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

[vostro1400user]

The rest of the OCZ lineup is all Indilinx based until the Sandforce drives are released.

corsair seems to be in conservative side, its tech guru ramguy discourages buyers in corsair forum to take its indilinx based x-series as this line is more problematic based on failure rate.

[davepermen]

ermmm
NO
when you hit delete, windows delete pointer to certain memory space allocated on hdd, or ssd...
data on memory space still remains where it was before, only you don't have any pointers to that place, so, windows will see it as a blank space...

this is only true for hdds. and this is why the region the memory pointer pointed to will not get reported as "free space" to the disk.

but flash cells have two states: containing data, or not containing data. a free cell can easily be written to (filled with data). a non-free cell first have to be freed (be it 0es, be it 1es.. doesn't matter), to be able to fill it with fresh data.

and that freeing is the slowest part of flash. so if you can do it BEFORE writing to it, that's a gain.


second point:

by knowing which regions are free for the ssd, it can use those free cells for new data more quickly, as i thas more free cells to spread writes out to.



trim should have been implemented in any os. due to the fact that hdds never 'cared', as they don't have to, os optimized this away and forgot to inform drives about that.

now they are in sync again: both ssd/hdd and os always have the same amount of useful and random/free data.



happy new year.

[davepermen]

Not due out till March but Anand says...
OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro Preview: The Fastest MLC SSD We've Ever Tested

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3702

i'm so glad i got my second intel 80gb gen2 ssd today (i had to get another one as this one, the order, couldn't get delivered till christmas, and i needed it by then).

so it got all my love before i knew there's something better out there.. happy new year, it'll be fun. is this the year of ssds? for me, that was 2008.. and i'm still in love

[davepermen]

davepermen,

just want to acknowledge that your correction to my original post was correct (of course!), just thought I mentioned it earlier, but I didn't.

and that from you.. perfect new years gift happy new year! may ssds fullfill all your dreams this year, as they failed so hard the last one.

wanna try an intel gen2 80gb? i have one too much right now

[vostro1400user]

i'm so glad i got my second intel 80gb gen2 ssd today

with current great value of CHF, it's much cheaper to buy computer stuff in switzerland, i remember i was ripped off over four grands of CHF for a inspiron 3800 nine years ago when i was there. Prosit Neujahr!

[tilleroftheearth]

davepermen,

I again graciously decline your offer, first because the 80GB G2 would be too small for me to do a real test with and second, because I could not repay your generosity to my satisfaction, ever.

Happy New Year to One and All!

Best Wishes and good health to each and everyone here that I've made such good friends with. Tirelessly exchanging our knowledge freely and so easily helping each other like good friends should.

May each of your families and all your friends near and far prosper and achieve all their goals and dreams in the coming year.

Cheers!

And, Good Night... Peace on Earth... Goodwill to All Mankind.

[sakor1]

So I have an option, for about the same price, for one of the following:
- Intel x25-m G2 160GB; or
- Kingston SSDNow 64GB Intel x25-e

Capacity is not an issue. I have external drives and would only use for operating system, programs and a couple of games.

I understand that the x25-e uses SLC rather than MLC memory, so should be a lot faster. However, I am not sure how TRIM affects this (whether applies to the x25-e also) by comparison, and which one would be the better choice. I can get both for about the same amount (the x25-e actually a little cheaper), so was just wanting some opinions...

Are there any whispers of new Intel SLC drives soon?

[Forge]

I think TRIM is mainly for MLC drives, but don't quote me on that.

If it were me with that choice I would go for the X25-M without a second thought, but that's because I load the OS and some games (mostly the multiplayer ones) on the SSD. If storage isn't an issue with you that stick with the SLC.

(Very happy with my Gen2 X25-M 160GB, by the way. $400 isn't too shabby, either)

[vostro1400user]

(the x25-e actually a little cheaper)

are you sure it's x25-e? it should be over $700...
http://www.dealtime.com/xPO-Kingston...id-State-Drive

[darQ96]

darQ96, I suggest that you read up on how SSDs work. They don't work like Z80 procssors or Atmel ASICs. davepermen is quite correct that the trim command itself does not write anything. He is also correct in that a simple (non-trimmed) delete is insufficient for the SSD to know that those blocks are unused. A delete merely updates the filesystem's MFT (for NTFS, or equivalent for other file systems) so that the filesystem knows that the block is free. The drive doesn't know how to interpret the filesystem -- it works at a much lower level -- so it does not know that those block(s) are now unused. Thus, the trim command was created as a filesystem-agnostic way to tell the drive when a block no longer holds filesystem-relevant data. This will work any filesystem -- NTFS, FAT, EXT3, HFS, etc -- without requiring that the drive include a dedicated CPU and custom software to understand every known filesystem type.

of course ssd-s don't work like micro-controllers, I didn't said that, I've said that I have programed those to use flash memory
and again, you are wrong about deleting, if drive don't know what memory location is not used by the user or OS, then data would be written on random memory locations and non deleted data would be overwritten, and ssd could not work correctly without trim
but, as you know, ssd-s can work without trim, they only get slower