Velociraptor Vs. SSD

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pizza

Limp Gawd
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I'm looking into getting a new hard drive this year to improve performance. Right now I have a 400 gb 7200 rpm Seagate drive. I'm looking to get a new faster drive for the OS and games and use my 400 gb for storage. Now that SSD prices have gone down I'm wondering if I should an SSD or get a Velociraptor hard drive. For example the new 150 gb version which is now available on Newegg. Or should I get a 64 gb SSD for a similar price. OCZ has one for $194 after rebate and Patriot has one (no reviews yet) for $199 after rebate. My concerns are the write performance and multitasking performance. It seems like there is a trade off where you get great read speeds and access times with SSD but terrible write speeds. I've also heard about multitasking being terrible on SDD with Vista locking up when trying to run more than one app at a time. The extra 100 gb storage gained with the hard drive is not really an incentive for me because no matter which I get I'm going to have to uninstall games and make room sometimes. What do you think?
 
Well the reality is that SSD's currently don't write as fast as normal hard drives. Some of them are pretty respectable though. The thing I would remind you is, you spend a very small part of your computing experience writing to disk, most of the time you just read. The main thing is that you spec out the SSD for the performance you want. There are some SSD's now that are easily 2 or 3 times faster than other less impressive products.

Now that being said, I have no idea where you read or heard that SSD drives perform not as well during multitasking, and in fact, that makes no sense at all, since they are better at random access than other drives, and are faster in response then other drives. If anybody else can back up the claim though, I would love to hear about it.
 
In the review for the OCZ SSD I posted more than one person complains of multitasking performance. I'm pretty sure I read about that somewhere else too.
 
I run MTRON SSDs in RAID 0 and I would recommend that you not buy a SSD during 2008.

-OCZ and other MLC technology SSD have had quality and reliability problems, -There seems to be problems between Vista and SSDs (I use XP)
-There are some MOBOs that limit the performance of SSDs
-Intel just announced it's product line of SSDs.

Unless you can get immediate value (like I did for my business) I would buy the Velociraptor and wait until after the first of the year.
 
for those that have not seen it yet, go look at Anandtech, it has the single best article on SSDs vs VRaptor that i have seen. It might be the single best article written for almost anything with the level of detail that they do.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403

break out you glasses and pointy hat and make sure your calculator is handy. they cover a lot of ground...
Everything from a fresh install to gaming and how it feels is covered.
 
At this point in time my vote is for a VR. That'll change next year, maybe 2010, but for now the SSD's just aren't quite up to par. Once the big boys start duking it out though, these things will work themselves out (assuming anyone can keep up with intel;)).
 
SSD is too expensive right now and compatibility issues are relatively common.
I think it would be wise to wait one or two years before getting one of those.
 
even to me the WD Raptors are just not worth it, let along SSD's. Two 640 WD's for 85$ each in Raid 0 Slice and a Raid 1 slice is by far the best bang for your buck period.
 
SSDs are still in 'early adopter' phase, perhaps in a year or two they'd be worth it but right now there are still things that need to be ironed out and the price point is still a tad high.
 
Until the SSD's can beat hard drives in every category and come in under $400 for a reasonable capacity, I'll continue to ignore them.
 
+1 for the anand review, He does an excellent job of spelling it out for you. Plus he goes over the shuddering found on the ocz drives. With the current problems with the ocz drives I would go with the VR.
 
Here are my two 640 WDs on Intel ICH8R controller.

wd640raid0300gbslicepu0.png
 
Is that the entire drive?
Or do you have it partitioned?

Nevermind, just saw the 300gb in the menu of the screenshot... :)

I didn't know you could raid 0 part of the drives, and raid 1 the second half. What do you use to do this?
 
Its Intels Matrix RAID, its been around for years now, just not very used because it uses the CPU and its on your mobo.
Its on many Intel motherboards.
can be very useful.
 
RAID 0 isn't "true" RAID, of course. It's just an offshoot of the JABOD concept: Just A Bunch Of Disks, meaning anything you can put together and then stripe the data across 'em. Hell, I've seen people that just don't understand the concept do something like this:

- a 20GB 5400 rpm drive
- a 40GB 7200 rpm drive
- a 60GB 7200 rpm drive
- an 80GB 7200 rpm drive

Because the lowest common denominator is 20GB, the person took 20GB at the beginning of each drive and ended up with a "RAID 0" configuration of 4 drives, 20GB from each, for an 80GB array. The rest of the space was used as a single "partition" using NTFS, it all appeared as a simple folder in Windows.

Some people are truly desperate for RAID and don't even realize that more often than not it's a waste of time.

But yeah, on hard drives you can choose as much space as you want for the array parts, so it seems in the image above that poster chose ~165GB or so from each drive to create a ~330GB array, from what I can see. The rest of the space (~135GB on one drive and ~135GB on the other) can then be set up as a RAID 1 - the second part mirroring the first.

Easy stuff...
 
that was a really good article. its good to see why some of the existing drives have their issues.
 
why not buy the WD640AK? as fast as the 150GB Raptors and over twice the storage of the VR for $100 or less...

i had a 74GB raptor and write times were great...for the 2 minutes/day i wrote to disk. read times were great, too, but there werent any decently fast 7.2k drives until about a year and a half ago (relative to Raptors).

Both the Hitachi Deskstar 1TB/750GB series and the WD 640AK are about as fast with both read AND write times as the older 150GB Raptor at a fraction of the price and multitudes more storage.

As a former raptor owner, unless you do excessive professional work like video or imaging editing, you wont notice the difference versus one of the faster drives i listed. ever.

I bought into the raptor hype, and while they are definitely fast, they are not worth the price/capacity/speed ratio compared to current top model 7200 drives.

also just found this drive on the egg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

storagereview.com shows this drive ANNIHILATING all current 7200rpm drives in most benchmarks. the closest drive is the new 1TB Samsung Spinpoint but i dont trust Samsung drives with grandma's web browsing. the 640GB WD was not listed.
 
Dan_D said:
Until the SSD's can beat hard drives in every category and come in under $400 for a reasonable capacity, I'll continue to ignore them.
Click to expand...

same here.

Now if only WD can get the VRaptor under $200. Or put out those rumored smaller GB VRaptors.
 
Well I'm not exactly known for being frugal but there is buying the cutting edge and wasting money. I see the SSD as a waste of money at present. I know this technology is the future but I'm not willing to beta test it at the current price. Double or triple the capacitry and cut the price down to 1 3rd of what it is now and I'll give them a try. Short of that I'm not going for it.
 
Yeah im sure in a year or two they will be more palatable, both from a write speed and $/gb ratio.
 
i think we all share (or most of us, shy of Okie and a few others) the sentiment that SSD is not at prime time yet. Anand listed what Intel hopes to accomplish, and that is a 5+ year SSD warranty at 20GB writes per day on average. Plus the utility that will record and prevent writes to bad sectors. This is making it ready for prime time.

The OCZ press clips highlight how the current OSs are not optimized for SSDs at all, and because of that, the SSDs loose some ground to the regular spin drives. You really dont need a a swap file if all you have are SSDs... but thats not how an OS operates.

I think that unless dedicated drivers come out for SSDs, that alter the way an OS operates, the SSDs will be at an disadvantage for a while. they can combat that with brute force, but what is really needed is for the software to know how to use them properly.

2 cents.
 
Also keep in mind that once the issues with SSD's are straightened out they'll still be constrained by the SATA bus which really isn't that fast in the grand scheme of things. They'll never reach their full potential until the SATA bus gets a significant speed boost or the bus for them is changed completely.
 
Dan_D said:
Also keep in mind that once the issues with SSD's are straightened out they'll still be constrained by the SATA bus which really isn't that fast in the grand scheme of things. They'll never reach their full potential until the SATA bus gets a significant speed boost or the bus for them is changed completely.
Click to expand...

I think I misunderstand your comment. Current server class (MTRON) SSDs run about 130 MB per second with their own SATA interface so that doesn't stress the bandwidth. I can stuff multiple drives in an ARECA PCI Express card or other high power server card in my workstation if I want to get more bandwidth.

What am I missing?

Z
 
I don't know if you guys have seen this yet. But the Patriot 64 gb SSD is available for $170 after rebate from zipzoomfly. Very tempting. :( Wish there was some reviews on this model.
 
The patriot from what I understand, uses the same onboard SSD controller as the OCZ and RiData, a JMicron controller. There may be different revisions of that controller on each drive though. So, it may or may not have the same problems as the OCZ SSD Core drives. The drives will do awesome for anything but an OS drive for sure.

I'd say hold off till it's a more proven platform, unless $170 won't be missed, then have fun with the drive. I put 2 Cheetah 15k.5 SAS drives with an Adaptec 31605 controller and these drives seem to be almost as responsive in the OS as the OCZ core RAID setup I had. So, do what you wish, but the SAS platform is a known working config, where as SSD it's kind of hit or miss with the low-budget stuff.
 
I'm probably going to end up getting the Velociraptor. It's just tempting to upgrade with the newer technology.
 
Would all these issues still be a problem if you used one with a Ps3?
 
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