"Limited Edition" SSD Has Fastest Storage Speed

Vigile writes "The idea of having a 'Limited Edition' solid state drive might seem counter-intuitive, but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the 'Vertex 2 Pro' and included a super-capacitor for data integrity, the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspectives's performance tests, the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow-down effects, and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge."

Comments

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[MrNemesis]

If "almost a halt" is 200MB/s read speeds as opposed to 260, I think I can live with it before I upgrade to my TRIM firmware, which negates the whole issue... whoops, I started using TRIM on my home drives months ago.

Seriously, the SSD market has exploded in the last 12 months. It's gone from being an expensive tool useful to enthusiasts to a not-quite-as-expensive-but-faster-than-any-number-of-hard-drives-can-provide utility that's worth five times it's price, especially for enterprise users.

* Proud owner of 1 intel SSD, 3 OCZ SSD's and administrator of about 3TB of SSD SAN and >8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough

Re:Marketspeak, or as normal people call it: lies.

[MrNemesis]

Irish coffee's bring out the best in everyone ;)

Reason I started using them at home was due to video editing - not very useful for encoding when you can rarely outpace your CPU's capability to encode stuff, but for random seeking/non-linear stuff/extracting streams/muxing, SSD's are a boon. Depending on your workload you can even get away with using crappy SSD's that are shit at random workloads but awesome at sequential.

TBH though you'll get the most noticeable improvement with using it as your system drive; apps start almost instantly and there's never any thrashing as $bloaty_app loads. Heck, my linux machines boot in 5s with the comparatively cheap OCZ Agility drives; the difference is less noticeable in windows however. Try running a laptop off an SSD for a month and then go back to a mechanical drive - the apparent slowness will drive you crazy :)

The benefits for enterprise users are especially large because 20k of SSD can replace 100k of fibre channel whilst getting 10x the performance and greater reliability. Plus Picard totally loves SSD's as he can rest his tea, earl grey, hot, on them without risking Data loss.