SuperTalent 64GB + Seagate 1.5TB for $242 Shipped

one of my orders (win7 oem) said "in wherehouse" and I emailed support.. they said it probably shipped but the site hadn't updated yet.. they're both (win7 and ssd) likely to be at my house now..

edit: I got my ssd today... win7 coming tomorrow.. will likely mess with the ssd later this week.. flash it if need be before rolling windows 7 onto it.
 
Last edited:
revenant said:
...
edit: I got my ssd today... win7 coming tomorrow.. will likely mess with the ssd later this week.. flash it if need be before rolling windows 7 onto it.
Click to expand...

Mine's "out for delivery" :cool:

Despite 2nd day "air" UPS routed it through 6 different hubs, by ground. Hope it survived.
 
Mine is arriving tomorrow.....which sucks because the rest of my system just got delivered from the egg today....
 
bing said:
Mine's "out for delivery" :cool:

Despite 2nd day "air" UPS routed it through 6 different hubs, by ground. Hope it survived.
Click to expand...

mine was packed very well.. no extra space in the box at all. the package itself is so tiny also.. a little thicker than a dvd box.. just a small disk, 4 screws and a tiny manual. :)
 
Mine won't be here till Monday. I should have done fast shipping instead of the free one :(
 
Drive shipped with the latest FW. :)

Windows 7 Ultimate installed in 17 minutes (to the desktop, including the 3 reboots and login.)

After reading the OCZ forums for many hours over the last few days I was expecting to have troubles but it's smooth sailing so far (knock on wood.) I have learned that ST's forums are a complete and utter joke, just awful. I was starting to really wish I had paid up for an OCZ or Intel. OCZ in particular has terrific support.

To complicate matters I'm running an MSI 785G/SB710/AM3 board. :p

It is true IMHO, SSD's are downright "transformative." :eek:
 
Last edited:
Dang, looks like I missed this deal. No new codes eh?

I've been waiting forever for price drops on SSDs, and was finally ready to bite regardless since I need to reload windows anyway.
 
Ducman69, Check this thread and also at Anand for the eBay link (same drive, also for $175.) There were no details as to what FW was on it or anything, but still.

Here's my baseline bench's. Sure feels faster than the pics indicate. I'm not sure how it compares,,, I'll have to dig up some single drive bench screenshots.

I mistakenly installed under RAID, so as I understand it that means I have no TRIM. I thought to re-install, but I would want to secure erase the drive first, and I'm not sure how to do it with this drive. (Easy as pie with an OCZ, just go to their forum downloads section and get the secure erase executable.) :rolleyes: In fact, some on the OCZ mention SE'ing a new drive prior to OS install, and that it makes a big difference right off the bat.

It's hard to know how much of what is written there is no longer valid due to the newest FW release, toooooooooooooo.

And the fun begins. :D Oh well, totally worth it!

774376008_Q7ewq-L.jpg

774376001_Gjfah-M.jpg


I will update my .sig with this system, I hope you guys post up your bench's too.
 
wow... nice. shipped with 1916! coolness.. sadly I just got home from UPS with my 922 and lack the energy to do much ssd playing... I'll do that this weekend I am sure.. maybe sooner..

edit: lol @ 17mins from install to desktop ... that's effing fast :p
 
Last edited:
revenant said:
wow... nice. shipped with 1916! coolness.. sadly I just got home from UPS with my 922 and lack the energy to do much ssd playing... I'll do that this weekend I am sure.. maybe sooner..
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was relieved to see 1916. And, I don't know how you can wait!

revenant said:
edit: lol @ 17mins from install to desktop ... that's effing fast :p
Click to expand...

Yeh, I've been doing more reading, and heard of some XP installs taking closer to 10 minutes. Note that I did my install off a USB flashdrive.

A couple random notes;
- I've verified the drive alignment is correct. Win7 took care of it correctly.

- I've verified TRIM is working, or so says Win7. I don't understand why, as TRIM isn't supported under RAID (which is what I'm running, having mistakenly installed this way.) Perhaps it's because I'm using a single SSD. I do have a RAID'd set of laptop drives that I've used with the SSD, so RAID is definitely working too. :confused:

- Excessive benchmarking is bad for the drive (wears it out quicker.) Going forward I will just test once a week or so to monitor changes in performance.

- CrystalDiskInfo cannot identify my drive (probably due to the RAID situation)

The e8400 system in my sig feels about as fast as the machine that the SSD is on; Athlon II X4 620 @ 3.25GzHz + 4GB Mushkin DDR3 @ 1333-7-7-7-20-1T,,, so I'm curious to test and see what bench's I get on the other system with its ICH9R.

The sad part is I'm used to the thing now. Need one for the Netbook! And I keep looking at the graphs with 4+ SSDs on LSI controllers and drooling on my keyboard. :rolleyes:
 
bing said:
[snip]
The sad part is I'm used to the thing now. Need one for the Netbook! And I keep looking at the graphs with 4+ SSDs on LSI controllers and drooling on my keyboard. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

lol... I know, performance on these really scales well in raid0 configs... well on a good controller with more than a pci-e 1x interface..

anyways, I finally got mine into my machine. 1916! aw yeah... going to gut this pc either tomorrow or friday night, wooo, fun friday night stuff.. get all the goods into my 922 (which I have to say looks like a helluva a nice case) and then load win7 onto this drive.. finally.. no more xp. ;)
 
bing, you said Windows states that TRIM is working even tho you're supposedly using drivers that shouldn't support TRIM... What'd you mean by that, did you verify TRIM support via the command prompt? From my understanding that only tells you whether your drive and OS support TRIM, but not whether it's actually enabled and working or not.

The only true way to know would be to fill it up, delete stuff, and then see if performance degrades... But it'd be silly to try it if you suspect TRIM may not really be working anyway, since you'd then have to wipe 'em to restore performance.
 
Yep, latest firmware on mine as well. I don't have screens of the benchmark but in crystal disk it was around 195MB/S Seq Read and 105MB/S Seq Write

4k numbers were 32-33MB/S Read and 8-9MB/S write.

WEI score for disk was 7.1

Pretty happy so far, not too bad for the price.
 
Impulse said:
bing, you said Windows states that TRIM is working even tho you're supposedly using drivers that shouldn't support TRIM... What'd you mean by that, did you verify TRIM support via the command prompt? From my understanding that only tells you whether your drive and OS support TRIM, but not whether it's actually enabled and working or not.

The only true way to know would be to fill it up, delete stuff, and then see if performance degrades... But it'd be silly to try it if you suspect TRIM may not really be working anyway, since you'd then have to wipe 'em to restore performance.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I used the fsutil cmd... http://itcookbook.net/blog/windows-7-ssd-trim-and-fsutil-good-information-can-be-hard-find

It does feel like bleeding edge a bit, especially with an ST drive. Next SSD will definitely be OCZ. Despite their FW woes occasionally their support is terrific, and that's worth the extra cost to me (though somehow I forgot that in the xcitement with this deal....)

I have been banging on the drive pretty well with some apps doing writes all the time, all day long, but keeping usage down below 20GB. I've also been letting the system idle and letting the drive gnaw & crunch GC when I'm not home or asleep. I will report back periodically as to the perf numbers.

Thanks a lot for your input.

Eickst said:
Yep, latest firmware on mine as well. I don't have screens of the benchmark but in crystal disk it was around 195MB/S Seq Read and 105MB/S Seq Write

4k numbers were 32-33MB/S Read and 8-9MB/S write.

WEI score for disk was 7.1

Pretty happy so far, not too bad for the price.
Click to expand...

:cool: What system/controller? Thanks.
 
bing, I'm on an AMD Athlon II X4 620 on a GA770T-UD3P motherboard, which is SB710 chipset.
 
Eickst said:
bing, I'm on an AMD Athlon II X4 620 on a GA770T-UD3P motherboard, which is SB710 chipset.
Click to expand...

Thanks. Win7? And can you tell me if you're using AHCI and if so does CrystalDiskInfo work for you? (does it see your SSD?) As I mentioned above, it's not working for me and I'm wondering if it's 1) the SSD -- 2) the SB710 -- 3) My drivers. I'm just using the drivers that Win7 installs.

http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html#CrystalDiskInfo
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2046160
 
I'll post up more when I get home from work, but yes I am using AHCI, and I am pretty sure I installed the AMD driver for AHCI. And yes it's Win 7 64bit
 
Thanks.

I just posted the following to the anand thread above.

I just spent 20 minutes trying to verify TRIM is operable using the procmon procedure listed in posts 2&3 here:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ew-FW-Flashing

TRIM is not working for me, or at least I'm not seeing the calls in the procmon trace. (which may mean I just need to play with procmon more.) Can anyone else verify that it's working for them using this method?
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
OK, thanks. Must be because the drive is configured on RAID then. I think I've confirmed I'm not using TRIM, see the anand thread for details.
 
I need another 1.5 drive and wanted an SSD at this price the deal is dead, I was going to get this today since it's been on my mind. Are there any similar deals out there or anything similar?
 
Does anyone know if the OCZ Sanity Erase works with the SuperTalent drive? There are very few references to SE or the like in the ST forum. There is one reference to using a Ubuntu v9.01 LiveCD with hdparm and the security-erase option, but it says it's not been tested with the latest firmware.

Impulse said:
bing, ...
The only true way to know would be to fill it up, delete stuff, and then see if performance degrades... But it'd be silly to try it if you suspect TRIM may not really be working anyway, since you'd then have to wipe 'em to restore performance.
Click to expand...

Curiosity got the best of me, so I filled up the drive. I had filled the disk maybe 2/3rd full yesterday, and then cleared it back down to 12GB used. Let it idle over night. There was some small decline in performance today.

So I filled it up completely. Ran CrystalDiskMark and saw quite a hit across the board,, particularly 512K writes and 4K reads. Sequential reads/writes down about 20%, not too bad considering the disk was literally full, 100MB to spare.

Deleted the test files and let the disk clean up for 10 minutes, until I saw little to no activity with Resource Monitor. Re-ran CDM again and performance is at or above the first bench runs. One slight hit for 4K writes at ~12-15%, other wise, all good.

As I mentioned the SSD has seen heavy usage, and then been left to idle for half of the day. I think TRIM is off, so GC must be doing it's thing, and pretty well, at that. Going to leave it alone for a week and report back then. If anyone want any screenshots of the benchs above I can post them.
 
MasterShake said:
I need another 1.5 drive and wanted an SSD at this price the deal is dead, I was going to get this today since it's been on my mind. Are there any similar deals out there or anything similar?
Click to expand...

Honestly, I would not go for the best deal out there with SSDs, yes hindsight..... I'd go for a drive from a company that supports their product. Definitely OCZ, possibly Intel (I have not checked their forum.)

Also, you didn't mention capacity, but if I had it to do over again I'd get 2 30GB drives as opposed to the one 60GB drive. With OCZ support and tools (see above) you can always take the drives back to factory configuration (minus the standard degradation that is inherent in the technology, of course.) So even if TRIM in RAID never comes along (and with an SB710 controller who knows if it ever will,) I'd feel comfortable going this route. And as long as I have regular backups I wouldn't worry. On that note I have dropped Acronis and starting using Paragon instead based on OCZ support threads. I have not tested restoration of a full backup yet.

I have thought to return my drive and take a re-stocking hit, and then move onto an OCZ SSD per above. But I will keep the ST for now. If it ever gets to the point where I can't restore performance or I bork it using someone else's erase tool, I will RMA it and sell the replacement.
 
So there is really no trim support with this drive or is it only because you installed with the raid driver?

I just got windows 7 installed on my ssd.. it's pretty fast.. haven"t benched anything yet... just got done rebuilding my itunes install with lots of symbolic links to the media on my old raid1 set.. it all worked very nicely.. looks, works and feels just like my old itunes install without the storage weight on my C drive.. whew. I was hoping that would go smoothly as I hate rebuilding play lists..

So far it seems pretty fast and working in windows is smooth.. I still need to install office and a few other things though.. I still as of now have 46.2gb free of 59.6... thank goodness for mklink. ;)
 
First of all, congrats! :cool:

revenant said:
So there is really no trim support with this drive or is it only because you installed with the raid driver?
Click to expand...

I haven't found anything other than the procedure I pointed to above on the OCZ size about using procmon to verify TRIM is being used. Note I said used, not enabled.

That said, if GC continues to work well I'd rather just keep the controller on RAID, even with a single drive. It is apparently faster than AHCI in many cases. And that sets me up well for when I get a second drive, or a pair of another brand.
 
Thanks! ok... Well, I don't install lots of things on this pc once I get the base install the way I like it.. all DLs go to my raid1 set, page file is on an 8gb partition on my 74G raptor... I'm going to try and keep data turn over on this disk to a minimum.. So is it safe to use the Indilinx Wiper tool on the disk from time to time if performance does degrade? Also, stupid question here, but what is that little switch on the back of the disk for? I didn't see anything about it in the manual and the one ref I found to it in the forum the person writes back to their own posts and says "nm, I found it"..
 
revenant said:
Thanks! ok... Well, I don't install lots of things on this pc once I get the base install the way I like it.. all DLs go to my raid1 set, page file is on an 8gb partition on my 74G raptor... I'm going to try and keep data turn over on this disk to a minimum.. So is it safe to use the Indilinx Wiper tool on the disk from time to time if performance does degrade? Also, stupid question here, but what is that little switch on the back of the disk for? I didn't see anything about it in the manual and the one ref I found to it in the forum the person writes back to their own posts and says "nm, I found it"..
Click to expand...

Yeah, like I've mentioned previously a few times -- their support forum is beyond ridiculous. Reflects very poorly on their business IMO. Read this for a laugh: http://www.supertalent.com/home/forum/viewforum.php?f=43 Hopefully enough here got in on this deal and will chime in to make for some peer support. :D If you want I can can host images of your bench screenshots, PM me if needed.

Dunno about the switch, my drive has one too.

I'd keep the Swap on the SSD. That said, I'd monitor it and if there's a lot of activity I'd figure out why and/or add RAM (shouldn't need to use swap much these days.)

As to Wiper I'd let the FW do it's thing for now and just monitor performance until there's an issue. Between the changes with TRIM, GC and wear-leveling I gather there is less need for manual tools to force cleanup. SuperTalent has a tool similar to Wiper on their site, unfortunately it hasn't been updated for the last two FW revs or more, and they mention that the correct tool per FW is needed. So, reading between the lines I take it there's no need for the tool anymore (or at least ST hopes this is the case.)

Check the SSD alignment (AS SSD tool shows this)
Set the Power config so the SSD never powers down (So GC can do it's thing during idle times)
Enable Write Caching (and Turn off Write-Cache Buffer flushing if you have an UPS)
Disable Indexing on the SSD
Disable Defragmentation Schedule, then disable the Defragmentation Service
Disable Superfetch (And maybe PreFetch too)
Disable Hibernate
Move Browser cache to RAM

These links should help with all that:
OCZ Support: Just what tweaks are needed in win7 with SSD
OCZ Support: Windows 7 Ultimate Tweaks Utilities

'One other thing, if you use your browser extensively and an add-on like SessionManager for Firefox, consider putting the profiles on a RAM disk and sync'ing with a non-SSD disk. (This sounds harder than it is, I can followup if need be.) I use SessionManager with 100's of F/F tabs open all the time, so this is important to me, though for now I'm just using the SSD to see how it holds up. The tip above to put the cache on RAM makes a huge difference with so many tabs though, so far I like this configuration and F/F has never worked so well (no more stutter when scrolling pages, and there was some when I had the cache's on the SSD.) :cool:
 
Last edited:
lol.. that's bad.. zero forum monitoring.

as for the switch, maybe it's a RO mode switch?

I'm going to wait for my 4gb of ddr2 to come back from crucial, install it, then move the page file back to the ssd... I'm guessing I won't need to hit virt mem much if at all with 4gb of RAM... Ahh yeah, I guess I will let the controller just do it's thing and not worry about wiper.. even without TRIM, between wear leveling and GC I'll be covered fairly well.. thanks for the tweak urls.. I just tweaked windows7 a bit.. didn't move browser cache to RAM yet but I will.. I don't use session manager but I will check it out. thanks for all the tips and suggestions! :)
 
bing said:
Looks like the new FW adds some performance too.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2043558

I got mine with two-day Air for $13 extra, can't wait as this is my first SSD.

Thanks for posting OP. :cool:
Click to expand...

So do you use the firmware for this ssd from the agility or vertex on that forum? I'm pretty sure it's the vertex model because I saw on here it uses the same controller.

Or does the newer supertalent firmware offer better performance? from what I saw on their forums the agility/vertex 1.5 FW offered a rather large boost in performance.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but this is my first SSD and I want to get the very most I can out of it!!!! I can't wait!!
 
MasterShake said:
So do you use the firmware for this ssd from the agility or vertex on that forum? I'm pretty sure it's the vertex model because I saw on here it uses the same controller.

Or does the newer supertalent firmware offer better performance? from what I saw on their forums the agility/vertex 1.5 FW offered a rather large boost in performance.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but this is my first SSD and I want to get the very most I can out of it!!!! I can't wait!!
Click to expand...

I wouldn't use OCZ FW on an ST drive, in fact I'm leery of even using OCZ tools such as Sanitary Erase on my ST drive. It will likely work, but I won't find out for sure until I do a reinstall of Win7.

Back to your question, someone asked about using another brand of FW on an ST drive and support replied that it may make the drive unable to see any future ST releases.

I don't know if 1.5 offered a perf boost on my drive over previous versions as mine was delivered with v1.5.

hth, please report back.
 
bing said:
I wouldn't use OCZ FW on an ST drive, in fact I'm leery of even using OCZ tools such as Sanitary Erase on my ST drive. It will likely work, but I won't find out for sure until I do a reinstall of Win7.

Back to your question, someone asked about using another brand of FW on an ST drive and support replied that it may make the drive unable to see any future ST releases.

I don't know if 1.5 offered a perf boost on my drive over previous versions as mine was delivered with v1.5.

hth, please report back.
Click to expand...


The reason I asked is because I wondered if the vertex was faster than the super talent, if it's not I won't bother messing with it!
 
Dunno, but I don't think it's worth bricking the drive. Particularly because an RMA would likely be denied on top of the headache of ruining the drive.
 
They are about even. Maybe a ~10% difference.

Honestly, I dont think you will notice the difference if you are running one or the other. They are both way better then HDDs, so just get the best FW you can and be happy.

My drive came today. Waiting for my Mushkin Blacklines to get here so I can get my i7 going.
 
Thanks for the responses, I hope it comes with the latest firmware so I don't have to mess with it. I have no experience with these things (tech geek but never had an ssd) and I hope it's as good as it sounds. I've seen threads with lots of settings you should change when using an SSD so I will have to find a guide for that.

I told my boss I needed another 1.5gb drive for backups, the sata jack on my other 1.5 gb drive basically broke off so I need something just as big for a backup (I work from home and have a lot of files on my pc that aren't kept anywhere else. The drive keeps fucking up and I lost a lot of stuff that was due today >.> ) I didn't mention I was getting the SSD and he actually got overnight shipping so I hope it gets here tomorrow, but it seems there was a problem with me having a different address than the business address which is in another State.

I assume we have a forum here about setting up SSD's, I'm glad to finally being in the club!!!
 
MasterShake said:
I need another 1.5 drive and wanted an SSD at this price the deal is dead, I was going to get this today since it's been on my mind. Are there any similar deals out there or anything similar?
Click to expand...

60GB OCZ Agility is still $179 AR at Newegg IIRC. Short of that, if you shop around you can probably find the Intel 80GB X25-M G2 for $250 or under, comes out to the same cost per GB. The 40GB X25-V is $120.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top