on me =( am i happy with my samsung? yes... I'm glad i got it at the price point i did! but now reading that article and vertex 30gb for $83... I woulda definitely RAID0'ed two of em' rather than get the sammy...

Ok what would you guys do? I've been planning on buying a second samsung when they're back in stock for 179.99 at geeks.com to set them up in RAID0 or no should i just buy a vertex for os and and sammy for storage (lol). i think i'm still leaning towards the RAID0 setup but don't know how truly it will double the performance of the sammies... or how much RAID0 on SSD's will impact real world usage.

 

I still like my Sammy's. They are SLC instead of MLC and they are proven. Vertex hasn't been out very long. Who knows, they could start dying all of a suddent due to design problems - like the Xbox and "red ring of death".

 

Real BAD news for Vertex SSDs. See http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=53290

 

Impressions so far of the Samsung SLC:

-Everything is ready to go after boot as soon as desktop is loaded
-Multitasking-intalling, downloading, loading all at once- doesn't seem to slow like a normal HDD
-Loading big applications is only noticably faster but not rediculous (compared to my 7k200gb seagate)
-Warhammer Online (similar to above)-Not noticing huge decrease in zone loading times (still staring at loading screen) but once loaded all textures and character models are up, with HDD it was noticable after zone loaded that most of the textures NPC's and other players were not loaded for seconds, sometimes 10sec or more.

i was hoping the sequental reads would "feel" a bit faster but i'm still satisfied with the upgrade. Hopefully a RAID0 array will fix that (if geeks.com ever gets more in stock or someone else can match their price) and rid me of this antique mechanical drive otherwise i may look into my next SSD venture

 

the raid0 should give much more speed. at least my mtron raid0 on the desktop is amazing snappy. i like how the vista startup sound and animation is so long, the logon-sound comes at the same time, and the desktop is loaded in the background while the animation is still playing/fading out

 

That seems like a pretty consistant problem... my sammy's looking good again if i had vertex I'm sure it would have happened to me. I insalled os and apps totalling about 40gb of data on my samsung formated and repeated 3 or 4 times until i was sure i got everything just how i wanted.

I could never get my vista footprint down to the 7gb davepermen seems to get. i think it usually ended up about 12gb or so but that was with drivers installed i guess. i would jsut be surprised if drivers occupied 5ish gb of space...

 

Does this article states that Samsung 256 SSD has 1G cache??

"Cracking open the casing of MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB reveals that Samsung has chosen to use a full complement of its own chips. There are 16 K9MDGZ8U5M-SCK0 NAND multi-layer cell (MLC) Flash chips with ten chips on the bottom side of the board and six chips on the top along with a 1Gb DDR cache K4X1G323PD-8GC6 chip."

 

looks like it says 1Gb so maybe 128MB?

 

how does 128mb come from 1GB?

Hmmm reading the first two pages i get the impression they don't know much about SSD's. Makes me wonder...

hmmm ( page 4)

 

Gigabit, not gigabyte

 

Read the Anandtech article. It is possible to torture certain drives into a state wherein they have problems, but you would have to be deliberately trying to do so. It is possible to do it to the Intel SSDs and others as well -- because they all work the same way when it comes to pages and blocks and such, I suspect no SSD is immune.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=15

In fact, the drive in the link is not actually a Vertex and the steps taken to break it are very specific and something you really shouldn't do even with a hard drive (filling the drive to maximum capacity is a bad idea). This is not really news (it's been reported before with other articles) nor is it really bad (it won't happen to you unless you're trying to make it happen).

 

yep, you would have had the same problem for sure, not just once i'd guess

heh, i don't get it down to 7gb as well on my 128gb ssd now. dunno, on the 32gb it's no problem, but once you have more space it just doesn't want to be small anymore hehe

 

I've read Anand's article. The article (and tests form users on other SSDs like Intels, Mtrons and Samsungs) speaks for slow (or even bad) performance and not for data disapearing. This is the Vertex case and that's why OCZ is working on it. Have you read the whole thread on OCZForums ?

 

1Gb = 1024 Mb (the key here being bits not bytes)

1024 Mb/ 8 = 128 MB

so effectively doubling what other ssd have had before in terms of cache, i.e., 64MB.

 

Would you recommend getting the Samsung 256GB as a normal drive for storage etc., or is it better to have a faster ssd like the X25-m with OS and programs only?

 

Get the samsung.

 

How do you explain the freezes/corruption when installing Photoshop or CS4?? That worries me, and that's not even close to filling the drive full or pushing it and looking for problems.

 

u got 2 samsung 256G?? what a monster.....

 

I'm begining to have confusion regarding OCZ's product segmentation; Sammit is suppose to be much more expensive per GB than Vertex, yet, its performance in comparison isn't all better?

 

128 GB UltraDrive LE will likely go for significantly more than $400. BUT AT LEAST WE WILL HAVE A PLAYER IN THE 128GB SLC MARKET! Taken from here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Super-Talent-UltraDrive-SSDs,7319.html

Way to go Super Talent!

 

Supposing the IOPS figures cited in that article are real, how does that compare to the X25-M?

 

jedisolo has been a real world tester & user of several types, brands and technologies of SSDs for a good long while now. I would take his suggestion as a strong endorsement.

 

What amazes me is that no one is looking at power consumption. For a laptop, this is almost as important as stuttering.

 

Sure we are, that's why Mtrons, while being very good drives, don't get the love. Their consumption is higher at a higher price point. On the other hand, all the low-end SSDs show very high power consumption at a very low price (an acceptable compromise to some). This is why Samsung is the best in following the path of moderation. It may not have the blazing times of the Intel, but it is an excellent all-rounder, especially in its current generation. And all at a very 'reasonable' price.

 

Succinctly put.

 

just to say, mtrons started as server-replacements. power consumtion is not their main goal, and not always a problem. the mtron feels quite faster than the samsung i have now (but it's slc vs. mlc, and it's not the newest highest end samsung).

but, just to say, the other end of ssd:

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532

 

Don't expect them to be under 600$. They are SLCs. The 128GB MLC is about 400$.

 

daveperman, we know you love your Mtrons

They would be perfect for desktop apps, in fact. However, I will stand by my assessment that Samsungs are better for mobile applications.