SSD Advice

54kroc

I'm a bit stuck trying to pick out an ssd,I've read a few review's but I'm still not sure what to get.
I'm thinking about either an Intel X25-m 80GB or an OCZ Vertex 60GB.
Any ideas which one is best? Or should I get a different one?

Komplett-Tech: Ryan

The OCZ has 200MB/sec read and 160MB/sec write speeds for 189e

The intel has 250MB/ secread and 70MB/sec write speeds for 205e

Both are fine, solid drives. But i would personally reccomend:

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=490463

Thats the Corsair Performance P64. Which has 220MB/sec read and 180MB/sec write speeds. It also clocks in cheaper then the other two at just 175.99. This is the drive i used at home as my boot drive. It's simply stunning, 7 seconds from power on to get into windows 7 (usable)

Any more questions, just let me know

54kroc

Thanks for the advice, I'll go for that one then.
Seven seconds into windows 7 is madness,well worth the money.

While the other drives have higher sustained read and write speeds this means very little unless you are moving huge files between the ssd and other drives regularly. You may be an exception but for most people these features are nice but will not offer the most noticeable performance increase in every day tasks. What is important with an ssd is random read and write speed and the intel is king here and will still boot any os just as fast as any of the drives with higher sustained read/write.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=25

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2010/02/17/kingston-ssd-now-v-series-128gb-review/8

Nollog

trim support is also important if you plan to use the drive for more than a year.

Basically, as your ssd gets full, you'll need to write over old data you may have deleted. Without trim support, this is slow.
SSD's can't just write over data like hard drives can, they have to erase it first, then write.
Both of those support it, most do now.

If you won't be writing much get the intel, they're the best brand for ssd's imo.
If you'll be writing, the ocz has a faster speed, so get that.

IrishGrimReaper

david7536 wrote: »

While the other drives have higher sustained read and write speeds this means very little unless you are moving huge files between the ssd and other drives regularly. You may be an exception but for most people these features are nice but will not offer the most noticeable performance increase in every day tasks. What is important with an ssd is random read and write speed and the intel is king here and will still boot any os just as fast as any of the drives with higher sustained read/write.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=25

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2010/02/17/kingston-ssd-now-v-series-128gb-review/8

qft. I bought the Intel myself, the 2nd Generation model and it's awesome. They're well regarded as the best SSD's out there(although any SSD would give a significant boost in speed over a HDD). If you're going for an SSD just go the full way and get the best one it's not much more expensive.

Intel X25-M Gen 2=ftw.

54kroc

Ah Jebus, I'll go with the Intel then.
Thanks for all the advice guy's

C.D.

Long Post Warning. Also a bit involved, recommend only bothering to read it if you are hardcore or looking to buy a SSD!

What a lot of people won't tell you is all the stuff about TRIM and GC (garbage collection). To give a brief summary (I had originally intended for it to brief but it is anything but) of what it is and why it is important:

A conventional HDD keeps something called a MFT (master File Table). This, for the purposes of this explanation, is like a relational database that tells Windows where the data on the HDD is. When Windows sends a delete command to a HDD, it in essence just updates the MFT (which thens list that section of the drive as empty) but the data are still there. In time, these data will be overwritten with new data. Keep in mind that in a HDD data is stored in a Boolean fashion (i.e. 1 or 0).

I can't really remember this as I read it ages ago, so it might be wrong On an SSD, data cells have 4 logical states, 0, 1, empty and one other value, possibly dead/corrupt. As flash cells essentially work by populating cells with electrons, cells need to be erased before new data can be written. Erasing is done on a larger scale than HDD's with blocks of cells (as oppossed to individualcells) being erased. All this means that when Windows passes a delete command to the SSD, the MFT (or SSD equivalent) gets updated, but the cell/block does not get erased. Let's look at an example:

Let's say you have a 10MB SSD and fill it with exactly 10MB of data.

The SSD works in blocks of 1 MB. Let's say you delete a 512KB file.

Your OS sends the delete command, the MFT is updated and reports 9.5GB free to your OS. But the SSD does not erase the entire block as some of those cells still have data.

You then go to write a new 512KB file. Windows passes a write command, the SSD does not have adequate space so what happens is that the existing 512KB is moved to the SSD's cache, the 1MB block is erased and the old 512MB and the new 512MB are then written to the block. This is very inefficient.

This leads to performance degradation over time and was a huge issue in the first generation of consumer grade SSDs.

This is where TRIM/GC comes. TRIM is a Windows 7 tool that will automatically pass an erase command to your SATA controller for particular blocks. Garbage collection is a tool released by your drive manufacturer which does essentially the same thing. This is where it gets interesting and I am more confident about my knowledge as it is more recent. When Windows issues the TRIM command:

Windows -> SATA controller/AHCI -> SSD

So, you need to do the following:

Make sure your drive supports TRIM. Do this by checking teh interweb. Be warned that certain firmware revision of certain drives will and others won't. The easiest option is to use a utility like

Crystal disk info which will tell you if your drive supports TRIM and other useful information like firmware etc.


[*]Make sure TRIM is enabled in W7:

Command prompt (right click to run as administrator) > fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)

Contrary to popular belief on teh interweb, this will only tell you that Windows 7 has TRIM enabled and is passing the commands. Not that TRIM is working.


[*]Make sure you have AHCI enabled in your BIOS, it is necessary for TRIM commands to be passed to the drive. If AHCI is not enabled and you enable it, Windows will not boot. W7 AHCI support is enabled/disabled at installation (W7 will, during installation automatically detect if you are using AHCI). To enable it after installation will require a registry tweak (note you can seriously mess up Windows if you don't know what you are doing in the registry):

1. Open registry editor. Start-> type regedit in the search box.
2. Locate and then click this registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesMsahci

3. Right-click Start in the Name column, and then select modify.
4. In the Value box, enter a 0.


[*]Make sure you are using the default Windows 7 AHCI drivers. AHCI will need to be enabled for the TRIM commands to be passed to the drive. These are the default drivers and should be in use unless you have installed specific ones for your motherboard's chipset. You can check what drivers each hard drive is using by Drive Controller Info. This will also tell you if TRIM is enabled. Edit:Forgot to say that the default Microsoft drivers are called MSAHCI, these are the ones you want to be using.


At the time of writing there is no definitive way to tell if TRIM is definitely working other than to fill your drive up and benchmark performance. One suggestion I read was to create a large file, delete it and a few seconds later there should be a lot of hard drive activity (LED on your computer or info in the Windows Performance Monitor), though this is hardly scientific or conclusive.

All recent drives support TRIM. The Intel X-25M (Gen 2) does and I believe that the Corsair P64 does, dependent on firmware. It is worth noting that a small number of people make SSD controllers- Samsung, Toshiba, Jmicron etc.- and all the big names, Intel, Corsair Kingston (etc) just buy these and rebrand them, so what you are really interested in is the controller being used by your drive.

I recently bought a Kingston V+ 64GB (2nd gen, Toshiba controller and not Samsung like the first generation V+ series, key is in serial numbers). I found the ideal setup for a drive of such size is:

SSD: OS and critical applications- productivity software for me.
• HDD, Partition 1: Application drive for Windows.
• HDD, Partition 2: Storage (kept seperate so when I can reformat Partition 1 when doing a fresh install without having to move my files to another drive). Note you can change the location of your user files (My Documents, My Music etc.) to another drive by:
  
  Go to your Start Menu, click Documents or any other user directory.
  1. In the left hand pane, expand the libraries tab for My Documents.
  2. Right click "My Documents", not "Public Documents".
  3. Hit up the location tab and point wherever you wish

I also keep HDD, Partition 2 encypted (I hate the thought of thieves having access to my photos etc.) and encryption on an SSD is a whole different can of worms which I personally wish to avoid subjecting my SSD to until a later date. It essentially centres around encyption software filling empty space on a drive with random data to obscure the encrypted data.

Perhaps a mod (I'm looking at you Solitaire ) might like to tidy this up (and correct some of the stuff I'm sure I got wrong) and put in the FAQ's section if it might help people. Took me a fair bit of time to collate all of that information and I certainly did not find it all in one place.

IrishGrimReaper

Just make sure to get the 2nd Gen one(which is the White Version) Gen 1 is black(with no TRIM support).

Shelga

OMG I like totally love SSD, thanks CD! I now have all the information I require to satisfy all my SSD needs, and then some. :pac:

C.D.

Shelga wrote: »

OMG I like totally love SSD, thanks CD! I now have all the information I require to satisfy all my SSD needs, and then some. :pac:

You seem to have gotten lost again, Fashion & Appearance is that way ->

And I am taking those brownies home with me tomorrow!

the_coderator

what about 2 64mb ssd in raid 0 for using intel matrix raid if your mobo supports it?

this way you might just have enough room too squeeze in all your apps and win7 and have super super fast speed.

C.D.

the_coderator wrote: »

what about 2 64mb ssd in raid 0 for using intel matrix raid if your mobo supports it?

this way you might just have enough room too squeeze in all your apps and win7 and have super super fast speed.

It will have very high throughput alright, but it will be costly and RAID controllers will not pass your TRIM commands. Unless you are doing some series amount of file operations everyday I would not recommend it. If you are running a server you are best of looking at the enterprise class SSD's for some real I/O performance.

54kroc

the_coderator wrote: »

what about 2 64mb ssd in raid 0 for using intel matrix raid if your mobo supports it?

this way you might just have enough room too squeeze in all your apps and win7 and have super super fast speed.

I think 64gb is plenty,I've not gone over 60gb for a long time.
At the moment I have 4 samsung 1tb f1's and the plan is to swap to 3x2tb Spin Point F3's for storage and an ssd for the os.
I'm hoping the 2tb drives are quieter than my 1tb drives as they are 5400rpm.