Going back to conventional hard drives...

[cogrady84]

Just as an update to this thread...

I'd like to say thanks for the sheer volume of replies/support given on this subject.

I see now that I am kinda stuck unless I want to make a sizeable investment into a top of the range SSD (which I cannot afford right now). I am much more tempted with the vast amounts of storage and comparable performance offered by the F3 looking at a Priceerformance ratio.

The drives are ordered and will be a christmas present as it turns out, so i'll be having an interesting day! Not sure what to do with these SSD's now, ebay ***? It's a shame I managed to pick precisely the wrong time to buy an SSD and also failed to realise that I should have made a bigger investment at the time, but issues like this hadn't really come to light.

Thanks again, it's nice to see such a well informed, professional community coming together to help with this, hopefully this thread will inform a lot of people on the Pros/Cons of this scenario.

 

[redballoon]

The drives are ordered and will be a christmas present as it turns out, so i'll be having an interesting day! Not sure what to do with these SSD's now, ebay ***? It's a shame I managed to pick precisely the wrong time to buy an SSD and also failed to realise that I should have made a bigger investment at the time, but issues like this hadn't really come to light.

Yeah, ebay them. They still sell for around £90 despite having mediocre performance even compared to the newer Samsung SSDs.

Did you need the 120GB space for the system drive? You could have instead gone for an Intel 80GB after getting rid of the old ones.

 

[Zarf]

Is there anything that can be done to speed up the Kingston, I have looked on Kingston website and there is not firmware release or trim software.

As someone posted above, i'm happy to live with it, however in a few months i'm going to fully re-install to Windows 7. Will formatting the drive and filling everything back up again cripple the performance even more?

If you have a look through the OCZ forums at their first gen drives section (Solids, Apex etc) there are some good tips as the OCZ Solids are jMicron based.
The best solution is to run your card through a hardware RAID controller, which will buffer the writes in its onboard cache and eliminate stutter completely.
Other people are running their systems in a special mode whereby all disk writes are buffered in RAM and only committed to disk on shutdown - obviously you risk data loss if there's a power cut or your comp crashes though.

 

[Zarf]

Unrar'ing 4.7GB (50mb rar's) on my seageate 7200.11 is much faster than my M225 64GB even after wiped with wiper software.

All benchmark software I tried always stated my SSD write and read twice the speed than the seagate.

I think its all down to I/O speed, SSD sucks at reading and writing at same time, like unrar'ing, install big games (read installation files then write)

But SSD is the king for loading big applications due ultra high reading speed. (No need to write anything)

Reason I got the M225 was for a laugh and love to try out the new technology, also it was cheap at MM (£85 for a week old lol)

Fairly soon I will make image of OS from SSD the dump onto seagate then sell SSD in MM

I personally think SSD is nice but not for me as I am big time usenet user, I download lot stuff from usenet daily and unrar'ing on SSD is biggest let down for me

Something strange going on here, SSD's should be much better in situations where the drive has to do two things at once, reading/writing shouldn't matter. I did some benchmarks of my own (I'm a Usenet user too) and got an average of 36MB/s unrarring a 6.8GB file split over 70 parts using 7zip on my Samsung F1, and 48.6MB/s on my Intel X25-M G2.

 

[Corasik]

If you do wipe your drive, and get it trimmed properly... Windows superfetch, writes large amounts of data to your windows folder, with programs loaded on an SSD it has pretty much 0 performance benifits.. turn off superfetch.

Indexing also creates a fair bit of disk write, but not as bad as superfetch, but you may wish to evaluate your need for indexing services, if you dont search much for files and know where everything is stored it may be doing very little for your systems overall performance.

Disabling system restore will also prevent a large quantity of duplicate writes being made on a regular basis.

The biggest thing is, superfetch, indexing and system restore all perform fairly considerable amounts of "tiny writes" this is where the IOPS on 4k random writes really comes into play, and of course this is where jmicron and many cheap SSD's fall over. Disabling them should at least delay the onset of decreased performance, and help avoid stutters on less efficient SSD's.

 

[Corasik]

Something strange going on here, SSD's should be much better in situations where the drive has to do two things at once, reading/writing shouldn't matter. I did some benchmarks of my own (I'm a Usenet user too) and got an average of 36MB/s unrarring a 6.8GB file split over 70 parts using 7zip on my Samsung F1, and 48.6MB/s on my Intel X25-M G2.

Yes, SSD should definalty outperform a hard drive on multiple file processing, as its not limited by the phyiscal need to relocate the read/write heads above the data in question.

Good SSD's like your X25-M have pretty good IOPS on random write, which is why you get better performance, but anyone with an early jmicron SSD is probably going to hate anything which envolves file write .

 

[Zarf]

Yes, SSD should definalty outperform a hard drive on multiple file processing, as its not limited by the phyiscal need to relocate the read/write heads above the data in question.

Good SSD's like your X25-M have pretty good IOPS on random write, which is why you get better performance, but anyone with an early jmicron SSD is probably going to hate anything which envolves file write .

Yeah, he has an Indilinx based M225 though, which should return great results with this kind of thing, since we are actually dealing with large sequential reads and writes.
Anyone with an Indilinx drive able to test it out?

 

[ChileanLlama]

Yeah, he has an Indilinx based M225 though, which should return great results with this kind of thing, since we are actually dealing with large sequential reads and writes.
Anyone with an Indilinx drive able to test it out?

Only got M225s in RAID with no HDs to compare against, but I'm not seeing this behaviour with large RAR files. My impression is that it's the total opposite.

The OP on this topic doesn't say what the source/destination is, I'm wondering if it's like for like in both tests, or if the SSD is actually bottlenecked by having the source on a slower drive?

If the source/destination is the same drive, on a 64GB SSD that's going to be a fair bit of use and degradation over a short period. This would impact performance, but I'd still imagine it would be faster than source/destination on a mechanical HD. Certainly a case for enabling TRIM or running Wiper though.

 

[ChileanLlama]

If you do wipe your drive, and get it trimmed properly... Windows superfetch, writes large amounts of data to your windows folder, with programs loaded on an SSD it has pretty much 0 performance benifits.. turn off superfetch.

Indexing also creates a fair bit of disk write, but not as bad as superfetch, but you may wish to evaluate your need for indexing services, if you dont search much for files and know where everything is stored it may be doing very little for your systems overall performance.

Disabling system restore will also prevent a large quantity of duplicate writes being made on a regular basis.

The biggest thing is, superfetch, indexing and system restore all perform fairly considerable amounts of "tiny writes" this is where the IOPS on 4k random writes really comes into play, and of course this is where jmicron and many cheap SSD's fall over. Disabling them should at least delay the onset of decreased performance, and help avoid stutters on less efficient SSD's.

I can see where you're coming from, and there may be merits on a slower, first generation SSD but;

Superfetch may actually help slower SSDs, in the same way it was designed to help with HDs. Worth trying and seeing whether there's an improvement or not though. I think it was the Engineering Windows 7 Blog on SSDs that said Windows 7 would test for this before disabling Superfetch.

Indexing. It's not active 100% of the time, usually fits and bursts with usually more reads than writes, so again I don't think this is going to really hurt performance or degradation significantly. Again try it.

System Restore. My understanding is that this is mainly large writes, but it's not something that is going to be running that regularly. Again try it.

Main reason for posting this reply is that they may be very useful for slower drives, but with more modern SSDs changing these certainly doesn't have much, if any, impact on performance.

 

[cogrady84]

Can anyone help me find an original spec sheet for my samsung 1st gen 64gb ssd? it seems they are unavailable in most online stores and samsung have given the same model number to the new gen drives, so have overwritten the original specification on their site (speeds etc...)

MMCRE64G5MPP-0VA is what is shown as the model in POST.

This is just to assist in the sale of the drives.

 

[ChileanLlama]

http://www.samsung.com/global/busin...ucts/flash/ssd/2008/down/SATA_3.0Gbps_MLC.pdf

HTH

 

[Subliminal Aura]

wesley, interesting comments.

I too am heavy on usenet but would never have considered placing the install on an SSD... A big no no. You're right it's heavy on the disks.

My setup consists of conventional SATA disks.

RAID0 - OS

RAID0 - Big temp ie downloads

Gigabit network mount (NAS) - Autounpack of usenet downloads.

This means the unrar/par fixing is split over the two RAIDs and then the completed file is spat out to the NAS

 

[Duke]

Hmm bit late as you've bought new drives now but if the Samsung doesn't support GC or TRIM, you need to run AS-Cleaner which will wipe the free space on the drives. Should work in RAID if you don't break the pair? There is a lot of info on the OCZ forums.

 

[ridin8ude]

Just to chime in I'm going through the same decision process regarding my 3x OCZ Vertex 30GB SSDs in Raid 0. The performance is fine, but the constant random lockups have made me decide to stop fiddling with them.

I'll continue using them probably as gaming drives but will run 3x Samsung F3 1TB in Raid 0 on my Adaptec 2405 controller. Time will tell if the performance is noticeably slower!

 

[jaybee]

Doesn't really help the OP but I have to say I'm glad I've held off SSDs. I've been harping on about them since last summer and waiting to buy one for Windows 7 etc. Just going to wait now until late into 2010 when they drop in price and problems become ironed out.

 

[Subliminal Aura]

I don't particularly like the maintenance aspects of ssds and for high volume disk writes just forget it

 

[SimonLC]

I was wondering as I put a few favourites together (not that I can even afford a new pc yet) whether I should get the SSD system drive option So glad I happened upon this thread Now I can review my favs or just bin them maybe and start over
...
[as a side note I really like dis goodfellas avatar theme youse got goin hea but I gotta make a rinky-dink objection see I dont want to be lookin like dis guy Fredo its bad luck yknow I umbly ax to be lookin like Carmine from Casino and I got a head&shoulders of Carmine & I can do some psd ing to make it like b&w yknow But if it is a rank thing okay okay I apologiz for any disrespect to all present uhn]

 

[Deleted member 76686]

Holy necros batman.

 

[SimonLC]

Yeah I did it again - I didnt notice the dates in all my enthusiasm So this threads closed okay I zombied it & Im a Sfigato fo dat but Id like to upload the gangster Carmine.png I just made so maybe the admins could use it for another ranked profile image Yet how to donate it IDK

 

[Malt_Vinegar]

Yeah I did it again - I didnt notice the dates in all my enthusiasm So this threads closed okay I zombied it & Im a Sfigato fo dat but Id like to upload the gangster Carmine.png I just made so maybe the admins could use it for another ranked profile image Yet how to donate it IDK

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