1st Intel SSD Review & 4 Way SSD RoundUp

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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highlandsun
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Re: Intel enters fray ...

Post by highlandsun » Tue Sep 09, 2008 11:10 am

dhanson865 wrote: 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 adopters of any tech pay a penalty, usually it is just price but sometimes the penalties vary widely. Caveat Emptor.
Yes, the quirks of writing to MLC flash *chips* have been known for years. Therefore, companies putting them into *drive products* should have taken steps to mitigate these quirks from day one. There's no excuse for OCZ's poor performance.

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Re: Intel enters fray ...

Post by Bar81 » Tue Sep 09, 2008 11:37 am

highlandsun wrote:
dhanson865 wrote: 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 adopters of any tech pay a penalty, usually it is just price but sometimes the penalties vary widely. Caveat Emptor.
Yes, the quirks of writing to MLC flash *chips* have been known for years. Therefore, companies putting them into *drive products* should have taken steps to mitigate these quirks from day one. There's no excuse for OCZ's poor performance.
Precisely, thank you.

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Post by dhanson865 » Tue Sep 09, 2008 12:29 pm

I'm not trying to be rude but your posts confuse me in a continuity sense:

viewtopic.php?t=48965
Bar81 Wed Aug 06, 2008 wrote:The Core is a monster; it just puts my Raptor to shame - we're talking full XP install in under thirty minutes, full Office 2003 install in around 8 minutes and programs open instantaneously (Firefox, Word, etc.) I'm using it on my motherboard's JMB port in IDE mode and have left write caching on with no issues so far. Write speed is excellent as well (guess desktop users don't do many random writes). With regard to the extremely limited number of issues reported in the ocz forums...
...
...The best $300 I've spent in some time; can't wait to pair it with a Deneb when they're released later this year.
Bar81 Wed Aug 06, 2008 wrote:Just a small modification to my original post. I was getting random hitching so I disabled write caching and it disappeared...
...
...One last thing, not only are these things silent but they are also impossibly small; I was shocked when I realized that 80% of the box is just packaging material (and the box is small to begin with).
Bar81 Wed Aug 08, 2008 wrote:I've been playing around with the drive a little more and got some interesting results. Earlier I mentioned that I was having a little hitching issue and that I resolved it by removing write caching. Well, that's not entirely accurate. The issue came back and was driving me crazy as the system would just freeze...
...
...I think I've figured out the issue. From my experience, the analysis by the gentleman above showing the atrocious random write performance is on the money. Essentially, when this drive has to engage in a random write, it's so poor performing that the system just freezes. Is this a fatal flaw? I don't think so for the desktop user as long as you understand the drive's limitations.
Bar81 Wed Aug 08, 2008 wrote:...
In any case, installed the OS and now doing SP3 and the Core is extremely responsive without any hitches...
Bar81 Wed Aug 09, 2008 wrote:...The issue with freezes is still there for installing programs but once installed I haven't had any issues whether hitches or otherwise...
Bar81 Tue Aug 12, 2008 wrote:Well, I tried an interesting experiment yesterday and switched back to my Raptor. Yes, some things were better such as being able to multitask without any freezes during installs of programs but when it comes down to it, the Core has ruined me. The instant access times and insane reads have made me a SSD convert. When prices come down I'll probably get a 64GB SLC SSD but the Core will hold me over just fine in the meantime.
viewtopic.php?t=49956
Bar81 Mon Sep 08, 2008 wrote:the MLC drives (before the Intel) have serious issues...
...
...In the meantime, the OCZ guys are replacing my drive, but based upon my experience, that of others and this article, I'm pretty sure I'll have a $300 paperweight and it will be my last purchase from OCZ as they had to have known what they were releasing and did so anyway.
I'm just trying to figure out what happend in this progression that I missed

1. The Core is a monster; it just puts my Raptor to shame
2. The best $300 I've spent in some time
3. Is this a fatal flaw? I don't think so for the desktop user as long as you understand the drive's limitations.
4. In any case, installed the OS and now doing SP3 and the Core is extremely responsive without any hitches
5. The issue with freezes is still there for installing programs but once installed I haven't had any issues whether hitches or otherwise
6. Still better than a raptor (paraphrased)
7. ???????? What happened here?
8. the MLC drives (before the Intel) have serious issues.

I just don't know what happened between Aug 12 and Sep 08 that made you so upset about the drive. You seemed to totally understand the drives limitations at slots 3 and 5 and made the evaluation at slot 6 that it was still better than using a raptor. I'm just looking for something more substantial than buyers remorse to put in slot 7.

It is it just coincidence that your anger towards OCZ grew after the Aug 14 2008 announcement of the Core V2? A better revision of the drive shows up a week after you bought the Core V1 so you are mad that you don't have the better version?

You have way more experience with this drive than I have so I value your opinion but it'd sure help if you'd fill in the blank.

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Post by MikeK » Wed Sep 10, 2008 10:03 pm

TBorgeaud wrote: However, I have found little information to give me any idea about what to actually expect in terms of wear leveling. I just assume that devices employ wear leveling that is sophisticated enough to deal with unusual but quite possible scenarios.

This is really where I am looking for a bit more information. I would like to be able to judge, with some degree of confidence, where I will definitely not be pushing the limits of a device.
It's actually not that sophisticated. I've done a little research on this and it's a bit tricky. All the companies keep their wear levelling algorithms secret so it's hard to tell exactly how they work, but I believe almost all are using a dynamic wear levelling as described here:
http://www.smartm.com/memdigest/Februar ... _topic.cfm

It's counter intuitively called dynamic wear levelling. They have some set order they go through to write over unused blocks with new data. This is supposed to spread out the writes and age the blocks more evenly, but there is always the chance that you aren't overwriting certain blocks and so the writes all go to the same "few" blocks, aging them more quickly. It's called dynamic since it rotates the blocks used by the "dynamic" data, aka not the data that stays the same. This definitely makes for shorter lifespan but is advantageous since it's easier to implement than chucking everything around based on how much it has been used and keeping track of everything and it's also faster since it doesn't have to do that. Imagine though that you have a 4GB USB flash drive and you have 3.5GB of it always full with the same photo files (cold data), but you use the other 0.5GB regularly. That would wear those out more quickly. Static wear levelling does more overall writes but keeps the blocks evenly aged. SiliconSystems is one company that is using static wear levelling.

I have worked some on figuring out the ordering of how a couple particular USB flash drives do it and I have gleaned some info but I've had to destroy them in the process. :shock:

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Post by Bar81 » Sat Sep 13, 2008 1:37 am

Thanks for the civil tone of your latest reply. I can see where you'd be coming to this conclusion but it's pure coincidence that the V2 came out, it was frankly, more annoying than anything else, as I wouldn't want that one either, as it, from all reports, has the same issues as V1.

To give you a better idea of what I've been through here goes:

The reason I got the Core was that I was looking for a replacement for the Raptor, not because I don't like it's performance but because it's too loud even isolated in my system; it's the only component that is audible above ambient. I also was hesitant to pay big dollars for new technology that may fail unexpectedly and the really good units were from makers I am not familiar with (Memoright and Mtron).

System at the time of buying the Core was a 939 Opteron system with a mobo from ASRock and I was using the JMicron controller for my boot drive. Core drive at the outset was blazing fast, installed XP SP2 in like 20 minutes and well under 10 minutes for Office 2K3 SP2. As I played with it it was very fast but as more programs got installed it would randomly freeze up every once in a while. Began to check out user reports and try everything recommended which helped at first but as soon as my excitement wore off, the same hitching remained but maybe less pervasive.

Next, I decided to try the ULi controller on the mobo and same thing, install was nice and smooth operation at first but it would hitch as I was using Firefox and anything else. Next, tried another 939 mobo I had sitting around with an ATI chipset and it wouldn't even recognize the drive.

So, wanting to upgrade at some point this year, I decided not to wait on Nehalem (as I figured the TDP would be unacceptable) and picked up a C2D system and installed the drive using the JMicron eSATA controller. The setup was amazingly fast and at first I was so excited by the speed I was just running programs to see how fast they responded, but as soon as I got bored of that and started using Firefox and other programs normally the hitching came back. I then used a Sil3132 eSATA card and it was similar.

My final attempt was to try the Intel controller despite the reported speed issues. Well, the installs took *foreever*, like I was using a 5400rpm hard drive and it would install in bunches. Very strange, but when the installations were done it ran the best of the bunch with the least amount of hitching. While the hitching was less prevalent, it was still there and over time it just drove me nuts.

So, essentially my positive reviews were initial impressions of various setups and "fixes" that, after enthusiasm wore off, were problematic in extended use to varying degrees.

To your question, 7 is where I stopped making excuses for the Core and finally came to the realization that the hitching would not go away no matter what I did.

I'm now back to the Raptor and have learned once again that you get what you pay for. I'll just wait for the technology to mature a little as outside of the random write performance it does everything I could ever want and then some.

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Post by dhanson865 » Sat Sep 13, 2008 5:38 am

OK, so you decided that the SSD as a lone drive doesn't fit your needs. Is there any reason not to put both drives in and have the Raptor handle the swapfile and other small files and the SSD handle stuff that is static? It might take some work to move profiles and temp directories around and get the apps/OS to look at the new location but it is doable.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache ... _directory the equivalent setting could be changed for IE or Opera as well.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/ ... efile.html (This is more about the concept than the exact steps, each flavor of windows may have slightly different steps to accomplish this task)

There will be numerous decisions like that for AntiVirus, IM clients, and more. Any program that updates itself regularly, creates log files, and/or caches content. So long as you work on it you can eventually tune the OS + apps to favor the traditional hard drive or SSD as needed.

Also you have used the $300 paperweight comment more than once. Can't you in the worst case scenario sell the drive to someone else? Sure you'll take a loss as the price has dropped but it doesn't have to be a total loss.

At least part of your statements have been that OCZ put out a product that they shouldn't have. I just wish you'd tone that down from general statements that apply to everyone and specify that for you personally it doesn't meet your needs. Others may find good use for these drives.

They definitely aren't for general use by power users yet. They do have their specific uses and casual users might be willing to make the trade off for silence while power users might be willing to take the time to configure their system with multiple drive types to get the best of both worlds.

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Post by yefi » Mon Sep 15, 2008 3:33 am

dhanson865 wrote:I just wish you'd tone that down from general statements that apply to everyone and specify that for you personally it doesn't meet your needs. Others may find good use for these drives.
Anyone that buys one of these drives is entitled to say that it's plain bad.

Random writes are one of the four operations a drive performs. In a worst case scenario, the drive can take one second to perform a single random write. One second. Talk about a three-legged donkey.

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Post by trxman » Mon Sep 15, 2008 4:03 am

maybe something like anticipatory I/O scheduler with big write expire times would help

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipatory_scheduling

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Post by trxman » Mon Oct 06, 2008 11:37 am

SSDs are more and more available... to bad there are no reviews of OCZCore V2.0, Super Talent MasterDrive OX and others... :(

http://www.alternate.de/html/product/So ... sk&l3=SATA

http://www.alternate.de/html/product/So ... sk&l3=SATA

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Post by Aris » Mon Oct 06, 2008 12:13 pm

trxman wrote:SSDs are more and more available... to bad there are no reviews of OCZCore V2.0, Super Talent MasterDrive OX and others... :(
OCZ Core V2 and MasterDrive OX are exactly like the original Core Series. The only thing they changed in the V2 is they designated by default more space for increased longevity and a very slight performance bump. But otherwise they are all identical. Same exact Samsung MLC Flash chips, same exact controller. Physically they are all identical.

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Post by trxman » Mon Oct 06, 2008 12:55 pm

very sorry to hear that... :(

dhanson865
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Post by dhanson865 » Mon Oct 06, 2008 1:26 pm

Aris wrote:
trxman wrote:SSDs are more and more available... to bad there are no reviews of OCZCore V2.0, Super Talent MasterDrive OX and others... :(
OCZ Core V2 and MasterDrive OX are exactly like the original Core Series. The only thing they changed in the V2 is they designated by default more space for increased longevity and a very slight performance bump. But otherwise they are all identical. Same exact Samsung MLC Flash chips, same exact controller. Physically they are all identical.
If it is the same flash and controller how is there a performance bump?

Do you mean similar but not significantly different when you say "same" like some people mean usually when they say "always"?

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Post by Aris » Wed Oct 08, 2008 2:13 pm

dhanson865 wrote: Do you mean similar but not significantly different when you say "same" like some people mean usually when they say "always"?
"Same" as in "Physically Identical"

Any changes are software in nature. Just like how new video drivers sometimes bring a boost to your framerates. But the underlying issues that cause these problems is still there. So while it "may" perform better due to tweaked firmware, its still going to suffer from studder issue's due to insuffecient amounts of cache to sequence data.

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Post by echn111 » Mon Oct 13, 2008 5:28 pm

Ok - I'll probably avoid the OCZ's SSD's for now regardless of the review on hothardware.

Has anyone had a positive first hand experience with SSD's as their main drive?

Would anyone recommend a decent SSD based on their actual hands on experience? (Or should I wait a bit?)

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Post by Turas » Mon Oct 13, 2008 8:52 pm

I just ordered 2 or the Intel 80GB MLC ones. I plan on putting them in RAID 0. I will post more info when they arrive.

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Post by Strid » Mon Oct 13, 2008 10:29 pm

Turas wrote:I just ordered 2 or the Intel 80GB MLC ones. I plan on putting them in RAID 0. I will post more info when they arrive.
Are they out already? From where did you order them?

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Post by Turas » Tue Oct 14, 2008 9:33 am

CDW, they do not keep them in stock but their distributor had 96 of them as of yesterday.

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Post by AZBrandon » Tue Oct 14, 2008 10:08 am

Turas wrote:CDW, they do not keep them in stock but their distributor had 96 of them as of yesterday.
Wow, $720 as of this writing.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/defaul ... DC=1568887

That's a lot of money for an 80gb hard drive. At the current pricing, you really need a special reason to buy one of these over a 300gb VelociRaptor drive for example, but I still believe SSD is the way of the future. They'll catch up and pass rotating magnetic disks not just in throughput and capacity but even price eventually.

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Post by highlandsun » Tue Oct 14, 2008 11:29 am

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 cache flushes. That prevents a lot of small random writes. Anything that *does* try to do a lot of small random writes is still a real drag.

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Post by Bar81 » Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:25 am

Just a small update. OCZ customer service has resolved my issues regarding my purchase of the Core SSD to my full satisfaction. OCZ continues to be a cut above.

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Post by Meowbay » Mon Nov 03, 2008 6:43 am

dhanson865 wrote:3. You still need to make backups of important data. Any drive can fail without warning.
Actually that's not entirely true for most SSD's on sale today. They will *all* begin failing at write, and still alow reading off of them. And most SSD's will tell you when they're starting to fail, i.e. let you know to copy all data off of it a.s.a.p.

I have yet to read a "My SSD failed and I lost all my data" story in my surroundings. They do fail, sure, but none of the users lost their data that was on it because of the SSD failing. Do a google on it and you'll see what I mean..

Of course, you should protect your system against electrical load, but that's beyond SSD and exactly the same with HDD.

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Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 03, 2008 9:34 am

Meowbay wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:3. You still need to make backups of important data. Any drive can fail without warning.
Actually that's not entirely true for most SSD's on sale today. They will *all* begin failing at write, and still allow reading off of them. And most SSD's will tell you when they're starting to fail, i.e. let you know to copy all data off of it a.s.a.p.

I have yet to read a "My SSD failed and I lost all my data" story in my surroundings. They do fail, sure, but none of the users lost their data that was on it because of the SSD failing. Do a google on it and you'll see what I mean..

Of course, you should protect your system against electrical load, but that's beyond SSD and exactly the same with HDD.
You are missing the logic of "Any drive can fail without warning".

If a drive shorts out due to static electricity or gamma radiation or pixie dust overload it doesn't matter the cause. The behavior is immediate loss of access to the data on that drive.

If you have a back up of the data you can get another drive and restore from backup. If you don't you are then up to the mercy of the possibility of a timely and expensive process of trying to recover data from a damaged drive. (That's ignoring possibilities like theft, fire, flood, etc that are out of the scope of a simple drive failure)

It has nothing to do with how SSDs behave related to a write error. It has nothing to do with SMART warnings. You make backups because the unexpected can happen not because it is likely to happen.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

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Post by dhanson865 » Mon Nov 03, 2008 9:42 am

Oh, yeah and as a follow up here is a SSD failure thread on SPCR

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Post by Bar81 » Wed Nov 05, 2008 11:29 am

I only see one failure, the OP. Am I missing something?

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Post by frostedflakes » Thu Nov 06, 2008 7:45 pm

Despite my better judgment, I recently picked up one of the Patriot MLC drives. After rebate it was so cheap, I couldn't help myself. :P

Just finished loading Vista on it, and so far it doesn't seem too bad. I should probably preface this by mentioning that the 160GB Samsung I've been using as my OS drive is no speed-demon. The Patriot drive may be slower than a modern 7200RPM drive (and certainly slower than a 2.5" Raptor), but it seems to be just as fast for general use as my old drive. Windows is installing updates right now and I haven't noticed any major stuttering problems. Maybe just like split-second pauses, but nothing major. I guess the true test will be once I have everything loaded (antivius, etc.) that runs in the background, that might start to really slow it down.

But for now, I'm pleased. :)

edit: Well, experiences seem to be about what I expected. Installing programs and stuff can make the system kind of laggy (there have been times it's hung for a good 5-6 seconds), but just for basic usage and multitasking I haven't noticed any major stuttering. Program load times don't seem to have changed a whole lot, but games start up a lot faster, which is nice.
Last edited by frostedflakes on Sat Nov 08, 2008 8:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by nutball » Fri Nov 07, 2008 1:30 am

Potentially interesting...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/07 ... am_buffer/

This sound a lot like some technologies used in high-end and ultra-high-end SSDs and SSD arrays. Good to see mulitple vendors coming up with such stuff.

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Post by dhanson865 » Fri Nov 07, 2008 6:12 am

Bar81 wrote:I only see one failure, the OP. Am I missing something?
The statement that one failure refutes is "They will *all* begin failing at write, and still allow reading off of them". It was clear from his post that he could not access data on that drive after the failure.

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Post by Bar81 » Sat Nov 08, 2008 8:43 am

dhanson865 wrote:
Bar81 wrote:I only see one failure, the OP. Am I missing something?
The statement that one failure refutes is "They will *all* begin failing at write, and still allow reading off of them". It was clear from his post that he could not access data on that drive after the failure.
I don't know that the post refutes or proves anything; it's just something in the ether. Until it's confirmed by others then it's just an uncorroborated claim.

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Post by LobStoR » Mon Nov 10, 2008 7:37 pm

dhanson865 wrote:MTBF and warranties are vague at best.

Why is it that people see a 3 year warranty on a hard drive from Seagate or Western Digital and feel reassured but they see a 2 year warranty on an SSD from OCZ and freak out?
MTBF can be vague, agreed. Warranties are very clear. You are guaranteed a working drive for 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, etc. Short warranties often indicate short product lifespan.

Think of buying storage as you would think of buying a service, rather than a product... You buy warrantied ___ gigabytes for ___ years. I feel safer knowing that I am not going to have pay to replace my brand new drive 13 months after I purchased it (apart from maybe 1-way shipping)

Everyone buys different products for their own reasons... I worry about 3 years vs 5 years. To drop from a 5 year warranty to 1-2 years isn't acceptable for my purposes. SSD have their place, but not for everyone, and a lot of people don't pay enough attention to warranties.

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Post by Bar81 » Mon Dec 01, 2008 1:05 pm

Just another small update. I ponied up for the Intel X25-M 80GB SSD and finally got it set up. Now THIS IS LIVING! Amazing drive without any of the drawbacks of the Core series; I guess you ultimately get what you pay for.

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