I know that I could flip back and forth between the various charts to calculate the performance per a watt, but it be great to get a consolidated chart that graphed the drives based upon write (read?) performance per a watt. Additionally analyzing drives purely based upon their write/read performance and/or purely based upon their power consumption seems a bit meaningless. It should be very easy to make a drive consumes almost no power but writes slower than a 3 1/2" floppy. Especially as you see some drives perform more than twice as fast as others.
Just a suggestion.
P.S. It might not be a bad idea to do the same for your other reviews, such as video cards and CPUs.
Agreed. In most reviews (video cards for example) performance per watt is somewhat less important as normally you'll be modeling or gaming and the power draw is going to be pretty stable.
But for a hard drive, especially when many of these will be notebook replacements, it is very important. I have an Intel G2 80GB and love it, and when I look at the power consumption numbers it looks better than the C300. But I'm not naive to the fact that (when TRIM'd) the C300 crushes the G2 in pretty much every benchmark. What that tells me is that in a real-world result the C300 would use more power but get the job done in a shorter time and since we aren't spinning up a traditional platter, the HD behaves very much like a modern Intel CPU and would go idle.
That hurry up and get idle I think would skew those power consumption charts heavily.
What I would design would be a benchmark that has a set instruction set (write 2GB of random, 2 GB of sequential, read 10GB of data), and then measure the TOTAL power of the drive consumed during that time. Then report that total power number and use it for future reviews (a static number to rank similar to a PCMark or Vantage score)
I think the best way to calculate efficiency is measuring the total energy used by the drive doing the "Typical Workload" test. Of course, if Anand could do the same with the "Heavy Downloading Workload" it would be great. IMO there is no need for the "Gaming Workload" though, usually who looks for the power graphs is aiming the improvness(does this word exist?) of a notebook's battery life, and frequently who cares about that, do not game on battery. Just a question to Anand, do you feel difference between two SSDs, say the Nova one and the Crucial?
It's kind of funny to see someone asking for power efficiency for something which is probably the most power efficient thing in the entire PC, especially if you compare it to HDDs. I understand it's interesting and maybe even important for laptops, though.
I'd rather be interested in more detailed power draw and/or efficiency analysis in case where the power draw really hurts: GPUs and to a lesser extent CPU. For example: how does the power draw of a GF100 improve under load if you watercool it? Sure, not very relevant for most users.. but the difference should be surprisingly large.
If you want best overall performance go sandforce. The only real large advantage the crucial drive had was in read performance. sysmark et al were within a few hundred points of one another. So the overall feel of the system will be identical till you either do some heavy read ops or conversely you fill the drive and dont trim it. With the prices being about the same for the 100 vs 128 the better performer is the sandforce drives.
Really? You'd take the performance tricks and the risk of real data that doesn't fit SandFarce's fancy algorithms over the straight honest performance of the Crucial drive? That's odd.
I've had my Crucial drive since it came out and it's been great. In spite of Anand's corner-case bashing the first version firmware has been rock solid. Debating even if I want to bother with the firmware upgrade, but I'll probably do it.
Relying on TRIM and optimizing for the least stressful case is also a "performance trick", so your implication that Sandforce uses such tricks and Micron does not is wrong. Also your childish pun on the Sandforce name shows alot about where you are coming from.
The Sandforce and the Micron drives look to have very similar performance in the vast majority of cases, so shin0bi272 is spot-on. And the increased cost of the Crucial drive would seem to be the deciding factor for me.
But you can't go wrong with either offering it would seem, so pick whichever you like best. As for myself, I would pick Sandforce, only because of my extreme aversion to any chance of degraded drive performance, having been bitten by stuttering of early drives. Not saying that the Crucial drive is anything like a JMicron, but I personally value the resiliency of the Sandforce controller very highly, and would pay some peak performance cost happily for the guarantee of better worst-case performance.
Not everyone will, or should, have the same opinion on this; those less averse to the risks of worst-case performance degredation would be well served by the Crucial drive.
Having read this review, I'm considering buying one of the 100GB "OCZ Vertex 2" drives used in this article, but I'm not sure exactly which is the correct drive model as there seem to be numerous "Vertex 2" drives on the OCZ website!!
Is it the Pro Series or EX Series or just the standard Vertex 2 series???
A standard Vertex 2 120GB drive is all you need. The 100GB capacities will probably be phased out by most SandForce partners over time as there's no tangible performance benefit for desktop workloads.
I just used the 100GB data we had in the engine which is why it appears as such in the charts.
There are 4 different Vertex 2 drives from OCZ as i know: -> the standard Vertex 2, which uses MLC flash and has ~13% overprovisioning (~91GB usable capacity for the 100/128GB model) -> then there is a Vertex 2e, which is the same as the normal Vertex 2, but with a modified firmware for ~7% overprovisioning (~111GB usable capacity for the 100/128GB model) -> then there is a Vertex 2 pro, wich also uses MLC flash and also has ~13% overprovisioning, but also has a supercap to help out on a sudden power loss (more like an enterprise feature) -> and an last there is the Vertex 2 EX: this drive uses SLC flash and therefor is way to expensive for normal desktop use
the first 3 should perform nearly identical. the last is supposed to be quite superior in performance, but i havn't seen any reliable performance numbers as of yet - anand? ;).
In normal desktop use there's no reason to get the standard drive. Sandforce initially designed its controllers for the enterprise market and servers can be much more brutal on a drive than end user computers are. On a server workload the extra scratch space was useful, but when they moved over to consumer drives it had no benefit. The 2e was released with an updated firmware once it became clear the controller was just wasting space.
Let me answer: there will be OCZ 'Vertex 2' firmware updates coming out that will allow you to "switch" between 100GB and 120GB on the same drive. So far no significant performance difference have been found, but time is an interesting factor here, noone had months or years to test it, and users who visit forums and write their experiences are usually not known for torturing their SSDs 24/7 just to see what happens/kill them/wear them out.
Based on the data available at the OCZ Support Forums, grab the 100GB or 120GB version, whichever you can cheaper, and later on you will be able to choose how much provisioning you want, 7 or 13%.
When your 120GB Vertex 2 SSD is full and you write 8GBs of data (7% of 128GB) in a short period, yes, then there can be degradation. But how likely is that, really?
Also, in average, you can write an MLC cell 10,000 times before you wear it out. This means, to evenly wear out all the cells of your Vertex 2, you need to write 10,000x120GB=1200 TERABYTES on your drive. Sure, when you only write a smaller than 4KB file, the whole cell has to be rewritten, but still, as a system drive, which is not supposed to contain huge files, in the size of several Gigs (raided Raptors are for that), when will you write 1000 Terabytes? By that time, your SSD is long outdated, because 10 years passed by.
More concretely: if you write 275 GBs EVERYday to your SSD for 10 years, 365 days a year, then you wrote 1000 TBs. Lets say i didn't calculate with a bunch of factors, and I am wrong to 3:1 degree and your drives wears out in 200TBs, that is 100GBs a day for 10 years. When will you "rewrite" the whole size of your SSD in daily usage?
Catch my drift?
Buy your drive and don't worry, just enjoy it, the same as I did. Have regular backups as this is still new technology, but be ready to be blown away if this is going to be your first SSD - you will realize that it was not stronger CPUs and overclocking that was needed to make a system snappy, but eliminating the most-overlooked bottleneck: the old HDD.
Actually i made a quick calculation: assuming you can write with 100MB/sec to your Vertex 2 continuously, 24/7, it would still take *120 days* to wear out all the cells, writing to them 10,000 times each. No mortal user had the time to try this yet. :))
FYI, in December '09 Micron announced that their MLC write durability increased significantly. Anything that has their 34nm chips (C300, maybe others) will have much better durability than your figures.
It seems the smart move would be waiting for the next generation of SSD's by Intel. Assuming it would be a SATA 3 drives paired with P65 it should beat anything on the table at the moment.
I will say it again, and keep saying it till it happens. Most people are not interested in 100-300GB SSD (except for lower prices obviously) or in 30-40GB SSD's. It's the 50-80GB ones that most people are interested in. That's about the sweet spot of capacity that is needed.
The Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB is x times more interesting then it's bigger brothers, it's much cheaper, not only in absolute terms, but also in capacity/euro. And by far the best buy atm in my eyes.
The line-up I want to see would be about something like this: - Kingston V-series S2 64GB - Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 64GB - Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB - OCZ Solid II 60GB - OCZ Onyx 64GB - OCZ Agility 2 60GB - OCZ Vertex 2 60GB - Corsair Force 60GB And perhaps some of the other, cheaper Corsair SSD's.
Really? I have 3 computers, and can see a use for the 30-40GB, 60-80GB, and 100+GB size drives depending on which system I am thinking of. For my HTPC, a small drive would be fine, all it holds is the OS. For my desktop, I have an 80GB X25G2, as IMO a smaller drive would be iffy when 2 operating systems are installed on the drive, and allowing for extra spare area. For my laptop I wouldn't consider anything under 100GB, as I don't want to have to carry a separate external drive to store stuff to.
I'll second that - my laptop has the 160 gig Intel G2 drive in it because I have installed slightly more than the OS on it (a few steam games + WoW = need more than 80 gig).
I don't need more than about 120-160 gigs on my laptop (that's what my home server is for). My desktop would be in the same boat - I'd need enough "space" to install some large applications on it plus the OS.
I've heard people recommend that you should install applications on spindle drives, but the reality is that some of those applications are very slow loading on a spindle drive.
Personally, I don't care if my OS takes 5 minutes to boot. I almost never shut down anyway.
Fantastic article as always, Anand. Informative, investigative, and conclusive. I couldn't ask for anything else ( other than the funds to purchase a Vertex 2 :P ).
Crucial claims to store very little user data in the external DRAM, it's mostly to give the firmware room to store mapping tables and history data to make better decisions about how to organize future writes.
Have you ever actually put this to the test, though?
Intel claims they do the exact same thing with their DRAM, yet I have had applications that were not in use become corrupt after a sudden power loss (i.e. bluescreen after resuming from hibernation, cat depressing laptop power button) on my Intel G2 drives. The mechanical drives that were in the exact same system prior to being replaced by SSDs only lost minimal amounts of data (and typically only the data in use at the time) under the exact same power loss scenarios.
My first SSD - And it couldn't be picked up after just 5 hours. Pretty crushed :s
It'd been shipped with Firmware 0001 which I'm guessing was a large oversight by Crucial or the retailer. I wasn't about to go flashing a £500 drive, so it's in RMA as we speak.
Will be waiting for Intel's 25nm offerings before dipping my burned toes again...
Are there any plans to test these drives in RAID configuration? You've already done so with Intel's cheapest value drive, but for those of us who are considering in the higher end drives, it would be interesting to know such things as will a pair of Crucial RealSSD 128GB drives on SATA outperform a single 256GB on SATA 6Gb... or even how well 4 of the 64GB drives compare as well. Also, how do the Sandforce drives compare in RAID to the others.
Do SandForce controllers suffer when BitLocker is enabled? I'm guessing there would be less predictable data patterns for it's controller to use, and thus might be slower? Would that then solidly put the lead in Crucials favor?
yes, a sandforce drive should be slower in general when used with third party encryption as all data seems random to the drive then and the compression algorithms have nothing to compress. i'm not sure if the sf1200 controller can, but the sf1500 controller definitely can encrypt the data on the drive by themself storing it in an aes-128 encrypted format.
quote from the sandforce site: "DuraClass technology automatically stores data in a secure, AES-128 encrypted format. This also prevents would-be thieves from extracting data directly from the flash memory should they ever have access to the drive." (http://www.sandforce.com/index.php?id=21&paren...
question is how good or usable their implementation is?! :)
last year the ssd market was pretty cut and clear with what was good and what wasn't. There have been a lot of advances recently, and it's getting hard to keep track of what manufacturers with what controllers work well in what configurations. I'd really love to see an SSD buying guide with all of the current drives, possibly separated into workstation, laptop, and server use sections.
I just sent my first SSD back to Crucial. I called. They RMA'ed me and will send a replacement ASAP. I am impressed. I have 5 year warranties on the M225 series SSDs, and they never even blinked...send it back and they will replace it.
This was the only M225 that I have installed that does not have 1916 firmware.
My comment is on the prices. If any of you recall, I was the guy who already had bought, installed and used 5 Crucial M225 128GB SSDs when I decided to try Sandforce in the OWC SSD. After I bought the SSD and ON THE DAY IT SHIPPED, OWC changed their website and said that the controllers were Sandforce 1200 and not the 1500 that I was told when I puurchased. It was still a good deal, but I was upset with the bait and switch, so I refused delivery and had it returned.
I then purchased a Crucial M225 for myself, this one the 256GB flavor.
I want to say that I have had no problems. Peak reads reach about 240MB/s and average reads are about 215MB/sec with large files. Writes are less, about 175-180MB/sec for larger files. With small files like Anand uses, my writes are about 125MB/sec and my small file reads are about 145MB/sec.
Very small files read and write much slower, in the 5-25MB/sec range, but those are files that are very small...in the 4-20KB range.
What amazes me is the speed. While 5MB/sec may sound slow, it is not, at least when you consider that these are 4KB files. These small files write and read nearly instantly.
I paid $525 for the drive. I have seen them as low as $509. This is a great price! Now that I have seen the newest article here by Anand, I really understand that my outdated M225 is still a great deal at $525.
I would like to see this drive, or a comparable one, listed in the lineup with these newer drives. While not as fast, I believe them to be a good value when sale priced. I even saw a Western Digital 128GB SSD a few weeks ago for $219 with free shipping. They were gone very quickly!
Thanks for the followup review - I have been using a 256gb C300 on each of my Poweredge T710 servers for the last few months with great results.
I am curious - does applying the destructive firmware update restore the drive to peak performance, or should it be coupled with some kind of secure erase?
This is all very interesting, and new SSDs seems to hit the market constantly. But the differences seems to be mostly software related i.e firmware. What are the bottleneck to get full SATA speed? Is it the NAND flash them selves? And if so, what is on the horizon when it comes to this type of memory?
I am kind of confused about the figures shown in that page, what axis X represents? Does it mean how much capacity has been filled? Or anywhere I can find explanations?
If yes, then for crucial drive, why the performance dropped more than 50% just after less than 10GB data is filled? Since from my understanding, if there are only a small percentage capacity is filled, there are still a lot of free space, the random performance should not drop so rapidly?
Anand, or someone else here can explain my confusion? Thanks!
Here's a question. If you have Windows 7 running under BootCamp on a Mac, and have an SSD that's partitioned with 1 partition being the Mac OS X boot drive (HFS+) and the other being the Windows 7 boot drive (NTFS), and finally have an HFS driver like Mediafour's MacDrive to read the HFS+ partition, will TRIM work on that SSD?
Since I know Anand has a couple of Macs, and possibly other readers, can anyone verify this?
I've been wondering how this particular scenario would affect the performance of SSD's. I believe that many users fall into this pattern:
- Laptop with smallish HD (same range as SSDs) - A few months after purchase the drive is ~90% full (Original OS + Crapware, Updates,Office + files, Emails + archives, photos + videos, leftover crap from every app, etc)
At this point, every write request starts hitting the same area (some old data is deleted to free space and new data from emails, browser cache, downloads replaces it).
Will the write leveling algorithms affect the performance of SSDs ? How much?
I am wondering why random read is slower than random write. Write operation is always slower than read, and sequential write is slower than sequential read. Why random read is slower? Is it because that the random read data is not 4K aligned?
With small random data, the overhead of looking up where the data is to retrieve it begins to show up, compared to simply identifying an empty spot to store something. This is somewhat related to why TRIM is important, keeps empty/no-longer-used blocks readily available.
I have two Crucial C300 drives in two different HP laptops. Both have ICH9, Intel GM/PM45 Chipsets. These work fine using the Microsoft AHCI 1.0 driver. If I use the Intel RST 9.6.0.1014 driver, I get BSODs intermittently on boot and almost always waking from sleep. These are known issues reported in several posts on the Crucial C300 forum and also seem to be a problem with the Sandforce drives as discussed on the OCZ forums. If I put an Intel SSD in the laptops, I have no problem with the RST drivers.
So I sent and email to Crucial asking about the problem. I figure there is some type of firmware issue. Here is their response:
Hello - - - - - - - - -,
Thank you for contacting Crucial. It sounds like the C300 drives are functioning properly if you get them to work just fine with the Microsoft drivers. We haven't had any reports of issues with the our SSD and the Intel Rapid Storage driver. We will keep our ears open for similar issues. In the meantime I will refer you to Intel to see if they have had heard of an issue with their driver with our drives.
If you have further questions, please visit the Crucial Community at http://www.crucial.com/help. For sales questions, try our online chat service at http://www.crucial.com/company/contacts.aspx. Our hours are Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Mountain Time). At Crucial, we are committed to providing high-quality products and reliable service and support.
Anand you really should've mentioned in this review that the AMD AHCI drivers do NOT pass on the TRIM command, so even w/ Win7 this SSD will lose TRIM support w/ the AMD AHCI drivers, and we'll get the abysmal long term performance u highlighted in your TRIM sectino). AMD needs to feel the heat in this regards cause they've been lazy as hell & need to get their stuff together. This is not a problem w/ Intel chipsets, but im really peeved that as of October 2010, there is STILL NO TRIM support from AMD. really pathetic on their part, SSDs are becoming less than $100 & they dont care to implement TRIM support for us. We're stuck using the much less performing MS drivers.
Anandtech really needs to emphasize this, otherwise i never would've bought this drive and went w/ a sandforce based one for its internal garbage collection, but i didnt realize AMD was so behind the times.
The degradation you Anand got with the c300 128gb after writes is not reproducible. Even without trim the c300's GC in rev 002 firmware was made extremely aggressive b/c the engineers knew that many people would use the drive without trim. I wanted to contact anand but i do not know how so i am posting here, if proof is needed it will be provided. After seeing results the GC is very aggressive and the drive will stand up to a beating stronger than a sandforce competitor, i was under the impression that this review is correct, but after seeing the results it is evident that those results cannot be reproduced and the write speeds go down only 5-10mb/s from original.
Hi Anand. What really bugs me is that I got EXACTLY the opposite impression of the OCZ Vertex 2, 240GB. :-( In fact all I had to do is one of two simple things. One was to simply copy say 100GB or so of files, like my Flight Simulator X, or Crysis folder, along with 40GB of VMWare files to the hard drive, and my CrystalMark write score would drop. Also the simple act of partitioning the SDD so I had a 32GB OS partition (C:), and the remainder on D:, also helped to bring the read and write speed down on the OCZ when I reloaded an IMAGE backup of my OS. And this is a typical thing a lot of people in the know do. You could do all these things to a standard HDD and not lose anything.
I tried every thing under the sun, including using Paragons align tool, also making sure my drive was reset with the toolbox first etc. Switching to AHCI and back. Nothing helped, except simply letting the Windows 7 DVD make it's partition, and making it ONE BIG 220GB or so partition. And then I only got about 220MB/s read sequential, and 145MB/s write. Random was also ok, but nothing great. Then I loaded a few GB's into this one big partition, and guess what? It too slowed down. It held up longer than my method of loading a cloned image to C:, but It only took me about 20 minutes to bring my drive to figures like 170MB for read, and 110 MB/sec write by transferring only ONE group of files to D: in the "Program Files" folder.
Then out of curiosity I deleted a 20GB folder, then transferred it back to the SSD and this resulted in having 85MB/sec, slow-as-a-cow-on-valium writes. I tried all sorts of things, and nothing short of removing the partition and clearing the drive brought the speed back up to 220MB and 145MB.. I think TRIM was working because I witnessed the scores improve very slightly when I left it over night. Or tried things I had read in forums, or even did "force trim" later on. But the improvements never got me back. I was stuck on 170MB/sec read and 128 or write.
Also this is on an i7 920 at 3.6Ghz, on an Asus board. This is no old or cheap machine! So my test on a clean install of windows 7 was the best, but disappointing as well. My image backups are also of clean installs and should also perform well, but they don't on OCZ.
Now here is where it gets VERY interesting. My first SSD was an barely known PNY 128GB with little support, documentation. It only supports TRIM, and no instructions, nothing on the net really. I beat the living c_rap out of it for 6 weeks. I partitioned it as above, and reloaded many, many cloned images of Windows 7 and Windows XP, over and over on C:. I made folders and deleted them on D:. At the end of 6 weeks, I got the SAME benchmark scores of 240MB/sec Read, and 150MB/sec write. No nonsense. But I had bought the OCZ Because I believed I was stepping up to higher quality and bigger size etc. This taught me that there is something right that PNY did and something very wrong with how OCZ handles their GC or Trim. I've also found reviewers saying the OCZ slows down too easily on Amazon. So again, I'm frustrated because your article is pretty much saying the opposite of what I experienced or expected.
I NEED an SSD that behaves like a REAL HD, except fast of course. Not something that slows down. I need to be able to make partitions and do my experiments etc. So because I know the PNY was fine, I figured it must be OCZ and I just went and ordered a Crucial C300 that isn't here yet. I figured it was a step above the OCZ and because it doesn't rely on sand force. I figured I wouldn't have a boat load of phony benches, along with ATTO with high marks because the data compressed so nicely as it did with the OCZ.
But now I read this article, and it's eluding to the fact that the C300 actually isn't so hot against the OCZ, which is obviously disappointing. The only thing I can hope for is that somehow the C300 won't mind me making a partition for operating system, and another for data. But then again, the OCZ slowed down even on one partition. I mean, who in their right mind is stupid enough to get stuck with 12GB of OS Plus 200GB of programs and data added into the SAME partition 2 years down the line? In the event they need to reload their OS, it makes it a huge task. I surely don't want to continually backup 200GB plus. My system can currently be reloaded in 5 minutes. That's why I do that. I just wish the SSD makers understood that not everyone wants to erase their HD every time and stick in a w7 disc and start all over to get their advertised speeds ( or even less)
And what happens if someone backs up their system (as they should), and then they need to reload it? Then what? Their SSD write scores will fall. I've seen the write speeds go below my green WD HD. I think this is an unacceptable problem that SSD's have and it needs to be resolved. If that Crucial C300 gets here next week and it slows down, you know what? I will return it along with the OCZ and I am going to buy back the PNY I mistakenly returned. Another thing is I am just amazed no one has done a review the PNY. It's not the best, but having an SSD that keeps its speed is worth more to me than anything. On the other hand, I have no clue as to why the PNY did so well, or how it works, and I'm sure it needs more testing. Thanks for the review. Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
After reading Anand reviews on the c300, i was amazed by the performance of the drive even for the 128gb model and since i have a Rampage III gene with a 6gb Marvell 9128 controller i was thinking of buying one.
Finally 3 days ago the drive was 250$ on newegg so i bought it.
Going around on forum i discover with great disappointment that the 6gbs Marvell controller "apparently" don't issue the TRIM command, is it true ?
Nobodies seem to have a definitive answer, Crucial don't have one, Marvell are under NDA so they don't answer anyone, Asus Told somebody that they should use the Intel controller instead to ensure TRIM support.
1- Is the Marvell controller supporting Trim and is there a way to test that ? (the "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" command is not the answer because it's only telling if the OS is issuing the command and that's not where the problem is.)
2- Some Claim that with the latest Marvell driver which is 1.0.00.1051 make the TRIM working. Some claim that it don't.
3-Other claim that the Microsoft ACHI drivers instead of Marvell's one work with TRIM.
It would be very nice if you Anand could test that particular scenario (C300 With Marvell 9128 6gbs windows 7 64) To see if the TRIM command work.
In the end not only me will benefit, but the whole community as well.
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fgmg2 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
I know that I could flip back and forth between the various charts to calculate the performance per a watt, but it be great to get a consolidated chart that graphed the drives based upon write (read?) performance per a watt.Additionally analyzing drives purely based upon their write/read performance and/or purely based upon their power consumption seems a bit meaningless. It should be very easy to make a drive consumes almost no power but writes slower than a 3 1/2" floppy. Especially as you see some drives perform more than twice as fast as others.
Just a suggestion.
P.S. It might not be a bad idea to do the same for your other reviews, such as video cards and CPUs.
7Enigma - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Agreed. In most reviews (video cards for example) performance per watt is somewhat less important as normally you'll be modeling or gaming and the power draw is going to be pretty stable.But for a hard drive, especially when many of these will be notebook replacements, it is very important. I have an Intel G2 80GB and love it, and when I look at the power consumption numbers it looks better than the C300. But I'm not naive to the fact that (when TRIM'd) the C300 crushes the G2 in pretty much every benchmark. What that tells me is that in a real-world result the C300 would use more power but get the job done in a shorter time and since we aren't spinning up a traditional platter, the HD behaves very much like a modern Intel CPU and would go idle.
That hurry up and get idle I think would skew those power consumption charts heavily.
What I would design would be a benchmark that has a set instruction set (write 2GB of random, 2 GB of sequential, read 10GB of data), and then measure the TOTAL power of the drive consumed during that time. Then report that total power number and use it for future reviews (a static number to rank similar to a PCMark or Vantage score)
Ernestds - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
I think the best way to calculate efficiency is measuring the total energy used by the drive doing the "Typical Workload" test. Of course, if Anand could do the same with the "Heavy Downloading Workload" it would be great. IMO there is no need for the "Gaming Workload" though, usually who looks for the power graphs is aiming the improvness(does this word exist?) of a notebook's battery life, and frequently who cares about that, do not game on battery.Just a question to Anand, do you feel difference between two SSDs, say the Nova one and the Crucial?
Keep on the great work!
MrSpadge - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
It's kind of funny to see someone asking for power efficiency for something which is probably the most power efficient thing in the entire PC, especially if you compare it to HDDs. I understand it's interesting and maybe even important for laptops, though.I'd rather be interested in more detailed power draw and/or efficiency analysis in case where the power draw really hurts: GPUs and to a lesser extent CPU. For example: how does the power draw of a GF100 improve under load if you watercool it? Sure, not very relevant for most users.. but the difference should be surprisingly large.
shin0bi272 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
If you want best overall performance go sandforce. The only real large advantage the crucial drive had was in read performance. sysmark et al were within a few hundred points of one another. So the overall feel of the system will be identical till you either do some heavy read ops or conversely you fill the drive and dont trim it. With the prices being about the same for the 100 vs 128 the better performer is the sandforce drives.Techdad - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Really? You'd take the performance tricks and the risk of real data that doesn't fit SandFarce's fancy algorithms over the straight honest performance of the Crucial drive? That's odd.I've had my Crucial drive since it came out and it's been great. In spite of Anand's corner-case bashing the first version firmware has been rock solid. Debating even if I want to bother with the firmware upgrade, but I'll probably do it.
bji - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Relying on TRIM and optimizing for the least stressful case is also a "performance trick", so your implication that Sandforce uses such tricks and Micron does not is wrong. Also your childish pun on the Sandforce name shows alot about where you are coming from.The Sandforce and the Micron drives look to have very similar performance in the vast majority of cases, so shin0bi272 is spot-on. And the increased cost of the Crucial drive would seem to be the deciding factor for me.
But you can't go wrong with either offering it would seem, so pick whichever you like best. As for myself, I would pick Sandforce, only because of my extreme aversion to any chance of degraded drive performance, having been bitten by stuttering of early drives. Not saying that the Crucial drive is anything like a JMicron, but I personally value the resiliency of the Sandforce controller very highly, and would pay some peak performance cost happily for the guarantee of better worst-case performance.
Not everyone will, or should, have the same opinion on this; those less averse to the risks of worst-case performance degredation would be well served by the Crucial drive.
hotlips69 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Having read this review, I'm considering buying one of the 100GB "OCZ Vertex 2" drives used in this article, but I'm not sure exactly which is the correct drive model as there seem to be numerous "Vertex 2" drives on the OCZ website!!Is it the Pro Series or EX Series or just the standard Vertex 2 series???
hotlips69 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
....also, why is it listed as 120GB in the chart on page 1 of the article?Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
A standard Vertex 2 120GB drive is all you need. The 100GB capacities will probably be phased out by most SandForce partners over time as there's no tangible performance benefit for desktop workloads.I just used the 100GB data we had in the engine which is why it appears as such in the charts.
Take care,
Anand
Breit - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
There are 4 different Vertex 2 drives from OCZ as i know:-> the standard Vertex 2, which uses MLC flash and has ~13% overprovisioning (~91GB usable capacity for the 100/128GB model)
-> then there is a Vertex 2e, which is the same as the normal Vertex 2, but with a modified firmware for ~7% overprovisioning (~111GB usable capacity for the 100/128GB model)
-> then there is a Vertex 2 pro, wich also uses MLC flash and also has ~13% overprovisioning, but also has a supercap to help out on a sudden power loss (more like an enterprise feature)
-> and an last there is the Vertex 2 EX: this drive uses SLC flash and therefor is way to expensive for normal desktop use
the first 3 should perform nearly identical. the last is supposed to be quite superior in performance, but i havn't seen any reliable performance numbers as of yet - anand? ;).
hotlips69 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Thx for the info!Why would anyone buy the Vertex 2 "standard" over the Vertex "2e" if it performs the same, but has a larger usuable capacity?
Would there not be a performance hit if there is only 7% provisioning compared to 13% if the drive got full???
DanNeely - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
In normal desktop use there's no reason to get the standard drive. Sandforce initially designed its controllers for the enterprise market and servers can be much more brutal on a drive than end user computers are. On a server workload the extra scratch space was useful, but when they moved over to consumer drives it had no benefit. The 2e was released with an updated firmware once it became clear the controller was just wasting space.jedighost - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Let me answer: there will be OCZ 'Vertex 2' firmware updates coming out that will allow you to "switch" between 100GB and 120GB on the same drive. So far no significant performance difference have been found, but time is an interesting factor here, noone had months or years to test it, and users who visit forums and write their experiences are usually not known for torturing their SSDs 24/7 just to see what happens/kill them/wear them out.Based on the data available at the OCZ Support Forums, grab the 100GB or 120GB version, whichever you can cheaper, and later on you will be able to choose how much provisioning you want, 7 or 13%.
When your 120GB Vertex 2 SSD is full and you write 8GBs of data (7% of 128GB) in a short period, yes, then there can be degradation. But how likely is that, really?
Also, in average, you can write an MLC cell 10,000 times before you wear it out. This means, to evenly wear out all the cells of your Vertex 2, you need to write 10,000x120GB=1200 TERABYTES on your drive. Sure, when you only write a smaller than 4KB file, the whole cell has to be rewritten, but still, as a system drive, which is not supposed to contain huge files, in the size of several Gigs (raided Raptors are for that), when will you write 1000 Terabytes? By that time, your SSD is long outdated, because 10 years passed by.
More concretely: if you write 275 GBs EVERYday to your SSD for 10 years, 365 days a year, then you wrote 1000 TBs. Lets say i didn't calculate with a bunch of factors, and I am wrong to 3:1 degree and your drives wears out in 200TBs, that is 100GBs a day for 10 years. When will you "rewrite" the whole size of your SSD in daily usage?
Catch my drift?
Buy your drive and don't worry, just enjoy it, the same as I did. Have regular backups as this is still new technology, but be ready to be blown away if this is going to be your first SSD - you will realize that it was not stronger CPUs and overclocking that was needed to make a system snappy, but eliminating the most-overlooked bottleneck: the old HDD.
jedighost - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Actually i made a quick calculation: assuming you can write with 100MB/sec to your Vertex 2 continuously, 24/7, it would still take *120 days* to wear out all the cells, writing to them 10,000 times each. No mortal user had the time to try this yet. :))sor - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - link
FYI, in December '09 Micron announced that their MLC write durability increased significantly. Anything that has their 34nm chips (C300, maybe others) will have much better durability than your figures.Drazick - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
It seems the smart move would be waiting for the next generation of SSD's by Intel.Assuming it would be a SATA 3 drives paired with P65 it should beat anything on the table at the moment.
Jonathan Dum - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Not to mention 25nm NAND from Intel/Micron... longest wait ever. Though I wonder when all the other guys like OCZ will get 25nm?james.jwb - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Anand, what are your recommendations for around the 60-80GB mark? Any changes from your conclusion above?Phate-13 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
I will say it again, and keep saying it till it happens. Most people are not interested in 100-300GB SSD (except for lower prices obviously) or in 30-40GB SSD's. It's the 50-80GB ones that most people are interested in. That's about the sweet spot of capacity that is needed.The Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB is x times more interesting then it's bigger brothers, it's much cheaper, not only in absolute terms, but also in capacity/euro. And by far the best buy atm in my eyes.
The line-up I want to see would be about something like this:
- Kingston V-series S2 64GB
- Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 64GB
- Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB
- OCZ Solid II 60GB
- OCZ Onyx 64GB
- OCZ Agility 2 60GB
- OCZ Vertex 2 60GB
- Corsair Force 60GB
And perhaps some of the other, cheaper Corsair SSD's.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Really? I have 3 computers, and can see a use for the 30-40GB, 60-80GB, and 100+GB size drives depending on which system I am thinking of. For my HTPC, a small drive would be fine, all it holds is the OS. For my desktop, I have an 80GB X25G2, as IMO a smaller drive would be iffy when 2 operating systems are installed on the drive, and allowing for extra spare area. For my laptop I wouldn't consider anything under 100GB, as I don't want to have to carry a separate external drive to store stuff to.erple2 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
I'll second that - my laptop has the 160 gig Intel G2 drive in it because I have installed slightly more than the OS on it (a few steam games + WoW = need more than 80 gig).I don't need more than about 120-160 gigs on my laptop (that's what my home server is for). My desktop would be in the same boat - I'd need enough "space" to install some large applications on it plus the OS.
I've heard people recommend that you should install applications on spindle drives, but the reality is that some of those applications are very slow loading on a spindle drive.
Personally, I don't care if my OS takes 5 minutes to boot. I almost never shut down anyway.
neoflux - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Fantastic article as always, Anand. Informative, investigative, and conclusive. I couldn't ask for anything else ( other than the funds to purchase a Vertex 2 :P ).Slaimus - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
With such a large DRAM cache, is there greater risk of data corruption when there is a power outage or power supply failure?Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Crucial claims to store very little user data in the external DRAM, it's mostly to give the firmware room to store mapping tables and history data to make better decisions about how to organize future writes.Take care,
Anand
GourdFreeMan - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Have you ever actually put this to the test, though?Intel claims they do the exact same thing with their DRAM, yet I have had applications that were not in use become corrupt after a sudden power loss (i.e. bluescreen after resuming from hibernation, cat depressing laptop power button) on my Intel G2 drives. The mechanical drives that were in the exact same system prior to being replaced by SSDs only lost minimal amounts of data (and typically only the data in use at the time) under the exact same power loss scenarios.
Echo147 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
My first SSD - And it couldn't be picked up after just 5 hours. Pretty crushed :sIt'd been shipped with Firmware 0001 which I'm guessing was a large oversight by Crucial or the retailer. I wasn't about to go flashing a £500 drive, so it's in RMA as we speak.
Will be waiting for Intel's 25nm offerings before dipping my burned toes again...
greggm2000 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Anand,Are there any plans to test these drives in RAID configuration? You've already done so with Intel's cheapest value drive, but for those of us who are considering in the higher end drives, it would be interesting to know such things as will a pair of Crucial RealSSD 128GB drives on SATA outperform a single 256GB on SATA 6Gb... or even how well 4 of the 64GB drives compare as well. Also, how do the Sandforce drives compare in RAID to the others.
Thanks! Great article as always!
mckirkus - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Just to get a sense of what is used by most humans (hard drives, not VRaptors).Alkapwn - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Do SandForce controllers suffer when BitLocker is enabled? I'm guessing there would be less predictable data patterns for it's controller to use, and thus might be slower? Would that then solidly put the lead in Crucials favor?Breit - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link
yes, a sandforce drive should be slower in general when used with third party encryption as all data seems random to the drive then and the compression algorithms have nothing to compress. i'm not sure if the sf1200 controller can, but the sf1500 controller definitely can encrypt the data on the drive by themself storing it in an aes-128 encrypted format.quote from the sandforce site:
"DuraClass technology automatically stores data in a secure, AES-128 encrypted format. This also prevents would-be thieves from extracting data directly from the flash memory should they ever have access to the drive."
(http://www.sandforce.com/index.php?id=21&paren...
question is how good or usable their implementation is?! :)
sparkuss - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
I asked this question in a previous review and once again you note your "using the Marvell 88SE9128 controller similar to many motherboards".Did you only use the WIN7 MSAHCI and INTEL IMSM 8.9 on both the onboard SATA2 and Rocket 620?
This is of interest to many on the Crucial boards concerning the lack of TRIM support in Marvell drivers for their 9123/9128 controllers.
mattgmann - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
last year the ssd market was pretty cut and clear with what was good and what wasn't. There have been a lot of advances recently, and it's getting hard to keep track of what manufacturers with what controllers work well in what configurations. I'd really love to see an SSD buying guide with all of the current drives, possibly separated into workstation, laptop, and server use sections.thanks
willscary - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
I just sent my first SSD back to Crucial. I called. They RMA'ed me and will send a replacement ASAP. I am impressed. I have 5 year warranties on the M225 series SSDs, and they never even blinked...send it back and they will replace it.This was the only M225 that I have installed that does not have 1916 firmware.
My comment is on the prices. If any of you recall, I was the guy who already had bought, installed and used 5 Crucial M225 128GB SSDs when I decided to try Sandforce in the OWC SSD. After I bought the SSD and ON THE DAY IT SHIPPED, OWC changed their website and said that the controllers were Sandforce 1200 and not the 1500 that I was told when I puurchased. It was still a good deal, but I was upset with the bait and switch, so I refused delivery and had it returned.
I then purchased a Crucial M225 for myself, this one the 256GB flavor.
I want to say that I have had no problems. Peak reads reach about 240MB/s and average reads are about 215MB/sec with large files. Writes are less, about 175-180MB/sec for larger files. With small files like Anand uses, my writes are about 125MB/sec and my small file reads are about 145MB/sec.
Very small files read and write much slower, in the 5-25MB/sec range, but those are files that are very small...in the 4-20KB range.
What amazes me is the speed. While 5MB/sec may sound slow, it is not, at least when you consider that these are 4KB files. These small files write and read nearly instantly.
I paid $525 for the drive. I have seen them as low as $509. This is a great price! Now that I have seen the newest article here by Anand, I really understand that my outdated M225 is still a great deal at $525.
I would like to see this drive, or a comparable one, listed in the lineup with these newer drives. While not as fast, I believe them to be a good value when sale priced. I even saw a Western Digital 128GB SSD a few weeks ago for $219 with free shipping. They were gone very quickly!
Makaveli - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
That was a good read thanks.pesos - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,Thanks for the followup review - I have been using a 256gb C300 on each of my Poweredge T710 servers for the last few months with great results.
I am curious - does applying the destructive firmware update restore the drive to peak performance, or should it be coupled with some kind of secure erase?
Thanks,
Wes
elimliau - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link
Hi,Has anyone made the above work, mine cant?
Regards,
elimliau
sparkuss - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link
elimliau,You need to head over to the Crucial SSD forum. I have seen several threads and posts on that specific card/board.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD...
sparkuss - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link
EDIT: You may have to register to get that link to work, sorryfoo-bar - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
This is all very interesting, and new SSDs seems to hit the market constantly. But the differences seems to be mostly software related i.e firmware. What are the bottleneck to get full SATA speed? Is it the NAND flash them selves? And if so, what is on the horizon when it comes to this type of memory?deardeerlulu - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
I am kind of confused about the figures shown in that page, what axis X represents? Does it mean how much capacity has been filled? Or anywhere I can find explanations?If yes, then for crucial drive, why the performance dropped more than 50% just after less than 10GB data is filled? Since from my understanding, if there are only a small percentage capacity is filled, there are still a lot of free space, the random performance should not drop so rapidly?
Anand, or someone else here can explain my confusion? Thanks!
zzing123 - Monday, July 26, 2010 - link
Here's a question. If you have Windows 7 running under BootCamp on a Mac, and have an SSD that's partitioned with 1 partition being the Mac OS X boot drive (HFS+) and the other being the Windows 7 boot drive (NTFS), and finally have an HFS driver like Mediafour's MacDrive to read the HFS+ partition, will TRIM work on that SSD?Since I know Anand has a couple of Macs, and possibly other readers, can anyone verify this?
SSDInq - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - link
I've been wondering how this particular scenario would affect the performance of SSD's. I believe that many users fall into this pattern:- Laptop with smallish HD (same range as SSDs)
- A few months after purchase the drive is ~90% full (Original OS + Crapware, Updates,Office + files, Emails + archives, photos + videos, leftover crap from every app, etc)
At this point, every write request starts hitting the same area (some old data is deleted to free space and new data from emails, browser cache, downloads replaces it).
Will the write leveling algorithms affect the performance of SSDs ? How much?
alexwy - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
I am wondering why random read is slower than random write. Write operation is always slower than read, and sequential write is slower than sequential read. Why random read is slower? Is it because that the random read data is not 4K aligned?sor - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - link
With small random data, the overhead of looking up where the data is to retrieve it begins to show up, compared to simply identifying an empty spot to store something. This is somewhat related to why TRIM is important, keeps empty/no-longer-used blocks readily available.Nick932 - Sunday, August 8, 2010 - link
Does anybody know a laptop that has sata3 controller? Or any other solutions that would accomodate the use of this drive?deBlanc - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I have two Crucial C300 drives in two different HP laptops. Both have ICH9, Intel GM/PM45 Chipsets. These work fine using the Microsoft AHCI 1.0 driver. If I use the Intel RST 9.6.0.1014 driver, I get BSODs intermittently on boot and almost always waking from sleep. These are known issues reported in several posts on the Crucial C300 forum and also seem to be a problem with the Sandforce drives as discussed on the OCZ forums. If I put an Intel SSD in the laptops, I have no problem with the RST drivers.So I sent and email to Crucial asking about the problem. I figure there is some type of firmware issue. Here is their response:
Hello - - - - - - - - -,
Thank you for contacting Crucial. It sounds like the C300 drives are functioning properly if you get them to work just fine with the Microsoft drivers. We haven't had any reports of issues with the our SSD and the Intel Rapid Storage driver. We will keep our ears open for similar issues. In the meantime I will refer you to Intel to see if they have had heard of an issue with their driver with our drives.
If you have further questions, please visit the Crucial Community at http://www.crucial.com/help. For sales questions, try our online chat service at http://www.crucial.com/company/contacts.aspx. Our hours are Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Mountain Time). At Crucial, we are committed to providing high-quality products and reliable service and support.
KELLI
Technical Support Representative
Tel: (800) 336-8896
Fax: (208) 363-5501
mailto:crucial.support@micron.com
poohbear - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Anand you really should've mentioned in this review that the AMD AHCI drivers do NOT pass on the TRIM command, so even w/ Win7 this SSD will lose TRIM support w/ the AMD AHCI drivers, and we'll get the abysmal long term performance u highlighted in your TRIM sectino). AMD needs to feel the heat in this regards cause they've been lazy as hell & need to get their stuff together. This is not a problem w/ Intel chipsets, but im really peeved that as of October 2010, there is STILL NO TRIM support from AMD. really pathetic on their part, SSDs are becoming less than $100 & they dont care to implement TRIM support for us. We're stuck using the much less performing MS drivers.Anandtech really needs to emphasize this, otherwise i never would've bought this drive and went w/ a sandforce based one for its internal garbage collection, but i didnt realize AMD was so behind the times.
sin0822 - Saturday, October 16, 2010 - link
The degradation you Anand got with the c300 128gb after writes is not reproducible. Even without trim the c300's GC in rev 002 firmware was made extremely aggressive b/c the engineers knew that many people would use the drive without trim. I wanted to contact anand but i do not know how so i am posting here, if proof is needed it will be provided. After seeing results the GC is very aggressive and the drive will stand up to a beating stronger than a sandforce competitor, i was under the impression that this review is correct, but after seeing the results it is evident that those results cannot be reproduced and the write speeds go down only 5-10mb/s from original.woosh7 - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - link
Hi Anand. What really bugs me is that I got EXACTLY the opposite impression of the OCZ Vertex 2, 240GB. :-( In fact all I had to do is one of two simple things. One was to simply copy say 100GB or so of files, like my Flight Simulator X, or Crysis folder, along with 40GB of VMWare files to the hard drive, and my CrystalMark write score would drop. Also the simple act of partitioning the SDD so I had a 32GB OS partition (C:), and the remainder on D:, also helped to bring the read and write speed down on the OCZ when I reloaded an IMAGE backup of my OS. And this is a typical thing a lot of people in the know do. You could do all these things to a standard HDD and not lose anything.I tried every thing under the sun, including using Paragons align tool, also making sure my drive was reset with the toolbox first etc. Switching to AHCI and back. Nothing helped, except simply letting the Windows 7 DVD make it's partition, and making it ONE BIG 220GB or so partition. And then I only got about 220MB/s read sequential, and 145MB/s write. Random was also ok, but nothing great. Then I loaded a few GB's into this one big partition, and guess what? It too slowed down. It held up longer than my method of loading a cloned image to C:, but It only took me about 20 minutes to bring my drive to figures like 170MB for read, and 110 MB/sec write by transferring only ONE group of files to D: in the "Program Files" folder.
Then out of curiosity I deleted a 20GB folder, then transferred it back to the SSD and this resulted in having 85MB/sec, slow-as-a-cow-on-valium writes. I tried all sorts of things, and nothing short of removing the partition and clearing the drive brought the speed back up to 220MB and 145MB.. I think TRIM was working because I witnessed the scores improve very slightly when I left it over night. Or tried things I had read in forums, or even did "force trim" later on. But the improvements never got me back. I was stuck on 170MB/sec read and 128 or write.
Also this is on an i7 920 at 3.6Ghz, on an Asus board. This is no old or cheap machine! So my test on a clean install of windows 7 was the best, but disappointing as well. My image backups are also of clean installs and should also perform well, but they don't on OCZ.
Now here is where it gets VERY interesting. My first SSD was an barely known PNY 128GB with little support, documentation. It only supports TRIM, and no instructions, nothing on the net really. I beat the living c_rap out of it for 6 weeks. I partitioned it as above, and reloaded many, many cloned images of Windows 7 and Windows XP, over and over on C:. I made folders and deleted them on D:. At the end of 6 weeks, I got the SAME benchmark scores of 240MB/sec Read, and 150MB/sec write. No nonsense. But I had bought the OCZ Because I believed I was stepping up to higher quality and bigger size etc. This taught me that there is something right that PNY did and something very wrong with how OCZ handles their GC or Trim. I've also found reviewers saying the OCZ slows down too easily on Amazon. So again, I'm frustrated because your article is pretty much saying the opposite of what I experienced or expected.
I NEED an SSD that behaves like a REAL HD, except fast of course. Not something that slows down. I need to be able to make partitions and do my experiments etc. So because I know the PNY was fine, I figured it must be OCZ and I just went and ordered a Crucial C300 that isn't here yet. I figured it was a step above the OCZ and because it doesn't rely on sand force. I figured I wouldn't have a boat load of phony benches, along with ATTO with high marks because the data compressed so nicely as it did with the OCZ.
But now I read this article, and it's eluding to the fact that the C300 actually isn't so hot against the OCZ, which is obviously disappointing. The only thing I can hope for is that somehow the C300 won't mind me making a partition for operating system, and another for data. But then again, the OCZ slowed down even on one partition. I mean, who in their right mind is stupid enough to get stuck with 12GB of OS Plus 200GB of programs and data added into the SAME partition 2 years down the line? In the event they need to reload their OS, it makes it a huge task. I surely don't want to continually backup 200GB plus. My system can currently be reloaded in 5 minutes. That's why I do that. I just wish the SSD makers understood that not everyone wants to erase their HD every time and stick in a w7 disc and start all over to get their advertised speeds ( or even less)
And what happens if someone backs up their system (as they should), and then they need to reload it? Then what? Their SSD write scores will fall. I've seen the write speeds go below my green WD HD. I think this is an unacceptable problem that SSD's have and it needs to be resolved. If that Crucial C300 gets here next week and it slows down, you know what? I will return it along with the OCZ and I am going to buy back the PNY I mistakenly returned. Another thing is I am just amazed no one has done a review the PNY. It's not the best, but having an SSD that keeps its speed is worth more to me than anything. On the other hand, I have no clue as to why the PNY did so well, or how it works, and I'm sure it needs more testing. Thanks for the review. Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Thevilpsycho666 - Sunday, February 6, 2011 - link
Hi !After reading Anand reviews on the c300, i was amazed by the performance of the drive even for the 128gb model and since i have a Rampage III gene with a 6gb Marvell 9128 controller i was thinking of buying one.
Finally 3 days ago the drive was 250$ on newegg so i bought it.
Going around on forum i discover with great disappointment that the 6gbs Marvell controller "apparently" don't issue the TRIM command, is it true ?
Nobodies seem to have a definitive answer, Crucial don't have one, Marvell are under NDA so they don't answer anyone, Asus Told somebody that they should use the Intel controller instead to ensure TRIM support.
1- Is the Marvell controller supporting Trim and is there a way to test that ? (the "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" command is not the answer because it's only telling if the OS is issuing the command and that's not where the problem is.)
2- Some Claim that with the latest Marvell driver which is 1.0.00.1051 make the TRIM working. Some claim that it don't.
3-Other claim that the Microsoft ACHI drivers instead of Marvell's one work with TRIM.
It would be very nice if you Anand could test that particular scenario (C300 With Marvell 9128 6gbs windows 7 64) To see if the TRIM command work.
In the end not only me will benefit, but the whole community as well.
Thank you in advance!