Advice on solid state drives?

[flyingcrocodile46]

I have been doing some research on the advantages of Solid state drives and am ready to take the plunge and upgrade the Sata II 500Gb HDD in my Acer Iconia 6120 Dual touch screen laptop which is running 8Gb ram and Windows 7 touch (don't like 8 and wont work properly with my dual screens).

I have spent quite a bit of time reading the Newegg feedback comments on the various brands and models of SSD. Based on the feedback around reliability and availability locally I have narrowed the choices down to (in order of preference) Samsung 840 Pro, Intel 520 series, Samsung 840 and Crucial M4.

I know that My sata II set up will not reap the bigger gains of the sata 3 drives but it looks like there aren't many sata 2 drives out there and they aren't much if any cheaper and some appear to have controller issues or limitations which may not be desirable. So I figured to run with the backward compatible sata III models (that don't have stability issues).

480 to 512 Gb are going to cost pretty much double the cost of the 240 - 256 GB drives and (up until recently) I made do with 60Gb of drive ok (in my previous laptop) so I probably can't justify spending more that the cost of the 240 - 256Gb drives.

From what I understand, some of the benefits of the samsung 840 pro over the std 840 are restricted to the 512Gb drive and with the Pro model at 25+% more $ than the standard it may not be the best value for money if I am only going with the 240 - 256Gb drive size. The Intel 520 is about 15+% more $ than the std Samsung 840 and I am not sure if it's worth it. The Crucial M4 is about the same price as the Intel 520 but maybe not quite as good performance and reliability wise.

That is where I am at.

Do any of you guys have any experiences and or knowledge that may be of benefit to me in this decision?

__________________

[flyingcrocodile46]

Putting my thoughts into words has helped make them clearer and am now looking to narrow it down to one of the samsung 840 models :laugh: A few more factors that I have noted are that the Intel 520 has 128byte auto data encryption built in (so no down time having to encrypt files which is a big plus if you are mega security concious (not so much for me). However it is 9mm thick (whereas both samsung 840 models are 7mm) so wouldn't be any good if I upgraded to an ultraslim form factor and wanted to reuse it (probably not likely) but it might result in a little more loss on re-sale value because of that, if I wanted to sell it separately to my current rig (into which I would re-install the original drive). Apparently the Samsung models feature a different memory manager than all other manufacturers and they read & write uncompressed files much quicker (which is probably the significant majority of typical data transfer that takes place).

The real kicker for me is that the Intel 520 uses almost 3 times more power that the two samsung 840 models. This is a lot more important for my purposes because my twin touch screens suck juice at a horrifying rate which together with an undersized 6 cell battery makes for miserable battery life of between 1 hr 20 to 2 hrs. I would like to improve on that.

So now it is just a matter of whether the sequential and random write speed gains of 280mps and 45k IOPs is worth the extra 25%, when my sata II setup probably won't benefit from it (but which would likely reduce resale loss down the track).

I am leaning toward saving myself the $100 now rather than later.

[bogan]

Haven't ever looked into laptop power/size features. But got a 240gig corsair one a few months ago, pretty damn happy with the speed of it; any spec SDD you get is going to make a huge difference to the practical speed. When you say 3x the power, is this doing work? idle? and is it in any way significant; not much point plugging a drip when there is a torrent coming out nearby...

[flyingcrocodile46]

Haven't ever looked into laptop power/size features. But got a 240gig corsair one a few months ago, pretty damn happy with the speed of it; any spec SDD you get is going to make a huge difference to the practical speed. When you say 3x the power, is this doing work? idle? and is it in any way significant; not much point plugging a drip when there is a torrent coming out nearby...

Corsair have a good rep. I haven't seen any here.

The Intel 520 uses more power at idle that the Samsung 840 uses under load.

When you have little, little is worth more.

[bogan]

Corsair have a good rep. I haven't seen any here.

Where are you looking, I found all manner of things they make available in NZ; they do a bloody good mouse fwiw.

[flyingcrocodile46]

Where are you looking, I found all manner of things they make available in NZ; they do a bloody good mouse fwiw.

Found some on Priceme and Pricespy. A bit over 15% more that the Samsung 840 std with about the same spec. Power use about the same as the Intel 520. Cheers

[steve_t]

I'd be wary about the 840 with its TLC NAND but then again, your laptop will probably be obsolete before the chips shit themselves

[SMOKEU]

Personally I'd go for anything SF2200 based as the early issues with the transition to 22nm NAND have been sorted. They're all very similar in real world performance if the controller and type of memory is the same (asynchronous vs synchronous NAND), so buy whichever is cheapest and has the features you want. The Crucial M4 is a nice drive, but it is dated compared to the newer generation SATA3 stuff such as the Vertex 4. The more expensive drives tend to have more IOPS, but whether or not that noticeably affects real world performance for the applications you're going to run is questionable at best.

If you can afford it then buy a RevoDrive. http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-products/z-drive-r4-rm-series-solid-state-drives.html
http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-products/z-drive-r4-c-series.html

Check out the specs on those OCZ drives. Up to 2.8GB/s read/write.

Read this http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=726109
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=725788

[flyingcrocodile46]

Personally I'd go for anything SF2200 based as the early issues with the transition to 22nm NAND have been sorted. They're all very similar in real world performance if the controller and type of memory is the same (asynchronous vs synchronous NAND), so buy whichever is cheapest and has the features you want. The Crucial M4 is a nice drive, but it is dated compared to the newer generation SATA3 stuff such as the Vertex 4. The more expensive drives tend to have more IOPS, but whether or not that noticeably affects real world performance for the applications you're going to run is questionable at best.

If you can afford it then buy a RevoDrive. http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-products/z-drive-r4-rm-series-solid-state-drives.html
http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-products/z-drive-r4-c-series.html

Check out the specs on those OCZ drives. Up to 2.8GB/s read/write.

Read this http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=726109
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=725788

Thank you for taking the time to give me your thoughts

I have some reservations about OCZ gear. In reading reviews like those on Newegg. They seem to have a noticeable number of DOAs with early adopters and some have taken a few swap outs to fix (and some that don't appear to have been satisfactorily addressed). It all starts to get too hard when you have to check batch numbers to be confident you aren't buying a hassle.

I understand the reservations about TLC but from what I have read in various SSD technical reviews it seems that there is no suggestion of anything more to the concern than fear of the unknown.

Given my shitty battery life and SF track history V Samsung's, I am not too scared of the unknown to miss the opportunity to increase the battery life.

[SMOKEU]

Thank you for taking the time to give me your thoughts

I have some reservations about OCZ gear. In reading reviews like those on Newegg. They seem to have a noticeable number of DOAs with early adopters and some have taken a few swap outs to fix (and some that don't appear to have been satisfactorily addressed). It all starts to get too hard when you have to check batch numbers to be confident you aren't buying a hassle.


Those issues were largely due to the early SF2200 controllers (which most SSDs use these days). Those problems have since been fixed so it's unlikely you'll get the same problems. The Crucial M4 uses a Marvell controller which is immune to the problems that the early SF based drives have (although that obviously does not guarantee that you'll never have an issue with it). Over the past year or so SSD technology has improved up to the point where reliability can be just as good as, or even greater than that of an ordinary consumer level HDD. http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=683156

The guys at www.overclockers.com are very good at giving helpful advice on these sorts of things so have a look there if you want honest advice from people who really know a lot about these things.

[flyingcrocodile46]

Those issues were largely due to the early SF2200 controllers (which most SSDs use these days). Those problems have since been fixed so it's unlikely you'll get the same problems. The Crucial M4 uses a Marvell controller which is immune to the problems that the early SF based drives have (although that obviously does not guarantee that you'll never have an issue with it). Over the past year or so SSD technology has improved up to the point where reliability can be just as good as, or even greater than that of an ordinary consumer level HDD. http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=683156

The guys at www.overclockers.com (http://www.overclockers.com) are very good at giving helpful advice on these sorts of things so have a look there if you want honest advice from people who really know a lot about these things.

Cheers

Will do

[steve_t]

This might also be interesting reading and is pretty recent

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269.html

[Gremlin]

Haven't used Samsung at all, used OCZ previously and now we're not touching it. Some of it related to the controller issues, some not, just didn't look like they could make a reliable drive (and we'll take reliability over outright performance).

The Intels have been the pick of the bunch in terms of being rock stable and simply doing their job, so we've ended up just staying with them. Avoid the 3 series, the 5's seem to be good. They do have a black plastic ring around the top that can be removed, but then the screws are too long. Done that a couple of times otherwise I couldn't get the drive into the laptop. :laugh:

Ultra important to then tune the OS for the SSD (find the SSD optimisation guide). You don't have to do everything, but stuff like indexing and defragmentation are important otherwise it will turn the drive to sludge.

[SMOKEU]

You don't have to do everything, but stuff like indexing and defragmentation are important otherwise it will turn the drive to sludge.

A SSD should never be defragged. Ever.

[Gremlin]

A SSD should never be defragged. Ever.
Probably should have expanded a bit more, but if you read the optimisation guide, it says turn OFF indexing, defrag etc etc.

[scracha]

Win 7 is SSD aware so to be honest, there's not much you have to do.

For general purpose apps you're splitting hairs between SSD performance. Even the slowest one will out-pace the other bottlenecks in most systems and will give a massive performance boost.

The Intel stuff has the lowest failure rate in the industry (buggered if I can find the article), comes with high quality SSD leads, brackets etc and has some nice Acronis based software to easily transfer your existing system. Software package also includes SSD optimisation tool. Very nice indeed.

Corsair...hmm.....sold and installed a few. To be honest, I dunno if it's their engineering tolerances or summit but they physically never seemed to line up quite right in laptops. Never had the issue with AData, Intel or Samsung. Aint tried anything else.

[flyingcrocodile46]

This might also be interesting reading and is pretty recent

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269.html




Haven't used Samsung at all, used OCZ previously and now we're not touching it. Some of it related to the controller issues, some not, just didn't look like they could make a reliable drive (and we'll take reliability over outright performance).

The Intels have been the pick of the bunch in terms of being rock stable and simply doing their job, so we've ended up just staying with them. Avoid the 3 series, the 5's seem to be good. They do have a black plastic ring around the top that can be removed, but then the screws are too long. Done that a couple of times otherwise I couldn't get the drive into the laptop. :laugh:

Ultra important to then tune the OS for the SSD (find the SSD optimisation guide). You don't have to do everything, but stuff like indexing and defragmentation are important otherwise it will turn the drive to sludge.


Win 7 is SSD aware so to be honest, there's not much you have to do.

For general purpose apps you're splitting hairs between SSD performance. Even the slowest one will out-pace the other bottlenecks in most systems and will give a massive performance boost.

The Intel stuff has the lowest failure rate in the industry (buggered if I can find the article), comes with high quality SSD leads, brackets etc and has some nice Acronis based software to easily transfer your existing system. Software package also includes SSD optimisation tool. Very nice indeed.

Corsair...hmm.....sold and installed a few. To be honest, I dunno if it's their engineering tolerances or summit but they physically never seemed to line up quite right in laptops. Never had the issue with AData, Intel or Samsung. Aint tried anything else.

Thanks guys. All good info cheers.

I am pretty much convinced that I would go for the Intel 520 if it wasn't for the much needed power gains that the Samsung's offer my toy battery (no upgrade for that). But have decided to minimise the risk by going with either the 830 model with MLC or pro version 840 to get the extra 2 years warranty and MLC.

Next mission is to learn more about the cloning process as it relates to my existing setup. The idea of smooth sailing because it is windows 7 sounds nice but there are too many horror stories to be ignored. I really cant be arsed doing a new install and having to load all my other shit and re-do all the settings of them all.

Thinking of getting a genuine SSD installation expert who knows all the correct sequence for bios updating and all the various confusing settings that optimise performance as well as the all important cloning process?? Happy enough to pay proper money for a proper pound of flesh.

Thanks again

[scracha]

Thinking of getting a genuine SSD installation expert who knows all the correct sequence for bios updating and all the various confusing settings that optimise performance as well as the all important cloning process?? Happy enough to pay proper money for a proper pound of flesh.

Thanks again

Buy a USB 3.0 2.5" Sata enclosure for about 30 bucks. Pop your shiny new Intel SSD into the enclosure. Throw in your shiny new intel CD into your PC. Install the Acronis software. Plug in your USB enclosure. Run the Acronis software, the wizard automagically migrates your internal hard drive data to the Intel one*. Swap the drives. Your PC should now boot into windows in about 1/4 of the time it took before. If it doesn't then you can always plug in your original untouched drive. If you're happy with the changes then you've got a spiffy exteral USB 3 drive for backup and/or movies and suchlike. Finally, run the Intel optimisation software that's on the included CD. There's fark all to change in the BIOS on pretty much anything that's running Windows 7.

Very similar process for A-data drives except the bundled acronis software has a bit more hassle involving registering it and bunging in the license key that's printed on the SSD drive.

The Intel and A-data drives (and Samsung I think but I can't be arsed looking in the workshop now) have 3 year warranty. Regardless, you should be doing a bare-metal backup (the Win 7 built in one is fine) if you give a toss about your data. Not much point in getting stuff with longer warranty...a).the warranty process is generally a PITA b) in 3 years time the drives will be worth tuppence anyway.


*you may have to run free for home use - Euasus partition tool to resize your original partition if it's larger than the SSD you're cloning to. - again wizard based and piece of piss. http://www.partition-tool.com/.. If it's a customer PC then I always backup before repartitioning but to be honest, I've only had one issue (really fooked sectors on the hard drive) in about 20 years.

The Intel 320 series is a good budget SSD that you'll be very happy with for the money IMHO. On an average consumer system the higher end stuff is just a waste of money.

Any SSD gives massive battery gains too (normally see 30 mins to 1 hour increase on newish laptops). The other components in your laptop will draw more power so I certainly wouldn't pay over the odds for an SSD that's more power efficient. I'd spend the change on a spare battery myself.

[flyingcrocodile46]

Buy a USB 3.0 2.5" Sata enclosure for about 30 bucks. Pop your shiny new Intel SSD into the enclosure. Throw in your shiny new intel CD into your PC. Install the Acronis software. Plug in your USB enclosure. Run the Acronis software, the wizard automagically migrates your internal hard drive data to the Intel one*. Swap the drives. Your PC should now boot into windows in about 1/4 of the time it took before. If it doesn't then you can always plug in your original untouched drive. If you're happy with the changes then you've got a spiffy exteral USB 3 drive for backup and/or movies and suchlike. Finally, run the Intel optimisation software that's on the included CD. There's fark all to change in the BIOS on pretty much anything that's running Windows 7.

Very similar process for A-data drives except the bundled acronis software has a bit more hassle involving registering it and bunging in the license key that's printed on the SSD drive.

The Intel and A-data drives (and Samsung I think but I can't be arsed looking in the workshop now) have 3 year warranty. Regardless, you should be doing a bare-metal backup (the Win 7 built in one is fine) if you give a toss about your data. Not much point in getting stuff with longer warranty...a).the warranty process is generally a PITA b) in 3 years time the drives will be worth tuppence anyway.


*you may have to run free for home use - Euasus partition tool to resize your original partition if it's larger than the SSD you're cloning to. - again wizard based and piece of piss. http://www.partition-tool.com/.. If it's a customer PC then I always backup before repartitioning but to be honest, I've only had one issue (really fooked sectors on the hard drive) in about 20 years.

The Intel 320 series is a good budget SSD that you'll be very happy with for the money IMHO. On an average consumer system the higher end stuff is just a waste of money.

Any SSD gives massive battery gains too (normally see 30 mins to 1 hour increase on newish laptops). The other components in your laptop will draw more power so I certainly wouldn't pay over the odds for an SSD that's more power efficient. I'd spend the change on a spare battery myself.

Fuck! Hows that. Just switched over from buying a drive on tardme to read this. :laugh: After all the pissing around I just now bought a 480Gb Intel 520 :laugh:

I could see I was going to regret being a cheapskate by only getting 250Gb (my 4 month old 600 is already 30% full) so decided to go for more bigger Gb and was all set to hit the pay button on a Samsung 840 500Gb for $600 when I thought feck it I'll just check my tardme watchlist to see what happened to the two 480Gb Intel 520's with buynows of $600 and see if they were re-listed for less. Bugger me they had passed over without selling a couple of hours ago and the seller had just sent an offer to let them go for $500. Snap $200+ saved.

I feel even better about being a cheapskate after having read your comments about the power consumption difference. :laugh:

Cheers.

[scracha]

Fuck! Hows that. Just switched over from buying a drive on tardme to read this. :laugh: After all the pissing around I just now bought a 480Gb Intel 520 :laugh:


I'm jealous. I've only got a 60GB one in my Toshy :-)

Was just gonna post that I can confirm the Samsung's also come with data migration software. It's not Acronis based though....says summit about Clonix Co ltd.

[flyingcrocodile46]

Buy a USB 3.0 2.5" Sata enclosure for about 30 bucks. Pop your shiny new Intel SSD into the enclosure. Throw in your shiny new intel CD into your PC. Install the Acronis software. Plug in your USB enclosure. Run the Acronis software, the wizard automagically migrates your internal hard drive data to the Intel one*. Swap the drives. Your PC should now boot into windows in about 1/4 of the time it took before. If it doesn't then you can always plug in your original untouched drive. If you're happy with the changes then you've got a spiffy exteral USB 3 drive for backup and/or movies and suchlike. Finally, run the Intel optimisation software that's on the included CD. There's fark all to change in the BIOS on pretty much anything that's running Windows 7.

Sounds easy but is it?

What about this warning I found about sector alignment problems degrading performance? Does windows 7 automatically sort it out when cloning instead of new installs?


Problem description

The traditional rotating disks are divided into physical sectors. The Windows operating systems and their components operate according to this sector logic. Despite the fact that SSDs store the data in a completely different way, they are still being treated with this sector logic.

The alignment of the SSD is required to assure that a logical sector starts exactly at the beginning of a physical page of the SSD. Without the alignment, the sector boundaries and the page boundaries will not match and sectors will span pages. That would require for a Windows write operation to clear two blocks in lieu of only one thus reducing the write speed by 50%.

Situation

If you install Windows7 on a brand new SSD, you need not make any special arrangements because the Windows7 installer will do the alignment for you. For Vista you are lucky because the start sector happens to match a SSD page. For XP the start sector is 126 which would be in the middle of a SSD page, thus a prior alignment is required.
A similar situation is present when you clone an existing OS (including Windows7) on a new SSD.

Solution

The easiest way to align an SSD is to create an aligned partition on the SSD with the help of Diskpart. Open an elevated command prompt (http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/783-elevated-command-prompt.html) and run the following sequence of commands – each line followed by Enter

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given for your SSD in List disk)
Clean
Create partition primary align=1024
Format fs=ntfs quick
Active (assuming you want to install an OS)
Exit

Note: If you want to create a 100MB partition with alignment, the create command is:

Create partition primary size=100 align=1024

The size unit is always MB.

Verification

If you want to verify the alignment (e.g. for a SSD where you are not certain whether the proper alignment was done), you use the following commands.

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n
List partition

Now you should see a result like this.

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Primary 59 GB 1024 KB - but 64KB or any number divisible by 4 is also good

The offset (in KBs) has to be divisible by 4.


Note: Some readers and users of this tutorial got confused because the alignment numbers in a typical Windows7 installation are shown as:

1024KB for the 100MB partition
101MB for the next partition - which is most likely the C partition

They think that 101MB is not divisible by 4 and that there must be a problem. But that is not so. If you convert 101MBs into KBs (multiply by 1024), then the number is divisible by 4 and the partition is aligned.

This shit is making my head hurt. I'm tired of learning tech stuff when I will only ever need to use the knowledge once.

More brain ache here
http://www.overclock.net/t/1226963/how-to-properly-re-align-your-ssd-hdd-partitions

What does it all mean, or am I over-analysing? Should I just grab my ankles and hope?

[scracha]

Sounds easy but is it?

What about this warning I found about sector alignment problems degrading performance? Does windows 7 automatically sort it out when cloning instead of new installs?




You're over-analysing.. Win 7 sorts out nothing (clean install is ok) but the Intel Acronis migration software sorts out alignment automatically). Anways..according to Intel website the 320 series doesn't give a monkeys about alignment...maybe something clever in their firmware?
"With the Intel SSD 320 Series, aligning partitions or RAID volumes is not required and provides no performance benefit."


Update - Intel now say 5 year warranty.
http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029645.htm

[Gremlin]

I wouldn't trust Win7 to automatically do things due to the presence of an SSD... it certainly didn't for me, either in new installs or migrations...

Yeah, was going to say, I know the 520 Intel are 5 year warranties.

[p.dath]

The issue with write performance is not unique to SSD. It equally affects hard drives - but because a hard drive is slower so the effect is greater.

Both Windows 7 and Server 2008 changed their alignment strategy, and now start the first partition at 1MB into the disk. The result of this is that the partition boundary is almost guaranteed to started on a sector/page boundary.

The only time it wouldn't would be if you were using sectors/pages bigger than 1MB, buy typically systems don't use more than 64KB.

[flyingcrocodile46]

Well it's all done, in and working great. Not as fast on startups as I hoped (now half of the the 85 seconds it used to take). I guess the fact that my touchbook is only Sata II will be part of it, but likely the Acer bloatware touch apps are the cause of most of the delay.

After scaring myself by trying to learn all about the process, the Intel migration software was a breeze to use. It auto aligned, auto set Trim, swallowed the 200 gb of data from the (bigger) 520gb drive partition without any fuss and upon swapping drives it fired up fine and everything works exactly the same (except faster). No time consuming switch setting of the countless programs that I would otherwise have had to reinstall and configure again. :clap:

The Windows experience score went from 6.9, 6.9, 4.5, 5.2 & 5.9 up to 6.9, 7.1, 4.7, 5.3 & 7.7 (max score is currently 7.9). The lower graphics score are due to the Intel HD on board graphics of the older generation 2.66-GHz Intel Core i5-480M processor.

All up I am pretty happy with the spend.

Thanks for all the input :niceone:

[SMOKEU]

but likely the Acer bloatware touch apps are the cause of most of the delay.


Do a clean, fresh install with your OS of choice without all the bloatware. If you're using Windows then open msconfig and disable everything that you don't need from booting with the OS. A quick Google search will tell you if something is important if you're not sure. That should cut boot times significantly.

[flyingcrocodile46]

Do a clean, fresh install with your OS of choice without all the bloatware. If you're using Windows then open msconfig and disable everything that you don't need from booting with the OS. A quick Google search will tell you if something is important if you're not sure. That should cut boot times significantly.

I don't want to do a fresh install. It takes to long to re-install and set up everything the way I like it (incl all the non OS software). Plus I don't want to disable the Acer apps because they improve the interface.

This is a big improvement

http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg305/flyingcrocodile46/HDDRWspeeds.jpg


over this, so I am pretty happy, though I will look into a SATA III controller upgrade as it may improve performance almost as much again. (edit) No they don't and are unreliable by all accounts.


http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg305/flyingcrocodile46/OldHDDRWspeed.gif

[SMOKEU]

I don't want to do a fresh install. It takes to long to re-install and set up everything the way I like it (incl all the non OS software). Plus I don't want to disable the Acer apps because they improve the interface.



You can't have it both ways.