Any recommendations for the latest/greatest SSD? Looking for about 120GB. Don't really want anything tiny and anything bigger seems to cost significant amounts of $$$.

The OCZ Vertex which Mark is using seems to be pretty good. It supports something called ATA-TRIM as well which helps with the performance issues with a used drive. OCZ only supply a Windows utility which does ATA-TRIM or something similar but you need to manually run it periodically. Windows 7 apparently has it built in or will have it built in. Not sure whether there are any other implications for using ATA-TRIM.

Any others?

Might as well check out the PhotoFast ones, which allegedly even work inside a 1st-gen MacBook Air. I can't seem to find a "buy" button for one anywhere, even though I really could use the extra capacity.

Well, actually it does *NOT* support ATA TRIM. Instead, it has a bug whereby it reports that it has support for ATA TRIM, but in fact does not implement it.

Instead, it has a proprietary opcode and protocol to do something similar, but which is unsupported except with a clumsy little "wiper.exe" utility that runs only under a few versions of Windows.

Note that the drives are actually mostly just Indilinx designs, as is the "wiper.exe" thang, and there are at least three competing brands out there now with more or less exactly the same stuff.

Indilinx is apparently working on implementing ATA TRIM, but they've been promising (and failing) to deliver it for months now.

Cheers

Good / long SSD article:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Ah. Interesting. The impression they give is that it does support ATA TRIM.


Yeah. I saw that. It is kinda buggy as well from what I've read.

If you had to buy another SSD now, would you get another Vertex?

I would definitely get a drive with the Indilinx Barefoot controller inside it. And probably the Vertex, since it's a well-known quantity now. Or perhaps a $20-$40 cheaper version of it from a competitor. Eg. G.Skill Falcon.

There is one review out there that tries to be particularly negative about the Vertex, because they got turned down for freebies or something. I forget the name of the review site, though, but it's the *only* negative one out there. And if you read it with a bit of logic, one can see right through it all.

EDIT: oh, it was techreport.com. I seem to recall that they made a huge deal out of alignment, blaming the SSD for WinXP misaligning itself on an odd-numbered sector (63) rather than on a 4KB page.

Cheers

Note that the 120GB Vertex drive here is in my main development / daily-use machine. According to the SMART data it has now averaged 33 erase cycles across all of the flash.

Only 99967 cycles left!

(that's around 50-years at the current rate of use).

Do you have any stats on how much it sped up compile times?

Cool. Thanks Mark. I think I'll get a Vertex. Performance is good and OCZ seems to be a pretty reliable company.

I had a look at the Intel drives but since prices of the 160GB model is pretty close to the price of the actual laptop itself, I can't justify buying it.

Definitely faster, for the first compile after booting. But after that, no difference, since it's all in the Linux page cache (RAM). Running diff between two kernel trees is incredibly quick now, though. And synaptic is much, much faster than before.

Booting is also *much* faster.

And my favourite: updatedb takes about five seconds after a fresh boot, rather than many minutes.

I just wish the machine had a SATA2 chipset, so that Firefox would load in under two seconds rather than three seconds.

Cheers

Mmm.. 34 seconds for "./buildit clean ; ./buildit" on the Hijack tree, with none of it already in RAM. That's a complete build of two empeg kernels (Mk1, Mk2) from scratch.

EDIT: heh.. and doing it again afterward, with everything cached in RAM, also took 34 seconds.

I don't remember what it was before the SSD.. something like 90 seconds, I think.

-ml

lol

Last time I compiled a Linux kernel from scratch it took something like 20 minutes

I believe Intel released one of the fastest SSD drives available to consumers today. The price is reasonable, considering...

The Intel drives are significantly more expensive though.

True, but they are significantly faster as well. (more than twice the read speed IIRC)

When I last looked at SSDs, maybe 6 months ago, it was unfortunate, but everything that was "reasonably" priced also sucked. Big time. Significant performance and deterioration problems, plus high failure rates and short (relatively speaking) life spans. This included numerous products from OCZ.

At the time , I was thinking of replacing the optical drive in my then "future" MacBook Pro with an SSD. I would have used the SSD as a boot drive and the existing drive would have been for data. The optical drive would have gone into a slim-line USB enclosure.

Yep. It all changed just about six months ago, when the Indilinx Barefoot controller hit the market in the OCZ Vertex, and now in other drives.

There are no drawbacks to these ones, other than price and low capacity.

Cheers

Today? That link is dated 08-Sep-2008. ???


Not possible, I'm afraid. SATA2 tops out at 300MB/sec theoretical, or around 250MB/sec in real-life. The Vertex drives achieve darned close to that speed, so doubling it would be difficult.

Even on smaller blocks, they're neck and neck, always mostly within 10-20% of each other.

EDIT: But the Intel drives do rule this market, when money is no object.

Cheers

There's apparently now a competing controller from Samsung out there, sporting a 128MB RAM cache. Drives based on it should also do quite well.

Anyone shopping for a Vertex should watch prices, as they are known to go up/down by $100 from week to week.

US$320 has been about right for the 120GB up to now. Over time that should drop further, of course, like most tech does.

Your earlier Anandtech article seems to show a much bigger difference then 10-20% at the lower block size tests.

You're right of course. I didn't mean to write 'today'. Don't know how that came up. In my defence, when I typed that, I was trying to do two things at once. I guess I shouldn't do that.

If that's true (and I don't doubt you Mark), then I stand corrected. It's just that I thought that there was no alternative (yet?) to those 250 MB/s Intel drives. I thought all the competition topped at 120-130 MB/s... But if those Vertex drives can reach the same speeds as the Intels, then they are clearly the better buy.

Yeah, looks like the artificial benchmark got a difference of around 40% on that specific random read test.

The Intels are much better at writes, of course, but with Linux one never really notices writes anyway. Note carefully how the best 10000rpm SATA HD (Velociraptor) does by comparison to the Vertex..

EDIT: Installing a single Vertex drive is like having a RAID0 array of many 10000rpm drives, except without the space, heat, noise, slow-seek times, and reliability issues of the 10000rpm drives.

When I said, "Best.. Upgrade.. Ever..", I really meant it. This drive just smokes anything (SSD or mechanical) that I've ever played with before.

It is *really*, REALLY, fast.

And yes, the Intel drives are reported to be even quicker, but at higher prices and lower capacities for now.

Things are improving rapidly in this segment. Performance of the new generation (Vertex and kin, and perhaps the new Samsung/ based drives with 128MB caches) is absolutely excellent. Now we just need the bigger sizes to get cheaper.

Hmm. I had thought the performance of the smaller Samsung controller drives to be significantly worse than the equivalent sized Indilinx controller drives but it appears the review I was looking at was wrong. I've worked out what is going on with the listed speeds and prices. The review is comparing the 256GB P series against the 128GB S series.

The Corsair drive uses the new Samsung controller + 128MB cache and is quite a bit cheaper than the Vertex drive and similar in overall performance.

It really depends on the usage situation. For common desktop usage, sure, writes will be covered up by the cache. There was plenty of times though that I could make the cache useless on the linux server hosting the perforce depot at my previous job. With a random smattering of really tiny files, and really large files, the difference between the Intel and OCZ drives above would be noticeable.

Of course SSDs aren't quite there on the cost side to justify replacing multi TB storage systems, especially when looking at the Intel cost. And as you point out, the upgrade above a 10k drive is already noticeable, even with worst case situations showing a minimum of a 2x improvement.

On the desktop, it's getting there. I'm probably going to try and round up an SSD or two here at work for testing, to see if they would work well for the developers. The main concern is still size, though a traditional hard drive could still be used for the stuff that doesn't require the speed. At home, I'm waiting for a 250GB+ SSD to come in below the $2/gb mark. The Vertex series is what currently has my attention.

The word from folks at OCZ is that the industry is moving quickly towards 4-level MLC NAND flash, which essentially means double todays existing capacities at the same cost.

Probably next winter for those.

I installed the Vertex into my laptop and this thing is fast. I can get to the login prompt from pressing the power button in 15 seconds. It is usable as well straight after logging in.

Now go into the Device Properties (System menu?), and verify that the reported firmware version is 1.30 or 1570. If not, time to reflash it. 1570 is the Indilinx version number, but OCZ renames it to 1.30.

The OCZ Forums have links and info for that. But don't bother with the rest there.. even the sysadmins come across as teen-agers.

Ensure that your Windows partition starts at sector 1024, rather than the usual 63 which incurs quite a performance hit.

Cheers

Yup. That was the first thing I did. It came with 1275 and I reflashed it to 1.30.


I noticed that...


I had no idea how to actually check what sector a partition starts at in Windows. I'm using Windows 7 x64 and the fdisk program seems to have disappeared. Booted off a Linux Live CD and Windows started the partitions at 2048.

Are you using yours with the SATA controller in AHCI mode? The firmware updater and the proprietory TRIM utility doesn't seem to like AHCI controllers.

They say the newer updater and wiper.exe utility do like AHCI better than earlier versions. Dunno.

My notebook is stuck in non-AHCI mode regardless.

Cheers