Four SSDs Compared — OCZ, Super Talent, Mtron

MojoKid writes "Solid State Drive technology is set to turn the storage industry on its ear — eventually. It's just a matter of time. When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical, it doesn't take a degree in physics to understand the obvious advantages. However, as with any new technology, things take time to mature and the current batch of SSDs on the market do have some caveats and shortcomings, especially when it comes to write performance. This full performance review and showcase of four different Solid State Disks, two MLC-based and two SLC-based, gives a good perspective of where SSDs currently are strong and where they're not. OCZ, Mtron and Super Talent drives are tested here but Intel's much anticipated offering hasn't arrived to market just yet."

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[Yvan256]

Well, let's see:
- Magnetic hard drive = solid state (ICs, buffers, etc) + magnetic platter + mechanical (rotating platter(s) + moving heads)
- SSD = solid state

As soon as the price per GB of SSDs is at parity with the magnetic drives, I'm switching. It probably puts out less heat and require less power, meaning quieter drives too.

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[mapsjanhere]

I noticed they claim 1,000,000+ h MTBF, but they only warranty for less than 10,000 h (or 20,000 in some cases). What makes you wonder why they have so little faith in their product (or in their own reliability estimate).

Re:Deconstructing solid state.

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

It's a good point. SSDs are so new that we can't really say empirically that they'll last for a lot of years. If nothing else, though, they'll be relatively safe against dropping your laptop on the floor.

Re:Along with SSDs an optimized OS?

[DaveWick79]

My point being, they spent so much time measuring performance with sequential data transfer and write speed, when at least in the short term (next 5-10 years) these are pretty much just going to be OS drives where those benchmarks are inconsequential. Let's test system performance in the setup I mentioned. Test Autocad performance with the app on the SSD. Test Crysis performance with the game data on the SSD. Run PCmark or similar benchmark utility installed on the SSD and compare it to the typical 7200rpm or 10,000rpm hard drive that is in a typical desktop today. Then we'll have a useful benchmark and a really good basis to determine whether or not we're getting close to price vs. performance feasibility.

I don't understand the problem

[erroneus]

I am not an expert by any stretch but it seems to me that write speed issues, at least when it comes to relatively small amounts of writing, could easily be mitigated with a very long on-board RAM buffer controlled by the drive... and by very large, I mean like 1GB at least. And to keep it stable, a capacitor should be enough to keep it alive when power drops to commit any changes in buffer to the SSD storage. Maybe what I speak of is impossible or ridiculously expensive, but I don't think either is the case.

I just bought an OCZ drive... now I'm selling it

[tezza]

I got a Core 64GB. I build large java projects. This is for my workstation, not a laptop. Power and quiet were not the reasons for my experimental purchase.

I aimed to slash my build time for complex scenarios.
I thought the Compile -> Jar -> War -> Deploy -> Expand -> Launch would be greatly spead up as the files would be accessed quickly.

I hoped effectively for a much more targeted and capacious file cache/ RAM disk.

Unfortunately, the hype does not turn out to be true.

The enormous time cost of writing files smaller than 8MB (!) [see footnotes] completely counters any read speed increase. Building a proect is making thousands of 2KiB files : one of the most pathological cases for these drives.

So is it slow? No, it's just as quick as a sluggish 7K250, but then again I just coughed up £179 for the privelege of the same speed.

So I'm ebaying mine to someone who wants it for a light and quiet laptop, perfect.

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Some "Terrible small write performance" links I found during research:

* http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram_6.html [xbitlabs.com]
* http://www.alternativerecursion.info [alternativ...rsion.info]/?p=106

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