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kayson

Member
Joined
Jan 5, 2005
I'm looking to get a new SSD before December comes around because my drive is getting full and there are so many new games coming out! I'm looking for something either around 128GB or 256GB.

My first question is, with a 128GB SSD, how much space do you actually get after Windows formatting? With a 256GB?

As far as drives, I want something with great gaming performance, and it seems the bigger drives are faster. I don't mind spending money, but I don't want to waste it either. Things I've heard:

OCZ Vertex 3: apparently the fastest out there but plagued with stability problems, so I'm not sure I want to deal with that.

Crucial M4: Seems to be a pretty popular choice around here, fast, cheap, and stable

Intel 510: very reliable but also seems kinda expensive. Might be able to get a discount through an intel employee which could make it worthwhile...

Kingston HyperX: haven't heard much about this guy, but its apparently quite expensive

Samsung 830: this one just came out and it seems to have great performance, beating the m4 in sequential reads/writes which is the main mode for games as I hear. apparently the reliability is in question though...

Any comments/suggestions?

Also, is now a good time to buy? from everything I've seen, it looks like there won't be any new groundbreaking SSDs coming out in the next few months, so I won't be kicking myself. I'll probably wait til closer to december for prices to go down but I want to start doing some research and figure out what I'm gonna get.
 
I'm curious about the differences between some of the newer drives as well. Especially OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G vs Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F120GBGT-BK.... Any suggestions?
 
Patriot Wildfire is same speed such as Vertex 3 MI, both got same controller and same NAND. Telling this because Patriot is eventually cheaper, OCZ always tried to get a extra bonus for something which wasnt even above others. I paid like 600 $ for the 240 GB but thats the last time i paid so much for a drive, the price definitely have to go down now. In regard of the heavy stability issues, such prices are not anymore able to be tolerated.
 
With SSD's, it's the same as it is with HDD's. For example, my 64GB SSD had approx 60GB storage. My 60GB SSD's both have around 55.7GB usable after formating. 128GB would be around 120GB usable.
It would be between the Crucial and Intel, unless OCZ fixes their weirdness problems with the SF based drives.
I do have an Agility 3 but did experience some weirdness in the first week of using it. I have updated the firmware and it has been solid for 3 days straight, no weirdness and as solid as my Indilinx drive was.
 
My first question is, with a 128GB SSD, how much space do you actually get after Windows formatting? With a 256GB?

As far as drives, I want something with great gaming performance, and it seems the bigger drives are faster. I don't mind spending money, but I don't want to waste it either. Things I've heard:

OCZ Vertex 3: apparently the fastest out there but plagued with stability problems, so I'm not sure I want to deal with that.

Crucial M4: Seems to be a pretty popular choice around here, fast, cheap, and stable

Intel 510: very reliable but also seems kinda expensive. Might be able to get a discount through an intel employee which could make it worthwhile...

Kingston HyperX: haven't heard much about this guy, but its apparently quite expensive

Samsung 830: this one just came out and it seems to have great performance, beating the m4 in sequential reads/writes which is the main mode for games as I hear. apparently the reliability is in question though...

Any comments/suggestions?

Also, is now a good time to buy? from everything I've seen, it looks like there won't be any new groundbreaking SSDs coming out in the next few months, so I won't be kicking myself. I'll probably wait til closer to december for prices to go down but I want to start doing some research and figure out what I'm gonna get.

The larger SSD drives are usually faster because they have more NAND channels onboard and thus are able to take advantage of using more channels when reading or writing to the NAND. Within each drive is kind of like a little RAID 0 setup, the larger drives have more NAND modules and thus the controller can spread the writes out to more drive flash modules which is faster.

My Win 7 Ultimate x64 install was about ~30gb so any drive you are considering will have enough room for the OS and several games. After formatting, a 256gb drive should have double the space of a 128 gb drive and then you will have to subtract off the 30gb for windows.

Personally, I wouldn't pay for a 256 gb drive right now as the prices are steep and it is unlikely that you actively play so many games that would all benefit from being on the SSD vs. a standard hdd. For most games, your CPU and GPU will still govern your performance so you would be better off getting the smaller drive and spending the rest on an upgrade of one of those components.

Your analysis of the various drives from the manufacturer appears to be spot on with what I have found from my own research. Just remember that the issue that people are having with the OCZ drives are related to the controller and that controller is used by many other manufacturers such as Corsair and Patriot so they all have the potential to have the same issue. That said, I believe that the actual number of bad drives out there is probably smaller than you would be lead to believe by all the people posting negative comments. Very few people every leave a review about a product unless they have something to complain about so that tends to skew the impression you get from reading reviews. Keep in mind that every manufacturer has issues from time to time, last year Intel released a firmware update for their drives that bricked the drives of tons of users.

All of those drives are excellent and will perform well for you. It will be up to you weight the speed vs. price of each drive. If it was me, I would lean toward the crucial m4 drive unless your friend can get you a good deal on the Intel one. At the same price I might get the Intel drive, but I wouldn't pay more for it.


I'm curious about the differences between some of the newer drives as well. Especially OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G vs Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F120GBGT-BK.... Any suggestions?

They are essentially the same. They both use the same sandforce controller and source similar if not the same NAND (There are only a handful of manufacturers). If you are trying to decide between the two I would consider price and support to make your decision. OCZ has a very active forum and is usually helpful at resolving issues as well as prompt with getting out new firmware versions. I don't have any experience with the corsair drives so I cannot comment on their support.
 
Crucal M4. I've used a few of these without one issue at all. 0009 firmware makes the drive faster. Second vote would be the Samsung 830. Third would be Intel.
 
The larger SSD drives are usually faster because they have more NAND channels onboard and thus are able to take advantage of using more channels when reading or writing to the NAND. Within each drive is kind of like a little RAID 0 setup, the larger drives have more NAND modules and thus the controller can spread the writes out to more drive flash modules which is faster.

My Win 7 Ultimate x64 install was about ~30gb so any drive you are considering will have enough room for the OS and several games. After formatting, a 256gb drive should have double the space of a 128 gb drive and then you will have to subtract off the 30gb for windows.

Personally, I wouldn't pay for a 256 gb drive right now as the prices are steep and it is unlikely that you actively play so many games that would all benefit from being on the SSD vs. a standard hdd. For most games, your CPU and GPU will still govern your performance so you would be better off getting the smaller drive and spending the rest on an upgrade of one of those components.

Your analysis of the various drives from the manufacturer appears to be spot on with what I have found from my own research. Just remember that the issue that people are having with the OCZ drives are related to the controller and that controller is used by many other manufacturers such as Corsair and Patriot so they all have the potential to have the same issue. That said, I believe that the actual number of bad drives out there is probably smaller than you would be lead to believe by all the people posting negative comments. Very few people every leave a review about a product unless they have something to complain about so that tends to skew the impression you get from reading reviews. Keep in mind that every manufacturer has issues from time to time, last year Intel released a firmware update for their drives that bricked the drives of tons of users.

All of those drives are excellent and will perform well for you. It will be up to you weight the speed vs. price of each drive. If it was me, I would lean toward the crucial m4 drive unless your friend can get you a good deal on the Intel one. At the same price I might get the Intel drive, but I wouldn't pay more for it.

Thanks for the input. I suspected that the negativity was being skewed by that effect, but I'd rather not risk it anyways. I'm leaning towards the 256GB drives because I don't want to have to buy another if I fill it up. It seems like SSD speeds aren't dramatically improving with each new generation, at least not in a way thats really noticeable, so I'd like to buy one now and not have to worry about it for 3-4 years.

The other reason I'm looking at 256GB is because I have 12GB left on my drive right now with Windows and all my games. Switching to a 128GB drive gets me about 48GB extra, giving 60GB total. 30GB will probably go to SWTOR, 15-20 to WoW, leaving me with little left. I don't want to run into the same problem again, basically. Any thoughts?
 
My first question is, with a 128GB SSD, how much space do you actually get after Windows formatting? With a 256GB?
i can answer this for you as i installed W7 ultimate x64 on a 128gb ssd (raid 0 crucial m4s 64gb). i ended up with 80 gigs of space after installing windows update, and if you move the page filing to another HDD off the ssd and disable hibernate, you'll end up with about over 100GB of free space.
 
i can answer this for you as i installed W7 ultimate x64 on a 128gb ssd (raid 0 crucial m4s 64gb). i ended up with 80 gigs of space after installing windows update, and if you move the page filing to another HDD off the ssd and disable hibernate, you'll end up with about over 100GB of free space.

The question wasn't how much space after Windows is installed, the question was how much space is there after Windows formats the drive.
 
Corsair Force GT vs. Vertex 3 MI.

They are essentially the same. They both use the same sandforce controller and source similar if not the same NAND (There are only a handful of manufacturers). If you are trying to decide between the two I would consider price and support to make your decision. OCZ has a very active forum and is usually helpful at resolving issues as well as prompt with getting out new firmware versions. I don't have any experience with the corsair drives so I cannot comment on their support.
Guess told already, the NAND is not the same. Inside Corsair Force GT (theyr fastest SSD) is "ONFI synchronous flash modules manufactured by Micron (probably 25 nm, same type such as inside M4)", Inside Vertex 3 MI is "Toshibas synchronous NAND manufactured in 32 nm".

Ah sorry, had to adjust because had in mind its Force 3 not GT.

nm value:

Generally what can be said, lesser nm is generally bad for endurance and it doesnt lead to more performance. There could be improvements but all NAND sizes have equal potential for performance, unlike CPU or GPU. I talk about theyr chip architecture NOT about drive size.

Drive size read value:
My knowledge goes that far as, that the read value is usualy limited by controler or interface, and isnt truly limited by the chips itself. So that means, there is no true advantage for readings, unless they are causing artificial limitations due to firmware OR due to the entire drive design on how they did build the chips inside the PCB..

Write value:
That stuff is indeed kinda limited by flash chips since flashing needs time, when a drive is bigger it means to have more possible chips to put a charge on it (at the same time) so it can write faster. However, a 128 GB technically from the chip design itself, is able to go full speed of what the controller and interface can take, unless they did artificially put a limitation on it (marketing strategy). Only 64 GB drives truly lack the chip-possibility to execute a fast write.

My final results:
128 GB drives are clear winners at price/power/benefit for value ratio in overall. Ofc it always depends on the use. If someone ONLY need OS drive, a 64 GB may be sufficient (but keep in mind that the write WILL SUFFER, deluxe customers might still use a 128 GB for performance), and if someone not having enough space 256 GB can be worth it, in term they cant live using a normal HDD for those kind of data.
 
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Quick bump with a new question: What's a more important/practical performance metric? Sustained reads/writes? or Random reads/writes?

People talk a lot about the crucial m4, but its sustained numbers are substantially lower than some of the other drives. It does seem to take the cake for random, though.
 
another route you might take is to buy two 120 gig/128 gig ssds and 0raid them thus providing better performance and speed than a single 240 gig/256 gig ssd.
 
Quick bump with a new question: What's a more important/practical performance metric? Sustained reads/writes? or Random reads/writes?

People talk a lot about the crucial m4, but its sustained numbers are substantially lower than some of the other drives. It does seem to take the cake for random, though.

Crucial M4 is my choice (see below). Your worried about the reads/write speeds. Well with the Rev0009 firmware update on the drive you get reads upwards of 520MB/sec now on a 128Gig, writes are just slightly faster 180-185MB/sec.

Really for the SSD the question doesn't come to much into play of writes as it does with reads. Reads are the key here. Writes are secondary but still good if your saving large files that are in memory, if copying from another drive.. it will be more then fast enough (M4).

Also take into note at least with OCZ drives the writes are achievable via compressed files. Think the 128Gig drives true uncompressed files is around 250 on there drives. Also as well small file reads/writes is important to take note of. I believe true Intel controllers are still the fastest when it comes to reads/writes of the 4k file area (310-320 controllers). Intel's 5xx series is a Marvel controller if not mistaken as well (new ones) but work pretty good from what I've heard.

As for the Samsung you listed. There 430 drives are great out there currently as well. Mainly see these in OEM machines. As for the newer ones, I'd assume they are faster, without looking at it, but they have there own controllers in these drives. No known issues with any Samsung drives.

Still would recommend M4's. Take 2x 128's in Raid0 :) Get them on sale you can find them for $180-190 when they hit sales. I know 64Gig is $120ish normally but on sale is in the $80-90 range.
 
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