WD, Intel, Corsair, Kingston, Plextor SSDs Collide 56
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.
Re:Can we really trust reviews of SSDs? (Score:3, Informative)
Not exactly. The testers open the cases up and look at the manufacturers of the chips, at least. There was quite a bit of variety there, so I imagine that has a considerable effect on performance. We can relatively safely assume that SSD x.1 from batch y has at least similar components as SSD x.2 from batch z. Surely, the chips themselves may be made similarly in the same factory somewhere, but that seems to go against the differences the tester discovered.
Re:"Attractive Price"? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Can we really trust reviews of SSDs? (Score:4, Informative)
I know for a fact that Kingston's SSDnow series are rebadged Intels, so they should perform identically.
You are referring to this [kingston.com], the kingston SSD of TFA is a SSDNow V+ series. That's not the same drive, my friend.
Re:Can we really trust comments on reviews? (Score:5, Informative)
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'.
Re:Why no comparison with a baterry backed RAID? (Score:2, Informative)
It's hard to find...
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_velociraptors_raid_ssd_alternative [storagereview.com]
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=878&type=expert&pid=8 [pcper.com] (this website uses iometer on all the ssds they test i think so can just look at ssd reviews like this one to compare numbers)
Re:Why no comparison with a baterry backed RAID? (Score:2, Informative)
Here's another one: http://it.anandtech.com/show/2739/7 [anandtech.com]
try searching for something like VelociRaptor "raid 5" iometer
velociraptor is a 10,000k drive so it should approximate performance of any high-end 1-2tb desktop drive even if the review is old
I should probably get back to work now :)