SSD's...........what your advice on the best way forward?
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Looking at the large array of SSD and massively varying prices and specs, what exactly is the best approach to take from your own experience and knowledge on the subject matter. Looking at the specs, there are 3 main factors from a speed point of view; Write / Read and IOps Then there is the capacity and price. As an example; An Intel 520 series 480GB is 520MB/s write and 42K IOps and 806ukp An OCZ Agility 3 240GB is 500MB/s write 525MB/s read and 85K IOps @ 227ukp. It must be better to get the 2x240 cheaper units and Raid Stripe these into one disk, than buy the larger single disk? In fact you could buy 3 smaller disks for the price of the one larger which would give you a 720GB rapido stripe set for the price of the single larger (and smaller) disk. It is bonus time of the year, and i've got money burning a whole in my pocket (i think) so seriously considering a purchase here, but want to maximise bang for buck. Your thoughts appreciated........Thanks. :)
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
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Looking at the large array of SSD and massively varying prices and specs, what exactly is the best approach to take from your own experience and knowledge on the subject matter. Looking at the specs, there are 3 main factors from a speed point of view; Write / Read and IOps Then there is the capacity and price. As an example; An Intel 520 series 480GB is 520MB/s write and 42K IOps and 806ukp An OCZ Agility 3 240GB is 500MB/s write 525MB/s read and 85K IOps @ 227ukp. It must be better to get the 2x240 cheaper units and Raid Stripe these into one disk, than buy the larger single disk? In fact you could buy 3 smaller disks for the price of the one larger which would give you a 720GB rapido stripe set for the price of the single larger (and smaller) disk. It is bonus time of the year, and i've got money burning a whole in my pocket (i think) so seriously considering a purchase here, but want to maximise bang for buck. Your thoughts appreciated........Thanks. :)
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
The main thing to consider is actually the controller inside the unit. There have been countless bugs and problems with controllers and firmwares, the last one with a new unit only a few weeks ago, causing data corruption and other reliability issues. So basically the first thing I would look would be user reviews and reports for bugs/errors/problems. Also, I would only purchase a unit that is not a brand-new model, but instead that has a few months of life so potential problems have been found (and hopefully fixed) already. Regarding RAID setups, they may give you some benefit if individual disks themselves do not use all the SATA bandwidth. With SATA3 that shouldn't happen, but it depends on your motherboard. In other words, it might be that a single uni already fills most of the bandwidth, so using two units in RAID0 would not give you an enormous benefit. Also, don't consider SSDs as indestructible. Quite the opposite actually. Jeff Atwood said that he has never seen a SSD last more than one year or so. So do backup your data.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] ScrewTurn Wiki, Software Localization Tools & Services and My Blog
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Looking at the large array of SSD and massively varying prices and specs, what exactly is the best approach to take from your own experience and knowledge on the subject matter. Looking at the specs, there are 3 main factors from a speed point of view; Write / Read and IOps Then there is the capacity and price. As an example; An Intel 520 series 480GB is 520MB/s write and 42K IOps and 806ukp An OCZ Agility 3 240GB is 500MB/s write 525MB/s read and 85K IOps @ 227ukp. It must be better to get the 2x240 cheaper units and Raid Stripe these into one disk, than buy the larger single disk? In fact you could buy 3 smaller disks for the price of the one larger which would give you a 720GB rapido stripe set for the price of the single larger (and smaller) disk. It is bonus time of the year, and i've got money burning a whole in my pocket (i think) so seriously considering a purchase here, but want to maximise bang for buck. Your thoughts appreciated........Thanks. :)
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
not sure I can quote speeds at you Dave - my Sony Vaio Z-Series has 64GB x 4 SSD, in a Raid 0 Partition, giving 256GB - its been around the world once, and on plenty of trips up and down Aus, without missing a beat. While I realise I should back it up, its a sweet machine that hasnt yet given me any issues ps .. the SSD's are SAMSUNG MMCRE28GQDVP-MVB 'g'
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Looking at the large array of SSD and massively varying prices and specs, what exactly is the best approach to take from your own experience and knowledge on the subject matter. Looking at the specs, there are 3 main factors from a speed point of view; Write / Read and IOps Then there is the capacity and price. As an example; An Intel 520 series 480GB is 520MB/s write and 42K IOps and 806ukp An OCZ Agility 3 240GB is 500MB/s write 525MB/s read and 85K IOps @ 227ukp. It must be better to get the 2x240 cheaper units and Raid Stripe these into one disk, than buy the larger single disk? In fact you could buy 3 smaller disks for the price of the one larger which would give you a 720GB rapido stripe set for the price of the single larger (and smaller) disk. It is bonus time of the year, and i've got money burning a whole in my pocket (i think) so seriously considering a purchase here, but want to maximise bang for buck. Your thoughts appreciated........Thanks. :)
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
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Looking at the large array of SSD and massively varying prices and specs, what exactly is the best approach to take from your own experience and knowledge on the subject matter. Looking at the specs, there are 3 main factors from a speed point of view; Write / Read and IOps Then there is the capacity and price. As an example; An Intel 520 series 480GB is 520MB/s write and 42K IOps and 806ukp An OCZ Agility 3 240GB is 500MB/s write 525MB/s read and 85K IOps @ 227ukp. It must be better to get the 2x240 cheaper units and Raid Stripe these into one disk, than buy the larger single disk? In fact you could buy 3 smaller disks for the price of the one larger which would give you a 720GB rapido stripe set for the price of the single larger (and smaller) disk. It is bonus time of the year, and i've got money burning a whole in my pocket (i think) so seriously considering a purchase here, but want to maximise bang for buck. Your thoughts appreciated........Thanks. :)
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
Remember that when you're using striping, whether in Raid 0 or Raid 5, the controller will write a whole stripe every time you write anything to disk, so striping might slow things down in many scenarios. I always recommend Raid 0 or 5 for storage only. For OS I recommend plain disk or mirroring. The Intel disk is about 10% faster, and it's entirely up to you whether it's worth it or not, I personally wouldn't care. But very noticable is the lower power needed for the Intel drive, which is definitely making a difference in a laptop.
Light moves faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright, until you hear them speak. List of common misconceptions
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Looking at the large array of SSD and massively varying prices and specs, what exactly is the best approach to take from your own experience and knowledge on the subject matter. Looking at the specs, there are 3 main factors from a speed point of view; Write / Read and IOps Then there is the capacity and price. As an example; An Intel 520 series 480GB is 520MB/s write and 42K IOps and 806ukp An OCZ Agility 3 240GB is 500MB/s write 525MB/s read and 85K IOps @ 227ukp. It must be better to get the 2x240 cheaper units and Raid Stripe these into one disk, than buy the larger single disk? In fact you could buy 3 smaller disks for the price of the one larger which would give you a 720GB rapido stripe set for the price of the single larger (and smaller) disk. It is bonus time of the year, and i've got money burning a whole in my pocket (i think) so seriously considering a purchase here, but want to maximise bang for buck. Your thoughts appreciated........Thanks. :)
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
I've had an Intel SSD for a couple of years now as my C:\ drive with no problems - actually, it's fantanstic :) I bought an OCZ Vertex 3 MI a couple of months ago to use as my dev drive. Again no problems, but it's not noticibly faster than my VelociRaptor. So my experience is that the price premium is warrented when you are reading lots of small files spread out randomly on the disc ( i.e. your C:\ drive ), but there's not much to be gained when the files are larger and accessed in order. So, I wouldn't buy a large SSD at the moment - what are you going to put on it? I'm actually considering using the OCZ as a mirror ( RAID 1 ) for my C:\ drive. I'm not that impressed with it in its present role. Nick
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I've had an Intel SSD for a couple of years now as my C:\ drive with no problems - actually, it's fantanstic :) I bought an OCZ Vertex 3 MI a couple of months ago to use as my dev drive. Again no problems, but it's not noticibly faster than my VelociRaptor. So my experience is that the price premium is warrented when you are reading lots of small files spread out randomly on the disc ( i.e. your C:\ drive ), but there's not much to be gained when the files are larger and accessed in order. So, I wouldn't buy a large SSD at the moment - what are you going to put on it? I'm actually considering using the OCZ as a mirror ( RAID 1 ) for my C:\ drive. I'm not that impressed with it in its present role. Nick
I was going to use it as my main C:\ drive. I would then use the current 2TB Constellation HDD as just a general drive. I also already have a 5x1.5TB Raid 5 QNAP NAS for storage and back. So it would be used mainly for, Office and Visual Studio. Looking at the SSD Raid charts on Toms Hardware there is a noticeable difference going from 1 disk to a Raid Stripe. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/ssd-raid-0-charts-2011/benchmarks,120.html[^]
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
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I was going to use it as my main C:\ drive. I would then use the current 2TB Constellation HDD as just a general drive. I also already have a 5x1.5TB Raid 5 QNAP NAS for storage and back. So it would be used mainly for, Office and Visual Studio. Looking at the SSD Raid charts on Toms Hardware there is a noticeable difference going from 1 disk to a Raid Stripe. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/ssd-raid-0-charts-2011/benchmarks,120.html[^]
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
Putting your C:\ drive on any SSD will make your machine a lot quicker. I have no tolerance for machines that make me wait, but app load times are quick enough on a single SSD that I don't even notice. I don't think even halving the load times would be good bang-for-buck - they're quick enough already. Also, my 120GB C:\ drive still has 40GB free even after a couple of years - why do you want 480GB? Continuous writes will degrade SSDs, so you want it to be mostly read-only. So you need to move your pagefile and hibernate file somewhere else, which is a big chunk of most C:\ drives. I just mirrored my C:\ drive and thinking about it, not having to spend a week reinstalling everything if the old disk goes kaput is worth more than half a second off the VS load time. Hope this helps, Nick
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The main thing to consider is actually the controller inside the unit. There have been countless bugs and problems with controllers and firmwares, the last one with a new unit only a few weeks ago, causing data corruption and other reliability issues. So basically the first thing I would look would be user reviews and reports for bugs/errors/problems. Also, I would only purchase a unit that is not a brand-new model, but instead that has a few months of life so potential problems have been found (and hopefully fixed) already. Regarding RAID setups, they may give you some benefit if individual disks themselves do not use all the SATA bandwidth. With SATA3 that shouldn't happen, but it depends on your motherboard. In other words, it might be that a single uni already fills most of the bandwidth, so using two units in RAID0 would not give you an enormous benefit. Also, don't consider SSDs as indestructible. Quite the opposite actually. Jeff Atwood said that he has never seen a SSD last more than one year or so. So do backup your data.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] ScrewTurn Wiki, Software Localization Tools & Services and My Blog
As eager as I have been to use an SSD as a primary drive, I have been reluctant because of reported high-failure rates as you note by quoting Atwood in your message. And by the relatively higher cost here in Thailand. It is interesting to me that just today I saw, on-line, on Thailand's kind of wannabe version of NewEgg, SSD's (Kingston brand) offered with a 3 year warranty: before today I had seen only offerings of SSD's with only a 1 year warranty. Given climate/humidity extremes here (in even a pretty well heat-shielded room, with air-con in use during the worst weather) local consensus is that most every IDE or ATA hard-drive will fail within two years of intensive use. Failure within two years has been my experience on almost every drive I've used here, even ones used, more rarely, as back-up drives. Fortunately we can buy hard drives here with three and five year warranties, and, interestingly, replacement can be quite prompt (as you may know many companies manufacture hard-drives here in Thailand, or did until the recent flooding of the large industrial estates where most of them were manufactured were damaged by this year's severe flooding). Now, if I went down to Bangkok, and really shopped-around in the giant emporia, maybe I'd find SSD's from other manufacturers being also offered with three year warranties, so take this single observation with a grain of salt. best, Bill
"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." Niels Bohr