[H]ot! Newegg: OCZ Solid 60 gb SSD $99 shipped, no rebate

Well, that took less than 5 minutes to go back up to $124.
*sigh* This is why I no longer buy anything from Newegg.
 
Pretty good deal. Speed wise, these things are not that great vs. disc hdd (the higher 1tb+ ones). But the seek time is amazing... for some reason I bring myself to pay >1$/Gb for it though.
 
Robstar said:
I wouldn't touch a solid with a 10 ft pole. If it was a vertex ? yes.
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You haven't had much experience with them, then. I have two of them, and a single drive is faster than my 16mb cache 320 gb 7200 rpm RAID 0 array on my desktop. A single drive in my laptop will load windows, load TF2 maps, and load COH maps faster than my desktop, and that's with a 600mhz clock speed disadvantage. Single drives usually get about 140 mb/sec read speeds, which is better than the vast majority of mechanical drives. When the Solids are put into RAID 0, the performance scales MUCH better than mechanical drives (+75% or more). Also, Windows 7 will convert most random hard drive writes to sequential writes, so random write performance will be less of an issue very soon.

Not to mention the RAID 0 Solids in my laptop use the same amount of power as a single mechanical drive, are lighter, load Windows instantaneously, operate silently, produce no detectable heat, max out Win 7's performance index, and are basically immune to shock. You get the idea...

Buying two of these drives and putting them in RAID 0 will give you generally better performance, twice the capacity, and a cheaper price than a 60 gb Vertex, which is going for $210 on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227394

Also, the only other comparable drive is the 120 gb Apex, and that's $250: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227411
 
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ordovician said:
You haven't had much experience with them, then. I have two of them,
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Two of these exact OCZ ones? I only ask because not all SSDs are created equal and most of them in this price point perform quite poorly.
 
Yeah, those are the ones with the terrible stutter issues. You've been warned. I'm picking up a 120GB vertex to put in my T61.
 
Cyper said:
Huh? With the promo code it's still $99.

124 - 25 = 99
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My bad, I must have misentered the promo. Still, with the others, they're the bottom end of OCZ's drives and have bad issues.

Oh, I would bloody KILL for a deal on the Samsung 256GB Newegg finally started stocking. Those things blow everyone away.
 
Met-AL said:
Two of these exact OCZ ones? I only ask because not all SSDs are created equal and most of them in this price point perform quite poorly.
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Yes, these exact drives. They do NOT studder as long as you properly configure them. I'm typing this very reply on my laptop, with 2 of them in it. All you have to do is align the partitions to 8kb, turn off indexing, superfetch, and prefetch, move your page file, and move the IE cache folder. Windows 7 gives a nice speed boost too. I wouldn't use these with Win XP, though.
 
ordovician said:
Yes, these exact drives. They do NOT studder as long as you properly configure them. I'm typing this very reply on my laptop, with 2 of them in it. All you have to do is align the partitions to 8kb, turn off indexing, superfetch, and prefetch, move your page file, and move the IE cache folder. Windows 7 gives a nice speed boost too. I wouldn't use these with Win XP, though.
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So, in other words, it's a great drive so long as you're running DOS. No thanks, I'll stick with my "ancient" magnetic drives that are capable of running modern Operating Systems with their convieniences.
 
Who said anything about DOS??? Windows Vista and Windows 7 are best for all SSDs. You don't need superfetch and prefetch with an SSD, because the indexing is so fast already. Indexing services are one of the causes of studdering. People who experience studdering are usually noobs who allow the OS to do background writes to the SSD. By moving all those things off the SSD, you eliminate any chances for studdering. Nothing stops you from also have a mechanical drive or two to keep their page flie, cache files, and backup. I have a small 4gb SSD in my laptop's expresscard slot for just that. As far as the alignment is concerned, that's really easy to do before you install Windows. The problem is that Windows usually defaults to a mechanical drive alignment, which can lead to messed up performance with ANY SSD.
 
ordovician said:
You haven't had much experience with them, then. I have two of them, and a single drive is faster than my 16mb cache 320 gb 7200 rpm RAID 0 array on my desktop. A single drive in my laptop will load windows, load TF2 maps, and load COH maps faster than my desktop, and that's with a 600mhz clock speed disadvantage. Single drives usually get about 140 mb/sec read speeds, which is better than the vast majority of mechanical drives. When the Solids are put into RAID 0, the performance scales MUCH better than mechanical drives (+75% or more). Also, Windows 7 will convert most random hard drive writes to sequential writes, so random write performance will be less of an issue very soon.

Not to mention the RAID 0 Solids in my laptop use the same amount of power as a single mechanical drive, are lighter, load Windows instantaneously, operate silently, produce no detectable heat, max out Win 7's performance index, and are basically immune to shock. You get the idea...

Buying two of these drives and putting them in RAID 0 will give you generally better performance, twice the capacity, and a cheaper price than a 60 gb Vertex, which is going for $210 on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227394

Also, the only other comparable drive is the 120 gb Apex, and that's $250: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227411
Click to expand...

I don't do _ANYTHING_ with windows and i'm used to mtron pros and the vertex.

I'd rather take a 30G vertex for $125 than a 60 G anything-pre-vertex from ocz.
 
Robstar said:
I don't do _ANYTHING_ with windows and i'm used to mtron pros and the vertex.

I'd rather take a 30G vertex for $125 than a 60 G anything-pre-vertex from ocz.
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You mean you don't tweak windows or you don't use windows?
 
ordovician said:
Yes, these exact drives. They do NOT studder as long as you properly configure them. I'm typing this very reply on my laptop, with 2 of them in it. All you have to do is align the partitions to 8kb, turn off indexing, superfetch, and prefetch, move your page file, and move the IE cache folder. Windows 7 gives a nice speed boost too. I wouldn't use these with Win XP, though.
Click to expand...
So what you're saying is "they're great as long as you never write anything to the drive while you're working with it".

It's still broken, you're just trying to cover up the issue by moving most write operations to a different drive. Eliminating 100% of write operations to the SSD isn't going to happen, which means you will still see stuttering at some point, albeit not as consistently as with prefetch turned on.

Oh, and by the way, turn SuperFetch back on. It doesn't write to your SSD, just reads back often-used data into RAM for super-quick access. RAM is still far faster than your SSD, and any data stored in SuperFetch's cache will be read from RAM instead of your SSD, which might help alleviate some stuttering.
 
From what I remember I read, the difference between the core/solid & the vertex as far as write IOPs is 1-2 orders of magnitude.
 
So these are the ones that suck then?

When ever I see "Turn off superfetch" used as a tweak I pretty much write off the rest of the post as nonsense.
 
Yes these suck in comparison to newer SSD's. These require a tweaking to get working right. Thats why they are cheap. You get what you pay for. They still have uses though.
 
as an alternative suggestion, combining a pair of these on a raid controller with write caching will eliminate all stuttering problems. no tweaking involv.ed
 
Met-AL said:
So these are the ones that suck then?

When ever I see "Turn off superfetch" used as a tweak I pretty much write off the rest of the post as nonsense.
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http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47212
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50376

A short note for those wondering why prefetch and superfetch along with drive indexing are not needed.

Normal HDD access time is in the region of 11 to 15ms. Normal SSD access time is in the region of 0.2ms. What this means is SSD has found and served data faster than regular HDD has even found it. Microsoft added these enhancements as data on HDD becomes extremely fragmented. So it places markers and indexes regular drives so it can speed up data recovery and enhance end user experience. It places regular use applications and files in special cache folders so that they can be accessed quicker. The issue is all this work it does in the background is slowing the SSD drive down due to additional writes and reads the controller is doing.

So we need to remove HDD enhancements to allow SSD drives to have an easier time coping with the read/write requestes the OS makes of it.
Click to expand...

It's not about performance as much as preserving the life of the drive, too.
 
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Question - if these SSD's were so great, then why did OCZ release the vertex and why did prices drop so drastically on these? Of course the OCZ rep is going to say they are great drives BTW. What did you expect?
 
ordovician said:
If the Core 2 was so great, then why did Intel release the Core i7? Your logic.
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Core 2 duo had a multi-year reign. The OCZ solid? Maybe a couple of months. It's a flawed product and a simple google search will prove that. It's good if you want to use it as a storage drive with no OS functions, but with 64GB why would you want to do that?

Believe what you want, but I'll be the one enjoying better performance in the end.
 
stainremover said:
before met-al writes off the posts you linked to as nonsense, it should be noted that the poster in those links, tony, is the official representative from ocz regarding ssds on those forums.
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So, preloading your data into DDR2 or DDR3 RAM is slower than just plain old reading it from the drive?

Oh, OK, didn't realize that.
 
ordovician said:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47212
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50376



It's not about performance as much as preserving the life of the drive, too.
Click to expand...

Met-AL said:
So, preloading your data into DDR2 or DDR3 RAM is slower than just plain old reading it from the drive?

Oh, OK, didn't realize that.
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preloading of data means reading from the drive. the point of disabling prefetch is to eliminate the unnecessary reads. reading from ram may be faster than reading from a drive, but with such low access times on ssds, you won't even be able to tell the difference between reading from memory and reading from the drives. even if the latency difference is 100ms (which it isn't), that's still only 1/10th of a second.
 
but with such low access times on ssds, you won't even be able to tell the difference between reading from memory and reading from the drives.
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......WHAT?

Here's a little lesson in Architecture for you.

Time to read from a typical magnetic hard drive: 9ms = 0.009s
Time to read from a typical SSD (using your number, I didn't bother looking up otherwise): 0.2ms = 0.0002s
Time to read from DRAM: 50-70 NANOSECONDS (source: Patterson/Hennesy, Computer Organization and Design, 4th Ed - the definitive architecture book at just about any university). That's 0.00000006 seconds. That's 10,000 times faster than an SSD.
And that's assuming the pages aren't in L2 or L1 cache, which are orders of magnitude faster still.

There's 1 order of magnitude (using your numbers) between Magnetic Disks and SSDs. There's 4 orders between SSD and RAM. Now which difference would you say would be more pronounced?
 
Look, all I can say is that in RAID 0, these SSDs are very fast, and have decent capacity. AFAIK, none of you have actually used this drive. A single drive is definitely noticeably better than a single laptop drive. Two in RAID 0 are noticeably faster than any setup I've ever used. And I've tested them, this laptop loads all games, apps, and windows faster than my 600mhz faster desktop. I am running Windows 7 on the laptop, and there is NO studdering whatsoever. You can't really argue with that.
 
Benchmarks to close this thread...

-----Sequential Read Speed----
Vertex - 255.9 MB/s
Solid - 134.7 MB/s
Velociraptor - 118.0 MB/s

-----Sequential Write Speed----
Vertex - 135.3 MB/s
Solid - 87.1 MB/s
Velociraptor - 118.9 MB/s

-----Random Read Speed----
Vertex - 34.9 MB/s
Solid - 16.2 MB/s
Velociraptor - 0.55 MB/s

-----Random Write Speed----
Vertex - 6.47 MB/s
Solid - 0.02 MB/s
Velociraptor - 1.63 MB/s

ZOMG WTF the Vertex is over 300 times faster at random writes?
 
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Arainach said:
......WHAT?

Here's a little lesson in Architecture for you.

Time to read from a typical magnetic hard drive: 9ms = 0.009s
Time to read from a typical SSD (using your number, I didn't bother looking up otherwise): 0.2ms = 0.0002s
Time to read from DRAM: 50-70 NANOSECONDS (source: Patterson/Hennesy, Computer Organization and Design, 4th Ed - the definitive architecture book at just about any university). That's 0.00000006 seconds. That's 10,000 times faster than an SSD.
And that's assuming the pages aren't in L2 or L1 cache, which are orders of magnitude faster still.

There's 1 order of magnitude (using your numbers) between Magnetic Disks and SSDs. There's 4 orders between SSD and RAM. Now which difference would you say would be more pronounced?
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way to read a post until the end.

stainremover said:
you won't even be able to tell the difference between reading from memory and reading from the drives. even if the latency difference is 100ms (which it isn't), that's still only 1/10th of a second.
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according to your numbers, even if you assume ram is read instantly (which it isn't), the difference between reading from an ssd and reading from ram is .2ms. that is 2/10000 of a second. you can notice this? seriously? you live life 1/10000 of a second at a time?
 
Um... the peak transfer rate of DDR2-1066 is 8533 MB/s (over 8 GIGABYTES per second)... I'm pretty sure programs will load faster from RAM. ;)
 
stainremover said:
way to read a post until the end.



according to your numbers, even if you assume ram is read instantly (which it isn't), the difference between reading from an ssd and reading from ram is .2ms. that is 2/10000 of a second. you can notice this? seriously? you live life 1/10000 of a second at a time?
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Programs need data instantly. If it takes them 0.2ms to load, that's MILLIONS of clock cycles they have to wait before they can do anything. It has a huge impact on program latency. That's why so much of processor design is centered around trying to avoid having to go out into main memory from cache, and why so much is centered around avoiding having to go out into secondary memory from main memory.
ZOMG WTF over 300 times faster?
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Here's some numbers for you from Blade's link:

Random Write Latency
JMicron JMF602B MLC 532.2 ms
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 7.2 ms

Random Write Bandwidth
JMicron JMF602B MLC 0.02 MB/s
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 1.63 MB/s

What's that, HUNDREDS OF TIMES SLOWER?
 
gtg465x said:
-----Sequential Read Speed----
Vertex - 255.9 MB/s
Solid - 134.7 MB/s

-----Sequential Write Speed----
Vertex - 135.3 MB/s
Solid - 87.1 MB/s

-----Random Read Speed----
Vertex - 34.9 MB/s
Solid - 16.2 MB/s

-----Random Write Speed----
Vertex - 6.47 MB/s
Solid - 0.02 MB/s
Click to expand...
You should have included a mechanical HD's results for comparison. Velociraptor results from Anand's Anthology:
- Seq. Read / Write: 118 / 119 MB/s
- Rnd. Read / Write: <1 / 1.6 MB/s

So JMicron drives can be a problem, because their performance is less consistent. They blow away standard HDs most of the time, then lose horribly in random write.
 
Arainach said:
Here's some numbers for you from Blade's link:

Random Write Latency
JMicron JMF602B MLC 532.2 ms
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 7.2 ms

Random Write Bandwidth
JMicron JMF602B MLC 0.02 MB/s
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 1.63 MB/s

What's that, HUNDREDS OF TIMES SLOWER?
Click to expand...

Dude, are you trying to disagree with me?.. cause you just proved the same thing I did, that the JMicron JMF602B is slow as balls.
 
They blow away standard HDs most of the time, then lose horribly in random write.
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Except that if you had ever looked at the internals of a modern OS, you'd realize that random write IS most of the time.
 
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