New Tech Alert: Solid State Drive on Newegg

Per Dubious Quality;

Bill Harris wrote:

SAMSUNG MCBQE64G5MPP-03A00 2.5" 64GB IDE Internal Solid state disk (SSD)

This isn't in stock yet at Newegg, but it shows an ETA of 9/06, and I think it marks the beginning of an era. Not for the price--$1299--which is obscene, but it's an SSD with enough capacity to be used as a primary drive.

Highly dependent on the user and their storage needs, obviously.

Five years from now, when most of us have SSD drives, this will have been a notable moment.

It's a little pricey, but so were USB drives a few years ago.

Newegg Link

Yeah I've been waiting for this.. its interesting to note that its notebook IDE based.. so it appears it wont be usable in a desktop PC build.. unless theres an alternative way to get power to the unit.

I'll have to look for some 2.5" Drive Bays that can be used in a Desktop PC.

If I can make it work I'd for sure get one or two for my OS and Games.

I'm not sure these will be all that great yet for normal users; flash still isn't all that fast. It'd be superb in a notebook for battery life, but I bet the normal day-to-day use will be roughly the same speed.

Where you'd get a big win is when hitting zillions of small files, like when doing a big compile. In development work, seek time rules, and these things have a seek time that's very, very close to 0. But dev work involves lots of writes, too, which is hard on flash, so you might have to replace the unit fairly frequently.

Oh, this would also be good for the silent-computing crowd. No moving parts = not much noise.

From the product page:

Sequential & Random Read Sector : 57MB/s
Sequential Write Sector : 33MB/s
Random Write Sector: 11 MB/s

<1ms Read latency
Fast Access Time and Read/Write Speed Under 1msec, No Seek time
No acoustic noise or vibration

No mention that I could find on how many writes a cell can take before it's likely to crap out. They list a 2,000,000hrs MTBF for the 2.5" drive but don't spell out the expected usage pattern. Would sort of suck if you slapped a page file on one and it wore the thing out in 3 months!

Pretty. The much cheaper 32GB version is particularly appealing: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...

This is what should be inside UMPC's. Maybe then we can get battery life over 2 hours.

esta muy caro

SSD drives are in use in the industry right now. Problem for the home consumer is that the price tag has yet reached the level of mainstream use. When we can get a usable SSD drive that is at least 50 to 60 GB in size and costs less than $200 then we will start seeing mainstream consumers use them as primary OS and primary app drives. That's my prediction on the matter.

Resurrecting an old thread; I picked up a Corsair P128 SSD last week for my desktop and installed Win7 RC on it. This thing just FLYS! From power button to fully loaded windows takes about 30 seconds, including 15 seconds in the BIOS.

App launches are all instant, no matter what the app is. Outlook launches in the time it takes for me to release the mouse button.

Sure the drives are still a little pricey, but that's why I went with the 128 GB model. I kept my old HDD as a seperate drive for storage of music, photos, videos... all the stuff that takes a lot of space but isn't hindered by the access time of the HDD.

Now I've read that the newer SSDs aren't as susceptible to the wear-out problem of only so many reads/writes, but I moved my page file to my HDD anyways. I don't figure I'll be paging much with 4GB of RAM, so that shouldn't hurt.

Anyway, very nice upgrade for me and it's just made everything so super responsive that it's almost unreal. Highly recommended if you can spare the $$.

I'm curious on your impressions of gaming with it. Do you plan on gaming at all? I know it'll cut down on load times, but I was curious if it helped framerate at all. I'm especially curious if it helps with stuttering in MMO's because that seems to be such a prevalent issue (my guess is you don't play mmo's because then hard drive size would be a primary concern, but since I'm not currently playing any mmo's this question is merely academic anyway).

Tom's had an article a few weeks back about the new Intel SSD that would be hitting soon for a much reduced price. Of course, Intel turned right around and recalled the initial shipment of drives due to a firmware bug that cropped up when using the BIOS password. No issue if you choose not to use the BIOS password feature, and a firmware fix is available so not really an issue any more. Caveat emptor.

garion333 wrote:

I'm curious on your impressions of gaming with it. Do you plan on gaming at all? I know it'll cut down on load times, but I was curious if it helped framerate at all. I'm especially curious if it helps with stuttering in MMO's because that seems to be such a prevalent issue (my guess is you don't play mmo's because then hard drive size would be a primary concern, but since I'm not currently playing any mmo's this question is merely academic anyway).

Actually, I'm a pretty big WoW player. The load times on WoW are definitely down, but the primary wait for loading is on data from the remote servers, so there's no local update that can improve that. That said, On my old HDD I sometimes noticed that it would take a minute in highly populated areas to load all the art assets for characters, armor, etc. That's completely gone now.

Local games (Fallout3, FarCry2, etc) all load pretty damn fast. They're not instant, but where a game might have taken a minute to fully load before, now it's more like 10 seconds.

bighoppa wrote:

Tom's had an article a few weeks back about the new Intel SSD that would be hitting soon for a much reduced price. Of course, Intel turned right around and recalled the initial shipment of drives due to a firmware bug that cropped up when using the BIOS password. No issue if you choose not to use the BIOS password feature, and a firmware fix is available so not really an issue any more. Caveat emptor.

I actually settled on the Corsair SSD due to reviews and the fact that there don't seem to be any issues with that particular model to speak of. Like any PC part purchase, just do your research and it should be fine.

I wonder if replacing my 74GB Seagate Barracuda system drive that has Vista 64 Home Premium OEM on it with this drive would be enough to trip Windows activation.

(By this I mean I'd ghost over the current system drive to the new drive.)

No, hard drive replacement alone is not enough to trigger reactivation.

So are SSDs decent for gaming rigs nowadays? Assuming my recent job becomes permanent, I plan on spending the money to make a new machine for Windows 7/Dragon Age. I know a lot of the problems like write times have improved greatly over the past year or so but I haven't been keeping up as to whether or not they are now a realistic (if unnecessary) option.

Some people say that the write times become crap after awhile or something. Evidently dont buy SSDs that have a micron made chip in them.

guru3d wrote:

We have seen that most budget MLC based SSDs have a JMicron controller with very little cache (16KB), then the next best step is a SSD drive like the OCZ Vertex and G.Skill Falcon with an Indilinx controller and 32 or 64MB cache memory, which is a horrendously good product series honestly.

But the reality is that there is a controller even better suited for SSD technology (at this time), and that controller comes from Samsung. This is what the P128 we are testing today is based on, a Samsung S3C29RBB01 controller with Samsung NAND flash memory (MLC). This choice will give this product several advantages in terms of overall speed and performance thanks to some additional bandwidth, reduced latency and overall throughput.

Now please do not make a mistake and get confused, the controller itself is not slower, faster or massively better than the Indilinx or even JMicron, but the one thing that is important is cache memory. SSDs need to fight off a bad habit; slow write times for a lot of small and petit files, that is where the sore bottleneck of SSD drives is to be found, and large data-caches can solve that issue very well.

The trick is that the P128 has a big phat SDRAM buffer, 128MB to be precise, and that my friends helps big-time in tackling the small write access issues I just mentioned.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/corsair-p128-ssd-review/2

So that should allay concerns about the particular model that I purchased at least. Of course whenever you're dealing with relatively new tech like this, it pays to do the research.

If you were pondering whether or not to include one of these in your next build, ponder no more. The answer is yes. I now have a dev machine at work and a general productivity/games machine at home which are both using the Intel X25 for the Windows drive. One runs XP, one runs Win7, and in both cases Windows finally performs at the speed-of-thought response time. Time from typing in your password to actually having your machine in a usable state drops to under one second. You click your browser and it's up instantly. You click absolutely anything OS related and it just appears. No more little hourglasses. No more half second delays on opening the control panel. Populating the add/remove programs list is instantaneous. A Visual Studio project which used to take over 30 seconds to open now completes loading in less than 5.

Everything just gets snappy. You don't realize all the tiny delays that you have become accustomed to over the years until you use SSD-based machines for awhile and then go back to caveman spinning-platter territory. As soon as they get the costs down on these things so that I can get a few hundred gigs at a reasonable price, I'm banishing all regular hard drives to my NAS box where they can perform chimp tasks like storing audio and video. Their puny, sequential-reading kind will no longer be welcome in machines which do actual work.

Anand just published a 27 page article on the current state of SSD and what is coming. A good read if you are interested.

I'm seriously considering dropping $300 of my own money and replacing the HDD in my work laptop now. The company won't pay for it as my laptop is already pretty high end, but man, having a SSD at home makes me hate my work laptop that much more...

Now I just need to figure out if I can mirror a SafeBoot protected drive without hosing it up royally.

Damn Baylie, that was almost the exact same thing that went through my head about 15 minutes ago! Mine is about a little over a year old Thinkpad T61 and the hard drive is a definite bottleneck every day. Except mine is protected with SafeGuard, not SafeBoot.

Serengeti wrote:

Now I just need to figure out if I can mirror a SafeBoot protected drive without hosing it up royally.

Let us know what you find out, eh? We're starting to get SSDs as options in our configs, but the boss won't pony up the dough for one so we can play wi--I mean test it for SafeBoot compliance.

Hmm, Baylie, the super-long Anand article does not speak well of Samsung flash drives.

It sounds like Intel finally has a competitor; Indilinx isn't as good yet, but they're getting reasonably close, and they're cheaper.

Ouch, wish that article had come out a couple weeks ago.

Of course I can always drop my Samsung based drive in my work laptop and get an Intel for my home PC, so it's not too bad.

I'm seriously thinking of buying two 30GB OCZ Vertex drives ($110) and doing a RAID-0 array. 60GB total and crazy access times and read/write speeds. My only worry is if 60GB will end up being too small.

Ok, quick update on the Samsung chipset. I did some research and the main problems are twofold:

1. The current Samsung firmware does not support the TRIM command, which other chipsets do.
2. There is currently no way to upgrade the firmware on Samsung chipsets.

However, a little digging on the Corsair support forums indicated that Samsung has promised both a new firmware AND an app to upgrade the firmware by the time Windows 7 is officially released.

So it sounds like the write performance degradation issue will become a non-issue within a few months.

PyromanFO wrote:

I'm seriously thinking of buying two 30GB OCZ Vertex drives ($110) and doing a RAID-0 array. 60GB total and crazy access times and read/write speeds. My only worry is if 60GB will end up being too small.

Prices are coming down. If you're worried about space, waiting is your best friend. It won't take long.

Besides, the 60gb is only $200 (after mir).

. . . I tell you no, then I dangle a carrot. *shrugs shoulders*

LOL, garion.

I'm waiting for the stupid G2 Intels to come back into stock. The 128G OCZs just aren't enough space, and the 256G cost too much. The $450, 160gig Intel drives should be just about right.

My Steam folder alone is 65 gigs.

I would use SSD's for your boot drive.. you are probably better off using the fastest 1TB drives for your games and programs...or perhaps Raptors.. but the newer 1TB drives are getting pretty close to Raptor performance.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Anand just published a 27 page article on the current state of SSD and what is coming. A good read if you are interested.

Thanks for the link, that was a really informative article. It's definitely something to keep in mind when I do my next build, which is probably a year or so out.

It's amazing to see both read/write times AND idle power consumption are an order of magnitude better than the existing top of the line magnetic drives.