Latest status of SSD controllers

[daschneider]

It's been a few months since Anand published his review of Intel's SSD and talked about the stuttering issues SSDs using the JMicron controller were having. Have things changed since then? I've seen several new SSD models rolled out from different vendors since Anand's review and I was wandering if all but the Intel SSD are still using the JMicron controller. Are Intel SSDs still the only option for avoiding the stuttering problems?

 

[aka1nas]

OCZ has a new line (Vertex series) coming out on the 9th that use an updated controller and has a 32MB or 64MB DRAM cache. Samsung already has their own MLC controller out, but I have not seen any drives using it available yet.

Edit: It's probably worth mentioning also that there are several methods to help mitigate the stuttering issues on the JMicron drives. OCZ has some good FAQs on this on their forum, such as disabling indexing and defrag on the SSD (i.e. features intended to hide the latencies on regular hard drives, that just cause excessive random writes on the SSD). It sounds like the Jmicron drives are fine for replacing something like a slow laptop drive, but probably aren't fit replacements for something like a Raptor.

 

[frostedflakes]

Samsung has always used proprietary controllers, and their new MLC drives don't seem to exhibit any stuttering. Random write performance is still nowhere near as good as on the Intel X25-M, but it's more than acceptable for normal usage.

 

[coolVariable]

JMicron drives (even with the tweaks) are worthless and slower than the slowest laptop drives.
Where did you hear when the new OCZ drives drop? I am waiting to see whether they have fixed the issue.