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

[Judicator]

Thankss !
I ordered the Intel X25-M this afternoon. I am willing to give up a little speed for reliability - I've seen so many bad reviews about the OCZ failure. Also, after using for a while, the performance of the OCZ seems to be degraded a bit, I dont know if it is true (even with TRIM). Intel also has better support. And, for a R2, SATA 6GB/s is useless, so I think intel is the best choice for me.

For the record, the Vertex 2 isn't SATA III (6 Gbps). The only SATA III drives out currently are the C300s (except certain OEM versions) and the Intel 510 series (are they released yet?). The main attraction of Sandforce over Intel is better write speeds (by a fair amount, although depending on your usages you may never notice, and if Durawrite kicks in, you'll lose that), and often better pricing (Intel still often tends to hover around $2/GB, while Sandforce often drops much closer to the $1.5/GB mark). These are US prices, of course. Intel seems much more competitive with European pricing.

For what it's worth, I've been well pleased with my Vertex 2, although the fact that it's a 240 GB model means that performance slowdowns and such will be further into the future for me.

[Torai]

For the record, the Vertex 2 isn't SATA III (6 Gbps). The only SATA III drives out currently are the C300s (except certain OEM versions) and the Intel 510 series (are they released yet?). The main attraction of Sandforce over Intel is better write speeds (by a fair amount, although depending on your usages you may never notice, and if Durawrite kicks in, you'll lose that), and often better pricing (Intel still often tends to hover around $2/GB, while Sandforce often drops much closer to the $1.5/GB mark). These are US prices, of course. Intel seems much more competitive with European pricing.

For what it's worth, I've been well pleased with my Vertex 2, although the fact that it's a 240 GB model means that performance slowdowns and such will be further into the future for me.

Thanks for the info. What I meant was SATA III is useless so I dont need to wait for the new SSDs coming (vertex 3, intel gen 3, c400...) and the crucial c300 too is gone for that reason. That means the Intel is my 1st choice for now.
I've heard a lot about SF1200 better than Intel, that's for performance for sure, but I also need reliability since data is very important.
Btw, how much is the slow down could you notice? I believe there is some software that helps you measure that? With the OCZ, I heard someone got 78% after 3 months use. That's not very good.

[Judicator]

After about 2 months of use, I've noticed essentially none, and a CDM I ran a few weeks ago (after my third windows reinstall because I'd been testing a few things) was pretty much within the margins of error of my initial, fresh windows 7 install CDM. I'm running Intel RST drivers, so the OCZ toolbox doesn't detect the drive, but CrystalDiskInfo says the raw lifetime writes value is 280, so that should probably mean 640 GB written (since raw SMART values are usually in hexadecimal). Again, a lot depends on usage patterns. If you heavily benchmark, and run lots of write operations to the drive, you'll be more likely to trigger Durawrite and lose performance. Note that in 2 months with 2.5 installs (one of the windows installs didn't have most of my programs reinstalled) I've "only" written 640 GB; and for the record, my current usage of the SSD is about 33% (70-80 GB). I also did formats between each of the (secondary) installs, which may have used up a full write cycle to every flash cell. Tilleroftheearth had a double penalty; he had a smaller drive, and it was the only drive in his notebook, so when he wrote 3 TB to said drive over the course of, I think it was 2 weeks, he naturally noticed a very dramatic slowdown as Durawrite kicked in.

So, long story short, the Intel is better in long term sustained heavy write scenarios (but pays for it with slower write speeds), while the Sandforce is better for "regular" usage scenarios (and thus can tweak for better performance). There's also the compressed/uncompressed data dichotomy for Sandforce drives; part of the reason Sandforce drives work as well as they do is that they auto-compress data in the controller before writing it to the NAND. This is why except with specific benchmarks or settings (all 0s or 1s for example), you'll pretty much never get the advertised speeds of a Sandforce drive.

[Tomy B.]

Can You show us that CMD results?

[Judicator]

Can You show us that CMD results?

Sure. Took a little while to get home and run fresh ones, since I didn't keep any besides the initial one. It seems that the sequential writes decreased a bit more than I thought, although I think the results from the (unsaved) CDM were more like 115 MB/s or so, which I at the time attributed to probable variations in fill data. I also rolled back my drivers from the IRST 10 drivers to the Matrix 8.9.8.1005, and got slightly better write values. This also let me use the OCZ toolbox again, which says I have 704 GB written to the drive so far. The first CDM is the fresh one, with just Windows installed, as is sort of obvious since only 20% of the drive is used. The second is the IRST CDM. Sequential and 512K writes have dropped a fair bit, but the 4Ks remain strong. The third is the Matrix Storage drivers CDM, with slightly better Sequential and 512K writes. The last was done before I uninstalled the IRST, and it's a 0x00 Fill, to show exactly how much faster compressible data makes a Sandforce drive. I also forget what other changes I might have made to the system between now and then, since I just noticed that the 4KQD32 Read results are much higher in the recent CDMs. Not sure what's causing that, since I've done no specific SSD tweaks (none of the performance boosting stuff in the other threads... I'm "just" using the SSD, apart from moving a bunch of the libraries and User files to my secondary HM640JJ, which wasn't in there for the initial CDM).

Again, though, I don't notice this drop in Sequential performance at all... Everything is still nice and snappy and fast.

Edit - Reminder, these are values pulled off an OS drive in a working notebook, with various extra processes running (Trillian, HWiNFO32, maybe a few that I'm forgetting since I was too lazy to shut things off). As such, they won't compare well with benchmarks done by most testing sites, which test non-OS drives in desktops.

[Tsunade_Hime]

Okay so I got an 80 GB Vertex 2 SF1222 SSD in my Latitude 13. It has the latest IRST drivers from Intel's website for my chipset. Yet why does a SF based SSD only get 5.9 when my 30 GB Vertex in my i7 desktop yields me a 6.9?

[flatsix911]

Finally, less than $1/GB ... the best price for a SSD so far this year

Kingston 2.5" 128GB SATA II Solid State Disk $125 at Buy.com
Buy.com - Kingston 128GB SSDNow V Series SATA II 2.5" Solid State Drive



Buy.com has the Kingston SSDNow V-Series SNV425-S2/128GB 2.5" 128GB
SATA II Internal Solid State Disk (SSD) for $200 - $75 rebate [Exp 2/17] = $125 with free shipping.
Features a sequential read rate of 200MB/s, a sequential write rate of 160MB/s and TRIM support.
Includes three-year Kingston warranty and 24/7 tech support.

[IntelSSDOwner]

Guys, I just updated my Intel G2 SSD using the v1.7 firmware and now I cant boot back into Windows 7 Pro 64bit. Please help me out!!! Please refer to this dedicated thread for more details.

BSOD after Intel SSD firmware update v1.7

Help will be greatly appreciated

[JKleiss]

Okay so I got an 80 GB Vertex 2 SF1222 SSD in my Latitude 13. It has the latest IRST drivers from Intel's website for my chipset. Yet why does a SF based SSD only get 5.9 when my 30 GB Vertex in my i7 desktop yields me a 6.9?

Try deleting all files from C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT and re running the assessment.

Don't worry too much about WEI, as long as other benches are giving you expected results then forget about it.

[davepermen]

Okay so I got an 80 GB Vertex 2 SF1222 SSD in my Latitude 13. It has the latest IRST drivers from Intel's website for my chipset. Yet why does a SF based SSD only get 5.9 when my 30 GB Vertex in my i7 desktop yields me a 6.9?

are you in ahci mode?