Conclusion: Recommending Samsung
Having looked at 14 flash SSD products, we found that the market can currently be segmented into three different sections, which can or cannot be recommended, depending on your budget and requirements :
1. High Performance
The flash SSDs based on single-level cell (SLC) flash by MemoRight and Mtron belong to this category. The two manufacturers build drives that are designed to deliver the best performance, regardless of other characteristics. MemoRight dominates the I/O benchmark section, which is important for servers, while Mtron’s Pro 7500 series is an excellent flash SSD for workstations. None of them are particularly efficient, and all are very expensive at $1,000 and up for only 32 GB.
2. Consumer / Mainstream
Most of the flash SSDs in our roundup have to go in this category, including Crucial, Hama, Silicon Power and Super Talent. Most of these drives are based on multi-level cell (MLC) flash and most are also, I’m sorry to say, not really that special. Crucial and Super Talent offer amazing read throughput. Silicon Power actually ships capacities of up to 128 MB, but its performance disappointed. The advantages of a consumer SSD over a conventional hard drives are there, but they aren’t as impressive as we’d like to see. We’d only go for such a product if the price were exceptional ; everyone else should stick with their magnetic hard drives a little longer.
3. Premium Consumer
This category currently holds only a single drive : the Samsung 64 GB SSD SATA-2, which is also available from OCZ as the 64 GB SATAII SSD. For those who want it all—high performance and high efficiency—this product is it. No other SATA-based flash SSD shows such low power requirements in idle and when active, and no other flash SSD provides balanced performance across all benchmarks. We hope that more flash SSD products will follow in this category, because only these drives are worth the cost. Samsung’s 64 GB SSD SATA-2 and the OCZ 64 GB SATAII SSD receive the Best of Tom’s award in the hard drive category.
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Well, nothing new here.
A comparison of random write access time would have been very nice
since this a major disadvantage of SSD (as far as I know).
Some flash drives only reach 100ms access time!
In addition to write access times, it would be interesting to know about the effects to Windows swap memory performance. When Windows goes and uses swap memory, performance is usually plunged, due to multiple simultaneous accesses. However, writing to swap file might be continuous access while reading it might be random. But how about if some other program is read-accessing hard drive while Windows is writing to swap file? I do not know about swap memory specs, so I do not really know. (This is where Tom's testers would step in.
) SSDs might greatly decrease hard drive crunching, but if it requires much random write access (and if it is much slower like nerd999/asdf999 claims), there might not be so much advantage.
And it raised another thought about the lifespan: how much writing Windows swapping really does generally and how much would profuse everyday swapping eat memory cells (e.g. when photoshopping large images)?
My understanding of SSD implementation is not to use a swap file, as the access time is so much quicker it negates the need for one.
I've installed XP on a number of drives and I always remove the swap file, and I've never seen any impact.
Hope this helps
... A comparison of random write access time would have been very nicesince this a major disadvantage of SSD (as far as I know).Some flash drives only reach 100ms access time!
+1 Yeh would like to see that. Killer SSD test!!
Bob
Hey, nice review, thanks. Can you offer the same endorsement for the 32GB version of these samsung/OCZ drives? And can you provide the model numbers as tested?
How about tests where the OS is installed on the SSD, how much faster would the system feel as a result?
Anonymous @ 19/08/2008, it seems you quite haven't grasped the concept of swap files. They are not for increasing performance (as in speed) or caching. They are used to extend system memory by moving memory contents temporarily to the hard drive. Using high-speed SSD does not negate need for swap file (using more system memory would), it makes swap file usage more viable one! Removing swap file should not impact system performance negatively, it would usually make system faster (because Windows tends to swap even much before you are low on system memory). But you can remove swap file only if you have enough memory available. When using large applications at the same time (e.g. the whole Adobe Creative Suite), swapping tends to become useful, even if you have 2 gigabytes of memory available. It is usually easier and faster to swap applications on the disk than to close all your work files and close the applications. But low access times would help situations when your hard drive is already in work and Windows starts swapping. Sometimes it may take minutes before your system is really usable again.
Synchronos (anonymous @ 18/08/2008)