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Why Size Matters For Your SSD Purchase
Vigile writes "Performance analysis on solid state drives is still coming into clarity as more manufacturers enter the fold and more of the drives find their way into users' hands. While Intel's dominance in the SSD market was once undoubted, newer garbage collection methods from Indilinx and Samsung are now balancing performance across the the major players. What hasn't been discussed in great detail yet is the effect that drive capacity can have on overall performance. Some smaller drives (64GB versus 128GB) will actually use fewer data channels from the controller chip and thus will have lower transfer speeds. The article compares drives using controllers from Indilinx, Samsung and Intel." Note that PCPer greedily spans this review over 12 pages. Next time maybe they can keep it down to something more reasonable.
The odds of me reading page 2 of any article not paginated sensibly (reading a single page should take several minutes) are probably around 10%. Page 5? never.
I'll just be uninformed until information is published with a sensible pagination system. I'm okay with that.
paul reinheimer
They're not going to be more reasonable until we take a stand. Vote down the story, and make sure not to click the links.
They all meet the definition of 'blisteringly fast' when compared to my current disk, but they also all meet the definition of 'cost more than I want to pay'.
I guess it is still useful to figure out which one provides the best value.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
From the article:
I was going to include a price comparison, but a few of the units tested (like the Corsair P64) don't seem to be carried anywhere as of yet. That said, prices generally do not sway far from the cost/GB of ~$2.75 set by Intel when they released their G2 drives at record low prices. The exception here is the SLC-based PhotoFast V4S, which will retail for a whopping $499 (that's $15/GB in case you ran out of fingers and toes).
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Um ... why would they do that if their 12-page version gets slashdotted anyway? The whole point of the splitting it up is to get page views.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
flaccid or erect?
I bought a 30 GB OCZ vertex for my boot/application drive, and use a few 1TB drives in RAID for bulk storage. Best of both worlds.
Yes, the 30BG one isn't quite as fast as the 120GB one, but it's still 10x faster at loading apps and 3x faster at booting Ubuntu then my past HD.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
OCZ also has forums dedicated to tweaking ram. There are thousands of forums on the internet dedicated to tweaking every part of a computer. Working "right" isn't "as fast as possible". Most components are configured to run less than optimum so they last longer. Granted, early SSD drives had issues with the abysmal cache causing stuttering, but really, that's just a design fault, not something endemic to the hardware line.
On the other hand, when I wanted to update my SCSI card 20 years ago there wasn't a firmware flasher - I had to buy a new chip, pull the old one off the card, and socket the new one in place. (The reason for the update? To add 'Seagate Mode' because Seagate drives didn't all spin up properly and without the new chip, the machine wouldn't boot off some Seagate drives.)
While things should certainly work right in the first place, being able to update them via software is a godsend.