SLC worth it?

[drgnfang]

So I'm in a bit of a conundrum. Are "older" (yes, very relative term here) SLC SSD drives worth getting?

Looking at drives like the Super Talent MasterDrive PX series, they are saying 170m/130m sequential speeds. Most of the SLC drives I can find reviews on are the older ones with speeds in the 100/80 range. The Intel seems to pretty much spank these...

I would be using the SLC drive for OS/Apps, probably on the desktop.

Rambling aside I guess my actual question here is will the SLC drive be "faster" than the Intel where it matters even if raw seq reads/writes are slower?

Aside from being naturally quicker by design (this is access time only yes?), and most likely lasting long, what else does SLC get me?

 

[thebeephaha]

SLC is more reliable technically but I'm not sure about speed, should be better overall even if slower in some areas. I could be wrong these are just things I've heard on these forums.

 

[Michaelius]

Those SLC with 100/80 speeds are probably rebranded samsungs which means they will be stutter free unlike jmicron based MLC drives with 170/100 speeds for example.

 

[Mcot]

You can put two of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147056

In raid 0 for less than the intel X25-M. I think two of those slc samsungs would be better than the single MLC.

 

[drgnfang]

Ok, I just picked up one of these: http://3btech.net/sost322sumap.html

I still don't fully trust the price since I haven't shopped with these guys before.

 

[Blue Fox]

You can put two of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147056

In raid 0 for less than the intel X25-M. I think two of those slc samsungs would be better than the single MLC.

I've had one of those since August. It is pretty decent, but then again, I don't need higher speeds for my laptop. Price certainly has dropped. When I got it, they were going for $800.

 

[nitrobass24]

I dont see the point in paying the price permium for SLC.

The problem with some of the MLC drives is not the implementation of MLC.
Its the fact that they were going for a inexpensive product, and in engineering a cheap product for mass adoption, they eneded up using a shitty controller(Jmicron).
Where these MLC drive fail is the implementation of the Jmicron.

That said some of these newer MLC drives: OCZ Vertex, and Gskill Titan. perform pretty damn well and dont cost near what a X-25 would.

 

[alamone]

I have two 64GB samsung SLCs in raid0 on my areca 1231ML and I'm very happy with em. Geeks was having a sale on the 2.5" 64GB SATA2 variant for about $180. Considering they used to be almost a grand last year, I think it's a great price, and you don't have to worry about the drawbacks of MLC.

I might be able to get better speeds from them if I put them in single drive mode or on onboard RAID actually, as I think the HW RAID stack can't keep up with the drives. But this way there's hardly any CPU load on my system, it's easier to change the boot drive w/out windows activation freaking out since the RAID presents a generic SCSI raided volume to the OS, and it's already plenty fast enough anyhow. I didn't mess around with realignment or anything either - not sure if any potential speed increase is worth the hassle. I might get around to it one day.

If I had more money I might have gotten two 32gb X25-Es instead (about $400/ea), but by getting the samsungs I pay half as much for double the capacity, although I'm sure the Intels are faster. Since the SSD market is evolving so rapidly, I don't think it really makes sense to buy the "top of the line" right now, as it'll get replaced soon enough, or drop to half the price.