Thinking about drive configurations

Nice overview on how that difference looks in benchmarks can be seen here.

They're testing green, blue and black against each other and a Seagate 7200.11 (variant of the aforementioned 24/7 drives that I currently own) and a Samsung Spinpoint F1.

The article also gives away a little bit about my drives and their problems:

Sounds very familiar.

 

Thanks for the info guys, it'll be good to know in the future if I build a rig for someone who wants WD drives. I probably could have easily looked it up...but at the time I lacked all motivation to do so.

 

I just ordered two Western Digital WD6401AALS. They're due on Friday or Saturday. I got a decent price.

 

They arrived! Yayness!

I'll set them up as storage drives to my ailing current main drive. As I'll (knocks on wood) get the SSD around December 18, I'll spare myself another Windows install that way.

 

The SSD won't arrive on December 18. The delivery date was moved towards an unspecified date end of December. Meh, anyway, everybody does have long delivery times with these drives. I have refused an offer of my retailer to withdraw from the contract. I insist on that contract because the deal as offered on October is just too good. As I said, I paid € 192 with delivery. Today the drive goes on Amazon.de for € 225 - and is listed as out of stock. If my retailer is off bad with the deal he offered, well, too bad for him.

Recommendation to Intel: When you sell a product, make sure you can deliver the product.

If the drive won't arrive till, say, January 15, I'll probably buy OCZ, which is 'good enough'. Actually having a 'good enough' SSD when you need it clearly beats not yet having a 'good' SSD.

 

I got mine today after an extra few days delay because the postal service was playing poker with the package. Unfortunately because of that delay I might not have the time to set it up anytime soon. I will post some comments when/if I get it up and running.

 

A nice Christmas spent in fever... so I have had time to fool around with this Intel SSD and to set it up. The OS loads in about 5 seconds to the login screen and another 5 seconds when you login. Although Linux boots up quite fast by default. Application launch is close to instantaneous. I also set up a semi-automatic TRIM operation (remember to update the drive firmware before anything else), which is run daily.

Here is a quick iozone test with a 256 MB file size and a 4k/64k/512k record size:

Code:

        Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
                Version $Revision: 3.308 $
                Compiled for 32 bit mode.
                Build: linux

        Contributors:William Norcott, Don Capps, Isom Crawford, Kirby Collins
                     Al Slater, Scott Rhine, Mike Wisner, Ken Goss
                     Steve Landherr, Brad Smith, Mark Kelly, Dr. Alain CYR,
                     Randy Dunlap, Mark Montague, Dan Million, Gavin Brebner,
                     Jean-Marc Zucconi, Jeff Blomberg, Benny Halevy,
                     Erik Habbinga, Kris Strecker, Walter Wong, Joshua Root.

        Run began: Fri Dec 25 15:44:47 2009

        O_DIRECT feature enabled
        Auto Mode
        File size set to 262144 KB
        Record Size 4 KB
        Record Size 64 KB
        Record Size 512 KB
        Command line used: iozone -I -a -s 256M -r 4k -r 64k -r 512k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
        Output is in Kbytes/sec
        Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
        Processor cache size set to 1024 Kbytes.
        Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
        File stride size set to 17 * record size.
                                                            random  random    bkwd   record   stride
              KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read   write    read  rewrite     read   fwrite frewrite   fread  freread
          262144       4   22346   25538    26303    26302   10564   23629
          262144      64   71079   73790    94187    91416   74947   55962
          262144     512   79634   81379   126888   126637  123617   80014

iozone test complete.

This is run on an older Intel SATA Rev. 1.0 controller (my laptop does not have a SATA Rev. 2.0 controller), so the test results are not as fast as you would expect. Nevertheless, I have been more than satisfied with the performance so far.

 

I reordered, with Amazon btw., and expect delivery towards the end of the week.

 

Eventually, I hold my priced 80GB X-25 M G.2 SSD in my hands.

My new retailer delivered within four days. Yay! Yay! Yay!

PS: I completed installation, and am now mopping up things. I just did my Windows Experience Index check, and it was boosted from 5,8 (due to the old hard drive) to 7,2 - the new 'bottle neck' being my Core 2 Quad 9450 CPU and 8 GB DDR-2 RAM. My ATI 4870 scores 7,5, the SSD 7,7. The computer is more agile than before, it's subtle but noticeable.

 

Merry christmas.

 

Admittedly, it does feel a little like it.

I am certainly happy that the two month purchase saga has eventually found an end. So much in fact that I wrote the other retailer a thank you mail for returning my money till Tuesday, also telling them that the competitor I turned to after cancelling my order with them was able to process my order and delivery in four days. Good riddance folks!

Funny, I was aware the drive was 2,5", and while I can convert imperial into metric measurement, I was still surprised by how physically small the drive is.

Application launch is snappy. Open office launches instantaneously. Firefox still has some lag here and there, but having seen Open Office starting I am now convinced it has far more to do with bandwidth and server issues and Firefox being bloated than with any hardware issues. I notice no difference in games, they run as smooth as they did before.

I updated my computer photos here and here with small screen shots from the Windows Explorer. I'm looking forward to perhaps making a few benchmarks and file operation tests with the computer over the next week.

Besides, you're still happy with your Kingston so far? One of the reasons I discarded a Kingston V+ as a choice was that their firmware still doesn't support TRIM.

 

It is a happy first one. Not having trim will become an issue. I will always ask myself if I did right but I am content.

Every year in June, I take the last two weeks off(wimbledon) and re-build the pc with an upgrade. Starting to fill the piggy bank right now, and already e-windowshoppig what toys to buy next.

About the lag, I have it too. Found a source: kasperky internet security 2010. I get the firefox is not responding notice at the top. switched to chrome.

 

See, this is why I don't understand the capacity/size/price ratio. A 2.5" drive is only nice if you're putting it in a laptop. For desktop users, we actually have to buy a bracket to mount the damn things.

It's quite simple: make the drive 3.5", use more lower capacity chips (which are easier/cheaper to make), and sell them at a much lower cost already!

 

The kingston with no trim became slow. very slow and i did not wait for June.

One ocz vertex 60 GB: http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_vertex_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd

 

Nice drive.

But doesn't Kingston have a drive maintenance utility? OCZ does.

 

The controller in the old kingston is not user flash-able, and no trim what so ever.

I installed dragon age on it before I knew that is was installing on that drive. I guess that it filled up fast. The temp folder during surfing, savegames and screenshots from games added to it.

I could empty it and install windows again, but was so fed up with the horrible writing times that I got the OCZ. I was not able to internet without waiting for minutes for a page to load, while giving me the message: does not respond, on almost every page I opened. I made a error in getting it.

This one has the trim, and is user flash-able.

 

Gotta say, I am very happy with my X-25 M so far. It is fast, and stays fast. Performance is quite snappy.

 

Anyone want to buy me a pair of Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (SATA-6Gbps)? They're only $680 each...

Can you imagine 2 of those in RAID 0?!?

 

I might consider it, if you buy me an IO drive duo first ... 1.500 MB/s, to the tune of just $14,400.