In part one of our SSD roundup, we looked at drives from Crucial, OCZ, Intel, Solidata, and Toshiba. To those results, we're adding Crucial's first 6 Gb/s SSD, WD's first SSD, and Kingston's 128GB SSDNow V-series, along with 'fresh' and 'used' scores.
The SSD market is clearly heating up. For the first time, we’ve received a drive that supports the faster SATA 6Gb/s standard. Unfortunately, it happens to deliver unreliable performance. Moreover, one of the traditional hard drive makers finally decided to enter the SSD market with a brand new product.
This is the second part of our 2010 spring SSD roundup. In part one, we compared offerings from Crucial, Intel, OCZ, Solidata, and Toshiba. Now it’s time to add some newcomers to our revamped testing suite. With Windows 7 and a SATA 6Gb/s add-in card from Highpoint (utilizing a Marvell controller), we’re ready for drives able to deliver 300 MB/s and more of throughput.
One of the new drives, Crucial's RealSSD C300, already reaches this impressive performance number. However, interface and high read numbers alone won’t make it the best SSD product.
We’re also happy to present two other new products: Kingston’s SSDNow V-series upgrade kit and a brand new SSD by Western Digital, the SiliconEdge Blue. If you're already familiar with WD's hard drive portfolio, then you'll remember that a Blue edition represents mainstream products, and this holds true for WD’s first-generation flash SSD.
Let’s look at the new drives and find out who emerges on top.
- SSD Roundup, Part 2: Crucial's SATA 6Gb/s, WD's First SSD
- Crucial RealSSD C300 (256GB, SATA 6Gb/s)
- Kingston SSDNow V-Series (128GB)
- Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue (256GB)
- Test Setup And Comparison Table
- Access Time And I/O Performance
- Throughput, Streaming, 4K Testing, Interface
- PCMark Vantage Application Test
- Power Consumption And Efficiency
- Conclusion
In all honesty, is Intel's comparatively low write performance really that much of an issue for a boot drive? With 12GB or even 6GB RAM you don't need a page file (compatibility reasons notwithstanding) and you're reading more than you're writing.
I suppose a bootable PCIe storage card is also an option (presuming bios supports) any chance of TH doing some reviews, bench of some of the PCIe data cards (bootable ones)?
Then when my laptop died, and I was forced to spend a week with a 5400rpm mechanical disk, I was getting chest-pains waiting for things to happen. It really did slow me down at work.
Now, I have the X25-M in my new compter, the difference is very noticable. Writes are still slow, but otherwise the computer is fast. When they make a 160 to 256 GB version of the extreme disk, I'll but it right away. 64GB is not enough....
We used for the purchase a european store:
http://SSDeurope.com
They have a great tool to lookup the right SSD (helped when search for the Dell Mini 9 upgrade we needed).
And for all those outside of the EU, since we operate mostly in France we also wanted to purchase a drive from a site located in another country, since we would not have needed to pay VAT on top of the buying price and the MX drives have apparently world wide covered warranty (a few drives were bought for private use and couldn't be written off as business expense).
Would be great to see a comparison between OCZ Vertex 2, Mach Extreme DS, Intel X25M G and the Photofast SFV1 to see who will take the lead.
Jean Paul