I replaced a dead Hitachi 100Gb 7200rpm drive with a Transcend 128GB SSD several months ago in my Asus M6Ne laptop. I think it was around $380. Cheaper than the Runcore, no idea about the relative performance though. Still can't beat the deal I got with my 256GB Samsung SSD from Dell for $480.

Those features disappeared some years ago. Motherboards now have lots of control-enabled fan headers, which have more or less taken their place. If the 120mm fans were runnning at min before, then I;d say just run them at 5V -- there are many ways to do this w/o spending a penny. Thanks for the rep...

I bought an Antec Sonata case many years ago and it came with this TruePower 380 bundled in. It's been working great, 24/7 but yesterday I shut it down for an OS upgrade and it wouldn't come back on. The little green pilot LED on my mobo turns on, so the standby power still works, but nothing else. ...

eh... I put a 128GB IDE SSD into my old Centrino laptop, and I have a 256GB SSD in my current laptop. The capacities are on par with notebook HDDs already, so it's really all about price now, how much are you willing to spend to get XX performance? You don't have to sacrifice on capacity any more...

Heh. So I guess OCZ Core series wasn't Premium when it was introduced. So, OCZ provides post sales support to their Premium customers, and says "tough shit" to all their peon customers...

If you believe JMicron, cache size wasn't their problem...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpos ... count=6226

I'm saying they've had a long track record of failure and refusal to admit their problems. Why should their future behavior be any different?

The P256 is definitely a Samsung, and it's got impressively low power consumption as well as high performance.

re: cache size - kind of a moot point, there are no JMicrons with large cache. Therefore, if it's got a JMicron controller, it's best to avoid it.

The Corsair P256 seems like an excellent product at the moment.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthr ... ost4933442

Mohan had it backwards, laptop IDE uses 44 pins (because it includes the power pins) and desktop IDE uses 40 pins (because power is on a separate connector). I just got a Transcend 128GB 2.5" IDE SSD for my older laptop, it's working fine. According to the data sheet, it's actually a SATA SSD with a...

The other way is for SSDs to make 16 or 32kb block arrays. This is more expensive, though, as that's a ton of tiny chips. But it would solve the problem quite nicely. Actually it just requires a simple reorganization of the internal array inside a flash chip. Unfortunately chip-makers are still mak...

Filling a drive with deliberately written, unwanted zeroes uses up *all* of the latitude the drive has for wear-levelling or whatever else, and does so without storing any information that really needs to be stored. No, not all. They leave themselves a pool of blocks for this purpose. In enterprise...

Of course, if you did something stupid (like a Full Format instead of a Quick Format I hadn't thought about that. I usually do a full format on traditional hard drives. Guess this gets added to the list. 1. Never do a full format on an SSD 2. Never put a swap file on an SSD (Turn off virtual memory...

If I had my choice after reading that interview I'd want a firmware that reduced the usable space of the drive noticeably so that wear leveling / controller optimizations would work better. Obviously they went for 30/32, 60/64, and 120/128 with the V2 but I'm thinking 26/32, 52/64, and 104/128 woul...

Does the Titan stutter? @highland who cares about sequential reads/writes. tell us how it does with random reads/writes. without cache to sequence data, its inevitably going to be doing a lot of random reads/writes I care that the product meets the specs that were advertised. The Titan does, the Co...

Hey dhanson, where did you get that JMicron info? My 120GB CoreV2 never performed at its spec'd sequential speeds, and stuttered all the time. It has a USB port that was supposed to be usable for firmware updates but then OCZ announced that they would not be providing firmware updates for Core V2 af...

Yep, they're always writing to various security log files, even when nothing else is happening. Annoying as all hell. It'll prevent your hard drive from ever getting to spin down and go idle.

HDDErase is produced by the Centre for Magnetic Recording Research. Not a good omen. Regardless, the Security Erase command is a standard part of the ATA command set, and MTRON drives support it. As for the drive reporting its size as only 15MB - pretty sure that's just from a corrupted MBR. A util...

I guess it's been around for even longer than I thought. Try reading here http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=148 This blog has some good info too http://ultraparanoid.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/securely-erase-hard-drives/ And if the HDDErase program doesn't work for you, you could try sending raw ATA c...

Flash storage devices should all support a Secure Erase command that can zero out the entire drive. It's a standard command in the ATA-8 specification, nothing special/proprietary about it. MTRON for certain supports it.

For a laptop, a raptor isn't an option. That makes the choice a lot more obvious... My 120GB OCZ Core V2 is mostly working for me on Linux. The only way to keep it tolerable is to up my writeback cache time to about 10 minutes, and make sure that none of the software I run calls fsync() to force cac...

Something still doesn't make sense about all this. If the controller is really too stupid to reorder logically random writes into physically sequential writes, then caching alone wouldn't solve the problem. I.e., if you throw a long stream of random I/Os into a big cache, eventually it has to flush ...

I bought a 120Gb Core V2 SSD for my HP dv5z laptop. It definitely has problems on Vista, as already described by many other posts all over. On Linux I set my cache timeout to 10 minutes. # grep vm /etc/sysctl.conf vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 60000 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 60000 vm.dirty_ratio ...

All I can say is that write speed issues with MLC flash have been known for years. Well before OCZ started selling SSDs. If you didn't know about it when you bought your first SSD then it may have been a harsh awakening but the truth was out there. You just need to open your eyes to it. Early adopt...

i'm feeling a bit like jumping on the OCZ drive was a premature decision, but what the hell. The 160GB Intel drive won't be out for another quarter or two, so in the meantime, I'm still getting better read performance with my 120GB CoreV2 than any other notebook drive.

I get 138MB/sec sequential reads from mine. More like Core V1 speed, I wonder how anyone can get 170MB/sec from this V2 drive...

ehh... As a software developer on Linux, I'm happy I made the jump already. Read speeds are terrific, and write speeds are irrelevant because writes are absorbed by the filesystem cache. On a crummy OS like Windows with a braindead and non-tunable memory management policy, you're kinda stuck. But on...

Yeah supposedly Intel says their controller does not suffer from the horrible write performance of the previous ssd's. I guess we will have to wait and see on this one. I guess the only way would be to us on of the caching controllers and setup a raid array. If there was no cache then I suppose you...

These days, 16MB of DRAM probably runs on less than a milliwatt. A capacitor would be enough to keep the buffer intact for quite a long time. Writing to flash takes a bit more juice, but I bet you could use a cap to handle this as well, so the cache would automatically flush when power was removed f...

Agreed, it's pretty stupid of SSD manufacturers not to include DRAM caches in their products. A cache would also allow the SSDs to have burst transfer rates equal to the interface speed, e.g. 300MB/sec on 3Gbps SATA2. Given how common 8-16MB caches are in current HDDs, there's really no excuse for it.

NAND flash can generally be written in sectors of 512 bytes at a time, but if you need to rewrite existing sectors they have to be erased first, and erasing is generally done 2MB at a time. So, if you're only rewriting a region of data that's only part of a 2MB block, the whole thing has to be read,...