Is SSD all that good?

G

gongo

Regular
Am i the only one who heard the famous forums rant about ...IO being the bottleneck in the era of multi-Ghz processors...

Thinking of trying out...Intel X25M G2 80GB...overhaul budget cannot go any higher...but at 80GB..it is like going back 4 years in main storage terms...how fast is SSD fast? I can boot up my PC under 50s to get a fully usable desktop...i load programs under 4s max...idk...get the 80GB SSD...use it for Win7 OS, 1-2 games...some music...Office 07...the work related documents..not a PS user..some transcoding of video....move my current 320GB HDD as storage...will SSD $/GB drop within the next 6 months..when is Intel G3 SSD coming? SSD...fast IO ...SLOW consumer takeup. lol. I also heard SSD works better with ICH10R under Intel Raid...?

Above sounds good?
 
I have an old JMicron based SSD and it's pretty bad. Its read speed is fine, but write is horrible, and everything are blocked when it's writing. So if anyone wants to buy a SSD, watch out for them (although they probably aren't available anymore). I'm going to try an Intel SSD later, and if it's good I'm going to replace my old SSD with it.
 
Intel SSD's are pretty great. Especially if you are replacing a laptop hard drive. The difference can be nothing short of astounding.
 
pcchen said:
I have an old JMicron based SSD and it's pretty bad. Its read speed is fine, but write is horrible, and everything are blocked when it's writing. So if anyone wants to buy a SSD, watch out for them (although they probably aren't available anymore). I'm going to try an Intel SSD later, and if it's good I'm going to replace my old SSD with it.
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Try Flashfire. It's a sort of in-between smart write behind cache. Turned my EeePC into a speed demon. Could be risky without battery backup though.
 
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Kyyla said:
Intel SSD's are pretty great. Especially if you are replacing a laptop hard drive. The difference can be nothing short of astounding.
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Yup, I think SSDs are one of the best things to ever come along for notebooks. They don't die if you bump them when they're running, they use very little power, and a good one is stupid fast compared to even a 7200RPM notebook drive. Even the crap SSDs in my EeePC show their instant access time advantage and Flashfire put a big dent in the write speed problem.
 
I have a 60GB Intel X25E drive, it's friggin amazing. Installing windows servicepack took seconds instead of minutes, booting the PC (with a dozen autostarting apps) just vastly faster, on and on the SSE drive just trounces mechanical drives.

I have win7, some regular apps, drivers etc and WoW installed on my SSE drive (loading any zone is at least 2x faster than HDD), with ~30GB free space. I wouldn't put any music on there, that'd be weird! :) I've got a 2TB regular HDD for stuff of that nature; bulk storage, and more games.
 
Grall said:
I have a 60GB Intel X25E drive, it's friggin amazing. Installing windows servicepack took seconds instead of minutes, booting the PC (with a dozen autostarting apps) just vastly faster, on and on the SSE drive just trounces mechanical drives.

I have win7, some regular apps, drivers etc and WoW installed on my SSE drive (loading any zone is at least 2x faster than HDD), with ~30GB free space. I wouldn't put any music on there, that'd be weird! :) I've got a 2TB regular HDD for stuff of that nature; bulk storage, and more games.
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I want one of those SSE (Streaming Single instruction multiple data Extensions) drives ;)
 
Sxotty said:
Why in the world would you put music on a SSD? And yes SSDs are awesome :)
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Wot? I thought that was the whole point of SSD...put your faves on it and let 'em rip! How does SSD deal with HD/uncompressed media seek times? Pause - FF - Rewind - Jump....i hated how much my media would stall...or do they response more to processing speed of the gpu..cpu?
 
For a good SSD, access time is quite literally thousands of times faster than mechanical drives. Seeking in compressed video is always likely to be dependent on more than just the storage media since if you randomly seeked to just any frame your screen would most likely fill with garbage... You gotta find the closest iframe first and then fast-forward the video from there to the point where you wanted to reach.

So the part of the operation that depends on storage access time will be much faster, but this is probably the least important factor overall, since you don't do hundreds/thousands of jumps per second...

Where the SSD is really effective (and traditional mechanical drives are correspondingly poor) is where there is a lot of random activity; for such situations the performance increase is typically on the order of hundreds of percent.
 
pcchen said:
I have an old JMicron based SSD and it's pretty bad. Its read speed is fine, but write is horrible, and everything are blocked when it's writing. So if anyone wants to buy a SSD, watch out for them (although they probably aren't available anymore). I'm going to try an Intel SSD later, and if it's good I'm going to replace my old SSD with it.
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my netbook's "SSD" is an internal micro SD card, connected in an SD-to-IDE fashion.
a real slow SSD, even worse than yours ;)
that means I must minimize I/O. It came with a lightweight-but-not-quite distro on ext3, now it's running a better distro on ext2 and feels fast because it's used for occasional typing or reading stuff.
 
Flashfire is the answer to "SSD" drives with horrible write performance. I can't say enough good about how much it sped up my EeePC with its slow SSDs. But it only is available for Windows.
 
gongo said:
...will SSD $/GB drop within the next 6 months..when is Intel G3 SSD coming?
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Intel G3 drives are reportedly coming Q4 with capacities up to 400 GB for SLC drives and 600 GB for MLC drives => Link. Right now the prices are stable, but I'd guess they will start to sink once Q4 gets closer.
 
Is an Intel 80GB G2 any good? I was considering an upgrade to W7 + A SSD at the same time and it seems like quite a good balance between price/performance.
 
I have an Intel 80GB Gen2 SSD, it's fast, which is nice.
Installed Windows and my games on it, it's nice not to be waiting for crappy Windows I/O thanks to overpowered hardware.
(Hardware compensating for software failure again though :( )
 
gongo said:
Wot? I thought that was the whole point of SSD...put your faves on it and let 'em rip! How does SSD deal with HD/uncompressed media seek times? Pause - FF - Rewind - Jump....i hated how much my media would stall...or do they response more to processing speed of the gpu..cpu?
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Music is pretty simple though even on a regular HDD from my experience. It doesn't have problems really unless your HDD has a firmware that puts it to sleep all the time in my experience.
 
Squilliam said:
Is an Intel 80GB G2 any good? I was considering an upgrade to W7 + A SSD at the same time and it seems like quite a good balance between price/performance.
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Yep the Intel G2 is very good, the sole weakspot being sequential write where its less than half as fast as the competition. Also the newer Micron and Sandforce controller drives are generally faster than the G2. Indilinx based drives are also decent but their random read/write performance isnt terribly good.

Heres a link to a recent SSD review by Anandtech, should answer some of your questions http://www.anandtech.com/show/3667/oczs-agility-2-reviewed-the-first-sf1200-with-mp-firmware

If you arent in a hurry, might be prudent to wait till Q4 for Intel's G3. You'll get better performance and 160 GB for around the same or slightly higher price
 
The G2s maybe slower than other modern SSDs for sequential writes, but they're not slow in absolute terms. They're on par with many desktop drives. Besides, sequential write is typically not a bottleneck for almost all people, so it's a non-issue anyway.

Not sure sandforce is faster across the board compared to the G2, at least on tests with high I/O queue depths, I've not studied the matter that much. However sandforce is a young company and quality and reliability may be an issue here. You better have backups of anything important... :D Then again, everybody should have backups of their important stuff, it kind of goes without saying.
 
Grall said:
The G2s maybe slower than other modern SSDs for sequential writes, but they're not slow in absolute terms. They're on par with many desktop drives. Besides, sequential write is typically not a bottleneck for almost all people, so it's a non-issue anyway.

Not sure sandforce is faster across the board compared to the G2, at least on tests with high I/O queue depths, I've not studied the matter that much. However sandforce is a young company and quality and reliability may be an issue here. You better have backups of anything important... :D Then again, everybody should have backups of their important stuff, it kind of goes without saying.
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Actually the G2 80 GB is slightly slower than a mechanical drive even :oops: only gets about 80 MB/s. the 160 GB manages 100 MB/s. As you said, sequential write isnt terribly important but it still makes a slight difference, especially if you copy a lot of files. But yea pretty much a non-issue. In any case i expect they'll correct it with G3

Sandforce is for the most part faster than G2, so is the Mircon(Crucial Real SSD C300 is the only SSD shipping with it right now). But yep reliability is the major concern. We'll have to wait and see on that one, but even mighty intel have once screwed up on that front though :p
 
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