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SSD drives research and advice.


Bikerdude

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EDIT: oops, I accidently clicked the report button instead of edit. Hopefully that didn't do anything bad. Sorry about that.

Only poor spelling :-)

 

That's a great collection of advice! I've just got to wait to get the funds for a SSD. Poor poor university student, I am.

You can by the 64Gb version for around $60 I believe :-D, then just used that for windows and a few of your most used apps(MS Office, DR, Modeling, Audacity) and games (Darkmod) and put the rest on your old mechanical drive.

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Ah thanks for the heads up, that said here in the UK I got the 256GB model (MZ-7PC256N) for a £140, it was the cheapest around even though it came with the pointless USB-to-SATA cable and equally pointless Norton ghost 15.

 

B model here in the states, the 128gb model is $99 from 3 different vendors (free shipping), i'm probably going to grab it. simply can't justify ~256gb for a system drive, even with the performance boost. also found i5 3570K for $189, can pick it up physically at my workplace with price match. if anyone knows a better price for that, let me know (but i doubt it). still don't know where to go with mainboard other than being decided on z77 chipset.

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  • 3 weeks later...

asssdbench1.jpg

 

830bench.jpg

 

this is from the 128GB samsung 830. It could be me, but i'm pretty sure the IOPS are advertised as 80K read, 30K write. The other AS SSD benchmark is still over my head, except for the sequential, which seems in acceptable tolerance, but doesn't that random read on the 4k seem..... low?

Edited by ungoliant
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I have spent time working with the 830 series as I have the 64Gb (media PC), the 128Gb (laptop) and 256GB (main PC).

  1. AS-SSD always underscores in benchmarking, but the benchmark you have is the same as mine and most others you'll see on the web.
  2. The Samsung magician benchmark, also always seems to under read on the IO, but even more so than other benchmarks so cont be considered accurate (I know SS are working on an updated version atm)
  3. Have you optimised your OS for running on an SSD, as well as moving your pagefile, ALL temp folders, IE/FF cache folders to a mechanical drive as well disable last access time stamp? (not to be confused with last written)
  4. at least once a week you need to leave the PC switched on over night to the drive can clean itself via TRIM.
  5. Have you got the very latest sata driver installed? in your case with an Intel mobo you will have the ICH10r or above chipset so you should go and download Intel RST 11.5.0.1207 there is a memory leak issue with this driver, but I haven't noticed it on 8Gb of ram. The earlier 11.2.0.1006 driver is still up on intel's site but is a little bit slower than 11.5. And lastly you should know on the intel 7 series chipset and the 11.5 driver you can get TRIM to work with raid!!!! so you could have 2x128GB SSD for even more perf.

On the subject of moving as many temp/cache folders of the SSD as possible I found out how to move the whole FF profile folder - http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles. The whole mindset is you want to minimise the amount of writes to the SSD.

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1. hm, interesting

2. hmm, more interesting.

3. yes, no, no, no

4. not yet. And yea, I actually ran into an article about the trim support with 11.5 like the very same day the update went live, but I misread it at the time, and thought it was only for Intel SSD's, lol.

 

More on #3, I've seen your posts on this subject, and I'm not buying what your selling with the whole longevity of the drive thing in regards to virtual memory. My virtual memory is sure as hell staying on my SSD. I mean, come on man, the whole mSATA market is for using SSD's for caching mechanical drive stuff, and yet you want to set the RAM cache from SSD all the way back to mechanical? You're moving in the wrong direction, friend. However, I am willing to negotiate on the temp folder and browser cache bit. Also, last access time stamp is very interesting. Re-write a whole block to change a 1 bit flag just because you opened a file? very inefficient for practically no benefit. I'll look into that one.

Edited by ungoliant
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More on #3, I've seen your posts on this subject, and I'm not buying what your selling with the whole longevity of the drive thing in regards to virtual memory.

All version's of windows have utterly shit memory management and the virtual memory is no exception.

  1. if you have 8GB or more and don't use apps like Photoshop you don't actually need Virtual ram but windows being as shit as it is will crash or misbehave if the pagefile is disabled.
  2. there is no speed benefit AT ALL to having the pagefile on the SSD, so moving to a mechanical drive not has tweo benefits, it frees up several GB and save on lots on unnecessary writes to the SSD.

Re: point 2 I have had the PF on the SSD and the Mech drive so am speaking from hands on experience. Also with regard to longevity, when my 256GB and 128GB were new I was getting 90MB/s writes @4k QD1 from them, but even after only a week this has dropped to 75MB/s. now this looks shocking but SS have reliably told me this is the figure the drive settles down to. but this this clearly shows how detrimental writes are to SSD's. The first and even 2nd gen SSD's were absolutely and utterly terrible in this regard, some dying with in 6 months. But the SS 830 is a believe a 3rd gen so should stand up far better.

 

Oh and another thing dont partition the who drive if possible, leave some empty space for over provisioning - the magician s/w is able to do this for you. This is another thing to do the help the drive keep its write speeds up.

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Oh and another thing dont partition the who drive if possible, leave some empty space for over provisioning - the magician s/w is able to do this for you. This is another thing to do the help the drive keep its write speeds up.

I don't know what a who drive is, but i assume you mean the SSD. Yeah I have no intention of further partitioning the drive, but IIRC the overprovisioning space is already set aside as unusable during partitioning, just waiting to get used up when your data blocks start to fail. I was planning on keeping as much free space as possible just for the TRIM.

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I don't know what a who drive is, but i assume you mean the SSD. Yeah I have no intention of further partitioning the drive, but IIRC the overprovisioning space is already set aside as unusable during partitioning, just waiting to get used up when your data blocks start to fail. I was planning on keeping as much free space as possible just for the TRIM.

 

Sorry I meant to type "whole drive", but it looks like your already on it.

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I was going to post my AS SSD values here, but they are totally fucked up since I have NTFS compression enabled. The benchmark shows huuuuge read speed but unrealistically slow write speed. Still, everyday work is nice and fast, and I save a lot of space (which is always an issue with SSD's).

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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You could check your alignment after formatting it with Windows 7:

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

 

Please update your firmware if it isn't the latest:

http://www.samsung.com/de/support/model/MZ-7PC512D/EU-downloads

 

Be carful, a change in alignment or a firmware update most of the times causes an empty SSD. ;-)

Edited by Radiant
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  • 4 months later...

Got any experience with those hybrid drives? I'm interested in putting one in a laptop. It can only fit one drive and I want something faster than the HDD. Half a TB of SSD space is still REALLY ****ing expensive, so this seems a logical alternative.

 

Its a hard drive with built-in NAND that tracks and pre-loads the data you most frequently use.

 

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Well, Crucial announced that they are going to release a TB SSD drive for a mere 550 USD. It's still a lt of cash, but considering that the price for the smaller SSDs will go down as well, this could be the breakthrough we all have been waiting for (at least I have).

 

From what I read, hybrid drives are a good compromise between speed and space - they hugely accelerate frequently accessed programs/files, but stil offer lots of space, especially compared with pure SSDs. Still, I don't know anyone personally who owns one.

 

On another note, my gf's OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB drive died recently. It just didn't react when she started her computer. The day before, everything worked like a charm, but the next day there was zero reaction. A red LED in the drive itself showed that the drive is not operational, so there is no way to access the data and even do a firmware upgrade. In such cases, OCZ readily replaced the drive, as the data in the drive is encrypted with a AES key - and there is no way to get access to this key. The bottom line is, any data on that drive is lost. Which again shows the value of frequent backups...

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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Well, Crucial announced that they are going to release a TB SSD drive for a mere 550 USD. It's still a lt of cash, but considering that the price for the smaller SSDs will go down as well, this could be the breakthrough we all have been waiting for (at least I have).

Thats not a bad price as 4x256GB would cost about that, that said those 4 in raid 0 may potentially smoke the single 1TB SSD. We will have to wait and see the benchmarks..

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Thats not a bad price as 4x256GB would cost about that, that said those 4 in raid 0 may potentially smoke the single 1TB SSD.

 

I'm not so sure about that. SSDs these days are severely limited by their interface, in this case SATA 3. I know it sounds ridiculous, but for decades, there was this huge gap between potential interface bandwidth and the actual data the drive could deliver. Now, the first time in PC history (to my knowledge), it's the other way around. Just look at these shiny PCIe 2.0 8x SSD cards with more than 2 GB bandwidth...

 

Super Talent RAIDDrive II 480GB, PCIe 2.0 x8 (R2S04801) - Read: 2400MB/s • Write: 2800MB/

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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Sorry I should have said "4* 256Gb SSD would potentially smoke a single 1TB SSD on 4K reads/writes", but if crucial implement internal raid then the tables would be turned.

 

I am personally hoping for atleast 50MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes on single 4K threads (All operatings systems operate at 4K). Ive said this before and will most likely repeat myself several times, I get utterly f****d off when benchmark reviews endlessly prattle on about 4K QD32 (QD=que depth) and Sequential reads/writes (Only relevent on large single files) when your average Pc/Mac/Linux user spends 99% of thier time around single 4K reads/writes which is the OS and your usual desktop related work)

 

Refering to my rant above, the SuperTalent RDII is very good at the 4K QD1, reading the crystaldiskmark test done they shows 141MB/s reads (this is 5x better than any other consumer SSD I have seen can do) and 134MB/s writes (which is 30-40% better than most consumer SSD's).

 

What remains to be seen however is how these figures settle to once the drive has been in use for a few weeks.

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Yeah the really exciting thing about SSDs is not what they do today, but what they will be capable of in the future. HDDs and optical disks are limited by physical cosntraints: heat, G-forces, vibration, acceptable noise, etc. These rules pretty much go out the window with SSDs. Remember the CD-ROM drive race in the '90s?

 

They can keep making the SSDs faster and faster.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I own a pile of SSDs now, I still don't see the point in them for 'performance' - I just use them since I hate physical damage being an option - and the majority of my boxes spend a lot of time idling, so the primary disk seems a bit of a waste.

 

If you want performance, take your silly raid money and go bribe Intel for one of their big nvme engineering samples. 1.7mil iops, whee.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 2 months later...

http://www.pcworld.c...ng-to-ssds.html

 

It doesn't really seem like a smart thing to do, but what the hell? If it can be overclocked, let's do it! :)

 

The largest issue with overclocking an SSD is having to deal with data corruption. Also, stress-testing the overclocked SSD by writing data to it and verifying it will degrade the useful life of the drive. For example, consider what a hammering the SSD will take if you do a 2-day-long stress test of reads and writes.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Yeah seems like a false economy, and if I'm honest a gimmick like the ram caching (called rapid mode) bullshit that Samsung are doing with the 840 evo drives.

 

The way to compare all SSD drive is thier native perf at 4k single queue depth reads & writes (4K QD1) time and time again I see reviews doing the sequential speed this and 4K QD32 that and its all bullshit, because at the end of the day the average user is only doing light stuff in either Windows, linux or mac.

 

Tip of the day: always look for the 'Crystal Diskmark 4K QD1 test', as it show what a drive is really capable of, or not and even then only consider the review that post a screenshot of the program in action not some bullshit bargraph. Eg the following image, if that SS is accurate the 256GB 840 evo drive is roughly double the 4kQD1 speed of my current 830 - but its all BS untill you see it in your own system and see what the actual perf is.

 

250-GB-CDM-haswell-WS-.PNG

 

-http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/samsung-840-evo-review-1tb-ssd,review-32742-14.html

 

164291_crystalMark-830-reference%20(on%20desktop%20pc).png

- similar results to mine when it was new.

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Thought this was worth cross posting from ttlg -

 

  • My motherboard is an ABIT IS-10 with two SATA connections (1.5GB/s).
  • For me the main one is long term reliability' date=' I've heard a few good things about the Crucial M4,
    [*']What experiences have you had with SSDs?

  • The primary issue with that mobo is the sata 2 controller will be horribly slow. So with say something like The Crucial M4 the 4k reads/writes with only be half of what you see in reviews. But conversely that will still be 10x faster than any mechanical hard drive.
  • Crucial is a good make, but samsung 800 series are better again. Avoid all OCZ drives and any make/model of drive with a sandforce controller (SF controllers are notorious for causing BSODs, but I will conceed that this issue make have been resolved, google your self to be sure)
  • I have 3x Samsung 830 SSD's the 256GB in the main pc, the 128GB in the laptop and the 64 in the media PC for the last year or so now. The perf on 256 after a years use of a few hrs per day is roughly 3/4 of what it was when I bought it. But I take good care of it and by that I mean I have moved the temp folder/s, the pagefile.sys, browser cache/temp folders and any other transitory folder off the SSD on to a mechanical drive. Eg SSD is the OS (C:\) and the mechanical (D:\), moving all those folders on to the emchanical drive reduces the amounts of writes to the SSD which helps keep the performance as high as possible for a long as possible.

Here is a little comparison of failure rates of some well know makes -

 

- http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?278896-Statistics-Reliability-of-various-consumer-SSD-models

 

I do have an Intel X25 (160Gb) for 5 years now' date=' running without any issues. Crucial is also a good brand for SSDs. check Tom's Hardware site for SSD reviews,[/quote']

The issue with that drive is it is ancient in SSD terms, the tech in that drive is 9yrs old). And to be fair those models have known issues with huge loss of speed over time and they aren't exactly quick to begin with 250/140 MB/s sequential and 50/12 MB/s 4k QD1. Compared to my S830 256GB - 505/450 and 90/25 and the 4K speeds have dropped to a stead 70/20 after a year.

 

And lastly what OS are you using? because if its Windows XP stop now! as your wasting your time. Upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram (I can help you with this if your on a budget) and then install at least Win7, or as its so cheap now Win8. Both are SSD ready, but Win8 more so due to its superb trim support. Under Win8 the new version of defrag detects you have an SSD and runs trim instead of the usual defrag aimed at mechanical drives.

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