Six-Drive SATA III SSD Round-Up Shows Big Gains 129
MojoKid writes "Solid state drives have gone from essentially non-existent on the desktop to the preferred storage medium of enthusiasts and workstation professionals in less than three years. Three of the drives featured in this six-drive SATA III SSD round-up consistently offered 'best-of-class' performance throughout testing, with speeds in excess of 500MB/s for read and write throughput. OCZ's Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Corsair's Force GT, and the Patriot Wildfire all feature the same SandForce SF-2281 controller and synchronous NAND flash memory. These drives offered the highest transfer rates in the majority of tests, though performance does drop off as the data gets more incompressible."
SATAIII is great, but unstable (Score:5, Informative)
Before getting excited and rushing off to buy a SATAIII SSD, bear in mind that there are currently some serious stability issues in some of the drives. I recently bought a Corsair Force 3 120GB, only to discover that many, many (as in most) customers are experiencing problems with system hangs and BSODs. I've been lucky enough to only have the drive lock up once a day after a full day of use, but plenty of folks only last about an hour. The old drives were recalled, but even the replacements are having the same problems. This a big support thread at http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96333, and plenty more just like it in the same forum.
Corsair seems to think this is an issue with the SandForce controllers, which is reasonable considering other big names (OCZ, for instance) are having the same issues with some of their new drives. Just be sure to do your research first.
Re:Why no testing with pci-e SDD cards next to the (Score:4, Informative)
Right now TRIM command don't pass through RAID chips. So unless these SSD comes with robust garbage collection algorithm I wouldn't put those in RAID.