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SSD drive


towhog66

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All of them would be good. All sata III drives are backwards compatible with sata II so no worries there.

 

Basic crash course on SSD terminology.

 

NAND: It is a type of flash memory. If you look at your RAM, those black memory chips on it is basically the same thing. Better quality NAND chips = more reliability and performance.

 

Controller: The controller is the processing chip that determines how and where the data is written to on the drive. The more efficient the controller is the better the drive will perform. Most drives use a sandforce (name of a company, not a term like I first thought :lol: ) model 2281 controller. That controller gives you very nice benchmarking scores, but the issue is that it achieves higher levels of speed by being able to compress your data before it is written to the drive. For example a 2gb file might be compressed into a 1GB file which is much easier to write and read to the drive than a 2gb file. This increases the theoretical speed of the drive. HOWEVER, most of your data is incompressible which slows down the SSD. The Crucial and plextor drive uses a marvell controller. This controller does not have the same max read and write speed that the sandforce controlled drives, but it somehow makes up for that in real world performance (not familiar with the marvell controller). Somehow the drive ends up as performing better than a low end sandforce drive like a corsair force 3, but worse than a intel 520. Finally you have the indilinx everest controller that is in the vertex 4 drive. Where this controller really sets itself apart from the other drives is that it does not suffer from the incompressible data limitations that are on the sandforce drives. So what the drive is lacking in numbers is made up for in real world performance.....by a lot. Now there are some other controllers out there, but they don't matter as much as the three primary ones.

 

Firmware: The firmware is the software that controls the controller. It is basically a fancy driver. And just like any driver, the firmware can be used to improve the efficiency of a component (in this case it would be the SSD) or it can be used to fix an issue. To give you an example, when the sandforce 2281 controller first came out, there was a pretty big problem with it giving people BSODs. Updating the drive to the newest software actually reduced the performance slightly, but actually did a pretty good job at fixing the issue. On the other hand you have the crucial company who released a new firmware that improves on what was already a stable drive and made it a lot faster. Lastly you have the vertex 4. Now this controller is so new that there really hasn't been a firmware release that has done anything noteworthy, but like crucial, they are sure to release one that will actually improve performance on an already stupidly fast drive.

 

I hope that solves some of the confusion.

 

it helped ill have to re read it...... so the one you sent in the link is the one you think i should get for over all no bull . kick butt speed and life? i like the cost of that sdd to by the way... ( from what i read its seems to be the best bang for buck SSD )

 

 

omg i cant get my pc to turn off it locks up.. wth i had to set the bios to stock to get it to boot ( lost my over clock and 1066 on my ram.... but it wont turn off... starting a new trend

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Towhog - I'll just cut through all the technical Mumbo Jumbo. Is it important yes. In the end will you actually be able to tell whether you're using asynchronous or synchronous NAND - or whether your SSD will do 40,000 Read IOPS or 90,000 Read IOPS. In real world terms...... NO. In benchmark runs...........YES. So cut to the things that are really important;

 

1. Design Standard - SATA II / SATA III (since you plan on upgrading your m/b in the near future might as well buy the latest technology now, however be aware that SATA III SSDs with Sandforce controllers are usually poor performers when used on SATA II controllers)

2. Capacity - 120GB or Higher

3. Warranty

4. Cost per Gigabyte

5. Brand

 

And those aren't in any particular order.

 

IMHO here are how I view the reliability rankings of the top four;

 

1. Intel

2. Crucial

3. Mushkin

4. OCZ (Vertex 4 not included since I don't have any experience with that drive)

 

There are others out there such as Kingston, AData, SanDisk etc. and I'll reserve passing any critique of those to people who have used them.

 

So to cut through the chase, what am I really saying? Figure out how much you're willing to spend, make sure you buy a SATA III SSD, and buy the SSD that offers the best price per GB and has the most favorable consumer feedback or professional reviews. Don't get too hung up on read/write speeds, IOPS etc. All that will do is give you a headache. Unless the entire reason for buying the SSD is for benchmarking. Real world use, no difference.

 

In closing, the Windows Experience Index is useless.

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+1 Do not rely on the WEI to rate your hardware.

I know Corsair Force drives are also reliable.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Corsair and Samsung drives. Add them to the list :) Have never used them personally, but they are trusted brands.

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I am running a vertex 4 in my laptop. That is why I freak out so much about them. I had a vertex 3 max iops edition in it before hand, and the vertex 4 still beats out the vetex 4 max iops.

 

I would also put OCZ above mushkin in terms of reliability. My mushkin drives get slower in real world performance as you add data to it. At least my OCZ drives will handle a fair amount of data before I see any difference even in a benchmark. :-/

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Oh yeah, I forgot about Corsair drives. Add them to the list :)

 

I have two Samsungs a 120 and a 256 both have been great drives thus far. Nobody ever mentions them as a choice which is odd since last I heard they are the only ones making the drive completely themselves.

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I am running a vertex 4 in my laptop. That is why I freak out so much about them. I had a vertex 3 max iops edition in it before hand, and the vertex 4 still beats out the vetex 4 max iops.

 

I would also put OCZ above mushkin in terms of reliability. My mushkin drives get slower in real world performance as you add data to it. At least my OCZ drives will handle a fair amount of data before I see any difference even in a benchmark. :-/

There's no real difference between any of the drives you've posted...

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There's no real difference between any of the drives you've posted...

 

I know you think so waco....I know you think so. :lol::teehee:

 

Waco, do you actually own a vertex 4 drive? I have at one point or another owned a vertex 3, vertex 3 max iops, crucial M4, mushkin chronos, crosair force 3, patriot pyro, and a intel 520. I can say with absolute certainty that there IS a difference between the drives listed above. The fastest I have owned is the vertex 4 256GB. Now the only difference is I use my laptop as more of a media editing station, so I am using mostly CS6 and sometimes sony vegas along with several other programs (if you are wondering why I use my laptop for content editing.....it is because I am lazy and don't want to transfer the data to my desktop :lol: .)

 

Second place is vertex 3 max iops AND the intel 520. These two drives traded blows. When I was converting all of my RAW pics into Jpeg, the max iops was faster, but the intel drive was a bit quicker with loading up CS6 (all be it the difference could only be measured by a second or two).

 

3rd was the crucial.

 

4th was the patriot pyro (however, I feel fairly confident that there was something funny about my particular drive because it never really seem to perform very well at all)

 

5th was the corsair drive

 

6th was the mushkin.

 

Now, I have tested all of these drives on my laptop under somewhat controlled settings (the best I could possibly do as a consumer and not a reviewer). I used the same copy of win 7, loaded the same driver (even though some were outdated by the time I got to the newer drives). I have a 80GB file folder filled with movies and pictures and all sorts of stuff to see what the real world performance is like when the drive actually becomes full (only because I fill mine up quite easily). I use Bioshock 2 as a measurement for speed in games simply because it has enough load screens and save points to make a decent test without being too big of a game to have to wait for an eternity to install.

 

The corsair, mushkin, and patriot pyro all performed pretty darn close. The pyro pulled a little bit ahead when I was writing data to it....but it was like 1. something percent faster. (I kind of wish I made a graph of this stuff. Originally I did this just to make sure I got the best SSD and nothing more :doh: )

 

The crucial was were I actually experienced a performance difference. When I open my laptop up I have about 5 applications that load on start up as a type of a test. The crucial on average booted up about 3-4 seconds faster. Now that doesn't sound like much, but when you consider the fact that the normal boot up is about 24 ish seconds on the wild fire, that is about a 15% increase in speed. However, in my tests I used the stock firmware, and because crucial is thoughtful, the drive that they sent me had a updated firmware.

 

The vertex 3 max iops and the 520 did slightly better at writing data to the drive. I honestly have no idea why. I could sit here and guess, but I will let someone else tell me their thoughts. All I know is the vertex 3 max iops was the best performing drive for me for editing content.

 

Lastly is the vertex 4. This one I did do some testing on, but not as much as the others. It was faster on boot up by 2 seconds, so a 14 percent increase there. Games loaded up about 2-3 seconds faster which was a close to a 20 percent increase in speed. Basically everything is one to two seconds quicker which you don;t notice right away, but when you get used to it and go back to use a slower drive, you realize just how good it was. I know that really doesn't matter to you waco, but considering it is faster than some much more expensive drives while still being affordable at around 115 bucks, you really can't get a better performing drive for the money.

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Waco, do you actually own a vertex 4 drive? I have at one point or another owned a vertex 3, vertex 3 max iops, crucial M4, mushkin chronos, crosair force 3, patriot pyro, and a intel 520.

I've had the following (either my own or for others or at work):

 

G.Skill Falcon, Corsair X128, OCZ Vertex 1, 2, 3, 4, Agility 3, Intel X25-E, X25-M, Fusion-io ioDrive Duo and Octal, Crucial Force GT

 

 

So yeah, I have. Nearly on a side-by-side basis for all of them except the Fusion-io drives. The only real differences are in benchmarks...unless you sit at your computer with a stopwatch.

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