2x X25-V vs. everything else review.....

[Anvil]

Link to What features are supported on the 9.6

cut'n'paste from the feature table.
TRIM support in Windows 7* (in AHCI mode and in RAID mode for drives that are not part of a RAID volume ) YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

In this case YES means NO for drives configured IN raid but YES for drives that aren't part of a RAID.
(confusing, not really)

[Computurd]

funny thing here guys. it has always supported trim in non-member drives. this has been a long advised tactic on several support forums, to switch it to raid, as it is just a very close form of achi.
people have been doing this for a while to avoid reinstalling or doing registry tweaks when they need to switch from IDE>
: raid mode uses achi.

[jalyst]

From the horses mouth:

Intel® RST 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI and pass through modes for RAID. A bug has been submitted to change the string that indicates TRIM is supported on RAID volumes (0, 1, 5, 10). Intel is continuing to investigate the ability of providing TRIM support for all RAID volumes in a future release.

Announcement 2:

http://communities.intel.com/community/tech/solidstate

thank-you, I have a special someone to silence in the comments section of anands x25-v raid review.

BTW, I think X25-V s***s bigtime due to the imposed limited seq. write. I have 4 x X25-Ms and it is boring to wait for stuff to be copied to it from the HDD R6 array. It takes half the time to do it on the X25-Es. The even more annoying thing is, while I copy to the X25-M array, I can barely access it (its speed is saturated). It feels like a bloody laptop 5400rpm drive And we are talking a RAID0 of 4 best consumer SSDs here Now imagine what it would feel to have X25-Vs instead of Ms..
It has its place, but it's not that great for RAID arrays, IMO - especially if you have something that can saturate it. And it takes 2 regular HDDs to saturate 4 X25-Vs with writing.

If you think your 4x X25-M's are too slow do you want to sell them to me
X25-V seems like a god-send to me for those wanting to RAID-0 with minimal cost.

Link to What features are supported on the 9.6

cut'n'paste from the feature table.
TRIM support in Windows 7* (in AHCI mode and in RAID mode for drives that are not part of a RAID volume ) YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

In this case YES means NO for drives configured IN raid but YES for drives that aren't part of a RAID.
(confusing, not really)

can you please still try the new drivers on your G2's and let us know?

Thank-you.

[jalyst]

C300 doesn't have the compression.
Combining random writes cannot show such a high difference (sometimes you would better results, but considering the writes are random it would not be sustained overall).
Caching cannot improve random writes all the time - when you surpass the cache size, there is little it can help with. The cache size on SSDs is in the MBs range not GBs to affect 30GB test sizes. Plus it would show different speeds in different runs then.

I could be wrong though, but I still think it makes no sense that random writes are twice as fast as random reads.

Man my head's spinning trying to absorb this discourse between alfaunits, anvil, & audienceofone!
I wish I wasn't so clueless when it comes to storage tech....

[Anvil]

Jalyst,

TRIM doesn't work on raid members.
I've tried the usual stuff to verify but it's just not there.

[Ao1]

Man my head's spinning trying to absorb this discourse between alfaunits, anvil, & audienceofone!
I wish I wasn't so clueless when it comes to storage tech....

alfaunits was just reminding me that sequential write speeds are important for some and I agree that if you are spending a lot of time writing sequential files then yes the X25-V is a rubbish option. In all other scenarios however the price/ performance ratio of the V drive is a bargain.

The V drive is going to be great for a boot drive and most OS tasks. You could get one and try it out as I mentioned before. If you need something faster you could simply get another one and raid 0 it. This way you take no risk.

The M drives are also great. One drive = less aggravation. Set it up and forget about it. Again for most tasks you will not need anything faster.


To confuse you a bit more I have been playing with single drives using a low end raid card today and I can notice that without trim things seem a bit snappier, even though an AS SSD Bench run is well below that of an ICH10. Conclusion so far: TRIM takes the edge off the "snappyness" of an (Intel) SSD.

[alfaunits]

If you think your 4x X25-M's are too slow do you want to sell them to me
X25-V seems like a god-send to me for those wanting to RAID-0 with minimal cost.

Don't get me wrong, the Vs (Intel X25-V, not the alien Vs :P) has its place. But as soon as you have some medium that can sustain nice read speeds the X25-V even in RAID get oversaturated.
I can saturate 4xX25-Ms with a RAID6 HDD array - the X25-E array is sleeping 'till X25-M finishes the copy That doesn't mean you will ever notice something like this (and it's not like people copy large stuff every 20 seconds..).
But unfortunately, when you do, you'd get more annoyed (and some might even get scared - thinking it stopped working) by it.

I often copy VM images to it and the last few days had to copy back/forth some OS images (non-VM) so I really noticed I didn't notice something like this for a decade almost on HDDs (had Raptors since they came out).
So it's funny


Just as audio said: If you have a laptop that has 2 HDD slots, putting 2 Vs or two Ms will be a bliss. Scenarios that I talk about are not common - not many people have several HDDs and one SSD or several HDDs and SSDs.

Man my head's spinning trying to absorb this discourse between alfaunits, anvil, & audienceofone!
I wish I wasn't so clueless when it comes to storage tech....

Don't beat your head with it I don't know squat about graphics really.. that's why i just look at the game scores I care about and the power consumption to choose.
Don't even get me started on sound cards - I wouldn't know how choose from those without listening to each

[Anvil]

alfaunits,

I redid the 4KB aligned vs 512B aligned iometer tests on my 2R0 LE array.
I'm not sure of what was wrong in my earlier test or if it's just me

The results are crystal clear, 4KB aligned reads are gaining a lot on the LE's

I'll create that new thread for my benches.

Results for my somewhat degraded 2R0 LE 100GB's (QD64, 1GB filesize)
4KB aligned reads : 250-270MB/s (65'-70' iops)
512B aligned reads: ~170MB/s (43-44' iops)

The writes are still ahead though, ~355MB/s or ~91' iops.

[jalyst]

Jalyst,

TRIM doesn't work on raid members.
I've tried the usual stuff to verify but it's just not there.

Thanks for confirming this Anvil.

[alfaunits]

Anvil, can't wait for that thread Are those sequetial writes or what?? That's virtually seq. speed write speeds.
(on LE I can understand why writes are faster than reads, as compression helps, but C300 doesn't have compression - can you test C300s as well?)

[jalyst]

Don't beat your head with it I don't know squat about graphics really.. that's why i just look at the game scores I care about and the power consumption to choose.
Don't even get me started on sound cards - I wouldn't know how choose from those without listening to each

Thanks, just a huge learning curve I guess

[jalyst]

For those wishing to offer opinions on this, it's prolly best posting in my original thread.
So as to avoid hijacking this one any more.... This post is also there.
I'm trying to decide between 2x X25-V, 1x X25-M 80GB, or 1x OWC Mercury 50GB (unlikely)
I'm almost settled on 2x X25-V's, but I'm having a hard time justifying their slightly higher cost.

It's hard to explain my workload in detail at this stage, all I know is it'll house....
*Win7 & some multimedia related apps
*Stripped-down Ubuntu + MythTV + XBMC/Boxee + maybe LXDE & NAS related s'ware.

It'll primarily be a media playback, media capture/transcode, & storage/bu device. i.e. HTPC/PVR & to a lesser extent, NAS.
There'll be at least one 1TB 7.2k drive for storage, & this is prolly also where captured DVB will be dumped.
LT I have plans for a dedicated NAS device with a more sophisticated array/config of HDD's.

I wonder how 2x X25-V performance compares "across the board" to these two drives & the Corsair F100? (100GB SF-1200)
Do the Anandtech bench tools allow one to see all this, or are there supplementary resources?*
And I wonder how their performance differences compare to their price differences??

I'm concerned my usage pattern will be random enough to accelerate degradation of 2x X25-V's in RAID-0.
Hence requiring me to set aside more space than I can spare to mitigate it...
To be safe, I'm pretty sure I'll need 60GB for both OS's, their apps, page file etc, but I'd be surprised if I need more than that.
Will I notice enough of an advantage in my workload to justify their higher cost & potentially higher rate of degradation/wear?

Sorry for the double-post, thought there might be users here not subscribed to the other thread that can help, thanks.

*Anand's X25-V RAID review seems to include Mercury 50GB & the X25-M in all the benches, but no Corsair F100.
*I'll need to analyse this data more carefully soon to help me towards a decision....

[jalyst]

So GullLars has recommended 1x X25-V, 2x Kingston V+ G2 64GB, + my storage disks (which initially will only be 1 or 2 1TB HDD)
The idea being that the X25-V is the OS-SSD, & the RAID-0 of Kingston's is my scratch-disk with high sustained r/w.
Does everyone else agree with this basic concept (seems pretty sound to me), perhaps you agree with the topology but not the disks picked?

[Computurd]

^^^jalyst you are double posting across threads bro

[Anvil]

jalyst,

If your workload involves a lot of copy/deletes you're better off using TRIM.

Anyway, if you get the X25-V and the V+ G2 drives you can try both scenarios.
I have no experience using the V+ G2, only time will tell how much it degrades without TRIM.
(cleaning should be easy though)

[jalyst]

Thank-you for offering your thoughts Anvil it is very much appreciated!
Anyone who wishes to do the same, it's prolly best posting in my original thread.
So as to avoid hijacking this one any more....
For anything involving my set-up, I'll endeavour to post only there from now on too.

[zalbard]

What's the cheapest X25-V you can get in the US? It can be Kingston or w/e, I'd re-flash it anyway.
Considering picking up two of those instead of X25-M, but Newegg has x25-M 80GB for $215 while X25-V is $125, which makes $250 for two, quite a bit more expensive...
Sorry if that's OT, I'm not very good with US stores...

Edit: FFS, missed the 75$ deal it seems, damn it. :\
Wonder what the chances are of a 75$ deal coming up soon again... 60$ off is something I could use badly.

[alfaunits]

At that price, I would buy ~40 of X25-Vs for storage

[richierich]

Newegg had the X25-V for $98.99 last Friday.

[jalyst]

we should start a dedicated, never-ending, thread on x25-v pricing

[Helloworld_98]

At that price, I would buy ~40 of X25-Vs for storage

1.6TB of raid 0 X25-V's,

wonder how many GB/s you'd get

[GullLars]

Postulating rougly 170MB/s read and 40MB/s write (these are conservative numbers) and not being bottlenecked by the controller, you can get 40*170MB/s = 6800MB/s read, and 40*40MB/s = 1600MB/s write.
In order to pull it off, you could use 2x LSI 9211-8i or 9260-8i with port expanders, but then you need to software RAID, since it doesn't support that large integrated RAIDs...
If you set it up so you use 2 x25-V pr physical SAS 6Gbps port on 2x 9211-8i, you get 2(cards)*8(SAS ports)*2(SSDs pr port) = 32 SSDs with 5450 MB/s read, 1300MB/s write, 950.000 4KB random read IOPS (wich would be limited to roughly 600K by the controllers), and 320.000 random write IOPS. The price of such a setup: 2*$250(?) + 32*$110 = ca $4000 for 1,2TB.
In order to get this level of performance, you would likely need a dedicated quadcore >3Ghz just to drive the software RAID. It could be doable on a dual socket mobo...

If i could make a copy-paste SSD of parts availible on the market, i would consider a LSI 9211-8i + 8 x25-V for 1400MB/s read, 320MB/s write, 80-90.000 4KB random read IOPS, and 80.000 4KB random read IOPS. (80-90K IOPS is the max of the LSI 92xx controller)
The price of such a setup could be 250 + 8x100(-130) = $1050(-1300) for 320GB, bootable storage using 1 PCIe 2.0 x8 slot.
Would any of you guys buy a 320GB SSD at $1000 with the performance numbers 1400MB/s read, 320MB/s write, 80-90K IOPS read, and 80K IOPS write?
Reducing storage to 250GiB would make performance degrading a non-issue.

[jalyst]

...<snip>....Would any of you guys buy a 320GB SSD at $1000 with the performance numbers 1400MB/s read, 320MB/s write, 80-90K IOPS read, and 80K IOPS write?
Reducing storage to 250GiB would make performance degrading a non-issue.

LOL, prolly not personally....
Cant see why I'd need that much extra performance when simpler set-ups are still very "snappy" & are way cheaper.
Perhaps in research labs or design houses etc. it'd be advantageous...