SSDs - State of the Product?

Santilli

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OK:
Merc, DD, do you think the Intel 25-M is worth 350 bucks? Other ideas?

80 gigs is enough for my boot drive.

Thanks
gs
 

Santilli

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Forgot to mention that both computers are limited to 150 mb/sec, sata 1, or whatever...
 

Stereodude

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FWIW, those prices suck. The 30GB OCZ Vertex has dipped as low as $115 after rebate. Not sure why it's worth $149 now. And, the Intel 80GB has been as low as $295.
 

Santilli

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David:
Why don't you give me a great price on those two OCZ 32 gigs, and, buy another Intel X-25E for your system?

Tax write off?

;-)

What's the advantages of the Auzentech X-Fi Forte over the Xplosion?
 

sechs

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Does anyone have experience with the OCZ Vertex series or Kingston SSDnow M series (of apparent Intel rebadges)?
 

ddrueding

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ddrueding

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The OCZ Vertex work great. There is no way I could tell the difference between them and an Intel "M" SSD without benchmarks. The larger capacity at each price point has caused me to switch to them over the Intel drives. The Kingston "M" series is exactly an Intel "M". The only thing different is the device ID and the sticker.
 

sechs

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Except for them announcing another new line, the Vertex sounds like a good choice. A few more questions:

Have you bothered futzing with all of that stuff they suggest in OCZ's fora?

What's your experience on firmware updates?
 

LunarMist

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Where are we now with the state of the SSD? I'm suffering from lack of capacity in the 32GB X25-E. Are there any alternatives with good write performance like the X25-E? $750 seems excessive for the 64GB X25-E if there is something better or the same available now or very soon.
 

ddrueding

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The X25-M and OCZ Vertex are the closest thing on this side of $750. A pair of X25-M in RAID0 made my i7 the bottleneck for most operations. What task are you trying to optimize for?
 

LunarMist

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I forgot this thread. My limitations are mostly with PS and (infrequently) PTGUI. The problem is that I have only one SSD, so the system can bog down when it is in heavy use. I can't decide whether it would be worthwhile to add another SDD, so that the temp files could be on a separate drive from the OS and page files. I'm not sure if that would help enough.
 

ddrueding

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Which SSDs are you putting in a MacBook Pro (and what apps are you running) that would cause real-world performance to be affected by a cap at 150Mb/s? Perhaps it was the lack of other features related to the spec?
 

MaxBurn

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Which SSDs are you putting in a MacBook Pro (and what apps are you running) that would cause real-world performance to be affected by a cap at 150Mb/s? Perhaps it was the lack of other features related to the spec?

Command queuing maybe??
 

udaman

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rumor :)

"Chipzilla" (gotta lov them Brits sense of humour :p ) <140char = Twitterrific™

link
 

Santilli

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Found another link that mirrors your post, but, with a promise of lower prices...

Can't remember where, now...
 

sechs

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Summit uses a Samsung controller. Vertex uses an Indilinx controller.

From what I can tell, the difference in performance and price is not large.
 

LunarMist

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Other than the Intel and rebranded Kingston SSDs, do any of them use the Intel controller?
 

LunarMist

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So why should one buy them, or are they faster than Intel in write IOs?
 

Mercutio

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I got an OCZ Vertex 120GB drive yesterday. It's definitely faster for writes than my X25-Ms but read performance as measured by system startup seems to be about the same, with Server 2003 needing about 16 seconds on either drive.

I can't quite bring myself to cough up for an SLC drive though.
 

Santilli

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That's absurd. Reminds me of paying 1264. for 32 mb of ram for a 540C Mac laptop.
Next year it was 150 dollars.
 

sechs

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So none of the other controller brands support SLC memory?
I think that Samsung has an SLC controller, but I don't think that it's better than Intel's.

I finally got the Vertex that I ordered and installed Windows on it. It's a lot less impressive than I'd been lead to believe.

It's definitely faster than the 10k SAS drive that it displaced. Windows gets to a useable state much faster, and Photoshop CS4 loads pretty quick. But it's not the whiz-bang wow speeds that a lot of people on the Internet have been reporting.

It is a lot cooler and seems to run on less power (which is not that hard to do). Definitely, at this performance level, it would be worth specifying SSDs as an upgrade for some laptop users.

What needs to happen is for prices to come down. I can't imagine putting anything less than a 60GB drive in a user's computer these days, but~$175 is a bit steep. And really, the folks who are willing to shell out, really want/need much larger drives, which may involve the trading of unborn children.

I see prices falling now. When should we expect the next generation of drives to be on the market?
 

Santilli

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Anyway you can quantify why you think it's not as fast as you were expecting?
Which SAS drive did it replace? Access, random, sequential read speed for the drive it was replacing?

Thanks
Sechs
 
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