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

looks like you have some freezes, too? (triple post)

 

It's the site. I was actually typing from a traditional HDD...

 

background stuff is not that regular. and would occur on any disk, then. but don't bother too much about it. as long as it performs well..


and commander, see, even hdd's can stutter.. (just jokin' around)

 

Actually, if you play music or watch a movie whilst running an HDTune bench, you can get some pretty regular patterns (because for some reason or another, I've tried)... but usually background tasks do materialize as just noise. If you can bench the drive externally and/or without an OS, you can probably get rid of a significant portion of it.

 

If the background task affected the benchmark there would be no patterns. The screenshot from Jlbrightbill's SSD is has a pattern.

That has to do with how the SSD works. Doesn't mean its a bad(or good) thing but definitely the ups and downs look "created".

 

Funky HDTune or not, my programs launch noticeably faster. GIMP is a prime offender of long load times and it's fully usable in 2 seconds now.

 

I have just been thinking how amazing it would be when prices come down and we could have something like my ReadyNAS duo sporting four or five SSDs. Imagine that! I suppose, I could still stick a couple of Mtrons in my Netgear (formerly Infrant) unit but it would be costly and wouldn't give me 1TB of RAID0 space (yet).

It's coming though. I say, one year, before it becomes viable.

 

Instant I can see my desktop in XP, I opened the shortcut to GIMP. It still opened with zero delay. That is something a mechanical hard drive simply can't do. I'm officially liking this new drive.



(Mtron Pro for comparison)

Boot time (This is my standard startup program configuration, so it's not like I'm booting a completely empty Windows installation)

 

It came with version 1199 when I bought it and I didn't flash after. There is a new 1275 version out now but I don't think I will be updating since I have no problems with mine now

It's really nice, so sound, no noises and everything just opens right up when you click on the application in a snap. The only thing I wish was better was boot times. I get about 28 seconds but was expecting around 18 seconds or so.

 

I still can't tell the difference between shuttering vs CPU full load.

The last couple of weeks I've been using Premiere Pro 4.0 like mad for my final project. I notice when I have video effects in my project and have it rendering entire work area, I get this HUGE pause (10 sec). My mouse would stop working and Premiere will come to a halt. I have to wait around 10 second before the rendering bar shows up.

Occasionally I would this these small pause of 2-3 seconds... I don't even know if its my CPU or the HDD.

I'm working with videos from a Canon XH A1.

 

I'm still dreaming of having terabytes in my homeserver, only with SSD's. So it would be completely silent one day.

 

Yah, it's a bit difficult to find out what's happening sometimes. espencially on my quadcore with the mtrons, i never hear the cooler turning on faster. so if i have some freeze, is it the mtron, is it the cpu, is it the program itself? the network waiting for some reply? the os? no clue. i know that my mail program sometimes blocks the snappiness of my system after a cold boot (windows live mail).

i can just say, in premiere, you just have to accept blockings. it's actually quite independent of system (a friend has it on his p4 with hdd, i have it on the quadcore with raid0 ssds).

 

guys, before new firmware for my samsung slc 64gb, I've had some problems with display shut down time when laptop is in idle, it was simply resetting to factory settings of 5 minutes or something after each reboot, and it would not wanna to remember my "never" setting, so after I've upgraded FW it started to work like it should, so, it wasn't w7 beta thing, it was samsung ssd thing !!!

so, that in mind, I remember that I had some white screen of death issues at boot in w7 when using nvidia w7 beta drivers, so I was using vista ones, and guess what, after new fw, no more white screen of death with w7 drivers for my nvidia GPU...
so, all of you sammy 64gb slc owners, if you have some issues like mentioned above, try the new fw

 

Man, I'm with you there; that'll be the day. I'm using old notebook hard drives at the moment...

That's really random. I can't imagine how a firmware update would fix such a thing, but if it did, congratulations As far as I know, display activity settings don't randomly get changed on my E6400...

 

Is there a new firmware for the 128 MLC Sammy?

 

I really don't know, some bloke posted links for my drive few pages ago and I downloaded that and updated, so, for your drive, I'm really don't know

 

@ ALL Samsung SLC SSD owners : I have four 64GB Sammy SLC (MCCOE64G5MPP- 0VA00 is reported from everest and hd tools), the novatech.co.uk offer, and 2 questions if you can help me :
1) Do flashing erases ALL the data on the drives ? (They are set, all four as raid0)
2) Is the new firmware suited for my models ? I cannot find anything in Samsungs website regarding new firmware.

Thank you in advance !

 

1) no

2) yes

 

I'm just curious... when will my computer actually write at 70 mb/sec?

I'm monitoring my disk activity using HD Tune "Disk monitor" and I can never seem to max my write speed. I notice when I am exporting videos, I only write at 15-30 mb/sec.

The average user will never max the write speed right?

 

If you've got another SSD (or even a fast spinner) hooked up via eSATA... and you want to transfer some large video files from what externally attached device, you will hit (or come close to) your maximum sequential write speed. But it is true that this sort of thing doesn't happen very often, which is why sequential speeds really aren't all that.

I'm fairly certain you'll hit limits in random reads and random writes much more often.

 

i can write with 100MB/s no problem onto my raid0. i don't have 200MB/s writes very often, if at all.. but if i copy from the gigabit net, i can copy with 100MB/s and have those write speeds. you should be able to reach 70MB/s easily when copying files around. but of course from a different disk. hdd's often show half-duplex behaviour when reading and writing (ssd's shouldn't, but still do as far as i've tested and seen..)

 

I tried for over an hour to update my Samsung 64GB SLC SSDs with Dell's R214180. First, I could not get the ISO image to create a bootable CD. I tried twice. I wonder if my ISO writer software (Deep Burner Pro) is bad?

Then I tried the USB stick and had trouble creating a bootable USB drive. I ran into problems with the HP utility that was suppose to help with it as it did not work right on the computers that were running a RAM disk.

When I did get it to boot off the USB drive, I got an timeout error on the drives or a page fault (in ACHI mode I think).

I also turned off my MB's RAID because I wasn't sure if that was getting in the way.

Fortunately no damage was done and my computer still works!

But what's the deal??? For those who have done it, how did you do it? Thanks!

 

Yeesh, this is why doing these kinds of updates scare me. I say if it isn't broken, don't fix it; DarQ96 already suggested that the update doesn't offer any performance increase. Even BIOS updates still scare me at times...

 

I'm looking at getting a XPS 1530 with a solid state drive, only I'm trying to figure out what size. I only need 100 odd gb, so I'm looking at the 128. But I can't figure out if Dell is shipping the newer version of that or not.

Samsung makes a faster 256gb model, with 200mb/s speeds. They make the same model in a 128gb version. Is that what Dell's selling now? Or are they still selling the older kind, which maxes out at around 120mb/s?

 

How is space degradation?

 

You are brave. I thought that fw 1199 was pulled due to corruption over time with eventual disappearance of the partition.

I have decided to roll the dice on a Vertex 250 GB, but not until I am certain that the drive I order will ship with fw 1275. I wonder if Newegg knows what they currently have in stock. Seems lame to spend over $700 on an item knowing full well it may come with faulty FW. I guess OCZ isn't a big enough company to recall from the reseller and simultaneously ship updated drives.

I did notice that Dell recently dropped the price on the Samsung 256GB: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...x?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=341-8981#Overview (if that still is the Samsung drive).

 

I feel your pain. The CD burn utility (BURNCDCC) that I use said the Samsung ISO from Dell was corrupted. Eventually I found an old WIN98 boot CD and was able to install the update from it. I have an M1730 with no RAID running in ACHI mode. It only took a few seconds and my firmware was changed from PS105D14 to PS105D15. It will be several days before I know if this fixes my problems. I have had intermittent timeouts of 1 to 2 min where everything freezes and the disk light is continuously on. Several events in the system log indicate the boot SSD drive went temporarily haywire. I hope this update fixes that but who knows, after reading several articles about SSD technology I have my doubts... This one is a long article but worth reading IMHO
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

 

If the following two SSD can be bought at the same price, which is the better in terms of performance. I can't decide!

The Samsung SLC SSD (64GB) or the Intel X-25M (80GB)?

 

The Intel is the better performer (speed). The SLC would probably last longer.

But you can get a 1.8" Samsung SLC from Newegg for much less than the Intel.

 

Honestly, at the same price, I'd say there's no competition between the Samsung 64GB SLC and the Intel 80GB X25-M. I'd get Intel, almost hands down. By the time even something like the Intel fails, you'll be able to get a drive two times as fast at half the price. Samsung might have slightly better power consumption, but I daresay it's not by much...

 

Hey your 1-2minutes freeze problem sounds like mine when I was using intel 80GB X-25M last year. But I experienced such problem yet with the corsair 128GB MLC, and definitely not with Mtron.

 

I did it from an usb drive
here are the files for download:
http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197
download the hp utility and on the top of the page you have win98 boot files to chose when making the bootable usb
after bootable usb is done, just exact and copy firmware files to usb as directed by guide file

 

if you have any stutter with samy slc drive, first thing you need to check is chipset drivers, learned it the hard way

 

That looks like what I did, but I am not using a Dell PC or a Dell branded Samsung drive. I suspect that may be the problem too... What PC are you using and do you have a Dell branded SSD drive? My drive's firmware is PS105006 so it's not like the Dell firmware PS105D15... so perhaps I should not even try.

 

my transfer rate is little weird on intel 80G.
when I copy 20G file from Samsung 256G to intel 80G, initial transfer rate is 100MB/s, but eventually hit 50-60MB/s. is this normal??

 

Just based on rated speeds, I'd say it's quite normal. Nominally, the X-25M is only rated at what... 70MB/s sequential write; if yours has been run down a bit, it's going to be slower due to lack of virgin blocks and whatnot. The initial 100MB/s is probably the cache trying to compensate a little (but it obviously can't do much when you're making a large sequential transfer).

 

no, my drive is samsung slc 64gb MCCOE64G5MPP

what drive do you have ?

 

I have a Samsung 64GB SLC MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA with firmware PS105006.

 

So go for the intel, huh?
Are you saying that the Samsung 64GB SLC performs the same as the Intel 80GB X25-M? -> Is that why you are saying that there is no competition between these two?

 

Intel's X-25 drives are head, shoulders, torso, and thighs above any of the competition when it comes to performance.

The OCZ Vertex performs very well, much better than a mechanical drive, but there's some firmware questions still in the air. Mine has performed excellently on XP 32.

 

No, he is saying that the performance of x25-m is better, but it is more costly. People consider the Samsung as its cheaper and some think that the SLC drives do not suffer from degradation.

If you really want to get the low down on SSDs, go over to Anandtech and read their comprehensive article on it.

 

Updates from Anandtech

Looks like vertex now gets really nice. Hope reliability works out for them.

Oh, and a lot of teasing towards new stuff from intel. can't wait, can't wait, CAN'T *****ING WAIT


(possibly you'll soon get some cheap ssd's from me )

 

The vertex is MLC, right?

 

yes it is. there aren't really much new slc coming anymore. i think supertalent will release some new slc (or did recently?). intels highest end is slc. that'll be it in the consumer space.

mtron is still slc, as is memoright and the older samsung. but besides the mtron 3500 line and the samsung, none of these are really cheap.


i actually, for the first time, realized, why mtron never released their 1000 line. it was an mlc line and they dropped it as it "performed poorly". looks like they tried the jmicron as well for months, but never got satisfied due to stuttering and all. maybe.

 

SuperTalent UltraDrive LE is out... but the price is too steep ATM

64 GB version is $540
128 GB starts from $1207

This is too much, but I guess it is due to SLC memory pricing.

For those who don't know what UltraDrive LE is - this is a drive that uses the same controller as OCZ Vertex, but instead of MLC it uses SLC flash.

 

Dibs on your 1.8" Mtron... gonna use it in my future Latitude XT2... oh yeah

So, the thing is, for more than twice the price of the MLC variant... how does the performance compare? Anyone have any figures (nominal or not) for this thing?

 

the latitude xt2 is not micro-sata? is that still zif?

i would possibly have a 2710p together with the mtron, for that matter


i would like to see more tests of supertalent. they are like the silent shadow of ocz. and, at least around here, normally more cheap but similar performances.

 

Hmm... good point actually. I've never actually checked. I just assumed it was the same as the original XT, though it might be something exotic like SATA-ZIF (does such a thing exist?). Micro-SATA would be excellent, though; I'd just get a micro-SATA Samsung SLC and be done with it

EDIT: Ho deng, micro-SATA indeed: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latxt2/en/SM/td_harddrive.htm... that changes everything O_O

 

hehe. just be warned. the samsung 128gb mlc (100MB/s read) is much less snappy than the mtron. so i'd suggest an slc, or even the intel one (i've yet to experience one, but it's said to be even more snappy than my holy mtrons ).

so i'd suggest the intels actually.

 

then, you're safe to go I've had PS105D14 fw, after upgrade it says PS105D15