Print
At the end of our November 2008 solid-state-drive roundup, we concluded that those NAND-flash-based drives just weren’t ready for prime time, thanks to astronomically high prices, small capacities, and flaky first-gen controllers.
Flash forward to mid-2010. Not only have newer drive controllers thoroughly washed the bad taste of the first-gen SSDs out of our mouths, but performance has shot through the roof. And the slowdowns that early SSDs experienced when writing to memory blocks where data had been deleted have been vanquished by the TRIM command. Implemented in modern SSDs as well as in Windows 7 and Linux, TRIM’s garbage-collection functionality has helped SSDs overcome one of their remaining hurdles.
Of course, there’s still the matter of price. While solid state drives have several advantages over their mechanical hard drive brethren—durability, reliability, and speed among them—they still cost a lot more. A one-terabyte mechanical hard drive costs less than $100, but a 256GB SSD can cost close to $800. Nevertheless, today’s SSDs have significantly dropped in price, and combined with the technological advances, are a much improved value. Is that enough to get your purchasing dollars? We were compelled to find out, Maximum PC–style.
We gathered five newly released SSDs to see how far the field has come since late 2008. We ran each through a gamut of tests: HDTune 4.01 for sustained read and write speeds as well as random-access times and 4KB random reads and writes (historically the Achilles’ Heel of SSDs); PCMark Vantage x64 to simulate performance during common Windows tasks; and Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 to measure sequential writes by writing an uncompressed AVI to the disk. We’ll tell you how they compare to our current Best of the Best pick, the 128GB Patriot Torqx (the cumulative benchmark results can be found here), and even explore a budget-SSD option. So let’s see how the state of the SSD union fares.
Comments are closed on this article
blindhorizon
June 21, 2010 at 11:59am
one thing that has bugged me for some time now is the Windows system swap file. i have a laptop with the only option of one SSD drive. and with out the support of TRIM on it and the Winows Swap always eating away at space. the question is...
Would it be better with the speeds of SSD to turn off the windows swap file? or is there another option i'm not seeing.
system spec:
2.4ghz
4gb ram
128gb SSD
Win 7 Ult.
blindhorizon
June 22, 2010 at 9:45am
yes i did mean the Paging file. thanks for the advice...i did turn off the system protection/system restore, i am one of the few that probably actually use hibernate mode so i cant turn that off....i'm still hesitating on turning off PAGING all together maybe i will play around with it.
nsvander
June 17, 2010 at 7:26am
Funny that you guys give the sandforce such great reviews! Have you guys checked these drives over say the period of a month? I have read many many reviews on the net that states there garbage collection system and lack of cache cause major system performance degradations over time, and cause them to perform worse then Indilink or Intel base controller drives.
kevaskous
June 15, 2010 at 3:22pm
lol...get a machine that isn't several years old, and that simply will not be the case. Furthermore 64bit is the way to go, and in that term, is non comparable.
Edit:made to the post below
huhhuh
June 23, 2010 at 9:44am
As I replied to guy under - it's bloody q6600/4GB, I don't think it needs updates since apps and formats havent been progressing i na mean time.
Altough, if I get a Canon 5Dii then I might.
huhhuh
June 15, 2010 at 3:09pm
since xp does not have trim and it won't have it forever, what happens when drive fills up ?
i guess every producer has it's own tools to make empty bits really empty ?
I still am not ready for Win7 because when I tried it it run Adobe PhotoShop and Premiere way slower then 32bit xp.
Devo85x
June 15, 2010 at 6:30pm
My question to you is why would you spend all the money for an SSD to put on a XP machine? If your computer runs so slow in 7 you probably have more problems with your computer than just a slow hdd...
huhhuh
June 23, 2010 at 9:42am
Actually I havent said my computer runs slow. Nor it does. I said the hard core apps on 64bit Win7 are in disadvantage to same apps on 32bit XP. So let's say a Slider in Picasa for sharpening moves smooth in XP, and freezes in Win7.
And as far as my XP boot goes - around or less then 15 secs (since it's modified xp/sp3).
And I got the Q6600/4gbRAM machine, so I wouldnt call it underpowered.
