SSD time!

Going to restart the laptop and leave it on the windows logon screen overnight and see if it tidies itself up a bit. see the results in the morning!

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Originally Posted by Agent

There is a good chance you've hit the "Duraclass throttle". I've spent the last few days reading up a lot about this: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...else-Sandforce

There is the entire issue of writing compressed data and uncompressed data with these drives. That and benching seems to slow them down for a while (when using compressed data).

That thread is a very worth while read, even if long.

The review site benchmarks are starting to look like just that from my perspective at the moment. I've been seeing people getting writes as low as 50MB/s when using the "wrong" data on the Vertex 2e (or insert your SF1200 based drive here). I'm really not convinced by Sandforce right now. The Crucial C300 has amazing reads, but much slower writes - yet the writes are consistent, showing minimal deviation with TRIM working. So while the benchmarks show the SF based drives killing it, as soon as you start playing with compressed data, the entire thing looks a bit different.

That on it's own isn't an issue though. You'd just think that you'd be happy for the extra write speed whenever you use none compressed data, right? But after a lot of reading, the Vertex 2e recovers VERY slowly when it comes to the GC map. People on the OCZ forums are resorting to secure erasing their drive just to get speed back, before doing the same the month after. Sure, these people are crazy, but it's illustrating the issue well and not something you'd have to do on the C300 for example (not to mention hurting the drives life) as I understand it.

Another thread that's worth a read: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ce-drive/page9
I think the top poster sums it up quite nicely with this examples. Quite frankly, I don't have the time (or inclination) to care about what type of data gets put on the drive. More so when they take so long to recover from it if its the 'wrong' type.

Meh. SSD market is so confusing right now...but I think I might go with the C300 - at least the writes are consistent and there appears to be no worry about the SF1200 compression of data and drive recovery.

edit - by the way, if there is anyone who wants to correct anything above / point anything out I might be missing, please fill me in. I'm not really 100% up to speed on the SSD market :)

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Totally agree with you that the current SSD market is very confusing. If you take, for example, the Anand review of the C300, it seems to be at odds with what you mentioned regarding the drive recovery over time:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3812/t...realssd-c300/8

In fact, this was the review that convinced me the Vertex 2E (or SF1200) was the better overall option.

I personally have avoided benching the drive and vowed to only worry about things if it is noticeably running more slowly to avoid the creeping paranoia that reading some of those OCZ forum comments tend to make you feel.

Yeah, I saw that too. In fairness it was fixed though:

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Either way, Crucial corrected the problem and spent weeks validating the firmware fix. Crucial did continue to sell drives during this period, which I wasn’t exactly happy about.

Either way the problem is now fixed with the 0002 firmware revision

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Having said all that about the C300 though, I decided to go with the Kingson 64Gb in the Bargain section. The recovery on it is very fast. Reads are good too, but writes are slower. Given that the drive is under 80 quid though, It's worth a punt for this new OS install I figured and is going to be faster than a normal HD for the OS anyway :)

I recently got a 64gb Crucial C300 real SSD to review and would highly recommend it; ridiculously fast reads!

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Originally Posted by PC4Free

I recently got a 64gb Crucial C300 real SSD to review and would highly recommend it; ridiculously fast reads!

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Was it connected using SATA 2 or SATA 3 ? and where can we read the review ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Agent

There is a good chance you've hit the "Duraclass throttle". I've spent the last few days reading up a lot about this: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...else-Sandforce

There is the entire issue of writing compressed data and uncompressed data with these drives. That and benching seems to slow them down for a while (when using compressed data).

That thread is a very worth while read, even if long.

The review site benchmarks are starting to look like just that from my perspective at the moment. I've been seeing people getting writes as low as 50MB/s when using the "wrong" data on the Vertex 2e (or insert your SF1200 based drive here). I'm really not convinced by Sandforce right now. The Crucial C300 has amazing reads, but much slower writes - yet the writes are consistent, showing minimal deviation with TRIM working. So while the benchmarks show the SF based drives killing it, as soon as you start playing with compressed data, the entire thing looks a bit different.

That on it's own isn't an issue though. You'd just think that you'd be happy for the extra write speed whenever you use none compressed data, right? But after a lot of reading, the Vertex 2e recovers VERY slowly when it comes to the GC map. People on the OCZ forums are resorting to secure erasing their drive just to get speed back, before doing the same the month after. Sure, these people are crazy, but it's illustrating the issue well and not something you'd have to do on the C300 for example (not to mention hurting the drives life) as I understand it.

Another thread that's worth a read: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ce-drive/page9
I think the top poster sums it up quite nicely with this examples. Quite frankly, I don't have the time (or inclination) to care about what type of data gets put on the drive. More so when they take so long to recover from it if its the 'wrong' type.

Meh. SSD market is so confusing right now...but I think I might go with the C300 - at least the writes are consistent and there appears to be no worry about the SF1200 compression of data and drive recovery.

edit - by the way, if there is anyone who wants to correct anything above / point anything out I might be missing, please fill me in. I'm not really 100% up to speed on the SSD market :)

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Thanks for the very useful extra information about the Vertex 2E SSD's :)
Do you have one? Also, do you know what the worst case scenario performance wise is for the Vertex 2E?
The reason I ask is that it sems that the Vertex 2E 120GB has the best prrice/GB of any SSD on sale at £150+VAT for 120 GB.
Provided the worst case scenario is that the Vertex 2E still performs like an SSD rather then an HDD for random reads/writes, I'm happy with that.

The Vertex 2E does indeed look like a good choice. Is there a noticeable difference in performance between the 60, 90, 120 and 180Gb versions?

bump ^ Anyone?

Maybe in random speeds but sequential speeds will all be around the same.

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Originally Posted by cotswoldcs

The Vertex 2E does indeed look like a good choice. Is there a noticeable difference in performance between the 60, 90, 120 and 180Gb versions?

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I'm pretty sure those are all the same, allthough once you get up to the 480GB edition, read, write and IOPS are down ~20%