Who said we didn't need SATA 6Gb/s? OCZ intros the Vertex 3 series at CES 2011!

Now we need SATA 6 Gb/s in our Sandy Bridge laptops, ASAP!

 

asap, except that they won't be out for another half year, and are even then not for the ordinary customer. those few that'll pay for that premium will pay for the premium of having sata6, too.

 

O_O Dang but I thought SF always markets those read/write for sequential only, when you actually benchmark it, it's alot lower..

 

I hope they do a comparison vs the vertex 2 in a SATA II laptop/interface. I want to max it out completely

 

it's not even for all sequential stuff. only for stuff it can compress. so for the big data (hd movies mainly), it won't be at that speed in most cases. or how many move gigabytes of uncompressed data around?

anyways, me not liking sandforce, so me not caring. they'll be highend, and highend laptops will have sata3 anyways. so it's a mood point. for the ordinary user, a sata2 saturating ssd will be more than impressive enough. consider that this drive will at most be 1.66x as fast. that's not MUCH faster per se. going from hdd to ssd is sometimes a factor 100. here we talk about 60% more at max, not 10000%. so not really worth any premium.

 

lol this is awesome SLC is still being made ^^ I wondering how much lol. Maybe my only christmas gift next year lol

 

slc will be made for the business sector, as they might run databases on it that require 1000ds of users at the same time accessing it. this results in many more (esp. tiny) writes. there, slc makes sense.

for the ordinary end user, it makes zero sense.

 

Agreed! This is why I am holding out until this generation gets released as I am not convinced the vertex 2 is the very best that SATA II can get.

 

I'm more interested in the random R/W speeds. Those still don't even saturate SATA/150 and most users don't transfer enough large files to actually notice much benefit from sequential speeds.

 

somone said in the comments Q2

-- the IBIS disc they announced is 1.8GBps (!!) that's enough to saturate a pci-e2.0 4x.

 

which means available in Q3 for me (i'm in switzerland, i always have to wait quite a while till something that's called available actually gets into stores that i can buy it on, even if those are american stores)

 

Well that or pay a hefty VAT?

 

@davepermen, so what are you going for Intel X25m G3 or Micron/Crucial C400?

 

predictably vertex 2 pro prices have jumped through the roof ..

right now on newegg the vertex 2 120GB thingie is at $210, the 100GB pro is at $630. About a month or so ago I almost bought a laptop -- and I specced it out with a 120GB vertex 2, the configuration option was $210. For another hundred and change, I could have upgraded to a 100GB vertex 2 pro. So thats about a 100% markup in expectation of the vertex 3 pros (get the price up before the new ones come out since the pros will be coming out before the regular line)

 

Even if this things saturates SATA II, I think you would need a very large file transfer to really reap a benefit. Just your average program that is a few MB of information is not going to really be faster just because you can transfer that data faster. SSD was always about that random seek speed and access time more so than raw transfer speed anyways.

If you do transfer lots of large files about, lets say a video editor that in itself kind of makes SSD a bad choice since they are so limited in capacity and I hear large file transfers kill off SSD rather quickly.

That said we should move to SATA III just because, if there is little or no extra expense in doing so.

 

anandtech got to run some testing on the drives:

OCZ Vertex pro 3 demo world's first sandforce-sf2000

 

well, most likely i just enjoy the ssds i allready have. even my gen1 intel still delivers just like day one, and is awesome. so why change?

but yeah, for my next laptop (it'll most likely be called 2750p or something) it might be an x25m G3. nothing else than intel for the laptop i'll use on stage. i need a 100% trustable device. and as i have stated times and times again, i can't trust some random company that i never heard about. intel i know very well, and trust with all my other pc components (not even a gpu for me since years). so i'll go intel.

now for some gaming desktop or something, i'd consider the c400 or what ever.. but most likely, i would just use one of my existing ssds. the performances are diminishing small, so it doesn't matter. even that new ocz won't make me feel "woah, my pc is fast" any more than my intels did. there's not enough difference there, yet. latency has to go much lower to show a noticable difference outside of "see, files copy faster".

 

Yeah, I was going to say. Is there even going to be a perceivable difference between SATA II saturating and SATA III devices? The slow secondary memory access bottleneck seems to be almost solved in the day of SSDs and 8GB+ of memory.

 

At best, we are going to see say a 2X in RAW throughput using ONFI2 and minor improvement in latency.

The improvement in SSD is diminishing other than size

 

or is it just that they no longer make it so using crazy price to turn you away ?

what is the advantage of the so called 'Pro' vs the rest in the '2' generation ? I failed to find any.

 

you can see a little comparison here Crucial C300 256GB - Benchmarks: Real-World Applications as far as speed are concerned -- not much difference really. I think the pro is based on the sf-1500 series controllers and supports some features that make it slightly more server-friendly. you can read about it here:

Understanding SandForce's SF-1200 & SF-1500, Not All Drives are Equal - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

but on the 2000 series its different. The sf-2500 exists and already has disks using it , presumably the sf-2200 series does not.

 

Those are marketing materials unfortnately. I want some real comparison of the pro vs say Agility.

 

^speedy specs... **major drool**

hmm... but is it reliable??

 

I don't like how they compromised reliability from tried and tested SLC to eMLC for their enterprise drives. Either make it MLC for a professional consumer (or hardcore enthusiast) or stick with SLC for enterprise drives.

 

That is a truly funny question

 

something called software bugs is more of an issue. It is not just the NAND used that count. OCZ have been talking about having tier 0/1 vendors to qualify their sandforce product and so far there is none.

 

Right. Most people will opt for the smaller ones due to expense, 50GB or 100GB. at 500MB/sec+ you're looking at filling the entire drive in 20 seconds. With a 100GB drive most likely it'll be for an OS plus apps. Not to mention you'd need to do SSD to SSD to achieve those kinds of speeds.

 

500x20 = 10GB?

 

Think he meant 200 seconds. Almost 4 minutes.

 

Yeah. I'm used to looking at my bank account with frequently dropped zeros...

 

i'm used to the - sign.. BUT I DON'T CARE!! i'll get a gen3, that's for sure

 

well I gave two articles .. the second one is from anandtech and its not entirely been outed as a marketing talk shop yet -- ie, they still stand on the press side of the aisle at events.

it verifies in words what the first article shows you in charts.

 

If you sold that Sager then you wouldn't have that issue.

Wait...I commonly find myself in your shoes lol.

 

Not sure what you want to say aout the first link(we were talking about sandforce).

As for the second, it is dated 4/2010 and a lot has happened since then and the faith of SF-1500 is unclear to me based on what I have read.

Can you find an actively selling SF-1500 based SSD that shows noticeable difference from say Vertex 2 or other SF-1222 based drive ?

 

lol i hear you

 

Seems like Corsair is also releasing some high end ssd,

Corsair Performance 3 SSDs handle up to 480MBs

 

Is this basically C300/C400 rebatched given that it is using a Marvell controller ?

 

It's the same controller (88SS9174) as the C300. The C400 is supposed to use the 88SE9130 (HyperDuo) controller.

 

So why would these drives come with higher reads n writes than the C300/C400?

 

The vertex 3's use the new sandforce controllers .. most of the permformance difference from a base usage of the NAND memory in any SSD comes from the controller's compression/decompression ... basically inexpensive ICs have gotten so small they can carry advanced logic in them .. these drives use compression and data-redundancy algorithms to minimize actual data written to disk. Thats why when they use random data the numbers drop a ton. Sandforce's controllers squeeze out a little more peak performance over the C400's at reading data, and a whole lot more when writing data .. but more or less only when the data is not compressed.

Wait, please excuse me .. I was trying to point out the differences between vertex 2 and vertex 2 pro. if that was the wrong thing to answer, I apologize.

The difference is exclusively that the vertex 2 uses a sf-1200 series (1222 I think) controller, the vertex 2 pro uses the sf-1500 series controller. Even 10 years from now, those ssds will continue to have their respective controllers, I'd bet a pretty penny on it!

The difference in performance is minimal .. you cahn find that in the charts on the first link. Even though they are a reseller (of many different things), they provide data that is in agreement with the description form anandtech in the second article, where he says he can find virtually no difference.

There are differences between the 1200 and the 1500, but they mostly have to do with data integrity and enterprise use features .. all of those differences are meticulously detailed in the second article.

 

That was what they said on their marketing material. I was looking for an active selling SF-1500 based product that can demonstrate this difference, let's forget about the performance.

In fact, people are asking the same question on OCZ and all they can do is ducking around it and give you an email address to their so called ocz-enterprise.

I tried to search addition information of their 'enterprise' line and everything google can land are their own website.

So is this so called SF-1500 based enterprise product exist ? I have my doubt.

 

Noop. That is not the case in SF-2000. It comes from this

http://onfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/onfi_2_breaks_io_bottleneck.pdf

the difference between SF-1200 and say Intel G2 is mainly from compression(and to a certain extend their controller, think it as an OS) which is why their top read speed is only slightly faster than Intel(and slower actually on uncompressable data). Compression cannot explain for the performance increase in SF-2000.

Their SF-2000 is according to their marketing material using ONFI2.

I would suggest anyone interested in SSD technology to read the above paper as it would give you a much clearer picture of what is going on, even for the existing generation.

Surprisingly, Intel G3 is not using this ONFI2 thing, may be they are playing it safe.

 

i see these incredible read adn write numbers are for non random data so they really aren;t real numbers. So the vertex 3 is going to be a tiny bit faster then the c400 not this huge amount faster that i was thinking. I love my c300 and I'm staying loyal and getting the c400 plus it will be out in a month instead of another 6 months for the vertex 3. Plus the vertex 3 is limited to 400GB and the c400 has a 512GB for 825 dollars. Wouldn't surprise me if the vertex 3's max size of 400GB cost even more then the 512GB size from crucial

 

yes, the C300 seems to be very strong in real throughput but lagging a bit in random IOPS ? Though your described activities benefit more from throughput than random IOPS.

 

yea i do a lot of video transcoding so sequential reading and writing is whats most important to me. Furthermore video doesn't benefit from those data compression algorithms that's the sf-2000 will use so basically the c400 will be right at the same speed of the vertex 3 and 512GB for 825 is just many factors cheaper then the current 512GB products (they are going anywhere between 1200-1600 currently)