I searched, but now I can't find the post where I posted by initial disappointed with SSD drives, what turns out it was a mere bad model and I was unlucky to pick it. I decided to write a bit longer post to share my experience with ya all..
Long story short - several months ago I built two new PCs for my colleges at work. The budget was tight and I needed to squeeze the last drop of it I decided to try the SSD as a boot drive. The model I picked was
Imation M-Class 2.5” Solid State Drive SSD 64GB SATA II
CDS is our company only official vendor so pretty much for everything I must try to get it there first.
The specs looks promising and price was right.
+ 48Bit ECC per 2KB of data - provides a 20% boost in longevity and reliability over 10 Bit ECC in 512 bytes
+ 5 Year Limited Warranty - industry leading for MLC-based products
+ Enhanced Global Wear Leveling - uniformly distributes P/E cycles for increased drive endurance
+ 230MB/s Sequential Read Write - fast data transfer and system performance
+ 170MB/s Sequential Write - fast data transfer and system performance
+ SATA II interface - allows for maximum sequential read/write drive performance
+ 64MB Cache - quick access data buffer
+ MTBF – 1,000,000 Hours
Shortly after getting the SSD installed and new OS configured - I noticed the performance wasn't what I expected and the benchmarks I ran confirmed it.
To my disappointment the windows 7 scored it a mere 5.9
- same score typical SATA disk would get and while HDtach shows impressive sustained read speeds - and somewhat good writes, the burst speeds were terrible - I don't have the numbers - the IOps were terrible.
In short - I barely gained any improvements at all, expect slightly fast windows 7 boot speeds
But I there is a bright light in this story. I decided to investigate further, read more benchmarks and reviews and quickly realized that not all SSDs are build the same and like so ofter the performance numbers claimed by manufactures often off the real world or simply meaningless.
While there are only two major types of flash memory - the building block of SSD - MLC and SLC - first one is cheap, while the other is fast, but prohibitively expensive for any home or smb use. This brings the question - there are hundreds if different models of SSD and most of the vary in speed (of same capacity) - How this is possible?
The answer lies in the model and make of the heart of every SSD - it's controller - and trust me - they aren't all built the same.
A relative new comer to market of SSD controller is yet not very known company, quickly captures entire high performance SSD market, but bringing the controller which simply dominates everything else out there.
I'm talking about
Sandforce.
Like any manufactures they love inedependent reviews and they are proudly show them off on the front page -
http://www.sandforce.com/index.php?id=161
Thanks to them I was able to find and hand pick a hidden gem -
OCZ Vertex Limited Edition SSD from this review.
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/OCZ-Vertex-LE-Sandforce-Powered-SSD-Review/?page=9
I got one from newegg -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227526
Price last month was a lower by $10 or A/R it'll cost me $140 for 5
0G - $2.8/gig - Is it expensive ? Yes, very much so, but my Old 4 year old computer with very slow boot hard drive was very slow and the proper upgrade: Cpu/mono/ram would cost me at least $600. I said lets try SSD again and I was VERY pleasantly surprised for result.
Current Setup:
Windows7 Ultimate comfortably sits on the ssd among with few smaller, but frequently used apps like Chrome & Firefox. Bigger ones like Acrobat and Office were installed on the bigger HD. Last but not least 2Tb WD green monster is uses to store all large media.
Windows 7 scores my disk speeds as 7.6 (out of 7.9), boot times from power button under 30 seconds and in whole it feels much faster.
Conclusion:
In the end i'm very happy with this purchase and highly recommend it for anyone with older computer trying to breathe a new life into it.
