I've been keeping an eye out for SATA III SSD drives ever since I let that Plextor sale slip by, then this popped up today for the Columbus Day Sale: Corsair Force Series 3 CSSD-F90GB3-BK 2.5" 90GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) It looks like it'd be enough for Win7 + a few very large, performance demanding games with some space left over, but the read/write data is only listed at max speeds. I searched around some and my initial impression is that no one is actually clocking these things at sustained speeds. Plextor was clocking at 420mb/s:210mb/s read:write sustained speeds, are these two drives even comparable?
uh.... I have to leave for work like right now. Ill respond with all the pros and cons of that drive later with a big post for ya. But to sum it up? Id pass on that drive. Ill say why later
Ok as I have said in previous posts, sequential speeds do not mean anything for performance. The only time those speeds come into play is when you are reading/moving a file larger than a few hundred MB. For real performance, you need to care about 3 things: access times random 4k read random 4k write Access times are generally very low and similar on all SSDs but the lower the better. You definitely wouldnt want something that is 0.2ms or higher. You also need to be careful if you use a RAID card or SATA expander as many of those models add about 4ms to your access times, completely unusable for a SSD. Random 4K read and write are the majority of all file transfers for Windows. Thus for normal use, you see huge benefits from a SSD because mechanical hard drives have TERRIBLE random 4k numbers (usually around 1MB/s max). Games use a combination of 4k - 512k files with things like textures being larger. You can estimate real performance based on IOPS, which is input/output operations per second. If something does not list MB speed then it usually lists IOPS. The higher the better. But there is a catch, Sandforce drives (like the Corsair Force 3). All Sandforce based drives market data you see in the specs are not always true. Sandforce uses compression algorithms to get its very high speed. But the catch here is, you can only achieve that speed in lots of highly compressible data. Data that cannot be compressed actually gets MUCH slower speed from the drive. That is one reason you cannot trust a Sandforce controller based SSD. Additionally, if you are using data that cannot be internally compressed by the drive then it wears out the drive much faster. And when the drive starts wearing, algorithms kick in to slow the drive IOPS down to maintain drive lifetime. So if you use the drive a lot in situations where it doesnt excel, then you will be left with an incredibly slow SSD. And on top of all that, we have Sandforce Sudden Death Syndrome. What causes it? No one knows for sure. Drives with a Sandforce controller are known to suddenly die with no warning at all and be completely unrecoverable by any means. This can happen at any time, in any situation, on any computer. Does it happen often? yes and no. Statistically the numbers are low compared to total drives, however the death rate of the controller is drastically higher than any other controller on the market. Even Anandtech's review drive suffered from this sudden death. This is the primary reason I steer people away from any Sandforce products. That Plextor drive is a re-branded Crucial M4. It uses the same NAND chips, the same controller, and probably the same firmaware. The Crucial M4 is one of the best drives there is, IMO it is the #2 drive on the market. it combines high sequential speeds (for the 2% of the time you care about that) with high 4k random speeds, and good reliability. Overall it is a good drive with very few known problems. Those problems include: Incompatibility with Mac OSX computer systems Some small incompatibility issues on some system using a P67 chipset and Sandy Bridge processor. The best drive on the market IMO is the Samsung 470 series. Why? Reliability. It is not the fastest drive thats for sure, but it is still quite fast. It is almost as fast as the Crucial M4 in random speeds and faster than Sandforce in random un-compressible data. Samsung is the largest OEM maker of SSDs and these SSDs are what ship in Mac systems and most computers like Dell or HP when you order a SSD from them. Additionally since Samsung's primary market is OEM and enterprise, they do incredibly QC testing and validation. As such, there have yet to be any firmware related issues with any Samsung SSDs. Samsung is releasing their new 830 series soon that is almost as fast as a Sandforce drive (when Sandforce is using fully compressible data). It is unknown yet is Samsung uses similar compression algorithms, although it seems unlikely. The Samsung 830 series when it is released will be the fastest drive on the market in nearly every situation. With Samsung's track record we can assume (or hope at least) that the drive will be problem free right from the launch. So what do I recommend to buy for you? Either a Crucial M4 or Samsung 470. I like Intel, but their cost and size compared to the competition puts them out of the price range to most people. And lastly, here are the specs for the upcoming Samsung 830 series if you want to wait: and performance review for speeds between the 830 and other major drives.: Ans lastly, I want to leave you with this image of benchmark testing between some drives at different compression levels. Here you can see illustrated what I said earlier about Sandforce based drives only being as fast as advertised in completely compressible situations:
I also had a question asked of me today that people should know about SSDs: Q: Do I defragment a solid state drive? A: No, you do not ever want to defragment a SSD. This will lower the SSD lifetime and slow the drive down for a while (until garbage collection fixes the drive speed or you run a TRIM command to restore the drive speed). Q: Should I still turn off Indexing on a SSD? A: No, you can leave indexing of the drive on if you want. it doesnt make a difference with todays drives lifetime's Q: Should I set up the Windows pagefile on the SSD or leave it off? A: Yes you should set up your WIndows pagefile on a SSD. A solid state drive is the best device to use with a pagefile because of its fast random transfer speeds and low access times. Additionally a pagefile is 90% reads and only 10% writes, so it will not cut your drives lifetime down and you will gain a lot of speed for Windows.
Another issue I was just made aware of with Sandforce drives (in addition to the sudden death) is that a small percentage of drives will randomly give BSOD's in Windows and will drop connection with the system. To get the drive back you need to restart Windows. The issue is seen on both Intel and AMD platforms while using a drive that has a Sandforce SF-22xx controller.
It's hard to believe the new Samsung will have the lead by that far of a margin, but the specs don't appear to actually be upselling at all, and future results will have to match the same outcome... It's pretty important to get this stuff right, being that SSDs are faster, more expensive and potentially much more volatile. With how unreliable some of these drives are it's like trying out a forest fire inside your computer to check if your load times can go quicker. I'll definitely be considering a Samsung, or possibly a Crucial version of SSD as the best alternatives.
Sandforce finally got off their asses it seems: Lol @ Sandforce discovering the BSOD bug, they didnt discover the bug at all. Sandforce has repeatedly denied any responsibility for their problems and blamed motherboard manufacturers, I guess until it was proven the controller is at fault and they release a firmware fix. Marketing FTW. This affects all Sandforce drives (SF-2xxx) BTW so look for your firmware updates. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4973/...re-bug-causing-bsod-issue-fix-available-today http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...-this-thread-for-questions-and-all-discussion
Hrmmmm Do you mean all new SF-2xxx based SSDs? I was under the impression that the Vertex 2 aka SF-1200 controller didn't suffer from these issues. I've had mine for years now and love it with zero issues.