Solid state drives

So with my imminent install of Windows 7 RC and the fact I've now got used to a partitioned system with all data on a large mechanical storage drive and OS/Apps on another, I've been mulling over whether or not to try a solid state drive.

My only experience with solid state is the pathetic excuse for one in the Acer Aspire One. However I do understand the higher range once can be rather quick.

I'd be looking for one of the 120-128Gb models ideally and I'd be after a serious speed boost from my current Samsung F1 750Gb, if I were to upgrade. I'd say my budget is around £200 to be realistic.

Of which only this OCZ model fits the bill. However it's neither the Summit or Vertex range, and the stated Read/Write speeds are considerably slower...

I realise I'm asking a lot, but I would potentially be willing to drop to 100Gb if that helped!

What brands / ranges should I be looking for?
Is there anything new on the horizon, any price drops or new tech expected?
Has anyone tried SSD drives and have an opinion?

Any thoughts appreciated :)

Anandtech have been doing some good reviews and articles about SSDs recently, and manufacturers are starting to involve them in the design process sometimes so they know what they're talking about.

The short of it is you should be looking at either an intel drive, or a drive with an indilinx controller.. and nothing else (if performance is your concern).

In terms of best to worst you've roughly got these groupings:
1) Intel X25-M
2) OCZ Vertex EX, SuperTalent UltraDrive LE
3) Patriot Torqx, Corsair Extreme Series X128, G.Skill Falcon, OCZ Vertex, SuperTalent UltraDrive ME
4) OCZ Agility

All of which have much better performance than a mechanical drive in all situations. Avoid anything else as it'll have an inferior controller - these still have better performance in some benchmarks, but can actually be slower in ones more relevent to every day tasks.

I think, today, to get under £200 you need to drop to 80gb (and get the intel). I think the 120gb drives from other manufacturers will hit £200 before long though, and the Intel 34nms have just been released.

Scan have the old intel 80 (as mentionied in the anandtech article) here:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/80GB-...-s-Write-speed

the 34nm one is even faster and should be cheaper, but it may take a while to filter through - even if you can't wait for it, this one is still really fast.

I heartily recommend reading this: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=3531&p=1

It's a big article but it answers a LOT of questions regarding SSDs - personally i'm now going for one of the new intel SSDs as a result.

Thanks for the quick replies. Will have a read of that during my lunch break :)

I'm saving my pennies for the new Intel X25-M. I'm hoping it might drop in price slightly after the initial launch price. Failing that it would be a Vertex as it is promised to be compatible with native TRIM in Win7, avoiding the dreaded SSD slowdown. From all accounts, it would seem that getting a drive with TRIM compatibility (or equivalent) is pretty key when shopping for a SSD.

Im waiting for these to come down in price before I get one for my work laptop as the boss wont spend £500!

http://www.memoryc.com/products/desc...ed_/index.html

I think once the new Intel drives start being stocked in big numbers, the other companies will have the drop their prices - the old Intels were always the best performers, these are even better, and they're far cheaper than pretty much everything else.

I don't think it's worth waiting for anything most of the time, but on this occasion it probably would be a good idea. Just don't go for something cheap with a JMicron controller, like the cheap OCZ drives (i.e. Core/Solid) because they're rubbish. Highly recommend the Anandtech review.

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

Just don't go for something cheap with a JMicron controller, like the cheap OCZ drives (i.e. Core/Agility) because they're rubbish.

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Do go for the Agility - they have the nice indilinx controllers.

I just bought one of the cheap Samsung drives for my HTPC. it's going to be a bit faster than the 400GB drive that died in there a few weeks back, plus its silent and doesn't heat up, so speed wasn't an issue.

Really am looking forward to the 200MB/sec+ ~120GB drives hitting the £200 mark. I will probably upgrade my desktop, laptop and server hard drives.

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Do go for the Agility - they have the nice indilinx controllers.

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Yep, got it mixed up with the Solid. Post edited :)

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

I just bought one of the cheap Samsung drives for my HTPC. it's going to be a bit faster than the 400GB drive that died in there a few weeks back, plus its silent and doesn't heat up, so speed wasn't an issue.

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Max transfer speeds are amazingly misleading when you compare HDD to SSD because you hardly ever find yourself in a position where the max transfer speed of a HDD is actually reached in normal operation.

Have you not found it to be substantially better, rather then just a bit faster?

What's misleading isn't max transfer (reads?) - it's max sequential writes. Intel's drives look like arse compared to others 70mb/s on this benchmark, but the reality appears to be that they're killer on random smaller writes - and that's what suits normal pc operation better making them much better at being an OS drive (and they now have far less latency too). It's this point that's steering me far away from drives claiming 180mb/s write speed when in reality that's only sequential and they're pretty much buried on day to day jobs by the intel drives.
Then again, two intel drives in RAID 0... yum!

As soon as the intel gen 2 80gb is out i'm placing an order.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

Have you not found it to be substantially better, rather then just a bit faster?

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Not installed it yet, it's still in the ant static bag on my desk. Thats tonights job :)

I'll let you know. I suspect boot times and loading of MediaPortal Frontend will be massively improved, the WD 400GB was a few years old. All this box is doing is reading media from the network or being fed TV and EPG data from the MediaPortal server. No media is stored localy, so a 60GB drive is perfect.

Intel 2nd Gen X25-M seems to be the one to look out for, do we have any timescale for when these are due?

On Scan's website they are listed as being overdue, so I guess any time soon then.

Soon - once the recall (bad firmware) is sorted is my guess (only affects the drive if you use a bios password on it anyway). Scan's price looks a bit high though.

I thought Scans price was about the same as everyone elses.......which are all substantially higher then the Hexus artical mentioned they would cost......

I am hoping they are available before August 4th....

For ref, avoid all first gen SSDs, including the OCZ Core, OCZ Core V2 and OCZ Solid Series. These do not have buffered controllers and perform similarly to 3600rpm 1.8" drives for running windows. Even today's eco drives flatten them for performance.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

I thought Scans price was about the same as everyone elses.......which are all substantially higher then the Hexus artical mentioned they would cost......

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Might well be - hence my question really - why (given exchange rates) the hike for the UK? Or are these just initial costs for pre-orders?

I don't look at the prices of pre-orders too much, they usually change when the product appears in stock, often higher than before, but sometimes lower.

Pre orders are likely to be the MSRP rather than the buy price plus markup that online stores usually operate by.

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Originally Posted by dangel

Might well be - hence my question really - why (given exchange rates) the hike for the UK? Or are these just initial costs for pre-orders?

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Can't say I have seen scan mark-up pre-orders before, although I just may not have noticed them doing it....

Looks like they won't be arriving in stock until August 14th - bah :(

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Originally Posted by shaithis

Can't say I have seen scan mark-up pre-orders before, although I just may not have noticed them doing it....

Looks like they won't be arriving in stock until August 14th - bah :(

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Probably due to the recall - which wouldn't of affected me anyway! gah!

You could always pick up the 1st gen Intel drive if you need it in a rush - Scan are doing it for £207 on today only. Admittedly that's still £40 more than the price of a a 2nd gen drive, but the performance is not much different.

There's enough different for me to wait tbh - and it's not as though my mechinical drives don't work right now :)

It's just always annoying when there's delays - but i'm old enough to be patient!

Despite the 70MB/s write speed (much rage about this, write speed is the one thing I was hoping to see improved with SSDs, ah well longer install times are better than longer loading times) the Intel next gen SSDs still seem to wipe the floor with the others in real world tasks.

Your drive spends most of it's time doing random reads and writes (the latter less so) and so sequential write speed works out to be pretty meaningless for an OS drive (or indeed for most tasks as you don't often deal with very large sequential files). I was all set to go for a SSD with high sequential write - until I realised it's marketing bull****. I did wonder why Intel went the route they did but they utterly destroy other drives in relevant benchmarks.

Exactly - the random reads on an early SSD are completely non-existant, and the latter ones are better, but the Intel ones absolutely destroy them. At £170 for 80GB too, I think they work out cheaper.

I too are waiting on the new intel drive, maybe bang it in a new i5 system :)

I was considering the i7 800 series, but I ideally want a system with full PCI express bandwidth, and so far I can't see any sign that the 1166 boards will have that without relying on an nforce chip.

I'm not too sure SSD's are worth it right now. Yea, they have great response times and better Read times, but the price/size is horrid. I'd rather Raid 0 afew WD Blacks and get over 1TB space.

The only way im getting an SSD is if the Size is even to the Price. So, 120GB for £120 (or close to).

Lets say i got a 60GB one, Windows 7 will take up 20GB of that. Then theres afew apps, so 10GB more. Then i have 30GB for my 90GB Steam folder... So i have to pick 3 games to fit on it for quicker load times... I'd rather wait afew ms more and have more space/money.

I would never use an SSD for data, in much the same way I would never use a RAID array for my OS drive. Not using separate drives for the OS and your games seems like such an old fashioned way of doing things these days, having done it since 2005, I don't see how I live without it for my main system - the only difference is my work PC which runs everything off a WD10EADS (It needs to be quiet, more than it needs to be fast)

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Originally Posted by MoonPig

I'd rather wait afew ms more and have more space/money.

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You'll be waiting for ever in that and every case. im currently running 280GB across a 120 & 160 HD's. This is small and the 1TB drives around the 50-60 mark are very tempting, but guess what theyre not big enough so im going to have to wait some more for the 2TB to come down by which point they may not be big enough also... - you get my drift don't you ?

Exactly - if you keep waiting for something better, there's always something better around the corner, so you'll never actually buy anything. To be perverse though Terb, 1.5TB drives are under £100 now, and quite a tempting buy :P

The "worth" of any peice of hardware is relative.

To put things in perspective, I paid £250 for my first hard drive....all 20 MB of it!

No, i didn't mean that. Basically, look how much SSDs have reduced in price since they were released. Then, look how long we've used HDDs. Give it a year and SSDs will be as good price/GB as HDDs are now.

I'm an enthusiast, i tend to buy new things all the time. But i wont buy something if it's completely pointless to me. I'd much rather have afew HDDs in Raid0 and loads of spare money / space, than an SSD with little space and a hole in my pocket.

Take Raptors for instance, they seemed fast awhile ago, now normal 3.5" HDDs are beating them all over. HDD will keep getting better and the gap between HDD and SSD will get smaller.

I feel the same about all components, whether it's the GTX295 (pointless for the money, SSDs or i7. I wouldn\'t upgrade, yet.

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Originally Posted by sammorris

To be perverse though Terb, 1.5TB drives are under £100 now, and quite a tempting buy :P

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Ya they are quite good for the price i suppose, but 1.5TB seems odd, bit like the Tri-core CPU's. Oddly enough i don't have a problem with Hexa-core wtf !?!?!? But yeah the reason ive not looked at the 1.5TB is becuase it really is too small, i must be one of the lucky sods on here who surpass there VM connection - 27Mb on the 20Mb package :). 2TB is probably what im going to buy if my pocket isnt pillaged by one of those spiffy new Intel drives :(

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Originally Posted by MoonPig

Take Raptors for instance, they seemed fast awhile ago, now normal 3.5" HDDs are beating them all over. HDD will keep getting better and the gap between HDD and SSD will get smaller.

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Maybe, maybe not.

I personally see the market going the same way as the monitor market......hard drives will be rarely seen new within the next year or 2 as SSD replace them for good, just like LCD replaced CRT.

Also, don't forget that HDDs are limited by the laws of physics, mechanical devices are not what you want......

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Originally Posted by MoonPig

No, i didn't mean that. Basically, look how much SSDs have reduced in price since they were released. Then, look how long we've used HDDs. Give it a year and SSDs will be as good price/GB as HDDs are now.

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Yes, and HDDs will have a fraction of that price/GB :p

Yea, i totally agree. Every once in awhile, a market gets replaced:

PCI > AGP > PCI-E
HDD > SSD
CRT > LCD
Serial > USB
IDE > SATA

But, i'd never buy the replacement straight away. That's how you waste money. Give it a year until it becomes standard, then upgrade. Getting an SSD upon release would of been very, very silly. Getting one now wouldn't be great.

But, all this is overcome by: Being incredibly rich and getting everything straight away... lol. Pity im not :(

I think SSD's are amazing, i've seen HDTach results with a constant 900MB/s! (3 x 120BG Vertex with Raid Card)... But that's costing nearly £1000... i wouldn't dare...

It's as shaithis says - it's relative worth. For me the 80gb intel sits right in price/performance and for what i'll use it for (the OS essentially). Yes it's a toy, but then this is my hobby and that's kinda the point. It's not an investment, computer hardware never is :)
Then again, this HD will probably be with me a few years (i'll inevitable RAID 0 it with another tho) as compared to most components which get replaced a good deal more frequently and cost more too! I'll keep my RAID 0 mechanical array for data of course :)

Yea, i've heard that many times. Especially when people were pitching to me why a £1000 Asus Mars is worth it.

Don't get me wrong, i'd absolutely love to buy afew SSDs for my computer, and i find myself trying to justify it. But i never can, at least for me. I game, ALOT, but my computer loads things fast enough...

When the prices drop, i'll buy one, or two, for definite. Just not now.

I hope you have fun with it, and i hope you are satisfied :)

It's all relative, but not to the age, but more the personal use. I would get a great deal of use out of the better performance an SSD would give me over my current 36GB Raptor, but I can't afford it, pure and simple. To other people they would see hardly any use out of the extra performance, so it's worthless to them even if they could afford it - two separate scenarios.
Terbinator - funnily enough I know exactly what you mean about the strange number, but I didn't have a problem with it when 1.5TB was the largest available size, in much the same way as I didn't have a problem with 750s when they were the biggest available, but now seem a rather odd size (but that's probably because it's so cheap to get a TB drive instead).
You have of course realised that the solution to storage is to buy MANY hard drives right? :P I have 9 hard drives in my server, as that's the most the case will fit without having to remove the fan controller I think. My current plan is to get rid of the pair of older 500s and the old 250 (that's basically filling in as the third external drive in my USB, since it's the only drive I don't network share and it has random crap on it) with a single TB and then hopefully replace the pair of 750s with a 1.5TB - that leaves only 6 drives with each a minimum size of 1TB, then I can fill in the other three drives with whatever can be afforded. Problem is, right now I can't even afford the initial replacements - damn there not being any jobs :(
I only have 4Mbps at York, and 6Mbps down here, but often it spends 12 hours or more a day downloading to get all the stuff I have off torrent sites, it's slow but it gets the job done, and with no seeming fair usage limits it's decent enough. On top of needing to do all this to my fileserver, I need to get a new drive for my main PC, hopefully a WD1001FALS, since it's so full I've installed half a dozen games already over a network to my fileserver - not so bad when it's at gigabit, but if the network drops to 100Mbps, loading times leave a lot to be desired :S
As for the HDD/SSD argument, CRTs only disappeared by majority when LCDs equalled their price and performance. The early LCDs had such huge response times they weren't great for gaming, and they cost a fortune, in 2004 it was £170 for a 19" CRT at 2048x1536 versus £320 for a 17" LCD at 1280x1024 (20ms I think). Needless to say, at this point I chose the CRT. Since I typically go for the 'if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well' approach, my first LCD wasn't until 2006, a Dell Ultrasharp 2407FPW, at a not-inconsequential £640. Ouch!
Right now, You can get up to 1.5TB drives at the competitive rate, and 2TB if you're rich. SSDs top out at what, 256GB for the remotely sensible ones? (let's forget about the £3000 Terabyte ones with internal RAID for the time being). 1500GB for £95 versus 256GB for £515 is a substantial difference. mechanical drives will outsell SSDs until the price is worth the change. I can see it being at least 3 years before my fileserver starts containing SSDs. Were I not so poor from previous expense, however, you would soon see an SSD in my gaming PC, a second gen Intel 80GB.
One thing that did shout out to me was how SSDs perform in RAID. Using the cheapo OCZ Core series ones, my friend Jon has excellent performance using three of them in RAID0. On their own they're damn useless. Of course, to do RAID properly it needs to be hardware. Hardware RAID cards, once again, much expense (Though SSD or not, I do desperately want hardware RAID in my fileserver).
As for the MARS295, that's less a performance product, more a collector's item :P

@Moonpig

Cheers - me too :) From what i've read it makes a big difference to responsiveness - i'll be interested to see what it'll do to at the desktop level, particularly when windows is struggling to load tray apps which really thrash things. I'll probably have a smallish partition for the latest game i'm playing - purely for scientific purposes ;)

Actually it's Deadlight's fault - if he hadn't of bought one i probably would of held off!

I'm also keen to see what difference it makes. The early SSDs load windows faster but are much slower loading tray icons - they also can't play youtube videos (because they can't read and write simultaneously) I'm assuming the intels can...

Tray app load times disapear, it was the biggest thing I noticed....Typing my password in and then having the desktop (virtually) instantly load and be 100% responsive was a massive "wow" factor.

While not so big or important a change, doing things like "My Computer > Manage" you notice how the window pops up instantly, rather then taking a second or so.

Things like Photoshop load times are another huge "wow" factor. A freind who works in media was sold instantly when he was CS4s load times on my rig.

And that was with 2 of the cheap Samsung 64GB drives (in Raid 0) vs 4 x 1TB F1 SpinPoint (RAID5) array.

RAID performance does scale almost linearly as well which is a huge difference to conventional HDDs, although RAID controllers add some latency, some people feel this effects performance noticably and use the on-board ICHRs instead......mine are currently running off of on-board but I will be trying my Intel drives on both the ICH10R and the Areca 1680i before making a decision.

On XP, instant response at login is something even my old Raptor can do - once you stack it high with programs it slows a little but not much. I find the biggest drag is loading the OS itself, not the actual HDD time, but all the device drivers :S I'm interested to see how they perform on an Areca card, my friend gets good performance off one of those from eight Seagate 1500GBs in RAID6.

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Originally Posted by sammorris

I'm also keen to see what difference it makes. The early SSDs load windows faster but are much slower loading tray icons - they also can't play youtube videos (because they can't read and write simultaneously) I'm assuming the intels can...

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I was using a first edition X25-E intel drive, windows was much faster, and the tray icons, where instantantious, so damn fast. Things like visual studio opened instantly, before it would take a couple of seconds! It was a quantum leap. The same is true of the 1.8inch MTRON drive i have at home.

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Originally Posted by sammorris

On XP, instant response at login is something even my old Raptor can do - once you stack it high with programs it slows a little but not much. I find the biggest drag is loading the OS itself, not the actual HDD time, but all the device drivers :S I'm interested to see how they perform on an Areca card, my friend gets good performance off one of those from eight Seagate 1500GBs in RAID6.

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No its not, not the number of apps i have that have to activate from logon. The OS that is XP itself is absolutely tiny, its all applications that slow it right down.

try me, how many you got :P

I personally won't be investing in an SSD until a decent 160gb one drops beneath the £100 mark. Looks like I am staying with mechanical hard disks for a while then!

160GB OS drive?

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Originally Posted by sammorris

160GB OS drive?

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You mean you didnt know the new versions of Windows consume all your S/HDD's space due to the awsomeness O.o

Windows 7 x64 fits on a 37GB drive. Vista x64 doesn't quite, but it'd fit on a 64GB drive, you don't need q

Well, Windows 7 x64 fits on a 37GB Raptor. Vista x64 doesn't, but it'd fit on a 64GB drive, you certainly don't need a 160GB.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

I personally see the market going the same way as the monitor market......hard drives will be rarely seen new within the next year or 2 as SSD replace them for good, just like LCD replaced CRT.

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Next year or two? Tad optimistic in my view. I say at least 3-5 more years before SSD outsell mechanical drives, and I think I am being very generous.

Feel free to bookmark this post and laugh in my face in 12 or even 24 months months time if I am wrong on this, but well, people have said what you just said over a year ago, and I've been saying that their predictions are well off for just as long.

As for capacity, 120GB is the bare minimum I am willing to take. Sure you can fit the OS with much less, but I want to have office/various applications and my most frequently played games too to benefit from the fast loading. My current system use about 96GB, and I can see the appeal in having a bit of spare space too (so 160GB would be nice). I am not cheap when it comes to storage having been willing to shell out on Raptors (and SCSI drive) before but that's pretty much as high in terms of £/GB I am willing to spend.

3 years is my bet, I'm sticking to it. The 30GB SSD I have (still needs to be ebayed) was damn useless, that's from December 08. The Intel drives you can buy now are much better, but they're still more expensive for the price by about a factor of 30%, and you can't buy cheap 30GB ones that are any good. That is at least some decent progress, give it a couple of years and we should start to see solidly usable drives at 1:1 price ratios up to the 256GB size I reckon, then all it needs doing is to make them bigger - not especially difficult given the technology already employed.

A 160gb OS drive would give me 80gb each for XP and Vista as I need both operating systems ATM.

I see more and more penetration of low capacity SSDs however into the notebook market though as the lack of moving parts and hopefully lower power consumption will be a benefit.

A 50/30 split on an 80GB drive would be ample really, but suit yourself, it's your £160 to spend :S

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Originally Posted by sammorris

Windows 7 x64 fits on a 37GB drive.

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Yah, 7 x64 RTM has only took up 15GB as a clean install !!!

15GB to start with, now I've started using it and installed a couple of programs it's 20.8GB, but still not as bad as Vista, filling the drive (I had to move my page file to another drive as it wouldn't fit!)

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Originally Posted by sammorris

A 50/30 split on an 80GB drive would be ample really, but suit yourself, it's your £160 to spend :S

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It gives me ample space for installing other stuff too and if I want to try to triple boot for example the extra space will come in useful too. I use an SFF PC and will continue to do so if possible in the future and this means I am limited to two hard drives usually.


Also why would I want to spend £160?? Anything over a £100 is a waste for me and I am not paying premium prices over a hard disk. When SSDs are more mainstream in a few years time I will get one.