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WD, Intel, Corsair, Kingston, Plextor SSDs Collide
J. Dzhugashvili writes "New SSDs just keep coming out from all corners of the market, and keeping track of all of them isn't the easiest job in the world. Good thing SSD roundups pop up every once in a while. This time, Western Digital's recently launched SiliconEdge Blue solid-state drive has been compared against new entrants from Corsair, Kingston, and Plextor. The newcomers faced off against not just each other, but also Intel's famous X25-M G2, WD's new VelociRaptor VR200M mechanical hard drive, and a plain-old WD Caviar Black 2TB thrown in for good measure. Who came out on top? Priced at about the same level, the WD and Plextor drives each seem to have deal-breaking performance weaknesses. The Kingston drive is more affordable than the rest, but it yielded poor IOMeter results. In the end, the winner appeared to be Corsair's Nova V128, which had similar all-around performance as Intel's 160GB X25-M G2 but with a slightly lower capacity and a more attractive price." Thanks to that summary, you might not need to wade through all 10 of the pages into which the linked article's been split.
Westelsairkingxtor!
Thanks for taking the time to write a decent summary.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
These drives are all built in Taiwan and China. The same factory may produce drives for multiple vendors. The only difference between one company's drives and another is the label on the outside of the case.
Add to that that the drives are manufactured in batches, so the quality differs from batch to batch. Also, a single vendor may use multiple factories, so drive quality may differ due to that as well.
I wouldn't put any faith in any review. The only thing you need to know is the price and return policy. Everything else is too variable to determine without a very broad review of multiple drives from a series of different batches.
How many SSDs crash head-on? The real tests should be the side-impact and low-speed tests that replicate the real word.
I guess all measurements were done at the Large Harddisk Collider?
True.. (That price seems to be from TigerDirect, BTW.. they're hit or miss in my experience, as far as order fulfillment, shipping times, and resale of defective items.) Still might be worthwhile to use as your "C:" or /boot & /bin drive, with the OS, games, apps, etc. I'm considering buying an SSD for this very purpose, although I may wait until prices are closer to the $300 mark for 500GB.. so 18 months or less, with any luck.
Content where access time and bandwidth isn't as critical to performance, can still go on much cheaper mechanical drives until SSD prices become competitive for size. Hard drives aren't the bottleneck for either downloading or playback of movies, which are limited by my internet connection and my desire to watch in real time, respectively.
Hopefully we'll see a congruence in prices between SSDs and magnetic storage in the near future, though we're clearly not there yet.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Better because it examines the performance of a new controller series from SandForce which beats the performance of these ones by using lossless compression to write less data.
http://www.anandtech.com/print/3656
(printed view has no ads and no margins and is one big long page...)
And still the Intel drive did reasonably well. Including being 4 times as fast in the 512b random write test...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The review omitted perhaps the most exciting SSD available to date:
Crucial C300 (6 Gbps SATA III) in capacities of 128GB and 256GB, at very competitive prices ($700/256GB on amazon).
They become attractive once you see the difference they make in a desktop PC. I bought my first SSD around 6 months ago, now I swear by them. If you're a heavy multitasker, a fast SSD can make a huge difference by eliminating seek times. I'm actually tempted to replace my boss' boot drive with an SSD, just to see if he notices - and by "notice" I mean "stop bitching about his gaming-grade PC being slow".
It is a sizeable chunk of change right now, considering a 500gb HDD can be bought for under $50, but you can liken it to a graphics card. Some people are fine with the onboard graphics, others need more horsepower and are willing to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars on faster GPUs. SSDs are no different. There are things I do with my machine that would take hours on an HDD, due to the sheer number of files or DB transactions, that finish in mere minutes on an SSD.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Not in your case. Perhaps if you had more than skimmed through TFA you would have seen this on page two in TFC:
Kingston Controller : Toshiba T6UG1XBG
I know for a fact that the Intel SSD's do NOT use the Toshiba controller, that they in fact use their own Intel controller. My fact trumps your so-called 'fact' that you think is a fact and is not in fact a fact. Thus the Kingston drive should not perform identically to the Intel drive and in fact it does not.
Next time read the details of TFA and then make an intelligent comment...oh wait, this is slashdot. Sorry.
In my opinion The Tech Report does some of the best storage device performance reviews and this review is hardly 'bunk'.
So I see these benchmarks between expensive SSDs and cheaper harddrives, but I'm yet to see a benchmark between some more appropriate price configurations: SDDs versus mechanical harddrives in RAID with battery-backed NVRAM, where the random write penalty is much much lower. Does anyone know of any?
iustin