Customized computer?

[Animeniax]

I'm pretty close to pulling the trigger on this SSD: Patriot Wildfire. It uses the new Sandforce controller and has read/write speeds up to 500MB/s.

[Buffalobiian]

I'm pretty close to pulling the trigger on this SSD: Patriot Wildfire. It uses the new Sandforce controller and has read/write speeds up to 500MB/s.

That's the sequential read/write max. What you really need to look at is 4kb random read/write performance since you'll encounter that more so than transferring movies in real life situations.

Thanks for the input David. I'm not tossing up between the Intel 510, Crucial M4 and Crucial C300 ~250GB models. The C300 is hard to find, and even when i do find it, its price isn't much of a bargain (if any) compared to the M4 at all. I don't know whether I should just jump on, or wait for a few weeks/months till price drops and reliability issues reveal themselves..

[Animeniax]

That's the sequential read/write max. What you really need to look at is 4kb random read/write performance since you'll encounter that more so than transferring movies in real life situations.

The Wildfire kicks ass at 4k random too, up to 85k IOPS which is twice most previous Sandforce models.

[David75]

That's the sequential read/write max. What you really need to look at is 4kb random read/write performance since you'll encounter that more so than transferring movies in real life situations.

Thanks for the input David. I'm not tossing up between the Intel 510, Crucial M4 and Crucial C300 ~250GB models. The C300 is hard to find, and even when i do find it, its price isn't much of a bargain (if any) compared to the M4 at all. I don't know whether I should just jump on, or wait for a few weeks/months till price drops and reliability issues reveal themselves..

Well, I mentionned the C300 because you sometimes have bargains due to its end of commercialisation, since the M4 is the replacement. The idea behind my answer to seek for good SSDs from last gen with 3Xnm nand flash, as 2Xnm nand flash seems to have performance and reliability problems...

The M4 is replacing the C300, should still be a good alternative, depending on customer service from Crucial.

The Wildfire kicks ass at 4k random too, up to 85k IOPS which is twice most previous Sandforce models.

The patriot still is a SF-2200 product, so I'm a little surprised they would get such high IOPS with the same controler/firmware unless they cheat somewhere (bench tool, or just a big lie?)
That also means you get the problems other SF based products get, so like for Crucial, you have to know wether Customer service is good when you have a problem and if they release firmwares once in a while...
SSDs remind me of the time when the HDD industry switched to PMR and reliability was sometimes poor (IBM GXP...)
It's very hard to know what products will be affected and how each firm will react.
I'm somewhat skeptical when with the same nand flash modules you see products from Intel perform 100 and SF products perform 200 for example... it's even more of a problem when you know that Intel manufactures those same modules...

So either there's a hidden truth, or there are reliability troubles coming... or both.

For example, just changing the sample size in a demanding SSD stress test shows that some SF products are tailor-made to do well in benchmarks... and their performance drops when you're out of the range of most benchmark tools. Behavior not seen on other products.

Example? 4kB random write with non compressible data at different batch size for the Vertex 3 240 GB:
- 1000 Mo : 72 MB /s
- 2000 Mo : 72 MB /s
- 4000 Mo : 52 MB /s
- 8000 Mo : 44 MB /s
- 16000 Mo : 44 MB /s

With the same test, the M4 is always at 58 MB/s
thing is, most benchmark tools use a small size batch...
(taken from the french site:http://www.hardware.fr/news/11462/ss...-x-benchs.html)
I'm quite lucky we have a very good french forum with quite skilled reviewers who can pinpoint problems in benchmarks and go beyond the usual press conference like reviews...
I think some of them were the first ones to pinpoint the JMF602 stuttering problem...

Still talking about benchmarks, it's always very strange to see many SSDs with very high synthetic results, not having a clear advantage over some intel SSDs that are supposed to be much slower on paper.

Be careful, we're in a bad phase for the SSD market. It's in full bloom and everyone wants their share with any means possible.
But I know no one wants to wait another 5 years so that things get clearer.

So, if you find a SSD with a good price, and nice customer support, it might be a safer bet than going for the "synthetic bench" beast.