Enter SSD

[cvt]

yes, I am the most spoilt person around.
For, sitting on my desk this morning at work, the invoice of the 160gb Intel X25M SSD for my notebook.
FUCK YEH!!!
got to wait about a week though :(

not some crappy shit pause my system and run like crap cheap arse Jmicron thing, but the ultimate in SSD's.

me is very excited.

[dominatrix]

whats one of those bad boys worth?

[kyzen]

whats one of those bad boys worth?

Not much after it's filled up once! LOWLS HUN!
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=4
but read this:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535
looks like someone's been given the inside scoop but has obviously signed an NDA, gonna wait to see what the intel news is :)

[brendon]

so SSDs have a lower failure rate now??
last time i checked the ratio of good:bad was pretty big

[cvt]

DELETED: ME N2L2R

And dom, not sure retail, think we payed $1600 or sumthin.
Not sure from memory, but as dear as fuck. Even shit SSD's cost way too much.

As for failure rate, that can only be answered by guesses. Going by the time it took to cause the 60gb ocz core to age in my notebook, I would get over 7 years minimum with nothing turned off to save the SSD.
Yes, I run vista, yes, I have 8gb of ram in it. If you lack RAM, well, fact is you could still kill one within a year.

[cvt]

Heres the juicy news.
X-25M is here.. YEH!
too bloody busy to touch it :( maybe tommroow. Except I gonna be out of office for start, maybe all day, so more likely, the weekend.
We did pay retail of sorts, X25-M 160GB = $1699 inc GST
Along with the X-25M, is a 120gb OCZ Vertex. That cost us $615 inc GST
Did get a chance to throw the OCZ into another notebook, but didn't get around to getting an OS onto it.

If your wondering why I am getting to try so many SSD's, even though I don't work in IT. well.
Last IT guy was rather... an idiot, they realised that when I started working there, these are his leftovers.
Looking at a purchase of 80 new notebooks, SSD is a must. I was against using SSD's... then after trying them, I kind of had to shut up then and admit they were rather nice :)
Still in the process of finding a SSD that is priced acceptable, and performs good.
Realistically, its down to these 2. All these others fail.

[kyzen]

so SSDs have a lower failure rate now??
last time i checked the ratio of good:bad was pretty big
Have a skim of the 2 links I posted, don't worry about all the blah blah blah, just get an idea about where we are. It's all new and exciting at the moment, I'm looking at a new pc, so obviously reading about new and emerging tech.
The intel drives are heralded as the best available at the moment, but you can see in the second article that intel are about to make some announcement pertaining to their SSD's. So might be worth waiting to see what they have to say.
But then again, if you play the waiting game you'll never get a new PC :P My PC fund has been sitting idle for about a year because I'm waiting for what's 'just around the corner'...
Oh well, these days I'm actually thinking about spending my PC fund on a greenhouse for my aquaponics system :)

[cvt]

SSD's are still way too new and expensive kenny.
As much as I like them, I haven't even considered buying one for my personal computers, and for good reason.

Just give them a while.
Both Windows 7 with the "TRIM" command, new SSD's with "TRIM" (no ssd currently supports trim)
thts going to make the 'slowdown' seen when they 'age' MUCH MUCH less, possibly even unnoticable.
IMO you definately should wait for that, trust me, don't waste your money.

[dominatrix]

mmm, aquaponics. what you growin ken?

[cvt]

err, poop
i was posting from my blackberry, so I only looked at 1 link of yours, and seen the other was the same source. which is overly trustworthy, so left it at that.

oops.

anyway, between trying to study for uni, and work interrupting me, I have now officially got my XPS 16 running on a 120gb OCZ Vertex Drive, running the 1275 firmware.
Specs: CPU: T9550, GPU: 3670, RAM: 8gb DDR3, OS: Windows 7 64bit beta

Decided I would put the Intel in the test server, and see its performance there. Since the SAS drives we running are over 4 years old, its time they were looked at getting replaced. We only use 96gb, but need 5 SAS drives to keep up with the IOs (raid 10). Be nice if they could be changed for 3 SSD's in Raid 5. we will see. Planning for a migration monday night to the test server, run live on tuesday, monitor it, then migrate back tuesday night. If heaps of emails get lost and no work gets done due to 5x SAS -> 1 SSD.. heh, that'll be my fault :P But tuesday is always the quietest for our server (30% peaks average compared to mondays alone).

Anyway, put simply, I don't really know what numbers to say, benchmarks don't show the difference you feel. Ontop of that, the drive isn't "aged". And on that fact. OCZ will have a new firmware with TRIM+ in the next week or so, and along with that, an app that brute force trims every boot. Better than nothing, and reduces any obvious effects of aging, sounds pretty sexy :) And best you'll get until Windows 7 gets trim added in.

Oh, the XPS 16's shocking battery life of almost 2 1/2 hours, is now a bit over 3 hours.
That alone is almost unbeleivable, 7200rpm hdd's are such a power hog :o

I shall report back in a week with 360gb 7200rpm vs SSD.
So far it is mentally meaty, so I better wait till I age it and fill win7 up with shit before ranting about the FDD vs HDD difference :P

[cvt]

Simulated I/O useage on the intel drive today.. results..
It should do it, but it may battle at times. I feel I may be rather nervous tommorow at work, but at 1 am the server will go offline, sync, and the new one shoule be up in under a minute.
naturally, I'll be logged in remotely watching in a state of OMGPLZDON'TDIEIHOPEIDIDN' TFUCKUPSCHEDULESORSCRIPTS PLZPLZPLZWORK!

In other news, Miss OCZ Vertex is going to have my babies.

EDIT: Server update.
Knocked off work at 7.30pm, yes, that doesn't mean things went bad, but a few issues occured.
I sent out emails to all the major exchange users, 140 people. I requested they only reply if they notice any difference today with the server. No user knew what I did. I received 18 replies. The lot of them were negative. The general concesus was, during off peak hours, the system was much more responsive, but peak times, it was slow.
One user explained it VERY well.
His description basically was, commonly he is on the phone mashing the send/receive button. Generally this takes about 250ms (I am converting layman into normal speak). During peak times, he said it used to take sometimes up to a second.
He said it never took more than about 100ms offpeak and peak (most of this would be from network lag, as it is over a 9km 140mbit wireless point to point connection), but the receival of mail was slow.
He reckoned a 5M email used to take about 5 seconds to receive. It took almost 15 seconds.
Now, my conclusion.
1 SSD performed more responsive, but lacked the speed of 5 SAS drives (a SAS is a Serially attatched SCSI, 15,000rpm)
Tommorow we will have a meeting to discuss todays results, but generally, from the bit of the talk to the IT people, we have decided to go 3 SSD in raid 5. And in every way it will outperform the 5 SAS in raid 10.

Kenny, no blah blah in that. Me + 4 IT guys were there monitoring the system, and the whole lot of us were stunned it did so good, let alone didn't freeze up during the morning email spike. Real world test done very stupidly here, and its looking pretty damn impressive to say the least.

[Joshu]

holy hell cvt how big of a business do you work for :|

you'd think if there were really that much of a disk access throughput problem, you'd just get some battery-backuped ram going on in the middle as a cache of sorts rather than dumping money on SSDs, or hell, even just using memory caching a bit better

but i guess that would deprive you of the chance to stress-test some new toys, hey. ;)

[cvt]

uhm, I work for a small business, but it happens, they own many many businesses, and the server for the lot of them is right beside my office :)

Unfortunately that doesn't really work due to being impossible to pre-cache, basically, where in that 95 odd gig it writes or reads, is, 100% purely off what user does what, and users are random. The only way is having 128gig of ECC ram, with the ability to upgrade further, and a battery backup that can garenteed write it all to disk in case of power failure outside of the UPS's backup (single PSU here).
If your wondering on specs, its a dual cpu xeon 2.6 (forget number) with 8gb of RAM.
The replacement is a dual CPU Xeon L5520 with 24gb of RAM.
They are a little bit different from home PC's, still takes some getting my head around some of this hardware that I never seen or in some cases, knew existed.

As for choice of hardware, I have no say in any of it, just the SSD and setup of some of the software.
I'm an engineer/programmer, not IT, this is just a timefill for me.

[kyzen]

mmm, aquaponics. what you growin ken?
Heaps man, tomatoes, chilli, capsicum, strawberries, zucchini, heaps of herbs, celery, corn, lettuce, plus heaps more, it's the business! All fed by the shits of 100 silver perch which should be ready to eat around Christmas! ;)

[cvt]

......i have proof of over-excitement when I went and picked up the vertex from the couriers.
within 3 blocks driving, I had the SSD out of the box, phone out, and photo taken ;)

No-one dare comment what I am driving.
Its a company car.. it costs me nothing to drive.. I'm not stupid :P

[cvt]

Aftet a long weekend of mainly unsuccesful fishing, I did get a few, but most had to be thrown back. I have come to the conclusion.
If you ignore storage capacity, and look at performance only. SSD is a bargain.
Only today, did I get home, jump on my pc, and well, after a weekend of SSD the shellshock of getting hit by the prehistoric spinning platter of unmeasureably slow and painful access known by many as a raid 0 of 2 wd raptors, was so painful I shutdown the computer, which noteably also took a metric fucktonne of time, retrieved my notebook and returned to my blissfal albeit expensive world of useable performance.

Put shortly, hdd -> (good) ssd is such a performance gain, even after it is well aged, is so much it pains you to such a degree to use a hdd again it turns you off even using the pc.

Do not buy a ssd unless you have the cash to convert all your machines. You will regret it.

[cvt]

After about another week of ssd to hdd between computers.
My opinion of it remain the same.

Using the firmware with TRIM on it, and a little app OCZ released for forcing trims.
Using hddled, I only need to trim every few days to ensure I never hit a slowdown.
Works perfect.
So well, have ordered 2 for my personal computers.

SSD for the win. No doubt, it wins.
HDD's make me laugh. Nothing more than some cheap movie storage.
HDD for main drive is, well, those days are in the past, along with slot CPU's and ISA cards.

[Peter]

Not quite yet mate. 160gb just doesnt cut it yet.

[Peter]

once the data density is a bit better maybe. along with price.

i mean, they are good, but they are still too expencive

[cvt]

you use more than 120/160 gb for your running partition?
how?

All my HDD's are just mass storage. Cheap data per dollar. like, 3tb of HDD = 120gb of SSD.
Thats like comparing.. Some old ancient 200Mhz DDR, 32gb for $100, or $500 for 4gb of 1066Mhz DDR3

Compared to HDD's, From a performance point of view, SSD's are cheap. From a Data Size, rediculously expensive.

2 ways of looking at it.

Why buy upgrades (or a new car), and put a 40kph speedlimiter on it? Sure, it may accelerate great... but its slow regardless how much more power you give it.

[Peter]

SSD really arent that much faster. the value just isnt there yet, and with the added cost and crap all storage. they havent won me over yet. is all im saying ;)

[cvt]

SSD really arent that much faster. the value just isnt there yet, and with the added cost and crap all storage. they havent won me over yet. is all im saying ;)

Thats fairenough, price is rather scary.
They will drop fairly quick.

only in sequential read/write are they comparable to HDD.
in every other way, they are not.

anyway, SATA150 is slower than the drive, but regardless, show me how "close" your HDD is to, well, any of it?

[Peter]

hahah, indeed, but yeah, once that price drops and they ramp up the capacity, ill be all over them like a rash! :Di use a mac lol

[cvt]

Samsung have announced their 500gb 2.5" one already. $1600
maybe not the price drop your looking for :P
but for a $/GB, it is quite a massive drop. So it won't be long :)
and have faith in Indilinx, the vertex I have is their first SSD controller... well, ever, and its now, honestly, with the X25's.
Their next round they'll be cheaper, and have more money to develop some serious gear with. Should be interesting :)

and using a mac means? oh, you run windows when you want to do something, and OSX when people look over your shoulder :)
why not run linux and go obscure properly?
Mac users take things so personally and seriously. They also deny everything thats not good about them. DO NOT DISSAPOINT ME!.

[dominatrix]

dude, after i started using OSX, i cant stand using any windows anymore.

so what task would you actually need windows for? i cant think of one. and having the unix backend kicks ass.

[Joshu]

so what task would you actually need windows for? i cant think of one.

just a thought
2155

[Peter]

still got options

[cvt]

what do I need windows for.? ok, here we go.

Logixmaster 90
Proficy Machine Edition
Copcept
Proworx nxt
Proworx 32
Cimplicity
RSLinx
RSLogix 500
RSLogix 5000
Picosoft
XBTL
etc....

but, wait, thats just one area of work... I spose
Solidworks
Pro/Eng
Matlab

hum, I spose apart from work
FSOne
Phoenix Flight Sim

Anyway, I don;t need apps like below, I can go with inferiour solutions.
Newsleecher
DUMeter
ImgBurn
etc...

And then finally, theres games, hardware compatibility, flexibility.

I own a Quadcore Mac Pro which I use for Photoshop.

but then again, if you need none of the above apps, you fit into the "play without games" category which mac specifically aim for. So they would suit you just fine.

[Peter]

Matlab is 100% working on mac dude. i know because i use it too. full version upto date.
as well, according to the internet:
Pro/Engineer: The application runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux and UNIX platforms

But that said, you still have boot camp

[brendon]

joshu wins?

[dominatrix]

I think something is wrong with this whole lanx concept anyway joshu...

also... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Macintosh_games)

[cvt]

Matlab is 100% working on mac dude. i know because i use it too. full version upto date.
as well, according to the internet:
Pro/Engineer:

But that said, you still have boot camp

Pro/Eng works on all 3, but the plugins do not.
over 1/2 of the plugins are windows only.

Rather than looking at what mac can do.... just think about what it can't.

It "can" run windows for compatibility. Well, Vista "can" run XP for compatibility.
infact, almost every notebook I have also runs OSX with no issues at all.

so, why OSX?


My main tools.
GE Fanuc Proficy Machine Edition - XP or 7
Rockwell (Allen Bradley) RSLogix 500 - XP, 7, or Vista
Schneider Concept - XP
Schneider Proworx 32 - XP, 7
Telemacanique PL7 Pro - XP


My main required hardware features.
LAN, RS232 (mac HW fails here)

so.. the OS is no good, and the hardware is no good.
sure, I can run windows on mac HW, but... why? and USB->RS232 do NOT work.
I can run OSX on PC hardware, but...why? when I need to boot windows to do anything anyway?

so, again.
Mac = play
Windows = work

I'll do you a favour to save you googling agaiin.
http://www.rockwellautomation.co m/rockwellsoftware/design/rslogix500/sysreq.html
trust me, every company is the same.. they are the very PLC's used to control the robots making your mac's.
so... no windows. no mac's?

[dominatrix]

Sweet, so we have come to the conclusion that you should use what is best suited to your needs and wants!

[zyaN]

Ah yep, pretty much. (http://techgadgetforums.com/files/screen_mouse.jpg)

[cvt]

but then again, if you need none of the above apps, you fit into the "play without games" category which mac specifically aim for. So they would suit you just fine.

hmm, exactly what I said... gratz on catching on dom ;)
your almost as fast as your mac.

[cvt]

After heaps of reinstalls trying different offsets, etc.
They all show in benchmarks, but in my real world tests (ie, proficy ME in vmware, moving through program with life referencing...... WoW, load time of map....... PS4 load time.... etc...
I found there to be little difference, infact, I did notice after a 64 offset, for there to be no real difference, and the higher was better.

so, heres the results of a 1024 offset.
The odd step you see in read/write speed is related to the block size I am running. I have tried various combinations on that aswell, I found bigger is better, but the waste of space, I have decided on a fairly typical 4kb block.
The largest I went was 32kb block, doing so acheived write speeds much better in the 64k + speeds, the bottom end was much the same. that is, the step dissapeared, and it levelled out at about 140MB/s
Read speed was up from 200 to about 230MB/s. The disadvantage, the windows install, + my testing apps was 20% bigger. A fair penalty to take for a speed increase I couldn't even measure in any of my real world tests.
Ontop of that, I can't explain why the step occurs where it does, the severity changes depending on the block size, not the steps location.

Put simply, regardless all the shit out there about the perfect alignment on SSD's, default partitioning on vista and win7 are fine (not XP). The only reason to do anything else would be to achieve pretty numbers on benchmarks.

Machine Used:
Dell XPS 16
T9550, SATA300, 6gb 1066Mhz RAM, Win7 64bit RC1
1024 offset, 4k block

[madcap_magician]

great info on the SSD's. We have started to implement these drives in some of our client machines where they use there primary system as a all in one server, file host and gateway system for remote access. And also for software development ...... the result is biblical. Usability is so much quicker. Just the flow of work is no longer behalted by the transfer from the disk.

Mega Kias for the testing you have done on the SSD's CVT - its good to start to spread the word on these, what i think is, and underused technology. But underused ... because they are still to expensive for impementation by the 15yo system builder/overclocker/enthusiast/LAN'er

[cvt]

New Firmare.

SSD just keeps getting better.

Read Performance is basically unchanged, access times on sizes are basically unchanged.
but write performance has just rocketed.

64gb eSata Vertex -> 128gb Vertex in notebook, ftr, averaged 191MB/s copying (127 files totally 3.2gb)
On the firmware shown previously, same folder of junk, same deal, copied at 112MB/s.

These things are becoming even more epic. FW updates do not = blank drive... Same install of windows as previously used ;)

And still not rubbish after one fill up, Kenny will be so disappointed. One day, he will learn.......doubtful.