Anyone running SSD's yet?

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

hp system huh? im just going to put it down to oem bios weirdness causing all sorts of strange fockups. guess the too new and modern ssd isnt compatible with the hp system...

have u tried swapping the sata cable tho? i had a bad/dodgy sata cable causing data transfer errors during high disk throughput. if the sata cable quality is dodgy, it can cause udma crc errors and sata link resets during heavy disk io throughput if the controller detects too many data transfer io errors.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I recently had an AMAZINGLY fucked up time with a SSD just a few days ago

customer had bad sectors appearing on her old drive, lock ups and wait times, took the computer home, it was seagate going bad (seatool confirmed it with basic test)

Had to get a new drive for this system (HP /w Phenom II X4 8xx series). Frys had a 860 Pro 512GB for $149 (also had a 1TB on sale for $199! but I didn't take it, they weren't using much space, mainly used the computer for email (outlook) and facebook (chrome). Win10 upgrade

Installed Win10 fresh from flash drive. Used windows built-in driver finder on the ahci controller (update driver button) an it installed as I expected the usual "AMD SATA Controller". Driver from 2010. This is when problems started. It seems with this motherboard (AMD 785G/SB 700), loading the driver on an SSD will cause a bus "reset", or in other words, cause windows and programs to freeze for 20 seconds, every minute or so. So I tried an even more updated driver (2013). When I tried to load it, it failed saying "invalid data". Well damn, ok, so I tried to reinstall the original generic ahci driver. Same thing, "invalid data". Deleted the driver. Booted back with it (after this I attempted to restore the original generic ahci driver...invalid data). Set a restore point and set to "delete the driver". I've had windows 7 in the past boot to generic doing this. But it didn't work. Took a few seconds of the wheel to get the dreaded "invalid_boot_device". Booted to USB win 10 installed to go back to a restore point I specifically set before doing this. Unable to set restore point. Hooked the ssd up to my other system to try to copy the "regback" registry files....they were all 0b. aaaand fuck

wiped and re-installed win-10, this time installing with the latest sb700 driver from amd (2017)....Same fucking lockups.

But this time, It let me go back to the generic driver and work flawlessly. Only a little slower than the AMD driver on boot. Still very fast.

I think this system was not built for the kind of SSD bandwidth this thing put out, and having so much over. The error I was getting in windows logs was "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued." Even though there was no raid enabled, I think this bandwidth confused amd's driver and the bios (which I updated to latest when this first started happening) thinks there is something wrong. I researched this and tried all kinds of power stuff but pretty much all of what I saw didn't relate to this chipset. Or even win10

How I know. When I got the 2017 driver in, it actually locked up much less, but I used the speed tester with the samsung magician software and thats exactly when it started resetting, when it bus was seriously full.

I don't think it's a win10 issue. I think it's a motherboard bios issue in the end. Win10 works great from a fresh install. It's what they've been using since the free upgrade offer

[Drack]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Sorry been really bored lately and reading old threads is entertaining

[Topcat]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Man... You really need popcorns when you are reading this kind of posts lol.

especially to wake up a 6yr old thread!

[Drack]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Man... You really need popcorns when you are reading this kind of posts lol.

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

You're right about the Sandforce and incompressible data.

However, if he were able to save up just a little more cash, he could get the same 120GB drive that I got, get all around faster speeds, and have lower cost per GB.

[mariushm]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Tom's Hardware did a test of 10 60 GB SSD Drives, most Sandforce based but also Crucial M4 and Samsung 830:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...view,3137.html

Pretty good read, especially the part about read speeds where Sandforce controller encounters data that can't be compressed.

While a tad slower, the Samsung 830 and the Crucial M4 have much higher and constant speed in time compared to Sandforce based drives.

At 105$, I really don't see why you'd want to pick something else: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148441

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Which one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...hnology%20Corp.

[shovenose]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I'm getting a Kingston 64GB is that a good choice?

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Well I went ahead and got one. It's the Mushkin Chronos 120GB that I linked earlier.

I went ahead and upgraded to Fedora 16 at the same time, also doing some tweaks to minimize writes to the SSD. Basically this consisted of moving /tmp and /var/log to a temporary ram filesystem, and the browser cache off to the mechanical hard drive. The bulk of my data is on the mechanical hard drive too. It did take some creative use of symbolic links to make it the way I wanted it though.

I just went ahead and made Fedora 16 the only OS on the SSD. I just don't use Windows enough to justify having it on the SSD.

I can tell you though, this thing is fast. I'm getting around 528MB/s average read speed, with an average access time of 0.2ms. Max read speed is 552.3MB/s, with a minimum of 204.8MB/s. I think the minimum is due to the fact that the OS is running on it at the time of the benchmark. It's around 550 for most of the graph with a few dips. You can imagine what that does to OS boot times and program load times.

So far I'm happy.

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

This should be able to display the raw SMART values (unlike OSX's own Disk Utility, which is so dumbed down it can basically only say "OK" or "Failed")

http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

Some of the SMART values should reveal interesting details, like total host writes or the like.
If you go by the ID's of this screenshot it should give you an idea of what means what (at least roughly)
The "raw" values are usually the most useful

There doesn't seem to be ANY SSD health tool for OSX out there. Heck.. even finding a tool capable of showing the raw SMART attributes instead of just "OK/Failed" was pretty hard..

[KeriJane]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I've been running an Intel X25 40gb drive in an older C2Duo Mac Mini for quite a long time now.
I don't have any benchmarks for you but it starts up really fast, even for a Mac and system updates go very quickly - like downloading, downloading...... then Pow! done.

The system is generally nice and "snappy" on OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard" even though this particular Mini was originally built for OSX 10.4 "Tiger", which would probably be ridiculously fast.

I haven't yet tried any of the SSD tuning tips. I'm going to enable Apple's built-in TRIM support though. Maybe I'll see if it's capable of running 10.7 first.

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

As long as you don't fill the (well.. actually any) SSD up to the brim it shouldn't be a problem at all.

Then again.. you shouldn't do that with a HDD either.. lol

the awkward moment when an error pops up during a long youtube session telling you about the HDD being full.. 0 byte free of 100GB *oops*
damn browser cache..

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Ok I ordered one. I'll see how it does. My plan is to install Windows 7 and Fedora 16 to it, then use the 3TB Seagate for mass data storage.

Is 120GB going to be enough, or would I be better off getting another one so that I have one for each OS? Another $150 is a lot to spend for what I consider to be an experiment at this time, but if it will help that much I'll do it.

Thanks to all who commented. Per, yes, I saw your comment. That's what I based my thoughts on. I also respect Pcbonez opinion. I believe, however, that the manufacturers have mostly worked around the issues he outlines. Time will tell.

Oh, and I already have the new firmware downloaded. I had a doctors appointment where they have free high speed wi-fi. I just downloaded it to my netbook in the waiting room. So as soon as the drive arrives, the firmware gets updated.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I see nothing other than buggy firmware that could make a modern SSD inherently more or less reliable than a normal hard drive. It's just different modes of failure.

Exactly my thoughts, I wrote this in my previous wall of text on SSD's:

Now finally, to those of you that say that SSD's are unreliable I must ask you this, are not mechanical hard drives unreliable too?
I mean even if you have a mechanical hard drive you must do backups lest you are a fool, so would you rather have piss poor performance* and poor reliability or great performance* and poor reliability?
*For source please scroll up to my previous post

As such, I've decided to jump in and try one. What are everyone's thoughts on this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226236

It's a very nice drive, as Scenic said make sure it has the latest firmware.
The Sandforce drives also does very well even without TRIM support, but of course if your system has it it just makes things even better

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

It's a Sandforce based SSD, so it should do fine as long as the first thing you do is update the (quite massive) firmware.

[acstech]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

Having read through everything so far, I believe that there may be long term issues with these drives. However, I don't see reason to think that they are unusable for their intended purpose. There have been examples posted on here of successful use of SSD's. I've seen every component in a computer fail over the years, in various ways. I see nothing other than buggy firmware that could make a modern SSD inherently more or less reliable than a normal hard drive. It's just different modes of failure.

As such, I've decided to jump in and try one. What are everyone's thoughts on this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226236

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

@tom: SSDs recently took quite a nosedive (cost-wise)..
Depending on the size, they can now be had for roughly 1eur/GB (less than 1gbp/GB)
Anything above 120GB still isn't really worth it though (IMHO).

Example price comparison for 60-120GB drives:

Sorted by price alone:
http://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hdssd&bp..._131072&sort=p

Sorted by price per GB:
http://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hdssd&bp..._131072&sort=r

[tom66]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

I've got two OCZ SATA II 120 GB SSDs... They get around 250 MB/s in raid 0 but are currently unused as they are sitting in the incomplete games computer which has had it's graphics card plundered for the HTPC.

I got them from my brother who upgraded to 6 x 64 GB Crucial SSDs.

He now gets around 1 GB/s read yet his computer takes longer to boot Windows 7 than Ubuntu on my Thinkpad X201... which was also his old work laptop. I've kind of figured out he's a bit of tech junkie but I don't mind because I get loads of free stuff which is only a year or so old. Having spent about £8,000 on his last computer (yes he is a well paid IT consultant) I'm sticking around for a spare GTX260 or three.

And yes they fast... but not really worth it. I'd be disappointed after spending £300 on them...

[Scenic]

Re: Anyone running SSD's yet?

@ Per Hansson: your screenshots show why I've linked to a newer (allthough already outdated) Pro version of HDTune, which has a seperate access time benchmark just like in this screenshot I posted earlier
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1330196689

That one only shows the access time and the speed at the given chunk size in a table, rather than having the access time indistinguishable at the bottom of the graph because it's getting dwarfed by the linear read speed graph.

Oh and as for the on-the-fly compression of the Sandforce (and only those!) controllers:
Imagine it as a little SoC hardware device in between the SATA controller and the SSD cells that does an on-the-fly ZIP compression on all the data to be written. It doesn't need much grunt to do at least some lossless compression. I'm willing to bet most SSD controllers are ARM based, even if they don't say it.
In fact, Samsung and Indilinx controllers openly show just that, as can be seen here (Samsung 830 Series) and here (OCZ Vertex series)

The compression can be very efficient for some kinds of data (uncompressed audio, like wav, big text files, etc.), boosting the read/write speeds to ridiculously high numbers, but at the same time it's almost completely useless for already compressed (like mp3, mp4, jpg, rar, zip, etc.) or incompressible (random) data

PS: I personally haven't had more problems with HDDs incorporating perpendicular recording than with those without it.

From my experience, new HDDs usually either fail within the first month in some way (bad sectors for example.. either after some use or out of the box), or they keep working for years without a problem if adequately cooled.
Only exception would be WD Green series drives where the head parking crap hasn't been turned off with the WDIDLE3 utility. Those usually only have a year or so to live before things go horribly wrong..