Help me choose a value focused SSD

D

DigitalEmperor

Gawd
Joined
Jan 24, 2004
Messages
760
Hey everyone, I am in search of a little advice. I just recently had an Alienware m17x r1 replaced, and while most of the components are massive upgrades, I accepted a WD 5400rpm hard drive in place of my old WD Black 7200rpm.

I notice the difference tremendeously on World of Warcraft load times / texture pop-ins, and less so, but still noticebly, on other games and Windows 7 start time. These are the two performance statistics I care about more than ANYTHING ELSE.

I figured I have a budget to replace the drive in it, and I will be coming out ahead with the other upgrades I received. Which ever drive I get will be my OS/Applications drive, and I will change over the 5400rpm to a storage drive. Also, I am trying to spend as little as possible, and I am willing to sacrafice some performance for value (but not reliability/useability).

The drives I am looking at (in order of most interest to least):

$65 ($1.02/gb) Corsair Nova Series 2 64gb - nearly the miracle $1/gb mark, very good advertised specs, but there isn't many (if any) real reviews of the drive, and there are some reports on corsair's support forum and on newegg's feedback section of the drives controller choking on multitasking

$130 ($1.35/gb) Kingston V+100 96gb - very close to the m4 and vertex 3 in benchmarks, with the advantage of an additional 32gb for the same price

$110 ($1.72/gb) Crucial m4 64gb - seems to be the most recommended drive, seems to have mixed benchmark results, but overall very good to excellent. value falls off on the $1/gb ratio on this drive.

$100 ($0.20/gb :cool:) Seagate Momentus XT - not an SSD, but rather a hybrid featuring 4gb of SSD like NAND. none of the problems that come with SSD, tons more space for the money, but performance on World of Warcraft not really measured NOTE: with this drive, I would consider getting a 2nd down the road for a 1tb raid 0 setup.

[Strike=Option]$130 ($2.03/gb :mad:) OCZ Vertex 3 64gb - seems to be the highest benchmarked drive in my budget, but reports of BSOD's and other reliability issues scare me away.[/s]
 
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m4 64gb FOR SURE out of the ones you listed.

Maybe you could find an Intel G2 80gb for a deal too, I'd suggest it if you need more space, and it fits in your budget.
 
HAQattaq said:
You need Sata III to get the most of the Vertex 3 drive.

Go with the Vertex 2.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227550


Tom's says Agility 3
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-solid-state-nand-reliability,2998-2.html
Click to expand...

Well, when going for budget I was keeping it under $150, and both the 64gb Crucial m4 and the 96gb Kingston V+100 show up on the next page of that review @ Tom's.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-solid-state-nand-reliability,2998-3.html

So, it seem's the Vertex 3 is overkill for a SATA II system (won't benefit enough to justify the high $1/gb).
 
i am also running circles searching for ssd, trying to upgrade 2 notebooks, rebuild my system and build a new one for my wife.

The Kingston 96gb i a beast: there were NO bad reviews at Newegg last time i checked. Samsung 470 series is almost flawless, with only a few 1.8" 3.3v drives receiving DOA reviews.

The next step on reliability is the Intel 320 series, after the firmware update last august.

Everything else is failing often enough to dismiss the purchase outright. OCZ is out of question, anything sandforce based is doomed to crash and marvell simply doesnt offer great speed, or safety to justify the increased costs over Intel and samsung.

I would stay away from SATA III 6gb/s SSDs in laptops for the time being. Unlike desktops, one can never be sure to backup nightly , or RAID1.

Currently the best cost/safety aprroach for laptops is mSATA Intel 310 series + Momentus XT.

Over the concept of "value oriented" , i tend to run away from bad choices. The smaller the ssd, the fewer channels the controller can use. a typical 64gb ssd has the sustained write speeds of a good HDD. The minimum is 80/96gb ( Intel and Kingston differ on spare area, not actual NAND installed), with 256GB being the best price/performance/ and cost/gb. Of course spending $270+ on an ssd demands safety and reliability above anything else, and it sucks to spend $100 on a 64gb ssd only to discover that your usage experience is handicapped by size constraints and the promised speed is down due to poor garbage collections algorithms.

On Ebay a 96Gb kingston consts around $120, a 160GB Intel 320 costs $230. Expect to pay north of $270 for a 256 Samsung 470 series. The first is garbage resilient, keeping performance no matter how much you fill it, a feat only mimicked by the Marvell based/ Mac OS oriented Corsair performance 3 and Plextor M2S. The second is king in reliability, featuring so many entreprise level safety and redundancy functions only seem on drives costing 3x more. and the last has both unbeatable price per gigabyte and an outstanding reliability reputation.
 
You pretty much sold me on the 96gb Kingston. I do see an 80gb Intel 320 that I could get for $15 more than the Kingston, but I don't know if it's worth the extra few bucks?

So are you saying the 96gb Kingston and the 80gb Intel are actually the same size?
 
DigitalEmperor said:
You pretty much sold me on the 96gb Kingston. I do see an 80gb Intel 320 that I could get for $15 more than the Kingston, but I don't know if it's worth the extra few bucks?

So are you saying the 96gb Kingston and the 80gb Intel are actually the same size?
Click to expand...

When compared the Intel's spank the Kingston.
 
So, the Kingston looks a bit dated and isn't really that fast, but it is pretty reliable and has high praises for it's garbage collection. I am going to be running Win7 Ultimate 64 so I would imagine being able to use TRIM limits the usefulness of the controller garbage collection.

The one thing I didn't realize was not only do you get more space by going bigger in SSDs but you also actually end up with faster drives for some reason.

When I was looking at the 64gb M4 vs the 128gb M4, you are getting both speed AND storage for upgrading. This has me sort of leaning towards just throwing down the $200 on a 128gb M4.

Sure, the Intel 320 120gb is the same price, but it's hard to find a direct comparison of the 320 120gb and m4 128gb, and from what I can see, the Intel 300gb gets slightly edged out by the 128gb m4, so I can't imagine the 120gb would be faster.

$200 sure does seem like a lot to spend on a drive, but when I have a quad-core cpu, crossfire gpu's, and 8gb of ram ... I think it's silly to try and stuff anything less than a SSD in there.

If only I could see some direct World of Warcraft comparisons of a 7200rpm HDD, and the Momentus XT HDD+SDD Hybrid. I know the boot times of Windows 7 sure do shrink with the Momentus XT.
 
ok, that took some serious photo research:
kingston 96gb is a 4x 16gb + 4x 8gb PCB, 96gb is real NAND installed,
Intel 320 80Gb is a 9x8GB + 1x16GB PCB , 88GB total NAND installed, hence, Intel is best value, you trade formatted capacity for spare area, reliability and speed. Neither drive is famous for amazing performance on SATA 3Gbs, trailing Samsung and first gen sandfroce ssds on SATA 2. Curiosly, the Intel has better bench numbers and the kingston better real life numbers. Remember that Intel does not cache data on DRAM and the kingston has 128MB of cache for writings.


Corsair performance 3 128Gb can be found south of $180, making it a better choice for mac OS, win xp users. But it is really hard to consider it given the competition; m4 128Gb for $190, samsung 470 128 gb, intel 320 120gb. a true bargain is the 512GB m4, for $712 :)
 
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First off, thank you geok1ng for looking into that. I've learned quite a bit about SSDs over the last few days, and your comments have facilitated that more than most information out there.

So what you are saying is that Intel sort of overprovisions their drives to help with reliability?

That's interesting that there is actually 98gb NAND on the Intel. I'm not exactly familiar with this "spare area" you refer to.

Another question for anyone: Which benchmark is the best tool for "real world" performance? I am talking mostly about gaming texture pop-in's and application start times.

According to an article on Tom's Hardware evaluating WoW Realm Loads (my personal target benchmark) located at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-gaming-performance,2991-9.html

I am looking exclusively at read benchmarks (less than 2% write operations). That helps me narrow down my focus.

But what I don't understand is when they say 88% of operations are at a "queue depth of 1".

In when CrystalDiskMark is used, I am seeing 512k and 4k random writes more often than not. Is that at QD1?

AS-SSD I see 4k and 4k-64Thrd. Again, are these at QD1, and what is 4k-64Thrd?

Last, I see in Tom's article they describe transfer sizes between 8 and 256 sectors, most being closer to 8. Where am I going to see what transfer sizes are used in these benchmarks?
 
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HAQattaq said:
You need Sata III to get the most of the Vertex 3 drive.

Go with the Vertex 2.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227550


Tom's says Agility 3
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-solid-state-nand-reliability,2998-2.html
Click to expand...

same with the crucial m4 which is a sata3 drive.

i bought the 96gb kingston v+100 for $90 AR a few months back and see it go on sale for the same price frequently. it's a solid drive with it's own garbage collection mechanism.

i just upgraded to the crucial m4 64gb coincidentally for $90 as well, and it's noticeably faster. you can't go wrong with either as far as reliability goes.
the only brands i trust for SSD is intel, crucial, kingston and maybe samsung.
i stay far away from sandforce drives.
 
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geok1ng said:
ok, that took some serious photo research:
kingston 96gb is a 4x 16gb + 4x 8gb PCB, 96gb is real NAND installed,
Intel 320 80Gb is a 9x8GB + 1x16GB PCB , 98GB total NAND installed
Click to expand...

9*8 + 16 = 11*8 = 88GB, not 98. It's in line with what I found for the 160GB which has 176GB.
 
thank you Aesma.
just a list of Intel 320 series nand:
40GB=6x8Gb dies, half populated channels. 20% over-provisioning!! no wonder price/GB sucks!
80GB= 9xGB + 1x16GB= 88GbB, my mistake, 10 channels are populated, but expect some performance issues since same die must act as spare area and overprovisioning
120Gb= 6x16Gb + 4x8GB ( thanks xtremsystems forum!)= 128GB, this is the least amount of % spare area in all the 320 series;
http://fotkidepo.ru/photo/232182/36307aIdDNpHkOE/0TZhrL715T/650498.jpg
160GB= 10x16GB + 2x 8GB. its is the first 320 series ssd to use the back of the pcb. with 10% overprovisioning this SSD currently offers best cost/GB and decent performance numbers.
300Gb= 20x16GB= 320GB of nand, 20Gb spare.
600GB= 20x 32GB?? can anyone post a picture of the 600GB PCB? as far as i can tell , the biggest NAND dies on market are 32GB, used on 128GB mSATA.

On ebay prices are climbing for all drives except OCZ...maybe be i wuld just pull the trigger on the Kingston 96GB RAID0 after all
 
as for benchmarks, kingston 96gb trades blow in numbers with the 80gb intel, but at least one review found amazing real usage results:
http://en.expreview.com/2011/03/23/world-exclusive-review-intel-g3-ssd-80gb/15569.html/5
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=6178

summary; Intel has better seq read, 4kQD ramdon reads, Kingston has better seq writes, other numbers are with 10% of each other.

considering that kingston has more agressive garbage collection, it is a RAID oriented ssd.

its a really though choice: 160gb intel or 2x96gb kingston?
 
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