• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Is there a difference bettween SSD brands?

depends on which brands you are comparing.
Intel allows somebody to rebrand their drives, indillinx (spelling?) sells controllers to several brands, although OCZ makes their own firmwares and developements.
Samsung is...well, samsung. Decent, but not exceptional.
Anything with a jmicron controller in it is crap.

So, yes. Brand (and model) matter.
 
Most certainly there is a difference in brands and even models of SSD drives. In fact, Maximum PC has done several reviews on them as has places like Toms Hardware, Ars Technica, etc.

Right now, the Patriot "Torqux" series seems to be very highly rated and is currently listed as the TOP performer when tested by Maximum PC magazine recently. They reviewed the 128GB drive, but I think they now have one that is 256GB if not mistaken.

Still darn expensive for most for the price/GB paid. You can get 2 2TB Western Digital "Black" drives and mount in Raid 0 for the price of a single SSD. But then again, SSD is the future and clearly where things are heading as cost will come down over time. :)
 
2 2TB drives in raid would give you a massive capacity differential and quite a bit more sequential write, but the read speed would be matched by a single intel drive and the random R/W would be straight destroyed. Most operations are random, not sequential, and the access time penalty for moving heads is HUGE, especially during boot and application load.

My default suggestion now is one SSD for OS/apps, one magnetic drive for games and user data.
 
TechJeff said:
Most certainly there is a difference in brands and even models of SSD drives. In fact, Maximum PC has done several reviews on them as has places like Toms Hardware, Ars Technica, etc.

Right now, the Patriot "Torqux" series seems to be very highly rated and is currently listed as the TOP performer when tested by Maximum PC magazine recently. They reviewed the 128GB drive, but I think they now have one that is 256GB if not mistaken.

Still darn expensive for most for the price/GB paid. You can get 2 2TB Western Digital "Black" drives and mount in Raid 0 for the price of a single SSD. But then again, SSD is the future and clearly where things are heading as cost will come down over time. :)
Click to expand...

The MaximumPC SSD reviews are horrible... They actually praised one of the Samsung drives, they don't go much into random read/write performance, etc. It's like they're reviewing them in a void and haven't read any tech sites.

If you wanna get educated just hit up Anandtech and read his last two or three SSD articles, he explains everything in as much detail as you could want (but not overtly technical) and keeps the broad picture in mind so it'll give you a very good idea of what to buy and the way the market is heading.

Basically the only things worth buying right now are the Intel drives and Indillinx (controller) based drives... OCZ, Patriot, and half a dozen other resellers now make drives based off the same Indilinx Barefoot controller. The best bang for the buck is probably OCZ's Agility line which uses slightly slower flash mem (same controller), $130-150 for a 60GB SSD is a great entry point.

The Vertex line from OCZ is the standard line, the EX/Turbo/w/e versions all seem overpriced... The Vertex line actually complements Intel's offerings as far as pricing. You can get a 60GB Vertex for $180-200, an 80GB Intel X25-M G2 (newer version, will have TRIM support) for $220-250 (if you can find it in stock for MSRP), a 120GB Vertex for $300-330, or a 160GB X25-M G2 for $460+... So they actually don't compete head on too much.

The Intel drives crush anything in random read/writes (most OS operations are random) but the Indilinx drives are still many times faster than a regular HDD in that regard, and they do have a substantial sequential write speed advantage on the Intel drives (which might matter to some, you'd know it if you'd benefit from that). TRIM support is forthcoming for either.

Samsung drives have middling performance and apparently aren't easy to flash w/newer firmware right now (might not even be possible), so they're a rather worthless option. Once you've messed around with an SSD you'd wonder why it's taken so long for the technology to mature and come down in price, it makes the difference between a Velociraptor and a HDD seem completely insignificant (and it makes those drives irrelevant).

It's easily worth the trade-off to organize your stuff and get into the habit of having the OS, programs, and your most played games in a single smaller SSD while keeping docs/media on a regular HDD... That's probably the way we'll be doing it for a few years to come anyway since HDD are still far cheaper for storage (unless you have very limited storage needs, in which case you could get by w/a 256-512MB SSD eventually, in a year or two when they're affordable :p ).

For the average user (with a C2Q/PII rig), it's probably a biggest usability upgrade than anything else, including i5/i7.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top