SSDs - State of the Product?

LunarMist

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The OCZ is rather bulky. Is that normal? The Intel SSDs are much smaller.
 

LunarMist

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I received the basic X25M G2 in a small brown box with no spacers or anything but an instruction leaflet. It is about 7mm or so compared to the standard 9.5mm notebook drive.
 
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ddrueding

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My X25-E were very slim, but the X25-M G2s came with a plastic spacer screwed onto the top to make them as thick as the Vertex drives. I would measure, but I just sold them.
 

LunarMist

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My X25-E were very slim, but the X25-M G2s came with a plastic spacer screwed onto the top to make them as thick as the Vertex drives. I would measure, but I just sold them.

The 80GB G2 I received from Newegg did not have any extras.
 

MaxBurn

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Was it a retail box? The one I got came with a 2.5 to 3.5 steel plate adapter which was nice to have.
 

MaxBurn

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Are you SOL? Mine came with an icy dock 2.5-3.5 adapter that I will likely never use and you could have real cheap.
 

udaman

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http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1221/13/

When it comes to pricing the 256GB model that we have here today carries an MSRP of $799 and is available for consumer purchase at Crucial.com today. With a total free capacity of 238GB that comes out to $3.36 per GB of storage space. This is expensive, but not out of line compared to other SSDs on the market today. The OCZ Vertex LE 100GB SSD retails for $399 and has a free capacity of 93.1GB, which means that you are paying $4.29 per GB of storage space. The Intel X25-M Gen 2 160GB SSD has 149GB of free space with a street price of $429.99 shipped. This places it at $2.89 per GB, so as you can see the Crucial RealSSD C300 is roughly 16% more expensive than the Intel Gen 2 34nm drives, but offers better performance in nearly every benchmark we ran the two drives on.
If you are looking for an SSD that supports the TRIM command and want to move to the SATA 6Gb/s interface to get the most performance from your system the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB drive is the way to go. You can't argue with sequential read and write speeds of up to 355 MB/s and 215 MB/s in a consumer based SSD. This is how SSDs should perform and we can't wait to see more SATA 6 Gb/s drives come on the market down the road.
gotta get a PCI-E card to use one of them @SATA 6Gbs, one that boots :(

Well, guess we'll have to wait for anad to test the shipping model firmware to see if they find the same flaw.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1222/14/

Vertex LE offers basically the same performance found with the Indilinix Barefoot controller in the original Vertex series of SSDs. The results in IOMeter and CrystalDiskMark say it all and the Vertex LE appears to be a solid drive for the consumer market. Any drive that is limited by 3Gbps SATA interface is a sign of where the market is going and that is the move over to the SATA 6Gbps interface. All of the drives in this review were tested on the SATA 6Gbps interface as that is where the market is headed right now and once Intel comes out with chipset support for this feature it will really take off. AMD will be supporting SATA 6Gbps drives on their upcoming 890G chipset, so native chipset support of SATA 6Gbps storage devices isn't that far off if you are an AMD fan. Intel fans will have to wait until 2011, which is when the ICH10R successor is scheduled to arrive. It is hard to believe that we have been stuck using the ICH10R chipset since 2008!
^That really blows

OCZ is planning on coming out with the following three drives with SandForce Controllers. It used to be four drives, but the Vertex 2 Pro has been canceled.


Model
Controller NAND Max Read
Max Write
4KRW IOPS Vertex LE
SF-1500 MLC 270MB/s 250MB/s 15000

Vertex 2
SF-1200 MLC 270MB/s 260MB/s 20000

Vertex 2 Pro
SF-1500 MLC 280MB/s 270MB/s ?

Vertex 2 EX
SF-1500 SLC 280MB/s 270MB/s 22000

The entry level Sandforce drive will be the Vertex Limited Edition (LE) and it will be using MLC Flash memory with the Sandforce SF-1500 controller. Since OCZ canceled the Vertex 2 Pro SSD it is highly likely that this limited edition drive is basically the inventory of Vertex 2 Pro drives with a slower, but more reliable and stable firmware from what we can gather. OCZ said that they have 5,000 of these drives available, so they should go rather quick. The Vertex LE will be available in 100GB (OCZSSD2-1VTXLE100G) and 200GB (OCZSSD2-1VTXLE200G) drive capacities with the 100GB model featuring an MSRP of $399 and the 200GB model having an MSRP of $829. Clearly, these are not inexpensive drives!
Hmm, how much does the V2EX SLC cost, in what capacities???
 

MaxBurn

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Competition is good. The Intel X25-M G2 80GB is back down to $219.99 on egg now.
 

LunarMist

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30GB is not much if the OS is Vista or 7. At one place I worked Corporate specified 120-128 GB drives for standard 2010 and 2011 machines.
 

LunarMist

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I should have mentioned that they are notebooks. I don't know about the mini desktop systems that sedentary workers have. I agree that 60GB should be enough for most users.
 

LunarMist

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The C300 is already out of stock at newegg. Are they up to old tricks or only received a few?
 

ddrueding

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Tricks? I'm sure if they could they would prefer to receive a lot. And if they did receive only a few, I'm glad they gave someone the opportunity to buy it.
 

LunarMist

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Tricks? I'm sure if they could they would prefer to receive a lot. And if they did receive only a few, I'm glad they gave someone the opportunity to buy it.

I meant that they might jack up the price as was done with the X25-M G2 a few months ago. :)
 

ddrueding

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Ah. Well, I wouldn't blame them for jacking up the price once massively. The part that annoyed me was when they did it a little bit at a time to keep interest up.
 

The JoJo

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Took the plunge after reading some of your posts here (and from having a slow computer running vmware, normal stuff and what not out of one Samsung 1.5T drive), so got myself one of these for a boot drive:
Intel SSDSA2MH080G2R5

So far so good. Nothing earth shattering, but seems snappier (re-installed everything, so of course it's quite fast...).

Still waiting for drivers for my 29160 :(
 

Santilli

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Took the plunge after reading some of your posts here (and from having a slow computer running vmware, normal stuff and what not out of one Samsung 1.5T drive), so got myself one of these for a boot drive:
Intel SSDSA2MH080G2R5

So far so good. Nothing earth shattering, but seems snappier (re-installed everything, so of course it's quite fast...).

Still waiting for drivers for my 29160 :(

One of the reasons I'll probably never use another Adaptec card...That, and slow processor
on a Zero socket raid card....

I think I have a LSI single channel in my storage box if you are intrested. Internal, and, I'll pull it out and look and see if has drivers. Running 7?
 

Gilbo

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Anyone aware of any good Micro SATA drives?

I know the Intel X18-M is MicroSATA, but are there any other decent drives out there? I've encountered a SuperTalent and Photofast one, but can't figure out the controller on either.


I've got a Sony AW190 I'm looking to upgrade with some SSDs, but the drive bays apparently use MicroSATA connectors, which through a wrench into my plans. The drive bays are 2.5" though (apparently) which is an odd combination.
 

Gilbo

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Micro SATA HDDs would be useful too actually. I want to add storage as well. It'll probably be a hybrid setup. 1 or 2 SSDs and then a hard drive for storage.
 

Santilli

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I'm kind of wondering about SSD's and laptops. Is there a different set of connectors for laptop SATA drives vs. the standard SATA drives?

If so, who makes laptop SSD's, and, has anyone used them?

I can't just plug a Vertex Turbo into a Lenova?
 

ddrueding

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Most laptops (and netbooks) use normal 2.5" SATA drives, and work with regular SSDs. In some laptops, someone decided that 1.8" drives would be a good idea, and that requires a smaller form factor for the connectors (the normal ones wouldn't fit).
 

Gilbo

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Oops, I'm wrong. It must be the smaller Sony laptops that need the Micro SATA connectors. My AW190 takes normal 2.5" drives with the standard SATA data & power connectors. It does need a proprietary ribbon to the motherboard.


Like ddrueding says, MicroSATA is used on the 1.8" devices like X18-M.
 

The JoJo

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Hi Greg,

yes, running 7 64-bit. Thanks for the offer! But I might ditch my SCSI-boot drive now altogether due to this, let's see. I'd also have a chance to upgrade my parents computer with the drive / controller.
 

LunarMist

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Does SAS really achieve 384 MB/sec. transfers from a 3Gbps port, or is that some vendor BS? SATA only reaches 270-280 sustained at the same connection speed and I thought that SAS had even more overhead.
 
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