Help needed to choose SSD

[LokutusofBorg]

According to this:http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=531&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=5
Both G-skill's Phoenix Pro, and the Vertex 2 have the same firmware, so maybe OCZ lost it's exclusivity?

The exclusive firmware is only for production releases. The Betas and RCs are what the other drives are shipping with to match the Vertex 2 with production firmware. Your link only shows RC firmwares for the 7% over-provisioned drives.

For as much as I see people posting a lot on this site, it amazes me that many of them apparently haven't read Anand's SSD articles.

 

[T0bias]

I just checked how much space my program, windows and games folders make up, and they result in ~95Gb.. I can surely clean it up quite a lot, and maybe I don't need to put all that stuff on the SSD.
How easily do you guys fill up your SSD?

 

[T0bias]

oups sorry double post, see above

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I have a 120GB Vertex 2 and a 1TB 7200.12 at work. I have Win7, Office and all other apps, and all my development tools installed on the SSD. I also have my entire source tree on the SSD and am running multiple ~5GB databases from the SSD so they're faster for my local development. I'm sitting at 63GB used.

There aren't many games that benefit from being on an SSD.

 

[T0bias]

I have a 120GB Vertex 2 and a 1TB 7200.12 at work. I have Win7, Office and all other apps, and all my development tools installed on the SSD. I also have my entire source tree on the SSD and am running multiple ~5GB databases from the SSD so they're faster for my local development. I'm sitting at 63GB used.

There aren't many games that benefit from being on an SSD.

I guess the loading times in games will improve, some games take ages to load right now Of course not super important, but always nice with faster loading times.

By the way, can you tell me what the usable space with such a Vertex2 120GB is - is it 120 "real" Gb or is it more like 111Gb showing up in windows?
And would you say that the Vertex2's speed advantage justifies it's lower capacity compared with the Intel 160Gb? They cost almost the same where I live.

 

[FishAk]

The exclusive firmware is only for production releases. The Betas and RCs are what the other drives are shipping with to match the Vertex 2 with production firmware. Your link only shows RC firmwares for the 7% over-provisioned drives.

For as much as I see people posting a lot on this site, it amazes me that many of them apparently haven't read Anand's SSD articles.

That's exactly what's confusing me, and why I asked. The Anand article inferred that OCZ was privy to a special production release. But the link I posted shows both OCZ and G-skill using RCs.

• 30CA13F0 (3.0.C Release Candidate): OCZ Vertex-2 "Extended"
• 310A13F0 (3.1.0 Release Candidate): G.Skill Phoenix Pro, OCZ Vertex-2 (Firmware Revision 1.10)

I have a 120GB Vertex 2

So with first hand experience, what is the firmware on your Vertex 2?

 

[LokutusofBorg]

By the way, can you tell me what the usable space with such a Vertex2 120GB is - is it 120 "real" Gb or is it more like 111Gb showing up in windows?

Formatted capacity is 119,926,681,600 bytes, which is 111GB. Don't let that discussion of GiB compared to GB earlier confuse you. Hard drives since the beginning of time have had a lower formatted capacity than their advertised space, and GiB is a useless unit of measure for normal people.

And would you say that the Vertex2's speed advantage justifies it's lower capacity compared with the Intel 160Gb? They cost almost the same where I live.

I wouldn't say it justifies it, as it depends on your workload and space requirements. If you're really set on the idea of filling up your SSD to 100GB or more, then it seems obvious you should get the Intel. It will be fast *enough* that you'll surely be happy with your purchase. (Or you could step up to the Crucial 256GB drive, which would be a very worthwhile purchase if you have that kind of money to spend.)

I am a software developer and we bought the Vertex 2's at work for our workstations. We host databases on our local machine for development, and the performance advantage of the Vertex 2 stood out for that usage scenario. If I had space requirements that took me over the ~80GB mark that I outlined in one of my previous replies then I would have asked for the Intel instead and that's what we would have gotten.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

That's exactly what's confusing me, and why I asked. The Anand article inferred that OCZ was privy to a special production release. But the link I posted shows both OCZ and G-skill using RCs.

• 30CA13F0 (3.0.C Release Candidate): OCZ Vertex-2 "Extended"
• 310A13F0 (3.1.0 Release Candidate): G.Skill Phoenix Pro, OCZ Vertex-2 (Firmware Revision 1.10)

I don't think the article inferred anything. He explained clearly what OCZ gets and what the other guys are doing to work around it.

If Sandforce releases a new firmware and it's going through the process to *get* to production release, the Vertex 2 loses nothing by also shipping with the RC firmware (as long as it has improvements over the previous production firmware, and there are no notable bugs in it). When that version of the firmware goes full release, the Vertex 2 can then start shipping with the production version and retain the same performance. The other drives can't. That's all there is to it.

The unknown is when the exclusivity will run out. I got the feeling that the PR pressure would cause Sandforce to back down (of course coming to some non-public arrangement with OCZ) and let everyone use the non-crippled production firmware. I actually expected that to have already happened. But apparently it hasn't as I would think that would get out, and Anand surely would have posted an article about it.

So with first hand experience, what is the firmware on your Vertex 2?

I didn't check the firmware, as I am not worried about it. If I noticed anything wrong with my drive I would have looked into it. But I haven't. If I read about a new firmware having some really cool feature, or improving performance by a large amount, then I will look into it. Until then, the drive is working fine and I am getting the performance I would expect from it during normal work usage.

 

[T0bias]

Formatted capacity is 119,926,681,600 bytes, which is 111GB. Don't let that discussion of GiB compared to GB earlier confuse you. Hard drives since the beginning of time have had a lower formatted capacity than their advertised space, and GiB is a useless unit of measure for normal people.

For some reason I wasn't 100% sure if the advertised capacity was GiB or GB for SSD's

I wouldn't say it justifies it, as it depends on your workload and space requirements. If you're really set on the idea of filling up your SSD to 100GB or more, then it seems obvious you should get the Intel. It will be fast *enough* that you'll surely be happy with your purchase. (Or you could step up to the Crucial 256GB drive, which would be a very worthwhile purchase if you have that kind of money to spend.)

If I assume Win7 64bit is around 20gb in size I estimated more precisely to end up at around 75Gb used space with the programs I intend to install right away. That doesn't leave me with so much headroom I think. Installing games on another drive would free up the space, but reduced loading times would be a nice bonus - I know World Of Warcraft's load time is reduced quite a lot with an SSD.

Anyways, would you think the increased performance of the vertex 2 is noticeable with general, normal use of the system - for things like boot-time, opening apps, surfing and general swiftness of the system with normal tasks?

Sorry for all my questions, maybe I'm overdoing my considerations

 

[jimhsu]

I guess the loading times in games will improve, some games take ages to load right now Of course not super important, but always nice with faster loading times.

It depends on the game.

Read: (oh and you're welcome).

For some math:

Avg mechanical disk seek = 15ms
Avg SSD read seek = 0.1 ms
HDD sequential read speed = 100MB/s
SSD sequential read speed = 200MB/s
We'll assume 3 bytes/pixel (uncompressed)

Typical WoW texture size: 256x256x3 = 196KB
Typical "modern game" texture size: 1024x1024x3 = 3.1MB * 3(diffuse, normals, glow) = 9.4MB. The diffuse, normal map, and glow map are typically contiguous in the packed file, so random access is insignificant here.

An SSD fetches a WoW texture in 0.1 + (196KB/200MB/s) = 0.1 + 0.98 = 1.08 ms
A hard disk does it in 15 + (196KB/100MB/s) = 16.96 ms. Notice that even with a huge RAID 0 array you can't get this below 15 ms.

Performance advantage = 15.7x

For the modern game texture, an SSD does it in 9.1MB/200MB/s + 0.1 = 45.6 ms
The hard disk does it in 9.1MB/100MB/s + 15 ms = 106 ms. The SSD lead here is not so impressive anymore. With a 2 disk RAID 0 array, this becomes 60.5 ms. With enough cheap disks, we can easily beat the SSD in cost.

Performance advantage = 2.32x

This all goes back to the latency vs bandwidth argument. Here's a really old but decent review on that:
http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html

For perspective, accessing data via ethernet on a remote computer with SSD (0.3+0.1 ms) is many times faster than accessing data locally via a standard hard drive.

TL;DR: Games that load many small files benefit, games that load fewer large files do not.

 

[RaistlinZ]

Running Dragon Age: Origins on my Vertex 2 is pure bliss compared to the mechanical drive I had on my old computer.

DA:O has a lot of scene loading, which would take me forever. The SSD loads scenes in about 1/5 of the time as my old HDD.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Anyways, would you think the increased performance of the vertex 2 is noticeable with general, normal use of the system - for things like boot-time, opening apps, surfing and general swiftness of the system with normal tasks?

Sorry for all my questions, maybe I'm overdoing my considerations

I think you're overdoing it a bit, yes. But I agonize over all my decisions so I understand.

I would just suggest that you let your space considerations guide your choice here. You want to put enough stuff on your SSD that a 120GB is going to be tight. So take the next step and get more space.

Get a 256GB drive.
Get a 160GB drive.
Get a 120GB drive and an 80GB drive.

 

[T0bias]

Another option just came up, which is a friend of me who can buy a drive from the US and bring it home to me - I saw that the Vertex 2 120 GB is very cheap on newegg.com (only $279) compared with the price of an Intel 160GB here in Denmark. The Vertex 2 on newegg is close to half the danish price of the Intel drive. That surprised me.

How come it's so cheap? I wouldn't save nearly as much by buying the Intel drive on newegg.

With those prices I don't think the 40GB of an Intel drive is worth that much extra cost. Only negative thing is that it's gonna be more troublesome in case it breaks.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Wow, that's a great price. It's getting cheaper because there are lots of Sandforce drives on the market, I would imagine.

Hell, have your friend buy you two. If one goes bad you're not completely screwed, and if both stay good you'll have the perfect setup.

 

[T0bias]

Just realized the $30 rebate-coupon ends tomorrow, so won't be able to get that rebate - but $309 is still a very nice price.

I'm just gonna stick with one for now and then see how that goes. Then I can always get another ssd next year if needed

Thanks a lot for helping me with the choice

 

[T0bias]

Hmm I just discovered that my motherboard (Asus P5K/EPU) apparently doesn't support AHCI... how big deal is this?

 

[FishAk]

Google: "Here is how to enable AHCI on P5K"

Not sure it's necessary, since you can just set your configuration to RAID in BIOS for the same effect. However, I'm not sure ICH9 will pass TRIM instructions in RAID mode like ICH10R will.

 

[T0bias]

It seems rather complicated and risky to do it in that way

If I don't perhaps it would be a bad idea even to buy an SSD?

 

[FishAk]

Hopefully, someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the only reason you need AHCI is to allow TRIM.

Even without TRIM, an SSD is many times faster than a spinning disk, and there are other methods to keep an SSD clean, posted on this forum. So no, it's not a bad idea to buy an SSD if you are looking to increase performance.

Did you check to see if ICH9 passes TRIM to an SSD in RAID mode? ICH10R will, providing the SSD in RAID mode is not actually a member of a RAID array. You should check concerning ICH9, since that's what your board has.

 

[Somatic]

I just bought an intel `160gb ssd (G2) and this thread has caught my eye, I will check the anandtech review of the drive, but can anyone tell me offhand just how much performance will decrease if I fill my drive up to max? Would the link to the article in this thread to the difference in performance when provisioning is set to 13% vs 28% (showing intel data too) be any indication of the performance decrease? Is what I'm seeing performance decrease on a full drive? Will it get even worse over time? And how does TRIM factor into all of this? I know TRIM helps keep the drive from decreasing in performance once you've written to all the blocks on the drive ( I think I have this right). But I am just wondering if I made the right choice in purchasing the G2 160 for 340 at this moment in time if I have to watch how much I fill it up, that kinda sucks.

 

[T0bias]

Hopefully, someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the only reason you need AHCI is to allow TRIM.

Even without TRIM, an SSD is many times faster than a spinning disk, and there are other methods to keep an SSD clean, posted on this forum. So no, it's not a bad idea to buy an SSD if you are looking to increase performance.

I have been searching around for info on this AHCI and IDE thing. The best thing I could find is this article:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...k=view&id=505&Itemid=38&limit=1&limitstart=12

They also state that TRIM should work with IDE, but reading on various forums I get a lot contradicting information - some says one thing and others something else. Kinda annoying

Did you check to see if ICH9 passes TRIM to an SSD in RAID mode? ICH10R will, providing the SSD in RAID mode is not actually a member of a RAID array. You should check concerning ICH9, since that's what your board has.

Haven't really been able to find any information about that anywhere unfortunately..


Btw, Somatic where did you find the Intel for $340?

 

[Somatic]

I bought it offa Ebay, Listing said it was "New" for 360, minus 30 with Bing Cash Back. I don't know how intel is with their warranty, but I hope it will be honored in case something goes wrong.

 

[LeCramp1]

I'm in almost the same bind as you, T0bias (I even live in Denmark also).

My choices are between 2x 120GB OCZ Vertex II or 2 x 160GB Kingston (which is an Intel X-25M G2). This is for a RAID0 setup.

So with no TRIM, I'm aware that I have to underprovision the disk.

But I'm really torn here. Not really sure what to choose. The prices are about the same. So i'm watching this thread closely

 

[T0bias]

I'm not so much in doubt which one to buy - I settled for the Vertex2 but after discovering the AHCI vs IDE thing I'm in doubt whether to buy an SSD at all or just stick with HDD's till my next big computer upgrade (which is far away most likely).

Since IDE seems to indeed lower the performance - so my main question is now: Do you think it's still a nice and good upgrade to buy the Vertex 2 SSD considering I will only be able to use IDE?

Some input on that topic is very appreciated since my friend is soon coming to Denmark, so I have to make up a decision fast, but it's difficult

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I just bought an intel `160gb ssd (G2) and this thread has caught my eye, I will check the anandtech review of the drive, but can anyone tell me offhand just how much performance will decrease if I fill my drive up to max? Would the link to the article in this thread to the difference in performance when provisioning is set to 13% vs 28% (showing intel data too) be any indication of the performance decrease? Is what I'm seeing performance decrease on a full drive? Will it get even worse over time?

Those graphs with the pretty colors on page 2 of that article show the performance decrease if you fill up the drive, yes.

I think it's dumb to over-provision an SSD, unless it's non-Intel and non-Sandforce. Both the Intel and the SF controllers use partitioned spare area the same as unpartitioned spare area. So you gain nothing by leaving more spare area other than forcing yourself to never fill up the drive.

And how does TRIM factor into all of this? I know TRIM helps keep the drive from decreasing in performance once you've written to all the blocks on the drive ( I think I have this right). But I am just wondering if I made the right choice in purchasing the G2 160 for 340 at this moment in time if I have to watch how much I fill it up, that kinda sucks.

TRIM works all the time, not just once you've written to the entire disk. It allows the drive to reclaim deleted sectors, so it always has the full free area to use as free area. Without TRIM the deleted sectors are off limits until something else comes along and tells the SSD "hey, you can use that sector".

You're going to have to watch how much you fill up any drive, if you're using it as your boot drive. This is especially true for SSDs but it's important to note that it's a consideration for *any* drive.

The manufacturers have worked out their numbers and they have a certain amount of the drive saved as spare area. You're safe filling your drive up, if you can live with the performance hit -- it's not that big of an impact. It's not like it reduces your SSD to the performance of a spindle drive or something. You still will have a fast SSD. Just not a smokin' fast SSD.