Alright so I am looking at upgrading my computer with SSD's. I am looking at getting 2x 240GB drives. My question is what do you guys think are the best drives available right now using a sata 6gbps connection? Money is really not an issue in this case, however that being said if you have two hard drives and one is twice as expensive than the other but only performs 5% faster then obviously it isn't worth the jump in price. Currently I am looking at the OCz Agility 3, but I am a little worried about all the people talking about blue screens (though supposedly the latest firmware has fixed most of this pretty well). Thanks!
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Best SSD Available
- Thread starter Lucrin
- Start date
Well, based on your money criteria, I'd avoid Intel's 520 Cherryville. It's silly expensive at 240GB. The best deal going on 240's at the moment is the Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240GB at $280. It's SF 2281 + 32nm Toshiba Toggle NAND.
Other good candidates in a non-SF drive include the Plextor M3 256GB and the Samsung 830.
Other good candidates in a non-SF drive include the Plextor M3 256GB and the Samsung 830.
While I see nothing wrong with SF drives, I'd stay away from asynchronous nand ssds (Agility 3, Force 3, Pyro, Chronos Deluxe, etc.). If you really feel the need to go with SF, which again is fine, go with synchronous 2xnm nand ssds (Intel 520, Vertex 3, Force GT, Pyro SE. HyperX, ect) or a toggle 3xnm nand ssd (Vertex 3 Max Iops, Wildfire, Enhanced Chronos Deluxe). If you don't plan on doing very heavy writes, heavy i/o, server stuff, etc., in which case the toggle 3xnm nand would be superior in terms of durability (5000 write cycles for 3xnm vs. 3000 for 2xnm, then I see no reason not to go with a Crucial m4, Samsung 830, or Plextor M3. They're some of the best on the market, are superior to the asynchronous nand Agility 3 mentioned, and the 512gb versions can generally be had for twice the price of the 256gb or less.
I agree with ckryan. The Mushkin is a steal, but I'd still go with the M3 or 830 he mentioned. I forgot we were talking about 256gb, in which case the m4 really isn't as great of an option. It actually loses to the 128gb in a few benches I've seen.
I agree with ckryan. The Mushkin is a steal, but I'd still go with the M3 or 830 he mentioned. I forgot we were talking about 256gb, in which case the m4 really isn't as great of an option. It actually loses to the 128gb in a few benches I've seen.
Yeah, if you can get the Chronos Deluxe 240 for less than an Agility 3 240, I think it's pretty obvious. I have the 120GB Deluxe, and it's pretty awesome.
I like the Plextor M3 at 256GB because it has a five year warranty. The Intel 520 is pretty awesome, but the price for the 240 is almost offensive -- but it comes with a five year warranty as well.
The 830 is superb as well, and it does well in RAID. It's garbage collection works quite well. Either way, I'd overprovision the drives down a little in R0.
I don't have have anything against SandForce drives, and the Toggle NAND equipped models are pretty awesome. But at 240GB, the 25nm IMFT sync NAND equipped models are pretty much as fast.
Bottom line is, there are a lot of good drives, but I'd not go with the Agility 3. There are much better drives for less.
So at 256GB/240GB and Sata III, these are the options:
Samsung 3 core MCX controller, 27nm Samsung Toggle Mode
Samsung 830
Marvel Controlled:
Plextor M3 <--24nm Toshiba Toggle
Crucial M4 <--25nm Micron Sync NAND
Corsair Performance Pro/Plextor M2P <-----32nm Toshiba Toggle
SandForce 2281
Mushkin Chronos Deluxe <----32nm Toshiba Toggle
Kingston Hyper X <------- 25nm Intel Sync NAND
Corsair Force GT <-------- 25nm IMFT Sync NAND
Intel 520 'Cherryville' <-----25nm Intel Sync NAND
OWC Mercury Extreme 6G <---- 32nm Toshiba Toggle
Indilinx Everest
OCZ Octane <---- 25nm Intel Sync NAND
Out of the SF2281 drives, the 240GB Toggle NAND and 25nm Sync drives are really close in performance.
Bottom line, the Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240 is too good a deal to pass on, but the Plextor M3 and 830 are both excellent though they do cost more. If they were all the same price, I'm not sure which I'd go for. I don't have an M3, but I almost bought one today. The only thing holding me back was the fact that Plextor is supposed to have an M3P which is slightly faster than the M3 standard.
I think when you factor in the cost, the Chronos Deluxe is an awesome deal.
I like the Plextor M3 at 256GB because it has a five year warranty. The Intel 520 is pretty awesome, but the price for the 240 is almost offensive -- but it comes with a five year warranty as well.
The 830 is superb as well, and it does well in RAID. It's garbage collection works quite well. Either way, I'd overprovision the drives down a little in R0.
I don't have have anything against SandForce drives, and the Toggle NAND equipped models are pretty awesome. But at 240GB, the 25nm IMFT sync NAND equipped models are pretty much as fast.
Bottom line is, there are a lot of good drives, but I'd not go with the Agility 3. There are much better drives for less.
So at 256GB/240GB and Sata III, these are the options:
Samsung 3 core MCX controller, 27nm Samsung Toggle Mode
Samsung 830
Marvel Controlled:
Plextor M3 <--24nm Toshiba Toggle
Crucial M4 <--25nm Micron Sync NAND
Corsair Performance Pro/Plextor M2P <-----32nm Toshiba Toggle
SandForce 2281
Mushkin Chronos Deluxe <----32nm Toshiba Toggle
Kingston Hyper X <------- 25nm Intel Sync NAND
Corsair Force GT <-------- 25nm IMFT Sync NAND
Intel 520 'Cherryville' <-----25nm Intel Sync NAND
OWC Mercury Extreme 6G <---- 32nm Toshiba Toggle
Indilinx Everest
OCZ Octane <---- 25nm Intel Sync NAND
Out of the SF2281 drives, the 240GB Toggle NAND and 25nm Sync drives are really close in performance.
Bottom line, the Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240 is too good a deal to pass on, but the Plextor M3 and 830 are both excellent though they do cost more. If they were all the same price, I'm not sure which I'd go for. I don't have an M3, but I almost bought one today. The only thing holding me back was the fact that Plextor is supposed to have an M3P which is slightly faster than the M3 standard.
I think when you factor in the cost, the Chronos Deluxe is an awesome deal.
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Well they don't have to be 256gig exactly, just said 2x 256 because I am looking to get close to 500 gigs of fast SSD.
@MissJ84: Why would you not go with the mushkin over the other two drives?
Thanks for the recommendations so far
I change parts rather often, so I guess I'm looking at it from a reselling point of view. Sandforce gets such a bad rap, which it really doesn't deserve, but again that bad rap comes into play when listing something in the for sale section. To be completely honest, I'm surprised there haven't been any posts in this thread damning SF lol. Anyway, if I planned on keeping something longer than six months, I'd probably go with the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe (Don't by the asynchronous non Deluxe by accident).
PS Nice second post ckryan
Alright so I am bouncing back and forth between the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe, and the Samsung 830. They both look great so I am not sure which to go for. Also another point is I noticed the Samsung 830 has a 512GB version that is the same price as buying 2 of the 256 ones, so, if I were to choose the samsung would it be better to get one big drive, or keep the two smaller ones?
It really depends on your usage. If you won't be doing heavy writes, heavy I/O stuff, etc., and the drive will only be used for the OS, apps, games, etc., then go with the 512gb. Also I'm not sure where you're shopping but B&H has the 512gb for $649.95 - http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/828450-REG/Samsung_MZ_7PC512N_AM_512GB_830_Series_SSD.html
Edit: I hate to do this, but another option would be OS, apps on a 240gb Mushkin and put static apps, games, etc., on a 256gb Samsung. Of course this is assuming there's no raid 0 involved, but if I needed 500gb+ of room, I'd probably go with Samsung 512gb, Mushkin/Samsung 256gb combo, then dual Samsung 256gb in that order. This is also under the assumption that I'd being keeping the ssds for awhile. Also, tell us what your usage is like, as it well help
PS - All my posts and edits were Swyped from my phone lol
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It really depends on your usage. If you won't be doing heavy writes, heavy I/O stuff, etc., and the drive will only be used for the OS, apps, games, etc., then go with the 512gb. Also I'm not sure where you're shopping but B&H has the 512gb for $649.95 - http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/828450-REG/Samsung_MZ_7PC512N_AM_512GB_830_Series_SSD.html
Edit: I hate to do this, but another option would be OS, apps on a 240gb Mushkin and put static apps, games, etc., on a 256gb Samsung. Of course this is assuming there's no raid 0 involved, but if I needed 500gb+ of room, I'd probably go with Samsung 512gb, Mushkin/Samsung 256gb combo, then dual Samsung 256gb in that order. This is also under the assumption that I'd being keeping the ssds for awhile. Also, tell us what your usage is like, as it well help
PS - All my posts and edits were Swyped from my phone lol
Wow swyped huh? Impressive lol. Anyway, my usage is general usage, and school usage. I also play games on it, and run a VMware virtual machine (ubuntu) for programming purposes. Alongside my fast SSD's I am keeping a 700gig data drive where I store raw data that isn't frequently accessed (mostly downloads that get run once to install but then don't really get touched again)
My computer has been limited for a long time by slow hard drive speeds when all my other hardware is quite fast and so I want to bring them up to par with everything else. Would like to see big improvements on load times of windows and applications/games.
EDIT: Also do you prefer the samsung controller to the SF one? Is there any major differences? How is the garbage collection on the Samsung chip? I heard that is the major advantage of the SF is that it's garbage collection keeps it performing well all the time.
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You don't have a smaller SSD drive now? Man, I was SO disappointed when I got my first SSD. I had dreamed of <10 second start ups and instant load times. That doesn't happen.
I recommend for virtually any user a 2TB data drive and a 64 GB boot SSD. This combo can be had for $200, and I'm surprised Dell and others haven't pushed it more.
I recommend for virtually any user a 2TB data drive and a 64 GB boot SSD. This combo can be had for $200, and I'm surprised Dell and others haven't pushed it more.
upgrade the rest of your components!!!!Well... with a fast computer it does.
Hell ya it does.
Especially in OSX
I know where you are coming from but I don't want just my OS and a few most used apps to be fast and everything else to be on the slow drives I want games and anything I install the be fast with fast load times, so I need more capacity and I understand that is more expensive but the extra cost is worth it to me.
FWIW, you're making me want to upgrade to the 256gb M3 so I can do the same thing lol. I think I'm going to bite, because of the deal Newegg is running. Just wanted to send a thanks back to you
FWIW, you're making me want to upgrade to the 256gb M3 so I can do the same thing lol. I think I'm going to bite, because of the deal Newegg is running. Just wanted to send a thanks back to you
Haha no prob, enjoy your hard drives
Ok so again I am going to ask if anyone knows anything about the controller on the Samsung 830? I am strongly leaning towards the 512gig 830 at the moment, but I would like to know how the garbage collection on it stands up to the SF chips in particular.
EDIT: Here this link shows exactly what I am concerned will be a problem. I am just not sure how much of an issue this will be in real world use. My computer runs 24/7 so I suppose even if there was a slow down throughout the day it would trim up over night and be good to go again the next morning.
EDIT: Here this link shows exactly what I am concerned will be a problem. I am just not sure how much of an issue this will be in real world use. My computer runs 24/7 so I suppose even if there was a slow down throughout the day it would trim up over night and be good to go again the next morning.
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Well this is true but I am not really interested in how the algorithm works (though that would be interesting to see as a programmer myself) however I am very interested in how they perform. I was hoping maybe people on the forum who own the drive could report their experiences.
You can answer your own question better than anyone else. How does your possible usage of this drive match up to that torture test that Anand is running? I don't do anything even remotely close to what he is doing and thus I don't have any issues remotely like what he is talking about?
So what do you expect to be doing if you had this SSD in your machine?
drescherjm
[H]F Junkie
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I do not see many users experience this in the real world. You should not be continuously writing to an SSD for 10s of minutes to hours in normal computer usage.
Suppose that is true, I don't see any reason I would have constant writes for an extended period. This isn't a server after all. Think I am going to go with the samsung 830 then so I don't have to worry about problems with the SF chip. I have always loved samsung products anyway and I like that they develop their entire hard drive proprietary.
The 830 is pretty terrific for garbage collection. With SandForce, even with TRIM, it's not impossible to get the drive into a lower performance state. Two 830s in R0 will stay pretty effective over time.
The 830 and the Chronos Deluxe are both pretty sweet. But every SF2281, including the 520 series, is going to start to look bad over time. Fresh out of the box performance is quite good, but after a while, it starts to degrade. One of my SFs, a Chronos Deluxe 120, is using about 35GB out of 111GB. It's write speeds are down about 25% across the board.
That doesn't mean that it's not still fast, but I am a little troubled by all SF2's performance degradation. The 830 will pretty much be the same speed indefinitely. And without TRIM, GC really works well to preserve performance in the Samsungs.
Hey, thanks for this response it was very helpful
I have decided to go for the Samsung 830 512GB. I will be ordering it, as well as my new memory tomorrow Hey, thanks for this response it was very helpful
It's on sale at Newegg right now, $45 off. The 830 is pimped out.
There are some slightly faster drives, but the number of drives I'd rather have at 512GB is pretty much 0.
The 830's "weakness" if you want to call it that, is lower 4K numbers at higher QDs. Well, I know my desktop workload tops out at 4, so I don't think the "faster" drives would really be faster for me. Plus, some of the reason for lower QDs is Samsung seems to have tuned the 830 for better behavior over time. When a drive has really high 4K write numbers, it usually means the drive isn't cleaning up after itself, and so performance can suffer over time, and WA goes up.
Post back and let me know what you end up doing.
Ok so queue depth is the number of commands that can be queued up for a hard drive to perform but I never understood how 4K and the other memory sizes related to this, could you explain this to me a little better? And perhaps relate it to how it might affect real world usage? I have a feeling it won't really impact it much.
Well, commands stack up. With two concurrent commands, you'd have a queue depth of two. Basically, when there is lots of disk activity, the commands are "queued" up. With spinning HDDs, it pays dividends to reorder the commands in such a way to minimize the amount of seeking the heads have to do. Since HDDs are so slow, commands can stack up fast.
With SSDs though, the disk is so speedy that commands don't really have a chance to stack up. With a HDD an order of magnitude slower, the OS might issue several commands while one is still being completed.
Part of the speed of SSDs is from exploiting parallelism. Meaning, SSDs can service many requests at the same time.
If you look at CrystalDiskMark's benchmarks, you get results for 4K read and write (at one commmand), and 4K read/write with 32 commands at a time. If you give the drive 32 commands to write 4K chunks, it can do so much faster than just 1 4K chunk.
The faster a SSD is, the faster requests get serviced, and the sooner the drive can complete the next command.
You can see what the queue depth you are experiencing with Windows' resource monitor. Just type in "resmon" in the run dialog box:
Most of the time your QD will always be below one (actually almost zero). When windows boots it might get as high as four. But you'll almost never see much more than that.
So what the lower 4K QD IOPS (lower than SandForce drives anyway) mean for you is almost nothing. You'll never have a QD of 32 or 128. Ever. Period. So how fast a drive works with 4K randoms at high queue depths is not real relevant.
Obviously, with servers, high QD performance is very important. It's only somewhat relevant for desktop/client users.
The long and short of it is, the 830 is perfectly awesome.
Well, commands stack up. With two concurrent commands, you'd have a queue depth of two. Basically, when there is lots of disk activity, the commands are "queued" up. With spinning HDDs, it pays dividends to reorder the commands in such a way to minimize the amount of seeking the heads have to do. Since HDDs are so slow, commands can stack up fast.
With SSDs though, the disk is so speedy that commands don't really have a chance to stack up. With a HDD an order of magnitude slower, the OS might issue several commands while one is still being completed.
Part of the speed of SSDs is from exploiting parallelism. Meaning, SSDs can service many requests at the same time.
If you look at CrystalDiskMark's benchmarks, you get results for 4K read and write (at one commmand), and 4K read/write with 32 commands at a time. If you give the drive 32 commands to write 4K chunks, it can do so much faster than just 1 4K chunk.
The faster a SSD is, the faster requests get serviced, and the sooner the drive can complete the next command.
You can see what the queue depth you are experiencing with Windows' resource monitor. Just type in "resmon" in the run dialog box:
Most of the time your QD will always be below one (actually almost zero). When windows boots it might get as high as four. But you'll almost never see much more than that.
So what the lower 4K QD IOPS (lower than SandForce drives anyway) mean for you is almost nothing. You'll never have a QD of 32 or 128. Ever. Period. So how fast a drive works with 4K randoms at high queue depths is not real relevant.
Obviously, with servers, high QD performance is very important. It's only somewhat relevant for desktop/client users.
The long and short of it is, the 830 is perfectly awesome.
Awesome! Thanks that is just the explanation I needed
Ordered it, shipped and will arrive on monday. Will let you know how it goes after I get windows all reinstalled and everything. Thanks again for the help
D
Deleted member 147607
Guest
I'm no expert on SSD's, but I've owned quite a few. Up until recently, I was purchasing just the Intel drives. The last couple have been the Samsung 830's...I've beat on them pretty hard and frankly the speed difference is like night and day with the 510's from Intel. I felt like I stepped up from HDD's to SSD's all over again. Damn things run like greased lightning.
Haven't had a single hiccup with them in two-three months with daily use of up to 8 hours.
With that said...
"The long and short of it is, the 830 is perfectly awesome."
+1
Best,
Liquid Cool
Haven't had a single hiccup with them in two-three months with daily use of up to 8 hours.
With that said...
"The long and short of it is, the 830 is perfectly awesome."
+1
Best,
Liquid Cool
Alright I have another small question. In my current setup I have all of my wiring routed neatly behind my motherboard tray and wire tied etc. Now I know the Samsung 830 comes with a "Sata 3 cable" but I read that there is actually no difference between these so called sata 3 cables and the older cables so I was wondering if you guys think it's ok for me to use one of the wires I already have cabled into my system or if I need to remove the old cables and use the one the Samsung 830 comes with?
D
Deleted member 147607
Guest
Lucrin...
I'm using Sata II cables on mine without any loss of throughput. If it was me, I'd just use the old cable and load up Samsung's version of the Intel SSD Toolbox...it's called SSD Magician(it comes with the SSD), and while it's not as nifty looking it's every bit as effective. Once you do a 'Performance Optimization', it then runs a test showing your read/writes and iops on the drive. Just make sure you're getting the desired speed...and go from there.
Best,
LC
I'm using Sata II cables on mine without any loss of throughput. If it was me, I'd just use the old cable and load up Samsung's version of the Intel SSD Toolbox...it's called SSD Magician(it comes with the SSD), and while it's not as nifty looking it's every bit as effective. Once you do a 'Performance Optimization', it then runs a test showing your read/writes and iops on the drive. Just make sure you're getting the desired speed...and go from there.
Best,
LC
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I'll be here on Monday to see what happens when you get that bad boy up and running. Oh, could you let me know what FW you have out of the box?
The CXM01B1Q FW was followed by CXM02B1Q and I believe the latest 830 FW is CXM03B1Q. There aren't any performance changes.
Just say FW 01, or 02 for example. I was wondering how many out there are >01. I'm trying to get a couple older drives with 01 FW.
The CXM01B1Q FW was followed by CXM02B1Q and I believe the latest 830 FW is CXM03B1Q. There aren't any performance changes.
Just say FW 01, or 02 for example. I was wondering how many out there are >01. I'm trying to get a couple older drives with 01 FW.
Sure I will let you know monday. I believe Samsung uses their magician software for viewing/updating FW right? Once I find it I will post it up for you. Anyone heard of any problems updating FW? Seems Samsung has made these drives pretty solid, can't find much negative about them.