craig5320

SSD Roundup June 2009
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Today we have a selection of these drives for review featuring models with various new controllers from Indilinx and Samsung as well as Intel’s award winning X25-M. Just to make things a little more interesting there is even a model which features a customised version of the old JMicron 602 controller.

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mike2h

cool. ty for all the great info. was kinda holding of on getting one because of price & various issues but looks like probs have been resolved, price is coming down fast & 1 of these would make great c drive. have to say the intel looks like the best buy overall.

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humonous

very thorough guys, the intel is a great drive and I didnt know it had a built in healing function. very education. OCZ summit is a hell of a performer, should sell well.

Kingston is a great litle unit though, thats mega value for money when you look at the cost - liked the fact you compared it against a raptor, nice idea.

kris23

i need to get me one of those summit drives..... nice

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Mac Daddy

Another great review and and some nice looking SSD's.

I have to say another solid SSD from Intel been quite impressed with the ones I have seen here on DH. The OCZ and Super Talent also looking really strong.

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"My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance." - Tim Allen

Judas

I'm still holding off just a tad longer.. perhaps this fall i'll make the splurge for a SSD.... i just don't want to jump into a rather new untested market yet.

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Veridian3

Interesting comment... why do you consider these to be new and untested and not worth trying when you are happy to run processors and graphics cards which are not exactly old?

lepel

I'm holding off too, until they become more mainstream and cheaper (price equal to or lower than mechanical drives). I might grab a small ssd as an os drive, but I don't think I'll be building a new pc anytime soon. It'll be after the release of Win7 for sure.

It's nice to see prices dropping and at the same time larger capacities made possible.
Btw, this drive looks interesting for fast storage. storage http://www.gadgetfolder.com/ocz-colo...utex-2009.html

Freshbard

Really nice review, but really all SSD should have been compared from the same capacity.

There are a lot of difference between SSD from the same series but with different capacity : ex : a 120 Go Vertex SSD is far better than a 60 Go one. That difference is clearly mentionned by OCZ for exemple.

For that reason, the results in those benchmarks are a little biased, and can make people think that, as in your benchmark the summit works better, so a 60 Gb Summit will work that way ... which is wrong

Maybe a comparison betwwen SSD of the same capacity would have been more fair

Veridian3

The review is entirely fair. Not only were the specifications of each drive listed cost was taken into consideration as well. In addition to that the review contains comments such as "It should be noted however that the 128 GB Falcon would also perform better than the 64 GB thanks to the additional channels/chips available on that model".

As we have shown the performance of various drive sizes it is much easier to see which drive/capacity is best for you. And what the impacts are of spending more on additional capacity.

Also, what 80gb model would you compare to the X25-M if trying to compare like for like?

clanman

What review did you read?

This was a roundup, not a head to head, DH do them quite often. you will see in the conclusion for instance that the cheapest, slowest drive won a VALUE AWARD due to the fact its great value for money. OCZ got a performance award etc.

I hate reading comments like this from 1 post users who just join up and don't even read the content but just post some meaningless nonsense.

Judas

It's the technology itself...

Graphics cards have been around for ages, they aren't exactly old, and while a change like a change from PCI to AGP or AGP to PCI-EX has shown very little to no issues in most cases, the core of the video card is the same.

The standard for Hardrives is changing, from a set of Spinning disks to something completely solid. You know this all.

But like any MAJOR change in anything, be it the change from say Standard TV tubes to LCD/Plasma/DLP... the first few generations May be Solid or a complete train wreck, completely unpredictable, and the lifespan is unknown. This is the only failure of any and all reviews of products that come out at release or even shortly after, they cannot review the lifespan of a product.

The first set of solid state drives had issues, where expensive.... the next bunch improved. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see every conceiveable issue or bottlekneck resolve by the end of this year.

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Veridian3

I disagree... for graphics cards a lot of the time the architecture changes completely between generations (yes some are evolutions) but often you can get a completely different team working on one generation to the next. Creating products in tandem to ensure they can release them in a timely fashion. This means that although the basics of the product are similar, the important components are completely different. Processors too... if you honestly think that using a Phenom is ok because AMD had previous CPUs then you are mad. Just look at the issues with the original Phenom revisions to see that any new product can have problems, regardless of the amount of time that type of product or company producing it has been about.

As for performance, things always get faster... the Samsung SSDs are the best at the moment. Wait until the end of the year and another faster one will come along. Wait a few more months and the same will happen again. There is no way to guarantee which will last the longest but the fact there are 3-year warranty's on these products gives an idea (Thats more than some manufacturers will give on their gfx cards or PSUs!). Added to that there is no way that Samsung would release these in to the small enterprise/OEM market if there was any doubt in their minds about longevity.

So overall, i still cant see why you have problem with this particular type of component when the same rules apply to it as pretty much anything else.

skip-01

I replaced my 7200rpm HDD yesterday with a Summit, and though the HDD was a good one, the Summit is the most amazing upgrade I have ever done. I now work in complete silence, and for general computing operations are almost instantaneous. It is amazing not having a hard drive spinning constantly, however good it is. It's more like having a huge ram drive...the summit is at a reasonable price, too.

Judas

The core of the cpu however remains the same.... yes the phenom had it's problems... well aware of that.. any product can... even though it had a good running history before... but the chances of those occuring skyrocket on Major changes.... I'm not talking minor/major design changes that still work off the same exact principle. I'm talking about MAJOR changes that completely disreguard the norms for a completely different method of working.

A good example of this would be PowerVR's orginal Series 1 and 2 technologies. These broke the traditional Rendering schemes completely, presented a completely new idea of doing it, and while the concept was sound, the products had a really hard time doing it.... 3rd total generation later the product was pretty much sound with all the growing pains sorted. A series 4/5 would have murdered if an actual product was released.

Another example would be IBM's Cell technology in which doesn't use the x86 coding. That in itself is a completely different way of working.

It would have been no different if AMD had instead released it's 64bit CPU's without backwards capability with x86.

Or a computer system using a trinary system instead of binary... I'm talking TRUE to the core changes.

This is identical to that of how SSDs have been progressing, few hiccups... stutters, glitches, issues, trial and errors and we still don't have a definite lifespan on them, but things are progressing. I/Os have come up, various other specific aspects of the SSDs that showed extreme weakness compared to a traditional drive have improved considerably. And while a traditional drive stores the same information a SSD does, the method in which it does the job is quite radically different.

Just to clarify ... i don't have a problem with any specific component.. including the SSDs.... i simply am being cautious and letting something mature before jumping on it.

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Zardon

Well I would assume the point Veridian3 is trying to make Judas is that most new technology has some risk involved regardless of the platform. I don't really see any issue now with a leading manufacturers SSD as they are generally created by the leading memory manufacturers such as OCZ with quite often 3 year warranties which we all know will be supported.

I do agree that the technology will improve over time, but its the same with everything. CPU's and GFX are in a constant state of improvement on an almost tri monthly scale whereas im confident that a leading SSD you would buy now would last at least 2 years+ without needing replaced, its not like you will suddenly need 400megabytes+ per second rather than the 200-250 we are already seeing. Firmwares are also being released for most on a regular basis.

What do the rest of you guys think about this? SSDs still not a viable platform? If not, then why not ?

Mac Daddy

Certainly a viable platform here and personally I can't wait to get my hands on one !

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"My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance." - Tim Allen

lepel

Well looking at the kingston drive for instance being x times faster than a raptor but not much more expensive, it's certainly a viable platform. But I think they're still working out R&D costs, so I expect prices will go down quite a bit. On top of that, I'm pretty much set for the next few years concerning harddrives. But when I shall be needing a new one, SSDs will certainly be on top of my list.

Metaluna

I would say the newer generation ones that have mostly solved the stuttering issues are viable and even highly desirable within a couple of restrictions:

1) You consider $200-$300+ to be a reasonable price to pay for performance.
2) You are OK with using the SSD as a boot/app drive and using a large HD for bulk data storage.

Point #2 mainly comes into play on laptops since many do not have space for a second HD. Maybe someday we'll see laptops with 30-60GB SSD integrated onto the mainboard, or on some kind of internal DIMM-like connector, leaving the standard 2.5" bay free for a big magnetic drive. Once you have your system split into two drives then the high price/GB of the SSDs becomes less important. I upgraded from a 300GB Vraptor to an 80GB Intel. After a little shuffling I went from having 200GB unused (wasted) space on the VR to around 20GB free on the Intel. So even though it looks like the VR kills the Intel on value, If I figured out the price per GB that I actually used, it would be a lot closer.

mkk

Nice article for sure. Next time when carrying out file copy tests, make one or two with a large number of small files as well. On the game loading test when you use a truncated axis it would be informative to see percentage values as well. Otherwise it's easy for some readers to mistake minute differences for major ones. Or don't truncate at all. (I prefer percentages in every situation, but that's me.)

bananaman

I think the SSD market is just on the cusp of taking off - at the moment it is still very expensive and generally I think the current benefits do not fully match the cost in a desktop environment (lower power is not really too much of an issue...). I think once the price comes down a bit then people wil be more willing to spend money on an "OS Drive" and then once capacity increases people will shift to using them for storage too

I know I am certainly keeping an eye on them and am looking to buy in conjunction with Windows 7

seems like timing is coming together nicely...

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