I have another query ChileanLlama, I've been doing some reading, and saw that there are several drives that use the Samsung controller, like the OCZ Summit, and the Corsair P64, so my question is, would any of these companies be adding TRIM support to their drives??
Some of the SSD comparison reviews I have been looking at show the Samsung based SSD's to have really good performance compared to the Intel ones, so I'm really confused again!!!
Is TRIM support absolutely necessary, or are there other ways of stopping these drives from degrading?
Yeah, this is sort of what I was trying to get at more ChileanLlama - i'm not really up to "speed" on SSD drives so although I have a brief idea of what TRIM is, I don't know if it's important or not.
Hi guys, I'll try and answer best I can
Samsung have provided a beta firmware to Corsair for it's P series drives. I'd imagine OCZ have this for testing as well, as OCZ themselves seem to be the most pro-active of all the drive manufacturers when it comes to support.
The question is for the unbranded or pure Samsung PB22J drives. Will Samsung provide firmware for these? There is a page you can get on the Samsung site to sign up for firmware notifications, that suggests a new firmware will be provided in Q1 2010... A branded firmware may work, but some firmwares check the drive tag first and will only work on a certain brand. I don't know how the Samsung one will work. For the Indilinx drives using the same controller, you can't use an OCZ Vertex firmware on a Crucial M225 for example. It's not this simple, but the comparison would be with a motherboard, you couldn't flash a BIOS from an Asus board on to a Gigabyte board even if they used the same chipset.
So in summary, I'm hoping that Samsung will release updated firmware for all it's PB22J derivatives - but they are much less forthcoming with information, and much slower than Indilinx or Intel to support their drives.
You need to be careful with the comparison reviews, Anandtech probably provide the most comprehensive testing. a lot of the other sites focus, wrongly IMO, on the same testing methods for SSDs as for HDs, or can look at the headline sequential speeds, when small read/writes and randoms are probably just as, if not more important. For all round performance the Intel is the class leader, followed by the Indilinx and Samsung. I've all these drives in my rigs, and would agree with the benchmarks. But in a blind test I cannot tell any of them apart (I might guess at the Samsung if any), so numbers only tell you so much of the story.
Personally I don't think TRIM support is all that important, but that is for me. Most of my SSDs are in RAID0 - so I don't have TRIM, and will probably have a long time waiting for it.
I think if you're an average/home user then it is really good. You can just put the drive in your system and it will clean itself over a period. If you're not running in RAID, then the Indilinx drives already have a tool, with Intel releasing one imminently that allows you to clean the drive on demand. I liken this to the equivalent of running a defrag on standard HDs. If you do run on a RAID controller, then it's case of cleaning destructively in DOS so involves reinstating your drive from an image. So there are definitely alternatives to TRIM, some more friendly than others...though TRIM is the way to go if you like to install Windows and never touch it or reinstall again.
The other side of this coin is the size of the drive, how much free space it has and how you are using it. If there's little data, just the OS and a say 20% free space, then it's probably going to take a long time before it degrades - only writes cause this degradation, so whilst the OS will still be writing it will take a long time before performance is hurt, i.e. months. If you're copying lots of downloads to your desktop, lots of data being saved to your drive etc then the free cells will get written to and deleted sooner, putting them in the dirty state and either slowing the drive down, or requiring a clean.
So in summary, I'd go for an Intel X25MG2 (including Kingston SSDNow V 40GB) or Indilinx (Crucial M225, SuperTalent ME, OCZ Vertex/Agility) based drive over all others at the moment. The Samsung would be a clear 3rd choice even though they are cheaper at the moment, because of the lack of support, and also because to me, it just doesn't "feel" as good as the other 2 which are indistinguisable from one another in normal Windows tasks.#
Hope that helps
