Why is there such a big difference in SSD?

[Kroze]

Can someone explain? What am I looking for when i'm purchasing an SSD drive?
My current 7200RPM hard drive is slowwwww. It transfer at about 25MB/s from one drive to another.

Do you really get that advertised speed with SSD of like 270MB/s transfer?

 

[hans007]

well part of it is the number of channels some controllers use on smaller capacity models.

 

[corkyg]

Like anything else in this world - there are good ones, not so good ones, and bad ones. Usually, you get what you pay for. Of the two you cite, I would go with the Intel 320.

 

[Emulex]

sandforce = compression = so they send all 00's to the drive and it gets benchmark QUEEN numbers. When you use CDM or AS with incompressible data (almost everything on your machine is compressed these days binaries,xlsx,docx,pst) - so people buy into the biggest number. It's pure marketing hype with sandforce.

When you actually use CDM and you see that both drives are about equal - you will understand the truth. intel doesn't post b/s numbers because we'd call them on that. ADATA - they are a chinese company with a small rep firm in the usa - they don't care and people will buy into the sandforce fake benchmarks. E-PEEN benchmarks.

The intel 320 actually reads faster than that too. they underrate their drive performance. My old X25-V 40gb pulled 240-250mb/s read all day long.

 

[jjmIII]

$/speed/capacity perfection

 

[wirednuts]

i was getting 80mb transfar speeds from a 500gb wd drive to a 160gb samsung the other day. i was shocked... i cant even imagine what 270mbs is like.

 

[exdeath]

If you like that, you should try a 3rd gen SATA III SSD RAID 0 and feel what 2 GByte / sec is like. Right click a dvd iso copy here to the same drive and you don't even see a copy progress dialog.

But the real benefit of SSD is the uniform near instantaneous CONCURRENT RANDOM ACCESS TIME of any file any size any location. You might get 100 MBsec on a platter, copying a large single linear unfragmented file, but throw some random seeks or fragmentation in there and you drop to < 10 MB / sec. SSD is more consistent and can achieve close to it's max speed under most all normal conditions, or at least keep performing reasonably responsive long after a platter has thrown up the "252 days remaining..." dialog and left your screen covered in unpainted non responding windows.

 

[Kyanzes]

If I were you, I'd buy an SSD drive based on its 4k random transfer rates. That's where crappy SSD drives and regular HDDs take a nosedive. Also that's what gives the snappy feeling when you do random stuff.

 

[yottabit]

My current 7200RPM hard drive is slowwwww. It transfer at about 25MB/s from one drive to another.

Even upgrading to a more modern HDD will help a lot. With transfer rates that slow I would think it must be a drive from before 2004. My WD 250GB caviar from a few years ago will do ~60 MB/s, and my WD 1 TB Caviar Blues from about a year ago will do ~120 MB/s

Heck, my WD 500 GB Black LAPTOP hard drive will do more than 60 MB/s

The awesome thing about SSDs as others have mentioned is their random performance. I'm pretty happy with the performance of the newer platter drives though

Most often the thing I find myself recommending people to upgrade when they complain about the performance of their 4+ y/o system is the hard disk

 

[razel]

Can someone explain? What am I looking for when i'm purchasing an SSD drive?
My current 7200RPM hard drive is slowwwww. It transfer at about 25MB/s from one drive to another.

Do you really get that advertised speed with SSD of like 270MB/s transfer?

People look for different things. As Tom's hardware has mentioned, the difference between SSDs is minimal compared to the difference between HDDs. You are left with reviews, but the majority are from smaller tech sites that are advertising pieces written by those who cannot analyze and explain what the graphs mean. That's not to throw away data from the graphs that they provide. Correct data is still good data.

What I tend to look for now is price/ease of use/lowest latency. Latency with some SSDs is so low that at times it can be affected by the programming or even how well regulated are the voltages to various clocks that the programs rely on. Sequential writes makes selling easy, but there isn't anything in your system that you read from that can output 200MB/s consistently for more than a second aside from another SSD.

The only SSDs I highly recommend are the Kingston V100+ and Intel. The Kingston V100+ is perfect for everyone and can still be found for about $1/GB. Great performance, no maintenance required. Plug that sucker in and move on with life, just like a regular HDD. The Intels have one of the lowest latency and are a wonderfully done all the way back to G1.

There are others... Zap's sticky is a great start. Best of luck, but right now, just get the V100+. It's still available for <$100 for 96GB. I think it's been like that for over a month!

 

[Emulex]

v100+ sucks balls it has near zero ncq.