Many small files - Intel 520 vs 830 (for coding/compiling)?

[naxeem]

I currently have Intel G2 X25-M and I'm building a new machine and can't really decide about an SSD. While Intel had it's own controllers, I've trusted reliability reports and the speed was nice (is nice). But now with all the models out, 320, 330, 510, 520, it is really hard to decide. It seems that 520 is what I'm looking for. Still, later reports are about Samsung 830, while bashing OCZ Vertex 4. I've read over 30 reviews from Anandtech here and still can't decide.

My priorities are reliability and speed with small and random files (coding, compiling). Which way to go? Intel 520 or Samsung 830. The size I'd go with would probably be around 160 (sweet spot for me) or actually 240ish as I'd rather go up than down.

Thanks for any advice but especially from those using those SSDs for the very same purpose as I do, which is a bit specific since it involves a mass of small files written and read constantly and very little sequential rw work.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

You cant really go wrong with either. The 520 does use a sandforce controller though, if that matters to you...

 

[naxeem]

You cant really go wrong with either. The 520 does use a sandforce controller though, if that matters to you...

Well, I've read that part and I'm wondering how wrong can that get in the end. How does SF perform compared to actually very nice old Intel controllers from the G2 series?

I've had Intel 320 at work and it made the machine go BSOD all the time. It was a freakin disaster and unusable for real work. Wouldn't want to make the same mistake again.

 

[BFG10K]

I've had Intel 320 at work and it made the machine go BSOD all the time. It was a freakin disaster and unusable for real work.

That's not normal. With that said, I’d avoid anything with SandForce, even if it’s Intel.

I scored a Samsung 128GB for an exceptional price, and it runs Visual C++ very well (I code as a hobby).

 

[saratoga172]

Well, I've read that part and I'm wondering how wrong can that get in the end. How does SF perform compared to actually very nice old Intel controllers from the G2 series?

I've had Intel 320 at work and it made the machine go BSOD all the time. It was a freakin disaster and unusable for real work. Wouldn't want to make the same mistake again.

Take this with a gain of salt but I've been running an Intel 320 for over a year now work no issues whatsoever. First in my gaming desktop as my first ssd and now in a 4 year old laptop.

As for the 520. Intel supposedly made a lot of changes to the controller and did much more internal testing prior to release and I haven't heard much at all about failing drives. I think you're pretty set on those.

The Samsung 830 is an excellent choice. Widely regard as one of the top ssd's right now with the crucial m4. One of the most reliable and one if the fastest. A tad more expensive ($30) or so for the 256gb. This would probably be my choice. Also my brother uses a pair of the 256's in his gaming computer and loves them. Reported no problems thus far.

The crucial m4 is another popular choice. I only throw it in because it's very popular, been out for a while and has proven very reliable after crucial released some firmware updates, and can be had extremely cheap for the quality of ssd it is. The m4 is what replaced the Intel I had in my gaming machine. It's been rock steady since day one. The reason I went with it was price. At the time it was about $50 cheaper than the 830. We also use the m4's at work due to the excellent pricing and reliability. We've yet to have a failure and have about 20 deployed.

Lastly, most oem's are using the Samsung 830 in their computers. The Dell computers we order with ssd's come with the 830's and apple uses them in their laptops.

It's all subjective but with either three I don't think you can go wrong. All are fast and reliable.

 

[Cerb]

Source code is highly compressible, but it's also so small per file that you will be waiting more on the sub-200-microseond seeks than anything else. You'll save on writes with the SF controller (520), sure, but your computer will barely cut it for grandma's Word machine by the time it gets anywhere close to rated writes.

If you're on Windows (or OS X, but I'm sure you'd mention that if you were), I doubt you'll ever notice a difference, provided you have TRIM (the 520 could get slower over time, otherwise). On Linux, with TRIM, the 520 would be faster, but that can be mitigated quite a bit with read-ahead (I'll guess that Windows and OS X do aggressive read-ahead, while I know Linux prefers not to, as a default).

I think the choice between the two should primarily be a matter of brand preference and price. Price generally tends to favor Samsung, these days.

 

[naxeem]

Yes, that is why it is a hard choice for me. I need an SSD that is reliable and performs the best it can within environment I create - which is "seeks, very small files, many of those". A 500MB project with tens of thousands of small files. Can't really profit from RAID0 and high sequential speeds, but can use short seek times and blazing randoms.

I'm using Windows, Linux and OSX. That is fun actually.

I'm open for Vertex 4 too as it still stands as fastest ATM with 1.5 firmware, but many just yell about how unreliable it is... Hmm?

 

[tweakboy]

Grab the Samsung 830 256GB check www.amazon.com

Also you said you work with small files.

My Cluster size is 512k normal is 4096. You might want to change that to 512k

I did a image upgrade so the 512k stayed,, but things are blazing fast,, boot up 20 sec photoshop 2 and half seconds,,,,,,,,,, everything instant. You said you work with small size files that 512k cluster would be nice.

 

[Cerb]

Between the Crucial M4, Samsung 830, and Intel 520, they've all been around long enough to get most of their kinks worked out (can't say the same for the Plextor M5S/P, regardless of how good they may actually be).

Between your choices in the OP and maybe a few others, there's not great differences to worry about. For the best performance across OSes, Intel would be the safest choice, but you probably won't notice the difference even then.

The Vertex 4 might be a perfectly fine drive, but OCZ needs to really clean up their retail act (get rid of half their drive lines, for a start, and maybe change their name--a CEO swap would be a good time for this), and they are under more scrutiny than other companies, due to their long history of being willing to release buggy crap. Their OEM deals do seem to be turning them around. I won't say the Vertex 4 is not the best drive out there, but I will say that I have no intention of finding out.

 

[hhhd1]

Performance wise, either 520 or 830 or any one of the new SSDs should be similar.
For C/C++ compiling, The CPU is going to be the bottleneck.

Plextor's newest drives appear to be fast.
Need to check some benchmarks for 4k random read.

 

[naxeem]

Yes I see. Considering the CPU, I'm sitting on i7-975XE which is quite nice to be honest. Got it for a fraction of it's retail price (the same as 920 was at that time).
I AM thinking of replacing it with 3770 but only to swap for a Gigabyte board and a newer platform with SATA 3, USB 3 and PCI-E 3 to ease the hell with OSX. Performance wise, there is not much gain with 3770 over my i7-975, at least when compared here on Anandtech. Still quite puzzled about that move and actually trying to find a SATA 3 controller that works from the boot up, which is much harder than it looks.

 

[Cerb]

I AM thinking of replacing it with 3770 but only to swap for a Gigabyte board and a newer platform with SATA 3, USB 3 and PCI-E 3 to ease the hell with OSX. Performance wise, there is not much gain with 3770 over my i7-975, at least when compared here on Anandtech.

With Nehalem, Intel made a huge change in cache hierarchy, and added an IMC. SB and IB have been improvements, but caches and IMC that came with Nehalem were a really big jump. Mutliprocess code like compiling (and DBMSes, and scripting languages, and current games, and...), that can share a lot of read-only data, share executable code, yet be working towards different results, got rather massive improvements with the change from the Core 2 to Core i.

Still quite puzzled about that move and actually trying to find a SATA 3 controller that works from the boot up, which is much harder than it looks.

With OS X, too? I wouldn't worry about it. The gains are going to be very small, anyway. Of SSDs capable of saturating 6Gbps, the differences between controllers, firmware, and NAND used, will far outweigh the performance difference between 3Gbps and 6Gbps.

 

[hhhd1]

Sata2 vs Sata3 is not going to make a difference, The main reason SSDs is going to help you is because its fast random access time, and fast random read speeds.

Take a look here:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1795/4/

The Samsung 830 256gb is capable of doing over 150mb/s when random reading 4k blocks, this means that if you have a project of 500mb, consisting of 4k files, the SSD is capable of random reading the whole 500mb in 4 seconds.

There is no processor yet capable of doing compiling that fast.

Even for slower SSDs that can do max random read of ~25mb/s (or if we assumed single thread read), you can read the whole 500mb in 20 seconds, which is still much much much faster than what any cpu can do.

Overclocking the processor is going to help allot, and make sure you are utilizing the 4~8 cpu cores while compiling.

 

[BrightCandle]

I do a similar thing (compiling fairly large projects with lots of small files - Java) and I have owned the X25-M G1, OCZ Vertex 2 and Crucial M4. I have also tested an OCZ Agility 3 and Samsung 830. What I found is that the X25-M makes an enormous difference to compile times compared to a pair of VelicoRaptor's, but I gained less than 1% going to any of the other SSDs. Simply put the moment you remove most of the 4k IO bottleneck you become CPU limited again.

So you can buy either knowing it will make no actual performance difference, you can choose based on price and perceived reliability.

 

[naxeem]

I'm using Intel 160 GB G2s already. Just need more SSDs since I want to replace Velociraptors and classics (6 of those).

Nehalm was fantastic (before i7-975 I was at Q6600) and XE one is very nifty. But Asus board (R2E ROG) gives me hard time sometimes with OSX.

That is why I'm actually puzzled between upgrading to IB 3770 (for less heat maybe and 10-20% improvement) and just waiting for Haswell beast (if it is going to be a change in arch.). Haven't actually yet read new data from IDF.

 

[Coup27]

Samsung.

 

[tweakboy]

Im running @ 3gbps its blazing fast. One day I upgrade that will go to 6gbps. gl

 

[Bill Brasky]

I've owned the Intel 320, crucial m4, and now the Samsung 830. All were/are rock solid stable. The 320 was in my laptop and I used sleep and hibernate regularly as well.