Samsung 64GB 2.5" SATA-II MLC Solid State Hard Drive

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love mine, but............

they will be getting faster, cheaper and bigger, i would guess easily by a factor of 2 in the next 12months.

Might be worth saving your money for the time being, unless you cant wait that is :)
 
I finally got my pair of Sammy's, and I spent all day cutting holes in my case to tidy up the old cables :). Now I've finished that I'm going to install my custom slipstream copy of vista and give it a whirl.
 
Running 2 in Raid 0. Insanely fast boot time and instant application opening. Very dependent on stripe size, particularly XP boot time which really seems to benefit from 16K or less.
 
My initial impressions are very good, although I've got a feeling I've hit the speed barrier which is apparent on ICH9 chipsets, need to do some more research on that.

My setup is 2x64Gb Samsungs MLC in RAID-0 128k stripe (with default offset for vista install)

So i installed Vista with integrated SP1 and current hotfixes and integrated drivers which took 15mins 48sec. Not sure how long it took on my old drives, but it was certainly longer.

7200 RAID 0 Bootup > Launch Firefox 1 minute 24s
SSD RAID 0 Bootup > Launch Firefox 27s

I found that both SSD and HDD take around 20s to get into windows itself, but once your there the SSD has loaded everything up very quickly and you can use your apps straight away. Where as my HDDs takes an additional minute until I can actually use any apps and you can hear my HDDs thrashing away.

Heres a few benchmarks I've done so far..

ATTOspeedtest.jpg


CrystalDiskMark.jpg


Full test (real world simulation):
Iometer.jpg


4k r/w test:
iometer-4k.png


The IOmeter test is one Tony from the OCZ forums likes to do. For comparison.... Update: I got the I/O bench wrong. The sammys don't do as many 4k I/O's as the Vertex. 1067 vs 2500. However the drive is still a very good performer for the price.
 
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LeJimster said:
I found that both SSD and HDD take around 20s to get into windows itself, but once your there the SSD has loaded everything up very quickly and you can use your apps straight away. Where as my HDDs takes an additional minute until I can actually use any apps and you can hear my HDDs thrashing away.
Click to expand...

It's that instant usability on the desktop I love.

I don't know if Vista is much different to XP, but my Windows load time is less than 5 seconds... going from a 64K stripe down to 16K made a huge difference so I guess the OS has to load many small files, rather than a few large ones. Your stripe size could be why you're not seeing much difference here between HDD & SSD.
 
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Vista has additional bloatware that isn't in XP. Around 30 seconds for vista on SSD seems about right.

I'll try some different stripe sizes if I can find a decent ghosting program.
 
imo the Vertex aren't nearly worth the price increase over the Sammys, same access time with a bit better sustained transfer speeds ...woopee.

SSD's are all about the access + you can get 2 sammys for 1 vertex ...easy decision.
 
marscay said:
imo the Vertex aren't nearly worth the price increase over the Sammys, same access time with a bit better sustained transfer speeds ...woopee.

SSD's are all about the access + you can get 2 sammys for 1 vertex ...easy decision.
Click to expand...

Agreed, two sammys cost less than a single vertex and is a lot faster. £100 sammy F.T.W.
 
I'm really struggling to resist buying 2 sammys.

I'm trying to wait for price drops and further advances in the tech, but I sure would like to half boot times. I hate waiting for things :D
 
mr_x_plosion said:
I'm really struggling to resist buying 2 sammys.

I'm trying to wait for price drops and further advances in the tech, but I sure would like to half boot times. I hate waiting for things :D
Click to expand...

Technology is constantly advancing, basing buying decisions on that would mean you'd never buy a thing. Just not loading times, best system upgrade I've done, though I purchased four of them.
 
I ran it against my 300GB VelociRaptor in HDTune's benchmark, and they come out with an average read/write of 100mb/s, but the Sammy slaughters the Raptor on access time - 0.2ms vs. 7.2ms.

Happy with it so far - had Vista 64 installed on it since Saturday. Had one BSOD and one complete freeze since then, but it seems to run pretty well, and best of all, is totally silent :)
 
I just found and ticked advanced cache in device manager, it made quite a difference in ATTO.

DeviceManager_AdvancedCache.jpg
]
Without advanced cache >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> With advanced cache
ATTOspeedtest.jpg
ATTOspeedtest-advancedcacheticked.jpg
 
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