Best 120gb SSD?

[Michael_R.]

No Trim support in raid, so the speed will degrade over time.

Heard about that before, but how fast will the speed degrade and will there be a trim function in the near future?

[Ao1]

It depends how much you write and what you write (sequential/ random) and what SSD you chose. Really heavy use could see performance drop significantly in a matter of days. Lighter use might not cause a problem that you would notice.

TRIM for raid is something Intel say they are working on, but I would not expect to see it any time soon and I suspect it will only become available on a new chipset i.e. ICH11

Intel: No garbage collection, but aggressive dirty page resilience
Kinston V+100: Aggressive garbage collection preventing degradation
SF: Weak garbage collection and dura class slow down to prevent excessive wear if too many writes are incurred over a short period.
C300: Not sure how Crucial do it but by all accounts it resists degradation quite well.

Aggressive garbage collection wears out a SSD faster.

[Dragoonseal]

Free Lost Planet 2 PC game w/ purchase, ends 12/31
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167035

Great sale on the 120GB Intel SSD at Newegg.

[little_scrapper]

Is that intel drive a new one or something? It only has 2 reviews. Just wondering.

I am also in the market for a SSD drive. Will it even work in my giga board.

[Ao1]

The capacity is new (120MB) but the drive is based on the G2 controller. The G3 drives are out in Febuary next year at a best guess. The G2 is still a great drive however.

[antiacid]

for absolute speed, I recommend the C300. However, I myself have a 160gb gen 2 intel drive and I also installed a C300 or two in friends machines. If I had to decide right here and now, it would depend on how much they were, with a soft spot for the intel solution.

[Michael_R.]

It depends how much you write and what you write (sequential/ random) and what SSD you chose. Really heavy use could see performance drop significantly in a matter of days. Lighter use might not cause a problem that you would notice.

TRIM for raid is something Intel say they are working on, but I would not expect to see it any time soon and I suspect it will only become available on a new chipset i.e. ICH11

Intel: No garbage collection, but aggressive dirty page resilience
Kinston V+100: Aggressive garbage collection preventing degradation
SF: Weak garbage collection and dura class slow down to prevent excessive wear if too many writes are incurred over a short period.
C300: Not sure how Crucial do it but by all accounts it resists degradation quite well.

Aggressive garbage collection wears out a SSD faster.

Could you define heavy use?

They would be my system drives, used almost every day for office tasks, surfing, CG, gaming, video editing

[Ao1]

Everything you mention is light use, apart from maybe video editing. If you only video edit occasionally I wouldn’t worry about it.

If the drive does degrade you have the possibility of running a secure erase, which will wipe the drive but fully restore performance. (Not a big deal if you make an image before you erase the drive).

Personally I find a single SSD more than enough for my use.

[tived]

Guys,

whats the opinion on the OCZ Revodrive 120GB, how does it compare to the C300 and the intel ssd's?
I am thinking of getting one of these! for a SR-2 Build
Henrik

[little_scrapper]

For the C300's, the 64GB are $130-$150. The 128GB are $270-280 so its a $100 price premium for the extra speed. I think I'll get a intel

[Michael_R.]

Well I think I´ll be going for the OCZs, however 2* 60gb in Raid 0 for 214€ or 1* 120gb for 170€?

[xeon_1]

Well I think I´ll be going for the OCZs, however 2* 60gb in Raid 0 for 214€ or 1* 120gb for 170€?

One drive of 120Gb would be my choice.
Why?.
Trim.
less write amplification due to raid.
and less €/Gb

[El Mano]

Moar help needed over here!

I currently have 2xWD500 black in raid 0.
I have a partition for Win 7, another for Steam (and games) and another one for misc. software.
I have a third drive for data.

Do you think I would see any improvement if I moved the gaming partition to an Intel x25-m 120GB 34nm?

Do you guys think that a Corsair HX620 will be enough to power a quad core, 5870, 8 fans, the three HDDs and the hypothetical Intel SSD?

My current options are:
to buy an SSD for gaming ( I don't trust them enough to store my work)
to leave the system as it is.

Thanks in advance!

By the way, my mobo is a P5Q Deluxe, which means SATA II and ICH10. Do you find any problem there?
Thanks again.

[IanB]

I currently have 2xWD500 black in raid 0.
I have a partition for Win 7, another for Steam (and games) and another one for misc. software.
I have a third drive for data.

Do you think I would see any improvement if I moved the gaming partition to an Intel x25-m 120GB 34nm?

...

My current options are:
to buy an SSD for gaming ( I don't trust them enough to store my work)

My question would be why you feel able to trust that SINGLE other drive instead? I assume it is mechanical, so it could just as easily fail tomorrow as any new drive of whatever sort. What makes you think you can't trust SSDs especially with important data? And if it's so important, then won't you have backups elsewhere anyway for any worst case scenario?

But the truth is you'd get better performance out of your machine if you put the OS partition on the SSD, not the gaming one. That's where the biggest difference due to lower latency and speed of file access will be noticed over your RAID0. Lose the first partition on the RAID array, resize the gaming one so it fills the space, then defrag it thoroughly so you are short-stroking that to get better speeds on game access - that is, if you can't afford a big enough SSD (or more than one) to put it all on SSD.

[tived]

Hi guys,

I just wanted to give some feedback on my past weeks experience with the Sr-2 board and two Revodrive 120gb.

I can't install and successfully use the Revodrive on this mainboard as my C: drive.

In order to get it to work at all and show up in the bios, i need to disable the SATA3 controller on the board.

I have tried moving the card(s) around to the different PCIe slots this made no difference.

At the moment, I have the two cards showing up in Windows 7, but only one shows up during the boot sequence, which is a little strange.

This here was a test setup, i tried to copy 100mb of data between the two Revodrives, and it was instant, didn't see any pop up's so that was very impressive.

I am now thinking of a new C: drive and it could either be a single C300 128gb or a RAID-0 of two or four Vertex 2 disks on a Rocketraid 27x0.

I am trying within reason to eliminate the storage bottleneck so the final destination for data storage is 6 WD Black caviar either 1 or 2TB in raid-0 which are backed up externally.

so the data side of my build (sorry for getting side-tracked) would like this

OS: either C300 128GB or 2R0/4R0 (RR27x0) Sandforce 60gb disks
Scratch/temp disks 2x Revodrive (could even try to do a soft raid-0)
Data storage: 6x 1 or 2TB WD Black Caviar on board controller

this is intended for Digital Photo processing

Henrik

[Michael_R.]

Guys, just wanted to give you some feedback, just received my vertex 2 120gb SSD and installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

It IS fast and very snappy, especially when compared to my standard laptop. I just popped the SSD into my rack, do have to configure it in any way with Windows?

And I´d especially like to know how fast it actually is, could you recommend some benchmarks?

[El Mano]

My question would be why you feel able to trust that SINGLE other drive instead? I assume it is mechanical, so it could just as easily fail tomorrow as any new drive of whatever sort. What makes you think you can't trust SSDs especially with important data? And if it's so important, then won't you have backups elsewhere anyway for any worst case scenario?

But the truth is you'd get better performance out of your machine if you put the OS partition on the SSD, not the gaming one. That's where the biggest difference due to lower latency and speed of file access will be noticed over your RAID0. Lose the first partition on the RAID array, resize the gaming one so it fills the space, then defrag it thoroughly so you are short-stroking that to get better speeds on game access - that is, if you can't afford a big enough SSD (or more than one) to put it all on SSD.

First of all, thanks for your input!

Now, I said that I don't trust SSD enought to store my work but what I actually mean is that I can't afford to lose the day or two of work that I would lose if my system disk died suddenly.
Does this mean that HDD's don't fail at all? Of course not, but you usually know that they are going to fail way before they die. They start making funny noises etc
As far as I know (reading reviews, forum etc) when a SSD dies, it dies in silence with no previous warning.

Sure I have several backups, but anyway if my system disk dies I would have to get a new disk, reinstall the OS, re install databases, servers etc and all that takes time even if I create an image. I can't spend a whole day like that right now.

That said, I don't really mind to wait a few seconds till my working software loads. But I'd really like to make my games load faster because when I don't usually have lots of time to play.

And that's the point.
Here's a shot I took while testing my WD CB HDD RAID 0 array with HD Tune:

[psyside]

Best 120GB (128) = Crucial C300 (SATA II) period.

[SteveRo]

Guys, just wanted to give you some feedback, just received my vertex 2 120gb SSD and installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

It IS fast and very snappy, especially when compared to my standard laptop. I just popped the SSD into my rack, do have to configure it in any way with Windows?

And I´d especially like to know how fast it actually is, could you recommend some benchmarks?

The easy benchmarks are AS SSD, crystal disk mark and atto.
If you want to take the time to learn - iometer is probably the best.

[Computurd]

crystal disk mark

only thing on that one it has been shown to write 15gb Per Run! couldnt agree more with iometer being the best. as sdd is pretty good stuff too.

[Michael_R.]

so finally found time to bench the SSD with AS SSD Benchmark.

Isn´t it a bit slow?

[johnw]

The Sandforce drives can have their write speeds slow down after heavy use, and even TRIM does not recover the performance. If you look at their forums, lots of people have seen this, and OCZ has claimed that this is a feature, and that the performance will recover in about a week. It does not sound like a feature to me. I suspect Sandforce did not intend for the drives to behave that way. Regardless, unless Sandforce documents under what conditions this can happen, and for how long the performance drop occurs, then the behavior is undocumented and it is certainly a bug. But it has been known for a while, and Sandforce has not yet fixed the bug or documented the "feature".

[tived]

whats the best performance one can expect of the ICH10 controller with SSD's in RAID, and where do you hit the ceiling with how many drives, (I am using the EVGA SR-2 with the 6 channel onboard Intel ICH10 controller)
I had a look at a site, which stated, or I understood it to be 3 ssd would be the best performance, but at what size blocks?

thinking 3x 120GB SSD's sandforce

TIA

Henrik

[johnw]

By the way, here is what G.Skill measured for a 120GB Phoenix Pro, presumably fresh and new, before any performance degradation could occur:

[little_scrapper]

here is my Intel 120GB drive that I just got.