SSDs - State of the Product?

[ddrueding]

I am, though only their RevoDrives recently. The rest have been Intel.

 

[Bozo]

Intel's next SSD's

 

[ddrueding]

That 720 looks like it could be my next favorite SSD.

 

[BingBangBop]

That 720 looks to cost a bloody fortune.

 

[LunarMist]

Interesting. Is that just the same old RAID controller strategy with a bunch of memory bolted on, or something else?

 

[time]

It appears to be a replacement for the X25e.

 

[MaxBurn]

Clarification to the new Intel 5Y SSD warranties: Your warranty ends when the smart E9 attribute (Flash wear-out indicator) goes to 1. The warranty does not include excessive writing to the point that the flash wears out regardless of how little time that took.

Intel clarifies five year warrant on solid state drives

An interesting note on this, when I updated the firmware on my drive it reset the wearout indicator back to the top.

 

[LunarMist]

I need to replace a drive on one system now. What is the best option, the SandForced 3 or something made with Marvel? (I will not buy an OCZ for sure.) I need at least 120GB capacity and good write performance since the SSD will routinely need to write 80GB of temp files in a few minutes.

 

[LunarMist]

Buchner, Buchner...

What do you feel about the OWC 6G drives?

 

[LunarMist]

Nobody buys SSDs lately? I guess I must make the first sacrifice.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm poor right now. No one wants any IT contractin'.

 

[LunarMist]

Me too, but if I go bnakrupt or have stroke or rupture, does it matter anymore?

 

[ddrueding]

I haven't needed any in a while, I actually have an OCZ RevoDrive and 40GB Intel that need a home...

 

[Pradeep]

I need to replace a drive on one system now. What is the best option, the SandForced 3 or something made with Marvel? (I will not buy an OCZ for sure.) I need at least 120GB capacity and good write performance since the SSD will routinely need to write 80GB of temp files in a few minutes.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4470/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480gb-preview/1

Marvell controller, massive performance with compressed files, if you are thinking temp nefs/RAW files etc.

I guess otherwise wait for the next Intel device.

 

[LunarMist]

The M4 may be sleeping with the hippos. The OWC 6G will overtake it by Thursday. :colors: :spiderman:

 

[Stereodude]

I'm really glad you posted that 4x.

 

[LunarMist]

Sorry, the board was stalling out on me. I thought maybe changing the formula would help ram those bytes through the series of tubes in the interwebs. ;-)

 

[LunarMist]

The OWC has reached a whole new level of crapitude. It cannot be partitioned or formatted in Windows and licks up the BIOS at boot. :tdown: $300 for this POS? :doh:

 

[time]

No sign of the M4 yet?

 

[LunarMist]

The single M4 is doing fine. It's quite a solid little drive, rather like the X-25M for the new decade. Only time will tell if it is reliable.

 

[ddrueding]

Any drive that licks the BIOS is ok in my book, that is some kinky shit.

 

[LunarMist]

No, the computer locks up and only the cursor blinks endlessly.

 

[LunarMist]

I tried it on four different controllers, but no go. I hope I can obtain a refund. ale:

 

[time]

It's a Sandforce 3 drive, what do you expect? That it should work as advertised? Sheesh!

Actually, I've been stranded again by my local supplier regarding disappearing stock of the M4, so I'm about to go out and be incredibly bloody stupid and buy a Corsair Force 3 - you know, the one that was recalled about 3 weeks ago.

That supplier claims I can get a refund if it's faulty, but I'll be double checking that before handing over the cash, as well as checking the serial number (the recall is supposed to only affect drives starting with 1122 or earlier).

Very unhappy about this, I'll be surprised if Corsair releases any more Sandforce drives.

 

[LunarMist]

I expected that at least it​

could be partitioned.

 

[time]

Well, I bottled out. Supplier was only prepared to offer refund if Corsair offered refund, and no-questions-asked swap (DOA) is limited to 7 days. Post-recall stock, and sales guy said he personally had confidence, but after 5 seconds reflection I realized I was being stupid by trying to make my life simpler and ignoring the possible consequences.

So I'll wait for an M4 instead, and watch what happens with Corsair and Sandforce.

 

[Will Rickards]

My two 64GB crucial C300's still haven't arrived, ordered them on the 14th for $90 each from the egg. They've been with USPS since the 16th.

 

[Bozo]

Intel killing off the x-25.

 

[LunarMist]

Intel killing off the x-25.

 

[Will Rickards]

What benchmarks should I use to test my new SSD?

 

[Stereodude]

None, unless you have some burning desire to put needless wear on it.

 

[LunarMist]

The 64GB C300? I'm not sure that you need to do much except make sure that is works. Maybe check the sustained reads to be sure that your SATA 3 speeds are up to snuff and check SMART once in a while.

 

[time]

Atto will give you some confirmation that sequential I/O is okay, although I wouldn't put any stock in individual numbers.

As Stereodude says, too much write I/O benchmarking will slow your drive, so I'd use a smaller file size and not run it too often.

MS SQLIO gives you tighter control over I/O requests, if you want to check 4, 8, 64 or 128kB block sizes. And you can confine yourself to reads.

I wouldn't run AS SSD more than once, or if you're concerned that performance isn't what it should be - it does an awful lot of writing. I found the numbers to be unreliable anyway, and there's no point at all in a queue depth of 32! The additional copy tests are okay though.

I did a Secure Erase on the drives that I did most of my benchmarking on, which resets them to factory condition. Garbage collection and TRIM should eventually restore most of the performance anyway, but it may take quite some time.

 

[time]

I'm poor right now. No one wants any IT contractin'.

Seriously? I thought you used to fill your weekends with it?

 

[Mercutio]

Seriously? I thought you used to fill your weekends with it?

Not any more. These days I'm lucky if I can get three hours of work in on a Saturday.

I can do a lot more remotely than I used to but other than basic monitoring I don't need to do much at this point.

 

[Mercutio]

I've noticed an odd behavior from the G1 X25-M in my gaming desktop. I only have one game installed in the 80GB space, City of Heroes, but since I had time to play this weekend, I did.

Unfortunately, what I actually spent most of the weekend doing was tracking down weird lag spikes in-game. My game machine is a ridiculously nice machine and at first I suspected the issues were related to my router, cable modem or some combination of other network traffic, but it turns out that the problem is my SSD. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's pausing for brief periods rather than delivering data immediately on request, resulting in issues with sound playback and when new textures are supposed to show up.

At the moment, normal operations like file copies seem to be unaffected, but I suspect my drive is nearing the end of its life. Maybe I'll get a G2 drive when it finally dies enough that I can RMA it.

 

[Mercutio]

I've noticed an odd behavior from the G1 X25-M in my gaming desktop. I only have one game installed in the 80GB space, City of Heroes, but since I had time to play this weekend, I did.

Unfortunately, what I actually spent most of the weekend doing was tracking down weird lag spikes in-game. My game machine is a ridiculously nice machine and at first I suspected the issues were related to my router, cable modem or some combination of other network traffic, but it turns out that the problem is my SSD. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's pausing for brief periods rather than delivering data immediately on request, resulting in issues with sound playback and when new textures are supposed to show up.

At the moment, normal operations like file copies seem to be unaffected, but I suspect my drive is nearing the end of its life. Maybe I'll get a G2 drive when it finally dies enough that I can RMA it.

 

[BingBangBop]

Isn't there an Intel utility that reports the status of EOL indicator in the S.M.A.R.T. data: Intel SSD toolbox

 

[BingBangBop]

It is also my understanding that the Intel warranty expires when the EOL indicator says drive has been written to too much regardless of the amount of time has elapsed. You need to RMA the drive before that happens.

 

[Will Rickards]

Do you have to have a clean drive to run these benchmarks on? Everybody in crucial forums seems to run AS SSD so I guess I'll run that as there is comparison data.