I second that. I'm glad you went with a lower capacity model. I wish you had included a first generation Vertex drive, along with a second for scaling. It may be SATA II, but I'm still using Vertex 2 drives and I would like to see just how modern drives compare.
Also, it seems to me that the best middle of the road performer here is Patriot's Wildfire drive.
Will you be reviewing mSATA SSDs at any point ? It's the same thing with them - limited PCB space meaning 2-4 NAND chips => much less performance. I'm looking to add some mSATA SSDs to my HTPC and laptop, but where the vendors advertise insane performance, the forums tell another story :)
A little tip: For small devices go for SLC NAND. That way you still get decent performance (and life-time - with little space there are less replacement blocks, and only so much load-leveling you can do) out of small devices, while only paying about ~2.5x as much - which at the small volumes isn't so dramatic.
The cheapest for 20GB SLC mSATA is £100 - that's the Intel 311 series. Is there a 40GB SLC mSATA ? Can't seem to find any
In any case a Kingston mSATA 60GB with the Phison controller nets for £75 and the OCZ Nocti 60GB with the Sandforce controller is £90~£100. The OCZ Strata 60GB with the Indilinx Eco controller is also around £75 but since there are no reviews and proper tests, can't really figure out which one to buy ...
Small devices for me are in fact up to 20 GB (I'm running two 8GB SSDs, where MLC might fall short). Above that, there is usually enough space to do decent wear leveling. (Wear is a function of the amount of writes per write block, hence the same amount of data written to a small drive over the same time, means more writes per cell, given the same level of write amplification)
It depends on your use case as well - for hybrid-caching or silencing down a HDD by putting the swap file on flash, SLC is probably the better choice, but for portable applications, MLC always wins due to size being more important than performance.
They've already benched the Intel mSATA devices. I'd go with MLC simply for cost effective reasons. In a year or two if you even are remotely worried about your NAND life, go buy another drive with the now twice the capacity and half the price.... (btw, NAND lifespan isn't near as important as it used to be. You're far more likely to drop-kick your Atom CPU well before your NAND dies).
I liked your comment about how many Velociraptors we could RAID for the price of an SSD. I have two 300gig 'Raptors in my desktop, backed by an i7 970. Funny thing, my Core 2 Quad latop with and Intel SSD 320 120gig feels every bit as snappy, even better when booting or loading PSE. I should put the SSD in my desktop for a day and see what my file transfers would be.
All are known for high dependability. Last two use sata III controllers, which you do not currently have on your system, but would become faster when you eventually upgrade your system. (And will therefore remain competitive longer.)
I have a similar system (i930) and currently have a OCZ Max IOPs 120gb for my boot drive, and an OCZ Vertex 3 120gb as my game drive (along with a 600gb Velociraptor for data).
When I first got the MAX IOPs drive, I had occasional issues with the drive disappearing (would need a reboot), but with the firmware updates, this drive has been running for 2-3 months with no problems. I never had any problems with the Vertex 3, but I got it later and it had newer firmware.
I think the reliability issues have been resolved with the Sandforce 2281 controller and I would not rule these out as they have come down in price.
Even if you add an SSD for working with your large photo data, Keep the Seagate as a data back-up.
I was avoiding the Sandforce based SSD's because they are best for data that can be compressed, my images are already compressed. Images are relatively big (spanning from 5-15MB or so), so my thinking is that I should be looking at sequential read/write performance and less on random read/write performance.
I have no doubt though that almost no matter what SSD I choose, I will get a quite nice performance boost.
Be careful of this -- the total bandwidth of a PCI-e 1x slot is only 500 mb/s. That's less than the maximum SATA III speed, and if you hook up more than one drive you could actually cap out at less than SATA II performance for each disk.
Maybe there are more expensive adapter cards that plug into a different PCI-e slot, but I would be inclined to only rely on motherboard connections for true SATA III speeds for the time being.
Here is where I stand: I am a software developer and I develop within VM's, and VM's are IO intensive when running more than one VM on the same drive - thus I will choose a sandforce drive and not the Octane for the que depth. However, my daughter uses a netbook in a consistent manner - a very light workload and i think the Octane would suffice for her however the price point of the Octane is too close to the price of a Sandforce so I would rather go with the sandforce. BUT, OCZ is going to put out a Petrol version at a much lower price point - in this case and considering my daughter is running a 5400 RPM drive the Petrol should give her a significant boost at a price I would be happy with. So... I would like to see some Petrol benchmarks - but really mostly I would like to here from a live user their "experience" of the drive rather than benchmarks.
Would have been great to see the samsung 830 128GB drive in the same charts
THANK YOU for the performance over time analysis that was missing from the original 512GB review due to logistics. I read these reviews for personal interest but also with an eye on them for something that a lightweight server could benefit from (at work).
Am I alone in being sore at OCZ for their sleazy means of making money? (Change NAND resulting in performance loss without changing the SKU or informing their customers.)
To counter the nearly guaranteed "But they changed their ways!"
They only came clean once they were busted. If they were never caught the practice would still be an on going.
I won't be buying OCZ for a long, long time as well. Besides their questionable business practices, every single one of my 5 older Indilinx Barefoot drives failed within one year.
Firmware upgrades usually take a few hours. I have to test 5-8 PCs until I find one that lets me boot the DOS image and flash the drives without cryptic error messages.
-- The smaller transistor geometry will eventually pave the way for cheaper drives
Given the past history of geometry drops, I don't thinks so, if maintaining performance is taken into account. We've seen significant increases in over-provisioning with drops so far. Given that we know the physics gets non-linearly worse for each drop, I'd be surprised if a 20nm SSD with comparable performance will be cheaper.
New Year of course is an excuse but not like in this case: that was worst ever publication about SSDs
-bad set of drives was taken. The mix of SATA2 and 3 is like comparing apples and oranges. Well it was ok when we had rare SATA3 drives. Not anymore. If Corsair is shown here with SATA2, it has to be shown with SATA3 too because it looks bad in this paper.
-non-substantiated predictions about pricing. Do you time the market? Prices strictly depend on market conditions --if market will nosedive like in 3 years ago in Mar 2009 the prices will follow below production costs. For example the 3 years ago we've already seen flash memory at $1/GB and see them again at this price point only now.
-No serious critics. Almost like on sites which are inherently interested to sell any cr#p they review. If this will happen, that will be the end of former great Anandtech. OCZ could easily make write performance of this drive in par with 512GB version taking same amount of smaller capacity NAND chips -- no suggestions or in-deep discussions why it was not done.
This drive has AES and Automatic Encryption, which is required for any drive I'll buy given that SSDs cannot be erased with current consumer technology.
I recently purchased this drive from the egg and I love it. Very reliable and not one blue screen. This is coming straight from a Sandforce 2281 Corsair Force GT 60GB that would blue screen sitting idle. That drive drove me crazy. Ill never go back to another Sandforce. So far so good. Been running this drive for abourt a month now.
Anand, Last October, you reviewed Kingston's SSDNow V+100 128GB (with Toshiba controller) and gave it a pretty high mark. It performed admirably under both light and heavy Anand Benchmark. A couple months back, the new SSDNow V200 is out, with JMicron controller and better specs than the V+100. I personally own two of each model but the benchmarks I have taken left me puzzled as to what to think about the newcomer. The random read/write department is great but the sequential read/write department is way bad, despite of the 6Gbps specs. I personally thinkg V+100 is way better and feel quite a bit ripped off by V200.
There is no reviews out there for V200 yet and detail info is hard to find. Do you think you can shed some light on the latest from Kingston? Thanks much, and happy new year.
Wasn't there a firmware update that was released for the M4's that substantially boosted speeds? I seem to remember that happening after the 256GB drive was released/reviewed.
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Xpage - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Thank you for the review on a model that is more down to earth on its cost.JonnyDough - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
I second that. I'm glad you went with a lower capacity model. I wish you had included a first generation Vertex drive, along with a second for scaling. It may be SATA II, but I'm still using Vertex 2 drives and I would like to see just how modern drives compare.Also, it seems to me that the best middle of the road performer here is Patriot's Wildfire drive.
realjetavenger - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
I was thinking the same thing. The Kingston HyperX and Patriot Wildfire are at the top of most of the charts and seem to be the real winners here.harshw - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Hi AnandWill you be reviewing mSATA SSDs at any point ? It's the same thing with them - limited PCB space meaning 2-4 NAND chips => much less performance. I'm looking to add some mSATA SSDs to my HTPC and laptop, but where the vendors advertise insane performance, the forums tell another story :)
Rick83 - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
A little tip: For small devices go for SLC NAND. That way you still get decent performance (and life-time - with little space there are less replacement blocks, and only so much load-leveling you can do) out of small devices, while only paying about ~2.5x as much - which at the small volumes isn't so dramatic.harshw - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
The cheapest for 20GB SLC mSATA is £100 - that's the Intel 311 series. Is there a 40GB SLC mSATA ? Can't seem to find anyIn any case a Kingston mSATA 60GB with the Phison controller nets for £75 and the OCZ Nocti 60GB with the Sandforce controller is £90~£100. The OCZ Strata 60GB with the Indilinx Eco controller is also around £75 but since there are no reviews and proper tests, can't really figure out which one to buy ...
Rick83 - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
Small devices for me are in fact up to 20 GB (I'm running two 8GB SSDs, where MLC might fall short). Above that, there is usually enough space to do decent wear leveling. (Wear is a function of the amount of writes per write block, hence the same amount of data written to a small drive over the same time, means more writes per cell, given the same level of write amplification)It depends on your use case as well - for hybrid-caching or silencing down a HDD by putting the swap file on flash, SLC is probably the better choice, but for portable applications, MLC always wins due to size being more important than performance.
Ammaross - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
They've already benched the Intel mSATA devices. I'd go with MLC simply for cost effective reasons. In a year or two if you even are remotely worried about your NAND life, go buy another drive with the now twice the capacity and half the price.... (btw, NAND lifespan isn't near as important as it used to be. You're far more likely to drop-kick your Atom CPU well before your NAND dies).Samus - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
You are so sexy!Tchamber - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
I liked your comment about how many Velociraptors we could RAID for the price of an SSD. I have two 300gig 'Raptors in my desktop, backed by an i7 970. Funny thing, my Core 2 Quad latop with and Intel SSD 320 120gig feels every bit as snappy, even better when booting or loading PSE. I should put the SSD in my desktop for a day and see what my file transfers would be.jramskov - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
My desktop (i7-920 based, Win7 64bit) currently have a 160GB Intel G2 as a boot drive, but my data drive is currently an older 500GB Seagate.Workload: Primarily editing images in Lightroom, etc. (compressed RAW files from a Nikon D700 currently).
I would like to replace the Seagate with a 256GB SSD, but which one would be recommended for such a workload?
Denithor - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Standard recommendations are:Intel 320
Crucial M4
Samsung 830
All are known for high dependability. Last two use sata III controllers, which you do not currently have on your system, but would become faster when you eventually upgrade your system. (And will therefore remain competitive longer.)
jramskov - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Thanks.I was thinking along those lines and not the Sandforce based as I'm generally working with compressed data.
And true, I don't have sata III controllers, but I don't think my system is worth upgrading just yet :)
JackF - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
I have a similar system (i930) and currently have a OCZ Max IOPs 120gb for my boot drive, and an OCZ Vertex 3 120gb as my game drive (along with a 600gb Velociraptor for data).When I first got the MAX IOPs drive, I had occasional issues with the drive disappearing (would need a reboot), but with the firmware updates, this drive has been running for 2-3 months with no problems. I never had any problems with the Vertex 3, but I got it later and it had newer firmware.
I think the reliability issues have been resolved with the Sandforce 2281 controller and I would not rule these out as they have come down in price.
Even if you add an SSD for working with your large photo data, Keep the Seagate as a data back-up.
jramskov - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I was avoiding the Sandforce based SSD's because they are best for data that can be compressed, my images are already compressed. Images are relatively big (spanning from 5-15MB or so), so my thinking is that I should be looking at sequential read/write performance and less on random read/write performance.I have no doubt though that almost no matter what SSD I choose, I will get a quite nice performance boost.
JonnyDough - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
He could also get a SATA 6GB/s controller card.ckevin1 - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Be careful of this -- the total bandwidth of a PCI-e 1x slot is only 500 mb/s. That's less than the maximum SATA III speed, and if you hook up more than one drive you could actually cap out at less than SATA II performance for each disk.Maybe there are more expensive adapter cards that plug into a different PCI-e slot, but I would be inclined to only rely on motherboard connections for true SATA III speeds for the time being.
StanFL - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Good review. In the last paragraph on the final page, myriad is spelled incorrectly.Denithor - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
No spell checker? Sheesh...JonnyDough - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
You must be new here. And by here I mean the internet...Education in America is at an all time low.
yogi2k - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
I guess your education must have been bad, seeing how the internet is global and not American.billegge - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Here is where I stand: I am a software developer and I develop within VM's, and VM's are IO intensive when running more than one VM on the same drive - thus I will choose a sandforce drive and not the Octane for the que depth. However, my daughter uses a netbook in a consistent manner - a very light workload and i think the Octane would suffice for her however the price point of the Octane is too close to the price of a Sandforce so I would rather go with the sandforce. BUT, OCZ is going to put out a Petrol version at a much lower price point - in this case and considering my daughter is running a 5400 RPM drive the Petrol should give her a significant boost at a price I would be happy with. So... I would like to see some Petrol benchmarks - but really mostly I would like to here from a live user their "experience" of the drive rather than benchmarks.Morg. - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Simple answer : your daughter does not need an ssd, quit trying to spend money for no reasons.If she can survive a netbook without requiring a hammer, I don't see why she'd need an SSD.
krazyderek - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Would have been great to see the samsung 830 128GB drive in the same chartsTHANK YOU for the performance over time analysis that was missing from the original 512GB review due to logistics. I read these reviews for personal interest but also with an eye on them for something that a lightweight server could benefit from (at work).
todlerix - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Am I alone in being sore at OCZ for their sleazy means of making money? (Change NAND resulting in performance loss without changing the SKU or informing their customers.)To counter the nearly guaranteed "But they changed their ways!"
They only came clean once they were busted. If they were never caught the practice would still be an on going.
(Prepare for a cliche.)
They were only sorry they were caught.
MrCromulent - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
I won't be buying OCZ for a long, long time as well. Besides their questionable business practices, every single one of my 5 older Indilinx Barefoot drives failed within one year.Firmware upgrades usually take a few hours. I have to test 5-8 PCs until I find one that lets me boot the DOS image and flash the drives without cryptic error messages.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
-- The smaller transistor geometry will eventually pave the way for cheaper drivesGiven the past history of geometry drops, I don't thinks so, if maintaining performance is taken into account. We've seen significant increases in over-provisioning with drops so far. Given that we know the physics gets non-linearly worse for each drop, I'd be surprised if a 20nm SSD with comparable performance will be cheaper.
sheh - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Looks like even after TRIM the drive is writing somewhat slower than it was (159 -> 134 MB)?And is HD Tach inaccurate in reporting burst speeds? Some of them are slower than the average.
SanX - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
New Year of course is an excuse but not like in this case: that was worst ever publication about SSDs-bad set of drives was taken. The mix of SATA2 and 3 is like comparing apples and oranges. Well it was ok when we had rare SATA3 drives. Not anymore. If Corsair is shown here with SATA2, it has to be shown with SATA3 too because it looks bad in this paper.
-non-substantiated predictions about pricing. Do you time the market? Prices strictly depend on market conditions --if market will nosedive like in 3 years ago in Mar 2009 the prices will follow below production costs. For example the 3 years ago we've already seen flash memory at $1/GB and see them again at this price point only now.
-No serious critics. Almost like on sites which are inherently interested to sell any cr#p they review. If this will happen, that will be the end of former great Anandtech. OCZ could easily make write performance of this drive in par with 512GB version taking same amount of smaller capacity NAND chips -- no suggestions or in-deep discussions why it was not done.
Don't drink and drive, Anand.
And Happy New Year
Spoogie - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
This drive has AES and Automatic Encryption, which is required for any drive I'll buy given that SSDs cannot be erased with current consumer technology.http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-octane-sata-iii-2...
Thanks for the review.
daos - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I recently purchased this drive from the egg and I love it. Very reliable and not one blue screen. This is coming straight from a Sandforce 2281 Corsair Force GT 60GB that would blue screen sitting idle. That drive drove me crazy. Ill never go back to another Sandforce. So far so good. Been running this drive for abourt a month now.gamoniac - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Anand,Last October, you reviewed Kingston's SSDNow V+100 128GB (with Toshiba controller) and gave it a pretty high mark. It performed admirably under both light and heavy Anand Benchmark. A couple months back, the new SSDNow V200 is out, with JMicron controller and better specs than the V+100. I personally own two of each model but the benchmarks I have taken left me puzzled as to what to think about the newcomer. The random read/write department is great but the sequential read/write department is way bad, despite of the 6Gbps specs. I personally thinkg V+100 is way better and feel quite a bit ripped off by V200.
There is no reviews out there for V200 yet and detail info is hard to find. Do you think you can shed some light on the latest from Kingston? Thanks much, and happy new year.
erple2 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
Wasn't there a firmware update that was released for the M4's that substantially boosted speeds? I seem to remember that happening after the 256GB drive was released/reviewed.erple2 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
Meep. Nevermind. I just re-read the article you linked.johnf1285 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
So at what point can we expect to have this SSD turn into a brick just like every other OCZ SSD that I've ever owned?chasM - Sunday, January 1, 2012 - link
Sorry to say it, but all the prices from newegg,amazon, and Compusa are for a different drive. That model is more in the $170 range.LoosCarl - Sunday, January 1, 2012 - link
Get OCZ Octane SSDs from Amazon, if you missed it: http://cl.lk/21hkw07binqq - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
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