Another SSD thread /sorry

Kryx

n00b
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Jul 29, 2008
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Hi,

Sorry for posting another SSD thread. I've watched here for a bit and am just not seeing the answers that I need.

  • Sandforce vs Marvell: Is Sandforce not stable enough for a OS SSD? Or is that hubub with the new driver fixes? I'm leaning toward Sandforce - particularly the Corsair Force GT due to it's excellent reviews. I know Sandforce had a fix and most of it's issues are gone. Other option is something more "stable" like a Crucial M4. The Corsair has some solid reviews - better than crucial m4.
  • Size: Stuck between 120gb and 240gb. I plan on using it for OS and games. Is it worth the $ to get 240gb, or should I try to manage my usage better and only have 3-4 games on the SSD at a time?
  • Compatibility Issues: Would I have any compatibility issues with either of the SSDs above and my mobo? Do I need to flash the Bios? I have an old mobo (P5Q Deluxe) which only has SATA 2 - which means I'll have gimped speeds, but that's ok. I'm potentially going to upgrade soon so that could be a non-issue.
Thanks!
 
I have been running a sandforce OCZ drive for over a year now, almost 1.5 years actually. No problems so far and running the OS Win7x64 and have one game on the drive, Star Wars ToR. The drive gets pretty full, 120 GB, so if you are planning on putting your steam folder on the drive, get the bigger unit. I could probably squeeze two more games on this drive, but I don't like to manage my disk space on a daily basis...
 
Hi,
... I have an old mobo (P5Q Deluxe) which only has SATA 2 - which means I'll have gimped speeds, but that's ok. I'm potentially going to upgrade soon so that could be a non-issue.
Thanks!

I have a P5Q Deluxe and in the past I've ran a Crucial C300 64gb, a Western Digital Blue 256gb, and am currently using a Samsung 830 on it. I don't care that it won't benchmark at its best due to Sata II bandwidth.

No, you won't have gimped speeds, except when you benchmark, otherwise you'd be hard pressed to noticed the difference with most tasks. People really sweat the whole Sata II vs. Sata III thing for SSDs too much. Any SSD on a Sata II port is a huge boost over a traditional hard drive, and having an SSD on a Sata III port is a minor, minor improvment over the same SSD on a Sata II port. Access times are why SSDs rock, and your drive interface has no real impact on access times.

At my current client work site, I am forced to use their desktop, and it throttles my Intel 320 120gb SSD to Sata I (max 150MB/s), but running a virtual machne off of it is still faster than running a virtual machine off a pair of striped velociraptors on my P5Q Deluxe at home (~225MB/s). Again, access times are what matter, unless you spend all day coping large files from one drive to another and back...

The only sandforce drives I would consider would be Intel or Corsair, and I think Samsung, Plextor and Crucial are good makes. I won't buy anything, much less an SSD from OCZ. Size, go as big as you can afford to.
 
I have added SSD's to 3 of my PC's -all can handle SATA III, the first was a crucial C300, second a Crucial M4 and last a Samsung 830. Everyone raves about the Samsung but even its own utility doesn't recognize it - although it works fine.

For $ per GB I think the M4 is the best, 128GB has proven fine for me since I use a SATA III 6GB 2TB HD's to do the heavy storage where needed.
 
I have added SSD's to 3 of my PC's -all can handle SATA III, the first was a crucial C300, second a Crucial M4 and last a Samsung 830. Everyone raves about the Samsung but even its own utility doesn't recognize it - although it works fine.

For $ per GB I think the M4 is the best, 128GB has proven fine for me since I use a SATA III 6GB 2TB HD's to do the heavy storage where needed.

The Samsung Magican software works best with Intel RST drivers. Are you MSAHCI or AMD?
 
For $ per GB I think the M4 is the best.
Why Crucial M4 over Corsair Force GT? It's $290 for 256gb on Amazon right now and I may bite.

There is a speed loss choosing Marvell over Sandforce. Is it worth it?


Quoting another thread seems to me that marvell is worth it:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/marvell-ssd.html said:
SandForce’s strength is the ability to compress data before it gets into the flash memory. This peculiarity helps solve several problems at once: first of all, increase the performance and prolong the drive’s resource. However, it only works well until the data stored on the drive are compressible. Otherwise, the advantages of SandForce controllers become not so obvious anymore.

However, SSDs based on Marvell 88SS9174 do not depend on the type of data saved onto the drive. They demonstrate constant stable performance with compressible files as well as with incompressible photographs, videos and audio content. Moreover, Marvell 88SS9174 is capable of fighting the SSD performance degradation very effectively, so that it improves almost to its “fresh” level not only after the TRIM command, but even without it by simply performing idle garbage collection.

Therefore, solid state drives with a Marvell controller inside are a much better fit for RAID arrays or systems that do not support TRIM. As for all other cases, the choice between Marvell or SandForce based SSD should depend on the preferred usage model. SandForce devices will work faster in everyday tasks dealing with well-compressible data, while Marvell devices will deliver higher performance with incompressible data and in case of dominating random requests at a deep queue, which is more typical of servers.

EDIT: Though it does score near the bottom of benchmarks... bah. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/marvell-ssd_6.html
Crucial m4 is the slowest Marvell-based SSD, which can only compete successfully against the low-cost SandForce drives using asynchronous memory , then Corsair Performance Pro and Plextor M3S built with Toggle Mode NAND look much more attractive.

EDIT2: based on that long read it seems m4 has some older parts and the best bet is Corsair Performace Pro or Plextor M3S.
 
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At a certain point you'll find that you're going 'round and 'round about whether this SSD or that SSD will be 428% better versus 432% better than a spinning disc.

Over the last 2 years I've installed about 20 SSD's with a mix of Intel, Sandforce, and Marvell. In the real world there's not much difference - they all run great.

For size - if you're even thinking the 120gb drive would be too small then gt the 240gb. Don't RAID a couple of 120's, just get a single larger drive. It'll be simple, fast, and awesome.
 
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