Performance/$ SSD

[Firestrider]

I *might* be in the market for an SSD depending on what you guys think. What is the best performance/price SSD out there that has a capacity of say 64 GB? I just need enough room to put Windows 7 64-bit, Office, Acrobat, Visual Studio, 2-3 games, and maybe Photoshop/Illustrator/Premiere Pro on it. All multimedia files and documents I can map to my HDDs. My budget is $150-175, should I wait?

I'm basically looking for better boot/load/installation times, faster compression/extraction, and better responsiveness.

Also a few questions about SSDs in general

1.) Do they last longer than HDDs even if you practically install/uninstall programs daily?
2.) Do they slow down when filled up as bad as HDDs?
3.) Is AMD's SB750 going to be any hindrance on the drives?
4.) Do you still have to defragment the drive regularly to maintain top performance?

[Rider200]

I have six SSD's...

Two OCZ, three Transcend, one Team.

Only one of the OCZ SSD's is a boot drive. See my sig for boot time on my tower rig.

The Transcends are all IDE drives (in laptops!) and the Team is a failure (DOA outa da box) I wrote about in some other theads. (IDE's tend to have lower read/write times).

The other OCZ is my backup drive, I use it as a SATA drive on the Tower and USB on the laptops.

Performace?

I haven't done any benchmarks or have any stats to prove my findings.

1) The boot time from after post to logon screen on the tower is: 2 second for MSDOS, 18 seconds XP, 21 for Windows 7 32 bit, ummmm 24? (don't remember exactly) for Windows 7 64 Bit.
2) Defrag - Once took little under an hour and then I re ran the Analizer, very little change. I am under the impression that the SSD with enough open space it doesn't fragment that much.
3) Slow down when they start to fill up? Not that I can tell. My OCZ is a 60 Gig split into two partitions with XP and Windows 7, 30 Gig each. The XP has 10 Gig (no games) and the Win7 is at 23 Gig (three games - testing Win7).
4) Do they last longer? I have had three SSD's for over a year. The manufactures spec's tell me they should out last me... 1.5 Millon hours between failures. Haven't done the math on how many years that is but I am over 60...
5) Will they work with an AMD? Don't see why not. I am an Intel guy though.

The main draw back to the SSD is the technology is new therefore the cost is higher.

But if you watch Newegg and MemoryC there are sales every now and then.

I will point out that you do get what you pay for, that is I bought a Team SSD for less than a comparable OCZ. It was dead out of the box, took a month to get it repaired and back to me. In the mean time I needed a drive so bought the second OCZ as my backup / travel drive.

Would I recommend a SSD for a boot drive? Heck Yea!

Good luck with your new SSD! :)

Just my $0.00002

[GrimX9]

Get a 10k rpm 150gb velociraptor for that price! SSD in my opinion are not to the point where they are mainstream, but in the future dependnig on how hard memory mfgs. try to push them, they will be popular.

Short to the point: Wait, or get a 10k 150gb raptor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136296

[hydrata]

My understanding is that you do not defrag SSD's.
Also, I wouldn't recommend installing/uninstalling lots of times on a SSD, and one of the main issues with SSDs is that they slow down when filled up. I'm not sure of exact prices or recommendations, but here's a good article for some background: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

[Firestrider]

I hear the problem with SSDs is that they have a limited write-erase cycles. This doesn't sound good to me since I install/uninstall programs a lot. In this case would SSDs still last longer than HDDs?

More questions:

1.) Do they have temperature sensors?
2.) Are they more or less sensitive to heat, and do they run hotter?
3.) When they "die" do they become read-only?

[dito]

Get a 10k rpm 150gb velociraptor for that price! SSD in my opinion are not to the point where they are mainstream, but in the future dependnig on how hard memory mfgs. try to push them, they will be popular.

Short to the point: Wait, or get a 10k 150gb raptor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136296

put aside the price difference, what is faster,TWO OCZ Vertex 30gb in RAID 0 or the Velociraptor 10,000rpm?

[Randyman...]

SSD's will BLOW a raptor out of the water in terms of system responsiveness. I went from 2x 74GB Raptors (16MB Cache versions) to a single (1) Intel X25M 80GB, and I'm never looking back...

2x 30GB Vertex's will shred a Velociraptor.

:cool:

[xtkxhom3r]

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

nuf said...

[Ashura]

SSD's will BLOW a raptor out of the water in terms of system responsiveness. I went from 2x 74GB Raptors (16MB Cache versions) to a single (1) Intel X25M 80GB, and I'm never looking back...

2x 30GB Vertex's will shred a Velociraptor.

:cool:

What he said. I've used both RAID0'd Raptors and single Velociraptors and the difference between using them as OS drives and using a good SSD is like night and day.

OP: I would either spend a little over your budget and get the 60GB Vertex (best value), spend even more over your budget and get the 80GB X25-M (best performance), or wait for the upcoming price drops in the comings months and then hop on either of the two. Whichever of the three works best for you.

As for your Qs:

1.) Yes.
2.) No.
3.) No.
4.) No, you don't defrag SSDs.

[Firestrider]

Yeah, I think I will just wait for Intel's next-gen 34 nm SSDs: http://vr-zone.com/articles/intel-ssd-roadmap--bigger--faster/6508.html?doc=6508

Hopefully the 80 GB will be cheaper :)

[xtkxhom3r]

the 80gb will be cheaper of our current tech lol that new ssd thats going to come out is going to be just as expensive or maybe even more as the ssd's we have right now lol

[Firestrider]

the 80gb will be cheaper of our current tech lol that new ssd thats going to come out is going to be just as expensive or maybe even more as the ssd's we have right now lol

Well theoretically going to a smaller process node for the same capacity is supposed to cut costs... but I can see Intel charging more if they improve the controller for it.

[Stilletto]

I *might* be in the market for an SSD depending on what you guys think. What is the best performance/price SSD out there that has a capacity of say 64 GB? I just need enough room to put Windows 7 64-bit, Office, Acrobat, Visual Studio, 2-3 games, and maybe Photoshop/Illustrator/Premiere Pro on it. All multimedia files and documents I can map to my HDDs. My budget is $150-175, should I wait?

I'm basically looking for better boot/load/installation times, faster compression/extraction, and better responsiveness.

Also a few questions about SSDs in general

1.) Do they last longer than HDDs even if you practically install/uninstall programs daily?
2.) Do they slow down when filled up as bad as HDDs?
3.) Is AMD's SB750 going to be any hindrance on the drives?
4.) Do you still have to defragment the drive regularly to maintain top performance?

1)That really depends, it is likely that it will last several years, prolly >3 so you will have gotten your use out of it before it dies no matter what.
2)No, there is no drive mechanics to worry about...no platter location of data to slow you down.
3)It may not perform quite as well in RAID as the Intel SB but for all intents and purposes you will not notice. It will be very fast.



2) Defrag - Once took little under an hour and then I re ran the Analizer, very little change. I am under the impression that the SSD with enough open space it doesn't fragment that much.


SSD's are not mechanical and do not suffer from fragmentation. De-fragging will reduce the lifetime of your SSD and is not required.

I hear the problem with SSDs is that they have a limited write-erase cycles. This doesn't sound good to me since I install/uninstall programs a lot. In this case would SSDs still last longer than HDDs?

More questions:

1.) Do they have temperature sensors?
2.) Are they more or less sensitive to heat, and do they run hotter?
3.) When they "die" do they become read-only?

Uninstalling a proggie doesn't erase anything. But when you are full, completely full, then things will start getting erased. All in all, the cells can usually be written to 10000 times, and you rarely write to a cell every day, if not every other day with heavy usage....so 20000+days is a long time

1) Nope, no need.
2) Less sensitive to heat, shock, etc. They run cool to the touch, no moving parts. Gets no hotter than your USB Flash drive.
3)That's a good question, but I am pretty sure that as they start to wear out that the SMART feature adjusts the space
like it would a mechanical drive developing bad sectors....your drive will shrink basically.

put aside the price difference, what is faster,TWO OCZ Vertex 30gb in RAID 0 or the Velociraptor 10,000rpm?

A single OCZ vertex is faster than 1 billion raptors in RAID anything:beer:
It's all in the access time. (7 ms vs <.1ms)

the 80gb will be cheaper of our current tech lol that new ssd thats going to come out is going to be just as expensive or maybe even more as the ssd's we have right now lol

Ya know, I was thinking about this. Even if they release something like the Vertex 2 or the Falcon 2 that is say, 20% faster, I am not too worried. These Indilinx drives are so stupid fast now that the difference would not be that noticable...I think we can stay put for a while without concern:D

[dito]

THANKS Stilletto! That was good.

[xtkxhom3r]

your wrong on how long ssd's last stilletto even if you trimmed them every week they will still last well over 10 years

[Stilletto]

your wrong on how long ssd's last stilletto even if you trimmed them every week they will still last well over 10 years

Well first off no one has even come close to 10 years with on yet, so that is optimistic thinking and speculation:beer:
And it is a fact that the cells will die after 10000 cycles or there abouts...
So if you write to the whole drive every other day that is 20000 days...there ain't no complicated math about it.
Trim has no effect on lifespan

[xtkxhom3r]

Well first off no one has even come close to 10 years with on yet, so that is optimistic thinking and speculation:beer:
And it is a fact that the cells will die after 10000 cycles or there abouts...
So if you write to the whole drive every other day that is 20000 days...there ain't no complicated math about it.
Trim has no effect on lifespan

yea it is simple math...

check out this quote from the OCZ forum, a hypothetical Vertex 60GB life span.

"Life span is calculable on Vertex.. but only to a 'worst case' scenario:

Each MLC nand chip on Vertex is a 64 Gbit (8 GByte) Density K9HCG08U1M Samsung with an Erase Block size of 512KByte. This works out at 4194304 Blocks per chip.

(excluding 'over provision' and 'perfect' wear leveling, bad block management.. and presuming a complete 512KB block erase for each OS/File System 4KB(NTFS) erase>write>erase cycle).. this means there are 4194304 x 8 (chips) x 10,000 erase cycles available a 64GB disk.

4194304 x 8 = 33,554,432 x 10,000 = 335, 544, 320, 000 erase block cycles available to the disk.

Worst case scenario is every 4KB write from the OS/File system is 'erased' as a complete 512KB block. A GigaByte is 1048576 KBytes. So, a daily write of 10GB in 4KB blocks would use up 2621440 erase blocks (10485760÷4KB).

335544320000 Blocks available.. 10GB or 2621440 blocks a day is 335544320000÷2621440 = 128,000 days of 10GB a day block erases.

128000÷365 = 350.68 years @ 10GB a day.. @50gb a day = 70.13 years.. so what's the problem?

10GB IOMeter file writes @ 4KB, so 10 benches a day would half the 70.13 years on it's own.. add in 50GB of daily 'useage' writes and things may get a wee bit more interesting.

Conclusion:

On Vertex.. factor 50% less erase life/50% 'bad blocks'.. write a 100GB a day 24/7.. and the drive should still last for 8.77 years.

Note:
Calcs done on 64GB.. half for 32GB Double for 120GB?

There must be a concrete connection between number of MLC nand chips o/b and overall life of drive.. i.e 120GB will last longer because it has more erase blocks available."

here is a good read on how the ssd works and why trimming does have an effect on the lifespand of the ssd http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=4

[Stilletto]

Again, that's allot of speculation! No one really knows. How much do you write a day to your drive? I would imagine most people who would look at SSD's write quite a bit to their drive. How often does your page file get rebuilt? How often does it get accessed? How long do you spend on your machine average a day? Ripping one DVD a week? All these things add up and I bet that most power users do more than 10GB/day total HD activity. It is quite possible that a given SSD would last for the 10+ years you are saying but it is quite possible that it will not even come close! I personally do not care to get 10 years out of mine, I will take 3 solid years because by then it will belong to someone else:beer:

What I meant about trim was you had stated that "even if you trimmed them every week they will still last well over 10 years " and I took that as you saying that trimming was harmful to the lifespan of the drive. Trimming has no ill effects is what I should have said:)

[bobad]

The MTBF advertised on SSD's are ludicrous.

Some of the RAM chips will be DOA, and you'll lose a few every month of intense usage. No,,, the drive won't totally die in a short time, but in 5 years time I bet a high percentage of the chips are dead. That reduces capacity, and I imagine performance somewhat. That said, they are still probably more reliable than mechanical drives.

Higher performance SSD's are already RAID internally, or something similar to RAID. It's hard to economically improve the performance of rewritable memory itself, so the controller companies are in high gear developing controllers for SSD's. A pair of SSD's set up in RAID are actually like 4 disks. I doubt the performance increases much.

SSD's read blazingly fast. Their weakness is writing speed, which can be beaten by a mechanical drive. I'm looking forward to a bit more improvement in memory and controllers that will improve write speed, then I'll buy one.

[Badbonji]

Hopefully they will find a way around this problem of deterioration. The write speeds are increasing quite rapidly now, I think some have around 200Mb/s :D

[Stilletto]

The MTBF advertised on SSD's are ludicrous.

Some of the RAM chips will be DOA, and you'll lose a few every month of intense usage. No,,, the drive won't totally die in a short time, but in 5 years time I bet a high percentage of the chips are dead. That reduces capacity, and I imagine performance somewhat. That said, they are still probably more reliable than mechanical drives.

Higher performance SSD's are already RAID internally, or something similar to RAID. It's hard to economically improve the performance of rewritable memory itself, so the controller companies are in high gear developing controllers for SSD's. A pair of SSD's set up in RAID are actually like 4 disks. I doubt the performance increases much.

SSD's read blazingly fast. Their weakness is writing speed, which can be beaten by a mechanical drive. I'm looking forward to a bit more improvement in memory and controllers that will improve write speed, then I'll buy one.

I am afraid your information is seriously outdated...the write speeds are now approaching the read speeds. I will post a benchmark shot of my GSkill Falcon SSD and bet you would be suprised. And the chips are not as fragile as you make out...

Hopefully they will find a way around this problem of deterioration. The write speeds are increasing quite rapidly now, I think some have around 200Mb/s :D not quite but close :)

Here is a SS of Crystalmark without any recent trimming.

74584

[xtkxhom3r]

wow nice scores Stilletto

[4GHZ_or_bust]

I was under the impression that controller on decent SSD would spread the write events evenly across all chips so one won't get hammered to the point of using up all of the write cycles and become dead.

Quick and cheap bat file to kill flash ROMs, replace D: with whatever drive letter, and some random small files into C:\temp directory. Name it killrom.bat so it'd self loop until it runs into error such as unable to copy to destination or unable to delete). Using the old pipe command, it will auto "YES" on delete confirmation so it would end up into an auto copy, delete, and rerun bat file loop. Unless you're deliberately torturing, or wanted to retire obsolete hardware that isn't worth anything like 16MB thumb drive, as well as SSD, other USB sticks, and memory cards, don't try this.

copy c:\temp\*.* d:\
echo Y | del d:\*.*
killrom.bat

[xtkxhom3r]

lmao good to know 4ghz_or_bust that little batch file can be very usefull