I actually bought one intel-v 40g and i got the shipment today. The sequential read is very good, 190mb/s with nvidia SATA controller driver and 170mb/s with win7 driver. However, the random read speed is only 22mb/s with both drivers, much lower than the test result 60mb/s. I still need to find out why.
I think it's misleading that you continue using the phrase "IMFT Nand". This gives the impression that all IMFT Nand is equivalent.
IMFT does not sell Nand -- they are the just legal way that Micron and Intel can share the cost of manufacturing Nand together. Each parent company has the ability to define their own litho process or their own test strategies.
This means that the Nand on the X-25 series is "Intel Nand", not IMFT or Micron Nand. Moreover, the Nand on the X-25 series receives much more extensive testing than what is sold to the removable memory market.
That might be the case for you, but not for everyone. I just upgraded my father-in-law's PC with one of the Intel 40GB SSD and a 250GB regular HD for data storage. Installation of Windows 7 Home Premium left just under 23GB of usable space. Besides IE, the only other thing he needed was Office 2003 (this took less than 350MB total). Still had 22GB of space left. It boots up very quick and opening programs in very fast (nearly instantaneous). A nice improvement over the previous incarnation with XP on a regular 7200rpm HD.
28 or 37GB is definitely too small for me. If you're going to buy a SSD to speed things up, there must be enough space on it to actually install some stuff on it to speed up. If you can only speed up a few percent of your disk operations, it's pretty pointless.
60GB would be the minimum for me, preferably 80+ GB. 30GB is barely enough for Win7 itself *or* a couple of games. I'm using 410GB on my "Applications" drive, the one that contains the OS and games and programs I use (almost no user data like movies or pictures).
I'd like to see some benchmarks showing time saved. That's my main issue with a benchmark. Most show a higher number, but don't exactly show yo uhow much time your saving.
Gaming benchmarks are self-explanatory but I would love to see more benchmarks showing the time difference as that to me is the ultimate reason to upgrade not just to have the fastest card, what have you.
i'm for more real world testing. fot consumer sata drives stuff like startup times and virus scans. for eneterprise sas drives i want to see exchange, sql, etc performance numbers.
There's no question that he's dead wrong to not address the single thing that matters with hard drives: time. Without it you can't see how significant the difference between drives are, the AnandTech Storage Bench doesn't mean squat since drives like the SandForce use compression, and hard drives have a long history of performing differently in benchmarks vs real life. For proof of those last two points, check out http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg">http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg where RAID0 bought 20-40% more IOPS but zero load time.
The only SSD time benchmarks I know of here are Pages 29 and 30 of the very first review http://tinyurl.com/yd73sf8">http://tinyurl.com/yd73sf8. Whuddayaknow, the Vertex boots up 1.2s slower than the X25-M, and loads WoW realms 1.4s slower. How about that, something tangible and meaningful to compare.
The kinds of numbers that are easy to understand:
- Win7 boot time (after POST is preferred, but whatever)
- Loading of a game, loading of a game while doing a background task.
- virus scan
- Loading and saving a large file in Photoshop or Excel.
- Win7 Shutdown time.
- Win7 Wake up (perhaps to quick).
My own experience with Win7 and the intel X25-M-G2
Win7 boot:
1m25s = Temp 160GB HD SATA (not a fast drive)
0m09s = Intel SSD (same computer)
0m35s = Another PC with a typical 500GB 7200RPM drive.
All the Sandforce drives are near the top, in general.
But I'm not really seeing those drives out in the market? What are those prices like.
I have my experience with intels X25 G2 drives and they still seems to offer the best overall deal. Reliability, TRIM and price (now). The 80GB G2 is down to around $200... so spend an extra $80 and double the space to work with and vastly improve the performance over any of those drives.
A typical Win7 setup with NO user data is about 15GB, which mine is with various Adobe programs, 3 browsers, Office suite and dozens of add-ons. So a 30GB is barely enough for future usage. 40GB is fine, but the performance needs to be better IMHO in order for it to be an excellent desktop boot drive. In one of our desktops in an office, Win7 boots up about 8~10 seconds after POST. Everything is instant.
Anand, in future SSD reviews, can you bring back the power consumption figures? Or maybe dedicate a short article that sums up the current lineup? I remember an article on Tom's which showed a huge amount of variance among 1st gen SSDs (with some being worse than "green" 3.5" HDDs) and am wondering how the current ones are versus a 2.5" laptop drive (ie: what impact a SSD swap will have on battery life).
Agreed. I would be interested to see these figures as well. Doesn't really matter for a desktop setting but for a laptop replacement/upgrade it can be helpful.
so what your saying is...sandforce wins! Im kidding of course, but i think 30 gigs is too small, and the intel 40gig is too slow. too bad a 50 gig sandforce costs $250! o_O
If I had a small SSD, then I'd definitely use it as a cache, rather than as a boot drive. There are 2 popular solutions: ReadyBoost integrated in Windows 7, which supports up to 32GB of storage, matching these drives. There's also external program called ReadyBoost that can work with Window XP or Windows Server version.
ReadyBoost only caches Reads, and would be utterly useless in this scenario.
As noted in the article, the "correct" way to use a small SSD is to install your OS directly onto it - use an additional mechanical drive as your main data store.
Does the Intel drive adhere to connector location for 3.5 inch drives when mounted in the bracket? IE, can I toss the 2.5 inch drive onto the bracket, then mount the bracket in the drive carriers of a Mac Pro and plug it in?
Western Digital failed this test with their initial release of the Velociraptor, only later coming out with a "Hot swappable" 3.5 inch form factor drive that adhered to SATA standards.
I've been looking for a similar solution. Two similar items:
Addonics Snap-In 25
Icy Dock MB882SP-1S-1B
Unfortunately, it looks like both of them use a separate PCB, which could possibly lead to connection problems.
I was looking for a dead-simple bracket that would offset the 2.5" drive to the proper location within a 3.5" drive space. The only candidate I've found so far is this:
Supermicro MCP-220-00043-0N
The pictures all show the complete Supermicro 3.5" hotswap carrier, including the metal bracket which properly places the 2.5" drive in the 3.5" drive space. It looks like the bracket is screw-mounted within the 3.5" carrier. I suspect that the MCP-220-00043-0N model number is actually for only the metal bracket and that the 3.5" hotswap carrier is simply shown for illustration. However, it's possible that they include both the bracket and the carrier. In that case, you could just remove the bracket and toss the carrier.
No, unfortunately it looks like the bracket keeps the drive centered, which positions the SATA connectors too far to the middle to work properly in 3.5" carriers like what Apple uses for the Mac Pro.
Thanks for the response. If you can pass some feedback to the manufacturers, can you let them know this is one of the big reasons I haven't jumped on a SSD yet? A SATA compliant 3.5 inch solution would be appreciated by those of us using cableless drive setups. I know HP shipped a few VoodooPC gaming rigs with similar drive bays.
I'm still really tempted to pick one of these up, but not sure how I can get it in my system without just dangling the drive on the connector.
Though I'm still operating almost all my machines on XP, I thought you said you were going to start doing all your benchmarks in Win7.
I appreciate doing both in this example, but that's got to be a lot of time spent doing it on multiple machines.
vol7ron
PS
This article really interests me when thinking about building an HTPC. I know I'll need a lot of storage space - I hope to have 4TB worth - but having a quick, speedy, small drive would be a loading dream. Thanks for the review.
I really enjoyed the article and am always impressed with the level of detail that is done when testing and comparing components. However, the only problem with this article is that when comparing queue depth and light/heavy workload averaging the results provides no value in so far as the distribution of IOPS is not normally distributed. Additionally, the fact that these drives are completely different in their drivers and priority addressing of queue requests to say that one drive is able to server requests faster depends on the fact that measurement of requests served fits the drives exact distribution of requests served. This is apparent with the charts of how each drive performs for sequential and random access. Finally, in order to make substantial claims confidence intervals must also be constructed otherwise how accurate are the results?
On the otherhand I am still intrigued with the findings.
Look at the size of the kingston, it's tiny! Now you don't even need dedicated 2.5" space for the drive, making the htpc/laptop/net book even smaller. It is definitely worth its price in the right settings.
That was my first thought, but with a slightly different angle. If Kingston made a custom form factor you could extend laptops with dual storage below ~15". In something like the M11x you could have one of these as a fast boot drive while using a big and slow HDD with aggressive power management to get more storage, faster storage, and longer battery life.
(Yes, I'm aware of mini-PCIe (and other custom connection) SSDs for netbooks and other SFF devices, but the performance there is terrible.)
it's a cheap and inexpensive SSD, and definitely the most entry level ssd existing.
and yeah, if you buy an entry level desktop (not an atom), you easily pay several 100$. investing 100 more to make it perform 'really fast', is the most cheap and inexpensive way to make it perform much better.
how would YOU invest that amount of money to boost up your pc? (laptops are a different story because there storage matters actually, in a pc, just let the old hdd be plugged in too)
Yeah, this is the decision I made when buying my 40gig. With a win7 install those 10gb make a huge difference. For an entry level SSD, I would recommend the Intel over the OCZ despite some performance differences. Especially when it comes to gaming.
Choosing between the Kingston drive and Intel at the time was a no-brainer.
However I would/will look at OCZ vertex series when going to 60GB or higher capacity.
It's progress in the right direction though. Wasn't long ago when these small drives were $200-$300. Still, I'm going to wait until 80gb SSDs drop to around that price. More breathing room. Still way too small for laptop use too.
When you talk about capacities in the chart on page 4 I take it the formatted capacity is in gigabytes (GB) and not gibibytes (GiB). So on top of reserved flash there is also the GB-GiB conversion to account for?
Harddrives are measured in Gigabytes (1 billion bytes), Operating systems (Windows for example) usually measure in Gibibytes... aka 1024 times 1024 times 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes
Thanks bro but that didn't add or clarify anything about my question. The fact that HDs use GB and OSes use GiB was implicit background knowledge for my post. I see Jarrod made a guess but I'd still be interested to know whether the chart on page 4 for formatted capacities especially and others just for funsies is in GB or GiB.
And flash chips are generally measured in GiB as well (or at least, the chips come in powers of 2). I think part of this is SSD makers figure they'll use the GiB vs. GB difference to make up for their spare area. So you can have 7.3% spare area and your 40GiB SSD ends up formatting to the same size as a 40GB HDD. Just a thought.
This was a good test, and one i've been waiting for a while. I'm a bit disappointed a 32GB Indilinx Barefoot drive wasn't included. I have a 30GB Vertex in my laptop that performs better sequentailly than these numbers, and has better random performance than the Kingston V 30GB. The price is slightly higher though.
Ref screenshot: http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?app=core&mod...">http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?app=c...h_rel_mo... CDM 3.0 + WEI for my laptop.
I'll also mention Nizzen, an enthusiast on a forum i frequent, who set a WR i PCmark vantage last spring with his 24/7 setup, and is still on top5 with the same setup (updated in august with 4GB RAM on the Areca). The key was an Areca 1680ix-12 with a RAID-0 of several (7 i think) OCZ Vertex.
ORB result page: http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.act...">http://service.futuremark.com/resultCom...sultId=2... 24740 PCmarks, WAY ahead of the highest score in your benchmark lists. The same level of disk performance is possible to get with an LSI 9211-8i with 8 30-40GB SSDs in RAID-0 for about $1000 (less than 2 256GB SSDs).
Suggested lineup for such an article: RAID-0 of 4 Kingston V 30GB, Intel x25-V, and Indilinx Barefoot 32GB (Vertex?). 2 RAID-0 SF-1200/1500 50GB, Kingston SSDNow V+ 64GB, Indilinx Barefoot 64GB, Intel x25-M 80GB. And single 100/128/160 GB SSDs of various controllers.
Regarding performance degrading in RAID whitout TRIM, increased reserved area can help negate the performance degrading (Ref IDF whitepaper on spare area). Increasing the spare area to ~20-25% from the default 7% (on most SSDs) will make sure degrading will not be noticable by users in normale usage models.
Hey Anand (or TWIMC)
Isn't there a way for your pretty graph program to move the text to right of the bar if there isn't enough room for the label to fit? It's really annoying when you can't read half of the results because the super long product names are compressing the graph...
I remember one of the other regular contributers mentioning that getting the graphs to look nice is not trivial, and I've had the same experience trying to accomplish the same.
Of course, if the bar is so small you can't see the number, it doesn't really matter what the number is, the result is dismal.
It's an automated system that unfortunately doesn't handle that case very well. We're launching the new site in a few weeks and we'll be updating the graph styles as well, so I'm going to try to get that fix in there :)
in fact, I'm pretty sure in the core2 times they got much bigger improvements on a dual-socket board, but I can't find that review anymore
you also do rendering tests on your CPU reviews
could you test rendering performance of some standard 7200 drive, vs the velociraptor, vs a low-end SSD, vs a high end SSD? with your new gulftown, perhaps?
I agree with your posts on the other thread: I don't care about IOPS, just like getting more points in a benchmark won't make me happy by itself
I'm totally in the dark with respect to SSDs so far; with things as they are now, I guess I'll have to wait till I get my hands on one of them and can do my own testing (general feeling, then 3D rendering, video editing and encoding)
well, if it is in the CPU reviews, then it could be here too, coudn't it? at least if they found out that there's some difference, which is why I'm asking
The kingston (intel) 40gb bootdrive was an awesome drive while it lasted. Mine actually did arrive last december with trim firmware on it, to my pleasant surprise. However after it died after purring along for 10 days and faced with no replacement possibility due to intel now wanting to sell only their identical more expensive drives i had to get a new one and for sure wasnt going to pay 35 dollars more to get the same drive back. An OCZ vertex 60gb is doing the purring now without issues.
still the small SSD drive to run your O.S. from is an amazing improvement to overall performance. For this these new small cheap drives are great.
I use the X25-V in a Media Center setup (all actual data over the (gb) network). the -V delivers absolutely stunning performance, resulting in a fast to boot, very snappy system. and it has enough spare space for recording tv before it gets shifted to the winhome server.
i could never get the kingston solution when seeing it's random performances. it's imho the main thing that makes an ssd feel fast. the media center is always "there", always "reacting". and even while the 40MB/s write speed is slow, the fact that it delivers nearly constant 40MB/s no matter if it's sequencial or random does it still perform quite fast (faster than hdds) in most real life cases (like installing the os).
i'm happy to get 10GB more space for the same price (a big thing in such low-storage devices), and i'm happy to get the overall more snappy and responsive performance.
So definite improvement when using an SSD in media center? I've been meaning to get one, but didn't think that my primary apps could fit in 40GB. Seems a bit small.
It depends on your install. You can easily get a win7 installation down to 10 gigs by turning things off like system restore, page file, and hibernation.
I use the 40GB Intel drive and have Win7 pro, Office, flash, and any number of small productivity apps plus Heroes V with all the expansions. 15GB free atm, plenty of room to add PowerDVD and whatnot.
" You gain better sequential performance and concurrent IOPS, but you have no way to actively curb performance degradation. "
Can you schedule the SSD Toolbox to perform a manual TRIM. WOuldn't be so bad then - set it to run once a week and forget about it.
I have to say, Intel wins this round, easily. The Kingston would have had to perform much better to make up for the smaller drive size. I would expect that the Kingston will have to come down in price to remain competitive.
Thanks Anand for clarifying the raid and SSD toolbox issues. I can see now that adding a second 40 GB drive will not be a good idea and I should save for a larger capacity.
I am very interested in knowing when Intel gets trim working for raid! Good to know I can count on Anandtech for the latest SSD news. Thanks again, Scott
I have a 30GB partition for Win7 and still have 8GB left, and that's after some pretty careless space management. I don't understand how yours can be so bloated. You're not counting things like program files, are you? You're aware that the users and program files folders aren't part of your windows installation, right?
"I have a 30GB partition for Win7 and still have 8GB left, and that's after some pretty careless space management."
Unfortunately things like volume shadow services and the source files of windows updates quickly eat up the space. A lot of users won't know about these things.
The only thing I have found drives under 60 GB useful for are speeding up database operations and development.
Your nice review of Kingston indeed encouraged me to purchase Kingston 64GB SSD for my win7 system, but your TRIM comment just kept my purchase impulse at bay. Would you mind clarifying the TRIM situation in the future? If nothing wrong with TRIM implementation on Kingston SSD, I'll buy bigger brother, 64GB SSD, for my system immediately!
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jed22281 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Given it's in a similar size category...Shouldn't the 50GB OWC Mercury Extreme be included in this?
Or is it only allowed to sit in X25-M territory?
Is that the only other competitor for the Mercury Extreme?
If true...
In which scenario/s might one pick the Extreme over the X25-M?
Thank-you!
thllxb - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I actually bought one intel-v 40g and i got the shipment today. The sequential read is very good, 190mb/s with nvidia SATA controller driver and 170mb/s with win7 driver. However, the random read speed is only 22mb/s with both drivers, much lower than the test result 60mb/s. I still need to find out why.jed22281 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Given it's in a similar size category...Shouldn't the 50GB OWC Mercury Extreme be included in this?
Or is it only allowed to sit in X25-M territory?
Is that the only other competitor for the Mercury Extreme?
If true...
In which scenario/s might one pick the Extreme over the X25-M?
Thank-you!
jed22281 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
^^^ anyone? thank-you!jed22281 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
^^^ anyone? thank-you!jed22281 - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Given it's in a similar size category...Shouldn't the 50GB OWC Mercury Extreme be included in this?
Or is it only allowed to sit in X25-M territory?
Is that the only other competitor for the Mercury Extreme?
If true...
In which scenario/s might one pick the Extreme over the X25-M?
Thank-you!
NandFlashGuy - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,I think it's misleading that you continue using the phrase "IMFT Nand". This gives the impression that all IMFT Nand is equivalent.
IMFT does not sell Nand -- they are the just legal way that Micron and Intel can share the cost of manufacturing Nand together. Each parent company has the ability to define their own litho process or their own test strategies.
This means that the Nand on the X-25 series is "Intel Nand", not IMFT or Micron Nand. Moreover, the Nand on the X-25 series receives much more extensive testing than what is sold to the removable memory market.
chuckbam - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
Because of the growth size of the winsxs folder, I think 40GBs are to small for a boot drive.sdsdv10 - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
That might be the case for you, but not for everyone. I just upgraded my father-in-law's PC with one of the Intel 40GB SSD and a 250GB regular HD for data storage. Installation of Windows 7 Home Premium left just under 23GB of usable space. Besides IE, the only other thing he needed was Office 2003 (this took less than 350MB total). Still had 22GB of space left. It boots up very quick and opening programs in very fast (nearly instantaneous). A nice improvement over the previous incarnation with XP on a regular 7200rpm HD.JimmiG - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
28 or 37GB is definitely too small for me. If you're going to buy a SSD to speed things up, there must be enough space on it to actually install some stuff on it to speed up. If you can only speed up a few percent of your disk operations, it's pretty pointless.60GB would be the minimum for me, preferably 80+ GB. 30GB is barely enough for Win7 itself *or* a couple of games. I'm using 410GB on my "Applications" drive, the one that contains the OS and games and programs I use (almost no user data like movies or pictures).
AnnonymousCoward - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
410GB for apps, are you insane? The only way I can see that possible is if you store every warez app out there.Even my bloated work machine only uses 21.3GB.
davepermen - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
tell that to our work systems which have all sort of apps on + os (+office, sap, and many other things) and all have only a c:\ drive.it's perfectly doable. not for everyone (esp. not for gamers), but for more than people might imagine.
iwodo - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
While the idea of $125 for 80GB Intel SSD is nice, but if we dont get any performance improvement over current Gen then market might wait again.SATA 3?
ONFi 2.0 / 2.2?
Faster Random Read / Write?
I really hope we get new Intel SSD controller.
Japunie - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I'd like to see some benchmarks showing time saved. That's my main issue with a benchmark. Most show a higher number, but don't exactly show yo uhow much time your saving.Gaming benchmarks are self-explanatory but I would love to see more benchmarks showing the time difference as that to me is the ultimate reason to upgrade not just to have the fastest card, what have you.
semo - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
i'm for more real world testing. fot consumer sata drives stuff like startup times and virus scans. for eneterprise sas drives i want to see exchange, sql, etc performance numbers.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
You're absolutely correct. I've posted this 3 times and emailed Anand directly, but he continues to ignore it.http://tinyurl.com/yjcr5vm">http://tinyurl.com/yjcr5vm
http://tinyurl.com/ylflfao">http://tinyurl.com/ylflfao
There's no question that he's dead wrong to not address the single thing that matters with hard drives: time. Without it you can't see how significant the difference between drives are, the AnandTech Storage Bench doesn't mean squat since drives like the SandForce use compression, and hard drives have a long history of performing differently in benchmarks vs real life. For proof of those last two points, check out http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg">http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg where RAID0 bought 20-40% more IOPS but zero load time.
The only SSD time benchmarks I know of here are Pages 29 and 30 of the very first review http://tinyurl.com/yd73sf8">http://tinyurl.com/yd73sf8. Whuddayaknow, the Vertex boots up 1.2s slower than the X25-M, and loads WoW realms 1.4s slower. How about that, something tangible and meaningful to compare.
Belard - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Don't they usually?The kinds of numbers that are easy to understand:
- Win7 boot time (after POST is preferred, but whatever)
- Loading of a game, loading of a game while doing a background task.
- virus scan
- Loading and saving a large file in Photoshop or Excel.
- Win7 Shutdown time.
- Win7 Wake up (perhaps to quick).
My own experience with Win7 and the intel X25-M-G2
Win7 boot:
1m25s = Temp 160GB HD SATA (not a fast drive)
0m09s = Intel SSD (same computer)
0m35s = Another PC with a typical 500GB 7200RPM drive.
Belard - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
All the Sandforce drives are near the top, in general.But I'm not really seeing those drives out in the market? What are those prices like.
I have my experience with intels X25 G2 drives and they still seems to offer the best overall deal. Reliability, TRIM and price (now). The 80GB G2 is down to around $200... so spend an extra $80 and double the space to work with and vastly improve the performance over any of those drives.
A typical Win7 setup with NO user data is about 15GB, which mine is with various Adobe programs, 3 browsers, Office suite and dozens of add-ons. So a 30GB is barely enough for future usage. 40GB is fine, but the performance needs to be better IMHO in order for it to be an excellent desktop boot drive. In one of our desktops in an office, Win7 boots up about 8~10 seconds after POST. Everything is instant.
Scalptrash - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Less expensive, better specs. Hmmm...Ijiwaru - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
newegg lists the 30GB at 89.99 standalone and 114.99(84.99 after MIR) for the kit.buy has the kit at 78.95 after MIR
amazon has the kit at 111.11
Taft12 - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
The pricing changes every couple of minutes, what do you want?UPDATE 13: Zipzoomfly now has the Kingston drive for $84.77 beating Newegg's $84.99
hybrid2d4x4 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Anand, in future SSD reviews, can you bring back the power consumption figures? Or maybe dedicate a short article that sums up the current lineup? I remember an article on Tom's which showed a huge amount of variance among 1st gen SSDs (with some being worse than "green" 3.5" HDDs) and am wondering how the current ones are versus a 2.5" laptop drive (ie: what impact a SSD swap will have on battery life).7Enigma - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
Agreed. I would be interested to see these figures as well. Doesn't really matter for a desktop setting but for a laptop replacement/upgrade it can be helpful.qwertymac93 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
so what your saying is...sandforce wins! Im kidding of course, but i think 30 gigs is too small, and the intel 40gig is too slow. too bad a 50 gig sandforce costs $250! o_Ompx - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
If I had a small SSD, then I'd definitely use it as a cache, rather than as a boot drive. There are 2 popular solutions: ReadyBoost integrated in Windows 7, which supports up to 32GB of storage, matching these drives. There's also external program called ReadyBoost that can work with Window XP or Windows Server version.Nomgle - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
ReadyBoost only caches Reads, and would be utterly useless in this scenario.As noted in the article, the "correct" way to use a small SSD is to install your OS directly onto it - use an additional mechanical drive as your main data store.
rivethead - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I guess I consider myself lucky that I purchased a Kingston SSDNow 40GB drive from Buy.com for $89. This was just eight weeks ago.A few hours of research and tweaking and a few aspirin later I was able to upgrade the firmware to the Intel firmware and enable TRIM.
So a big middle finger to you Intel.
Drakino - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Does the Intel drive adhere to connector location for 3.5 inch drives when mounted in the bracket? IE, can I toss the 2.5 inch drive onto the bracket, then mount the bracket in the drive carriers of a Mac Pro and plug it in?Western Digital failed this test with their initial release of the Velociraptor, only later coming out with a "Hot swappable" 3.5 inch form factor drive that adhered to SATA standards.
somedude1234 - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
I've been looking for a similar solution. Two similar items:Addonics Snap-In 25
Icy Dock MB882SP-1S-1B
Unfortunately, it looks like both of them use a separate PCB, which could possibly lead to connection problems.
I was looking for a dead-simple bracket that would offset the 2.5" drive to the proper location within a 3.5" drive space. The only candidate I've found so far is this:
Supermicro MCP-220-00043-0N
The pictures all show the complete Supermicro 3.5" hotswap carrier, including the metal bracket which properly places the 2.5" drive in the 3.5" drive space. It looks like the bracket is screw-mounted within the 3.5" carrier. I suspect that the MCP-220-00043-0N model number is actually for only the metal bracket and that the 3.5" hotswap carrier is simply shown for illustration. However, it's possible that they include both the bracket and the carrier. In that case, you could just remove the bracket and toss the carrier.
Nomgle - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
The Icy Dock MB882SP-1S-2B and MB882SP-1S-1B work just fine to convert a 2.5" drive to a 3.5" form-factor, whilst keeping the SATA connectors in the right place -http://www.icydock.com/product/mb882sp-1s-2b.html">http://www.icydock.com/product/mb882sp-1s-2b.html and http://www.icydock.com/product/mb882sp-1s-1.html">http://www.icydock.com/product/mb882sp-1s-1.htmlAnand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
No, unfortunately it looks like the bracket keeps the drive centered, which positions the SATA connectors too far to the middle to work properly in 3.5" carriers like what Apple uses for the Mac Pro.Take care,
Anand
Drakino - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Thanks for the response. If you can pass some feedback to the manufacturers, can you let them know this is one of the big reasons I haven't jumped on a SSD yet? A SATA compliant 3.5 inch solution would be appreciated by those of us using cableless drive setups. I know HP shipped a few VoodooPC gaming rigs with similar drive bays.I'm still really tempted to pick one of these up, but not sure how I can get it in my system without just dangling the drive on the connector.
Nomgle - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
See below - Icy Dock make two adaptors that'll fit your Mac Pro just fine :)vol7ron - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Anand,Though I'm still operating almost all my machines on XP, I thought you said you were going to start doing all your benchmarks in Win7.
I appreciate doing both in this example, but that's got to be a lot of time spent doing it on multiple machines.
vol7ron
PS
This article really interests me when thinking about building an HTPC. I know I'll need a lot of storage space - I hope to have 4TB worth - but having a quick, speedy, small drive would be a loading dream. Thanks for the review.
Itomerou - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I really enjoyed the article and am always impressed with the level of detail that is done when testing and comparing components. However, the only problem with this article is that when comparing queue depth and light/heavy workload averaging the results provides no value in so far as the distribution of IOPS is not normally distributed. Additionally, the fact that these drives are completely different in their drivers and priority addressing of queue requests to say that one drive is able to server requests faster depends on the fact that measurement of requests served fits the drives exact distribution of requests served. This is apparent with the charts of how each drive performs for sequential and random access. Finally, in order to make substantial claims confidence intervals must also be constructed otherwise how accurate are the results?On the otherhand I am still intrigued with the findings.
Zelog - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Look at the size of the kingston, it's tiny! Now you don't even need dedicated 2.5" space for the drive, making the htpc/laptop/net book even smaller. It is definitely worth its price in the right settings.GeorgeH - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
That was my first thought, but with a slightly different angle. If Kingston made a custom form factor you could extend laptops with dual storage below ~15". In something like the M11x you could have one of these as a fast boot drive while using a big and slow HDD with aggressive power management to get more storage, faster storage, and longer battery life.(Yes, I'm aware of mini-PCIe (and other custom connection) SSDs for netbooks and other SFF devices, but the performance there is terrible.)
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Entry level is not $125. $125 is not "cheap" or "inexpensive".davepermen - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
it's a cheap and inexpensive SSD, and definitely the most entry level ssd existing.and yeah, if you buy an entry level desktop (not an atom), you easily pay several 100$. investing 100 more to make it perform 'really fast', is the most cheap and inexpensive way to make it perform much better.
how would YOU invest that amount of money to boost up your pc? (laptops are a different story because there storage matters actually, in a pc, just let the old hdd be plugged in too)
casteve - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
The OCZ 30GB Agility @ $119 wins the entry level contest over these two. $99 after MIR at newegg.davepermen - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
technically, still more expensive than the intel 40gb at 125$ (per gb), but yeah, others than just kingston and intel should be listed.still i'm glad for the 33% more storage :)
buzznut - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
Yeah, this is the decision I made when buying my 40gig. With a win7 install those 10gb make a huge difference. For an entry level SSD, I would recommend the Intel over the OCZ despite some performance differences. Especially when it comes to gaming.Choosing between the Kingston drive and Intel at the time was a no-brainer.
However I would/will look at OCZ vertex series when going to 60GB or higher capacity.
mmntech - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
It's progress in the right direction though. Wasn't long ago when these small drives were $200-$300. Still, I'm going to wait until 80gb SSDs drop to around that price. More breathing room. Still way too small for laptop use too.vol7ron - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I'd like to see the 80GB/160GBs fall in price too. Once they do, I'll consume =]MadMan007 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
When you talk about capacities in the chart on page 4 I take it the formatted capacity is in gigabytes (GB) and not gibibytes (GiB). So on top of reserved flash there is also the GB-GiB conversion to account for?gaspard - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Harddrives are measured in Gigabytes (1 billion bytes), Operating systems (Windows for example) usually measure in Gibibytes... aka 1024 times 1024 times 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytesMadMan007 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Thanks bro but that didn't add or clarify anything about my question. The fact that HDs use GB and OSes use GiB was implicit background knowledge for my post. I see Jarrod made a guess but I'd still be interested to know whether the chart on page 4 for formatted capacities especially and others just for funsies is in GB or GiB.JarredWalton - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
And flash chips are generally measured in GiB as well (or at least, the chips come in powers of 2). I think part of this is SSD makers figure they'll use the GiB vs. GB difference to make up for their spare area. So you can have 7.3% spare area and your 40GiB SSD ends up formatting to the same size as a 40GB HDD. Just a thought.GullLars - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
This was a good test, and one i've been waiting for a while. I'm a bit disappointed a 32GB Indilinx Barefoot drive wasn't included. I have a 30GB Vertex in my laptop that performs better sequentailly than these numbers, and has better random performance than the Kingston V 30GB. The price is slightly higher though.Ref screenshot: http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?app=core&mod...">http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?app=c...h_rel_mo... CDM 3.0 + WEI for my laptop.
Now the next thing I hope Anandtech will do regarding SSDs is a comparison of RAID of low-capasity cheap SSDs VS single high capasity SSDs. This is something no other reckognized tech site has done yet, but enthusiasts have done for years now. Example: http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleshi...">http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleshi...
I'll also mention Nizzen, an enthusiast on a forum i frequent, who set a WR i PCmark vantage last spring with his 24/7 setup, and is still on top5 with the same setup (updated in august with 4GB RAM on the Areca). The key was an Areca 1680ix-12 with a RAID-0 of several (7 i think) OCZ Vertex.
ORB result page: http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.act...">http://service.futuremark.com/resultCom...sultId=2...
24740 PCmarks, WAY ahead of the highest score in your benchmark lists. The same level of disk performance is possible to get with an LSI 9211-8i with 8 30-40GB SSDs in RAID-0 for about $1000 (less than 2 256GB SSDs).
Suggested lineup for such an article: RAID-0 of 4 Kingston V 30GB, Intel x25-V, and Indilinx Barefoot 32GB (Vertex?). 2 RAID-0 SF-1200/1500 50GB, Kingston SSDNow V+ 64GB, Indilinx Barefoot 64GB, Intel x25-M 80GB. And single 100/128/160 GB SSDs of various controllers.
Regarding performance degrading in RAID whitout TRIM, increased reserved area can help negate the performance degrading (Ref IDF whitepaper on spare area). Increasing the spare area to ~20-25% from the default 7% (on most SSDs) will make sure degrading will not be noticable by users in normale usage models.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
So how much faster were program loads and other useful things with that super RAID array?Taft12 - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
A few hundredths of a second - $1000 well spent!!!semo - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
wow am i seeing <2mb/s sequential write speed on those drives? it must be an error i'm pretty sure that SD cards can do better than thatsamspqr - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
there's a 4 on the other side of the axis: it's 41mb/sQChronoD - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
That is annoying...Hey Anand (or TWIMC)
Isn't there a way for your pretty graph program to move the text to right of the bar if there isn't enough room for the label to fit? It's really annoying when you can't read half of the results because the super long product names are compressing the graph...
icrf - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Agreed, it is pretty annoying. What is used to generate these graphs? A third party tool or something in house? What language/what tool?Taft12 - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
I remember one of the other regular contributers mentioning that getting the graphs to look nice is not trivial, and I've had the same experience trying to accomplish the same.Of course, if the bar is so small you can't see the number, it doesn't really matter what the number is, the result is dismal.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
It's an automated system that unfortunately doesn't handle that case very well. We're launching the new site in a few weeks and we'll be updating the graph styles as well, so I'm going to try to get that fix in there :)Take care,
Anand
fless - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
You can change the location of those labels in swiff chart pro. Right click on the number then select single label. You're too lazy.samspqr - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
hisome time ago, 3dprofessor found that swapping a standard HDD for a WD velociraptor increased rendering performance by a sizeable 10%
http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews%20Folder%20Page...">http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews%20Folder%20Page...
in fact, I'm pretty sure in the core2 times they got much bigger improvements on a dual-socket board, but I can't find that review anymore
you also do rendering tests on your CPU reviews
could you test rendering performance of some standard 7200 drive, vs the velociraptor, vs a low-end SSD, vs a high end SSD? with your new gulftown, perhaps?
thanks
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
Anand stopped benchmarking SSDs in ways that pertain to real life long ago. http://tinyurl.com/ylflfao">http://tinyurl.com/ylflfaosamspqr - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
I agree with your posts on the other thread: I don't care about IOPS, just like getting more points in a benchmark won't make me happy by itselfI'm totally in the dark with respect to SSDs so far; with things as they are now, I guess I'll have to wait till I get my hands on one of them and can do my own testing (general feeling, then 3D rendering, video editing and encoding)
Taft12 - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
Rendering performance is not really an important bechnchmark for a general desktop computing website such as this.samspqr - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
well, if it is in the CPU reviews, then it could be here too, coudn't it? at least if they found out that there's some difference, which is why I'm askingsamspqr - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
here it is:http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews%20Folder%20Page...">http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews%20Folder%20Page...
they halved the rendering times by moving from a Western Digital 1TB RE-2 to a velociraptor, on a dual QX9775 board
soltari - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
The kingston (intel) 40gb bootdrive was an awesome drive while it lasted. Mine actually did arrive last december with trim firmware on it, to my pleasant surprise. However after it died after purring along for 10 days and faced with no replacement possibility due to intel now wanting to sell only their identical more expensive drives i had to get a new one and for sure wasnt going to pay 35 dollars more to get the same drive back. An OCZ vertex 60gb is doing the purring now without issues.still the small SSD drive to run your O.S. from is an amazing improvement to overall performance. For this these new small cheap drives are great.
davepermen - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I use the X25-V in a Media Center setup (all actual data over the (gb) network). the -V delivers absolutely stunning performance, resulting in a fast to boot, very snappy system. and it has enough spare space for recording tv before it gets shifted to the winhome server.i could never get the kingston solution when seeing it's random performances. it's imho the main thing that makes an ssd feel fast. the media center is always "there", always "reacting". and even while the 40MB/s write speed is slow, the fact that it delivers nearly constant 40MB/s no matter if it's sequencial or random does it still perform quite fast (faster than hdds) in most real life cases (like installing the os).
i'm happy to get 10GB more space for the same price (a big thing in such low-storage devices), and i'm happy to get the overall more snappy and responsive performance.
for me, it's Intel: 1, Kingston: 0.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Just like anand, here is another example of mindless intel worship.1. They arent the same price. One is 30% cheaper.
2. For media center applications, either would work perfectly fine, so obviously you dont know what you're talking about.
dagamer34 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
So definite improvement when using an SSD in media center? I've been meaning to get one, but didn't think that my primary apps could fit in 40GB. Seems a bit small.buzznut - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
It depends on your install. You can easily get a win7 installation down to 10 gigs by turning things off like system restore, page file, and hibernation.I use the 40GB Intel drive and have Win7 pro, Office, flash, and any number of small productivity apps plus Heroes V with all the expansions. 15GB free atm, plenty of room to add PowerDVD and whatnot.
kmmatney - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
" You gain better sequential performance and concurrent IOPS, but you have no way to actively curb performance degradation. "Can you schedule the SSD Toolbox to perform a manual TRIM. WOuldn't be so bad then - set it to run once a week and forget about it.
I have to say, Intel wins this round, easily. The Kingston would have had to perform much better to make up for the smaller drive size. I would expect that the Kingston will have to come down in price to remain competitive.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
The SSD Toolbox won't work on RAID volumes unfortunately.Take care,
Anand
buzznut - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
Thanks Anand for clarifying the raid and SSD toolbox issues. I can see now that adding a second 40 GB drive will not be a good idea and I should save for a larger capacity.I am very interested in knowing when Intel gets trim working for raid! Good to know I can count on Anandtech for the latest SSD news. Thanks again, Scott
pkoi - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
The difference between 30gb and 40gb is HUGE,,, I would need 50 to swap my bloated win7inighthawki - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I have a 30GB partition for Win7 and still have 8GB left, and that's after some pretty careless space management. I don't understand how yours can be so bloated. You're not counting things like program files, are you? You're aware that the users and program files folders aren't part of your windows installation, right?gerstena - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
"I have a 30GB partition for Win7 and still have 8GB left, and that's after some pretty careless space management."Unfortunately things like volume shadow services and the source files of windows updates quickly eat up the space. A lot of users won't know about these things.
The only thing I have found drives under 60 GB useful for are speeding up database operations and development.
hoohoo - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - link
I have 8 GB for OpenSuSE 11.2 and still have 3 GB free.I dunno about Windows bloat - yours or the other guy's!
davepermen - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I need one. it would be enough for 3 windows 7.no clue how bloated yours is :)
loimlo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Dear AnandYour nice review of Kingston indeed encouraged me to purchase Kingston 64GB SSD for my win7 system, but your TRIM comment just kept my purchase impulse at bay. Would you mind clarifying the TRIM situation in the future? If nothing wrong with TRIM implementation on Kingston SSD, I'll buy bigger brother, 64GB SSD, for my system immediately!
Thanks