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Kingston SSDNow V+ 256GB

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0600

A Samsung SSD by any other name...

You might think GPU and CPU upgrades happen quickly, but they’re practically glacial compared to the SSD market, where a platform can go from Kick Ass Award–winning performance to merely good in a few months.

Witness Kingston’s SSDNow V+ 256GB, essentially a rebadge of Samsung’s 256GB drive, to which we gave a Kick Ass Award back in July. The Samsung and Kingston drives, as well as Corsair’s P256 rebadge, all use 256GB of Samsung NAND chips, with the Samsung S3C29RBB01 controller and 128MB of onboard DDR cache to prevent random-write stuttering.

The SSDNow’s sustained average read speeds clocked in at 193.8MB/s, slightly higher than the OEM Samsung version but not quite up to the 209MB/s established by the 160GB Intel X-25M we reviewed in November. Its average sustained writes of 153MB/s trailed behind Indilinx-controlled devices like the Patriot Torqx, with its 175MB/s sustained writes, while the X-25M’s mere 79MB/s seem positively prehistoric by comparison.

The Kingston SSDNow V+ 256GB is a rebadged version of the Samsung drive we reviewed in July.

Random-access read and write speeds on the SSDNow are similar to those of the OEM Samsung drive and Patriot Torqx at .16ms latency for random reads and .24 for random writes. Here, the Intel drive remains king, with .11ms reads and blistering-fast .08ms writes. Premiere Pro scores were similarly middle-of-the-pack for the SSDNow.

The most unusual aspect of the Kingston drive’s benchmarks involved PCMark Vantage HDD, which tests the drive’s performance running Windows-based applications, such as Windows Defender, Media Player, application launches, etc. The first time we ran PCMark Vantage on the drive, we were confronted with a stunningly low score of 5,303 PCMarks—barely higher than a traditional 2TB drive. The second time, much to our surprise, the score jumped to 13,289. After a few more runs, it settled comfortably into a range around 18,400—a little lower than some of its peers, like the first-gen Intel X-25M and Patriot Torqx, but at least in the same neighborhood. None of the other drives we’ve tested that house this Samsung controller showed similar symptoms, and at press time Kingston’s techs were still trying to duplicate the problem.

The Kingston SSDNow V+ 256GB is a good SSD, built on a solid controller, with excellent performance. But we’re not granting this drive a Kick Ass Award, as we did its predecessors. Why? Well, first, the Indilinx-controlled drives we’ve reviewed since July offer slightly better performance, despite their smaller cache size. And Corsair’s P256 SSD, which is virtually identical to the Kingston drive, is $30 cheaper. And considering the still-high price-per-gigabyte that remains the biggest hurdle in SSD adoption, every penny helps.

Intel X-25M 160GB MLC SSD

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:30:00 -0500

Intel's killer solid state drive gets a capacity increase, but is it still the best?

Last fall, Intel slapped the solid state drive market on the back of the head with the release of the 80GB X25-M MLC drive. That drive absolutely trounced the competition with its 200MB/s read speeds, incredibly low random-access times, and best of all, no random-write stuttering or cache overflows. The first X25-M garnered a Kick Ass Award and defeated all comers in our last SSD roundup (November 2008), but the market has come a long way since then. With powerful competition from drives sporting Indilinx and Samsung controllers, can the 160GB X25-M maintain Intel’s crown?

The 160GB X25-M ships in a silvery chassis, unlike its predecessor’s black, and is 7mm tall—an included spacer accommodates 9.5mm drive bays. Intel’s kicked the flash manufacturing process down from 50nm to 34nm, and retained native SATA and Native Command Queuing from its previous iteration.

The new X25-M ships with a spacer so it can fit in 9.5mm as well as 7mm 2.5-inch drive bays.

First, the good news. The 160GB X25-M is even faster than the 80GB, offering 209MB/s sustained reads and 79.5MB/s sustained writes in our h2benchw benchmark, compared to the 80GB version’s 206MB/s and 64MB/s, respectively. Random-access reads and writes are within .01ms of the 80GB version, and Premiere Pro times are five percent faster. Oddly, though, its PCMark Vantage score is only 23,288—faster than nearly every drive but its predecessor, which amassed a cool 30K.

Unfortunately, the X25-M just isn’t the coolest kid on the block anymore. Not since we’ve seen other drives come along and smash the 100MB/s sustained-write barrier, or which feature either a Samsung or Indilinx drive controller with cache that eliminates the random-write stuttering that plagued early JM602-based drives. Both Samsung’s 256GB drive (reviewed August 2009, retailing as the Corsair P256) and Patriot’s Torqx (September 2009) nearly match X25-M’s read speeds and obliterate its sequential writes, with the Torqx and its fellow Indilinx Barefoot MLC drives (OCZ Vertex, G.Skill Falcon) offering write speeds close to 175MB/s.

The X25-M still reigns supreme in random-write times, though, with a latency of just .08ms compared to the Torqx’s .31ms. And it does so without the Indilinx controller’s 64MB of DRAM cache.

The X25-M remains a rock-solid choice for SSDs, and its read speeds and random-write response times are second to none. But in sustained-write speeds, it’s no match for the Patriot Torqx and its peers. But hey, the 160GB X25-M is $.10/GB cheaper than the Torqx, and 160GB is enough room for your OS and a dozen of your favorite games.

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:30:00 -0500

Faster than a VelociRaptor, and six times the capacity

After months of making do with 5,400rpm and 5,900rpm 2TB drives and odd-bird 1.5TB drives, it’s finally happening: 7,200rpm two-terabyte hard drives are coming to rigs near you. First out of the gate and into our greedy arms is Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Black, the performance cousin to the 2TB Caviar Green we reviewed in May. And brother, it’s just what we’ve been waiting for.

The 2TB Caviar Black is spec’d to impress, with four 500GB platters, two processors, 64MB of cache, and a dual-stage actuator system that puts a fine-tuned piezoelectric actuator head at the end of the standard magnetic actuator, enabling fine-tuned tracking for speedy seek times. The Caviar Black also comes with WD’s standard No-Touch ramp loader, so the read/write head never comes in contact with the platters, increasing the drive’s lifespan.

If this is the shape of 7,200rpm drives to come, we're wetting ourselves with excitement.

All these little extras add up, and the 2TB Caviar Black offers the speediest sustained reads and writes—exceeding 112MB/s each—of any consumer magnetic hard drive we’ve ever tested. That’s 15 percent faster than the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB’s read speeds. The 1.5TB Barracuda, previously our high-capacity speed champion, couldn’t keep up in sustained writes, either—here the Caviar was nearly 30 percent faster. And thanks to the greater areal density of the Caviar drive, its random-access read and write times are just 7.6ms and 5.0ms, respectively. You won’t find faster seeks short of a VelociRaptor or solid state drive. Of course, solid state drives offer the best performance—the $370 Patriot Torqx, our Best of the Best SSD, achieves sustained reads of over 200MB/s, sustained writes of over 175MB/s, and seek times measured in the tenths of milliseconds.

The 2TB Caviar Black has an MSRP of $300, the same price that low-powered 2TB drives like the Caviar Green and Barracuda LP debuted at earlier this year. Street prices, of course, will be lower, and keep falling—the first waves of 2TB drives, the “green” ones, are already selling for as low as $200. And the Caviar Black’s sustained reads and writes trump the fastest of those green drives by 20MB/s.

The 1.5TB Barracuda held a spot on our Best of the Best list for more than a year, but now it’s been firmly supplanted—the 2TB Caviar Black is officially our favorite hard drive.

Expect 7,200rpm 2TB drives from Hitachi, Seagate, and others in the next few months as well, with the aim of high performance. But if you buy a capacity hard drive today, next week, or even half a year from now, you can’t go wrong with this Caviar Black. It has the fastest sustained read and write speeds of any consumer magnetic hard drive we’ve ever tested. It’s faster in any benchmark than all standard hard drives save the WD VelociRaptor, which still holds the edge in burst speeds and random-access times—barely. Think about that for a second: You can get VelociRaptor-busting speed and six-and-a-half times the capacity for $300. We’re sold.

D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router

Michael Brown — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:30:30 -0500

Love the features; hate the performance—and the price tag

D-Link’s DIR-685 Wi-Fi router generated a lot of buzz at CES this past January. And when we took a gander at its spec sheet, we thought it a contender for Best of the Best in the router category; something that would finally displace the Linksys WRT600N, which is becoming hard to find. Alas, ’twas not to be.

The problem certainly isn’t with the DIR-685’s feature set: This router is absolutely loaded with goodies. The 3.2-inch color LCD can inform you of the router’s status and configuration; present digital photos from Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook; display RSS feeds, such as sports scores, weather reports, and stock quotes; and a lot more (this is one router your significant other won’t insist be hidden in a closet).

Next up, there’s a 2.5-inch internal SATA hard drive bay, which can turn the router into a NAS box (complemented by a built-in FTP server and BitTorrent software). There are two USB ports featuring D-Link’s SharePort technology, which allows you to plug in both an external hard drive and a printer and share these devices with any computer on the network. The router’s four-port gigabit switch automatically powers down any ports not in use to save a modest amount of energy.

You won't find a prettier wireless router, but you'll encounter plenty that are much, much better.

The rest of the features are just as valuable, if not as unusual. You can set up a password-protected guest zone, for instance, with the option of limiting access to a set schedule. And there’s both a UPnP server and an iTunes server. Lastly, there’s a Quality of Service engine to help eliminate lag for VoIP and media-streaming applications.

But our enthusiasm over all those whiz-bang features is tempered by the DIR-685’s slug-slow wireless throughput and NAS performance. We’ve been using the aforementioned Linksys WRT600N for comparison for more than a year, but we always retest its performance within a few hours of benchmarking a new contender, just to make sure both products are tested under the same environmental conditions.

The DIR-685 lagged far behind the Linksys in our Kitchen test, where the client is 20 feet away from the router and separated by an insulated wall and a set of plywood cabinets: It delivered TCP/IP throughput of just 45.4Mb/s compared to the Linksys WRT600N’s 98.9Mb/s. The D-Link turned in a particularly poor performance in our Media Room test, where the client is located in a double-insulated room-within-a-room 35 feet from the router, managing TCP/IP throughput of just 4.54Mb/s.

The 2.5-inch drive bay limits your choice of hard drives to notebook models, and D-Link provided us with an 80GB Seagate Momentus 5400.5 hard drive for this evaluation. But we find the router’s lethargic NAS performance more troubling than this physical limitation: The DIR-685 took a full 8:53 (min:sec) to copy a single 3GB file from a PC. Compare that to the Qnap TS-209 Pro II—our Best of the Best NAS pick—which copied the same file in just 2:27.

We won’t complain about a high price tag if a product’s features and performance justify it, but the DIR-685’s $300 price tag—which doesn’t include a hard drive—just rubs us the wrong way.

Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:30:00 -0500

Barracudas eat Caviar for breakfast

Update Oct 07, 2009: Fixed benchmark chart

We haven’t seen a new two-terabyte drive on the market in a while—not since we reviewed the Western Digital Caviar Green in May, in fact—but Seagate has finally added a 2TB drive to its Barracuda LP line of desktop drives. The LP (or low-power) line is Seagate’s “green” offering, equivalent to Western Digital’s GreenPower and Samsung’s EcoDrives. With an unusual 5,900rpm rotational speed—down from the 7,200rpm offered by the rest of the Barracuda line—the LP series trades performance for power savings and reduced heat output. Thankfully, it doesn’t sacrifice much speed in the process.

Unlike the performance-oriented Barracuda 7200.11 and 7200.12 series, the LP focuses on low power consumption, at both idle and full-spin states. We praised the low power consumption of Western Digital’s 2TB drive compared to the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11, but the LP series evens the playing field. On our test rig, the 2TB Barracuda drew around 4W at idle, slightly lower than the 2TB Caviar Green’s 5W, and 8W while operating, while the Caviar operated at around 9W. Both drives draw less power than the Barracudas of yore.

The Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB will restore the Barracuda name to users' good graces.

The 5,900rpm Barracuda LP handily outpaces the Caviar Green, which has a spindle speed somewhere between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm. In our h2benchw tests, the 2TB Barracuda LP’s sustained average reads and writes were 20 percent faster than the Caviar Green’s—around 91MB/s compared to the WD drive’s 76MB/s. In fact, those times are more comparable to Seagate’s speedy 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11—the 2TB drive’s read speeds are slightly lower, and its write speeds slightly higher than the smaller drive’s.

Random-access times for the ’Cuda were a few milliseconds slower than those of the Caviar, at 13.2ms random read and 10.06ms random write latency. Its HDTach burst speed was 10 percent lower than the Caviar’s, at 196MB/s versus the Western Digital drive’s 218MB/s.

With even “green” drives catching up to the WD VelociRaptor in performance (random-access times aside) while offering eight times the storage for the price, it’s now both possible and easy to add colossal amounts of storage to your rig without compromising performance. Next year’s high-powered rigs will almost certainly have solid state drives for their operating systems, but they’ll still need high-capacity drives for the grunt work. And at $240 for 2TB of decently fast, low-power-draw storage, the Barracuda LP will find a home in many a PC.

Nexto eXtreme ND2700

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:50:47 -0500

This portable photo drive actually delivers

Pardon us if we’re so oversaturated with so-called “extreme” potato chips and soda that we’re skeptical about anything bearing that moniker.

It doesn’t help that Nexto’s eXtreme ND2700 hardly looks the part. When we actually fired up the ND2700 and started copying files to it, however, we almost had to let out a whoop. Using a 16GB SanDisk, umm, Extreme III CF card, the ugly little ND2700 copied roughly 8.3GB of image files in 11:27 (min:sec). That’s about how fast it would take you to dump the files to your desktop via USB and that’s good news for people who think the microwave is too slow.

The unit supports CF, SD, SDHC, Memory Stick, and xD cards--and even has an eSATA port, too.

The ND2700 comes with a standard USB cable, as well as an eSATA cable and a short USB pig tail that lets you hook up a USB flash drive or hard drive so you can also back up all your files with the push of a button.

That is our main complaint with the unit. The interface is a single button, which can get tedious. A secondary complaint is the size. Our unit came with 160GB, which is kinda dinky. You can install your own SATA 2.5-inch drive but you’ll void the warranty in the process. The battery is rated for about 60GB of transfers.

Still, the upshot is that we’re impressed by the blazing performance of the ND2700—although the interface is a tad Captain Pike-ish, it’s livable and folks who want speed above all else won’t be displeased.

Patriot Torqx 128GB MLC SSD

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:30:18 -0500

Our heart swells with pride over this drive's record-setting write speeds

We’re finally out of the woods. After nearly a year in which the Intel X-25M was virtually the only solid state drive on the market not to suffer from severe latency during sustained random writes, the past few months have brought us sweet relief in the form of new SSDs with stutter-less memory controllers from such manufacturers as Samsung and Indilinx. This month, we tested the 128GB Patriot Torqx, which uses an Indilinx “Barefoot” memory controller and 64MB DRAM write cache to end the stuttering problem once and for all.

Right out of the box, Patriot impresses with the thoughtful inclusion of a 3.5-inch tray adapter for its 2.5-inch drive. It’s just a simple sheet of pot metal with screw holes and rail mounts, but it’s appreciated. The drive enclosure itself is all brushed-metal—black on top, silver on the bottom—and screws into the adapter easily.

The Patriot Torqx is a standard 2.5-inch drive, but an included adapter helps it fit into 3.5-inch desktop drive bays.

Once we got the drive into our test system, it performed like a dream, with average sustained read speeds of 205.4MB/s—virtually identical to our champion, the Intel X25-M. But the Torqx really brings home the bacon in the write speed test: Sustained write transfer speeds were a whopping 175MB/s, 16 percent faster than the previous champ, the Samsung 256GB MLC SSD (reviewed in August, retailing as the Corsair P256) and nearly three times as fast as the Intel X-25M’s 64MB/s. And although average random-write response times were slightly slower than the Samsung or Intel drives, we’re talking a few tenths of a millisecond here—still an order of magnitude faster than the Western Digital VelociRaptor, our magnetic-drive speed champion. The Torqx also proved superior in our Premiere Pro CS3 encoding test, beating the Samsung by nearly five minutes, and the Intel by one minute.

At $400 for 128GB, the Torqx is still much more expensive than a magnetic hard drive of similar capacity, but that price is pretty standard for SSDs. It offers 48GB more capacity than the $300 80GB Intel X-25M, so if you’ve got the extra Benjamin, the 128GB Torqx is a great buy. Although, if the present leapfrogging-in-awesomeness trend continues, holding out six more months for an SSD could be quite rewarding.

Samsung 256GB MLC SSD

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Expensive, but worth it

[Editor's Note: This drive retails as the Corsair P256. At the time this review was first published, Samsung had announced no retail partners.]

Solid state drives show immense promise with regards to reliability and read speeds, but current-generation models are rife with drawbacks. Due to NAND flash memory’s architecture, writing data to a block (after the first time) requires copying the entire contents of that block to cache, erasing it, and rewriting it with the added data. Large numbers of small writes run the risk of overloading the SSD’s disk cache, causing high latency. Multi Layer Cell (MLC) solid state drives, especially those utilizing JMicron’s JM602 controller, are particularly susceptible.

Fortunately, Samsung’s SSDs, like Intel’s (whose X25-M is the gold standard for solid state drives), use their own controllers, and the results are impressive. This 256GB SSD reached sustained average read speeds of 175MB/s, just 12 percent slower than the Intel drive and 75 percent faster than a Western Digital VelociRaptor. Better still, the Samsung drive’s average sustained write speeds topped 150MB/s, much faster than the 64.3MB/s average offered by the Intel drive. Oddly, Intel’s X25-M still reigns supreme in our Premiere Pro encoding test, beating the Samsung drive by nearly two minutes. The Samsung’s random access times, while slightly slower than the X25-M’s, still average at under .2ms for read and write.

The Samsung drive’s PCMark Vantage score, at 14,088, is less than half that of the Intel drive’s, but still double that of any standard hard drive.

Samsung's new 256GB SSD crushes the competition in capacity and write speeds.

Now to that pesky random-write latency issue that vexes SSDs: The Samsung controller hung up only a few times, once giving a random-access write latency of 294.5ms, which is enough for a noticeable lag. However, this occurred infrequently enough that the average random-access write latency was .16ms, several thousand times faster than the CSX 128GB SSD, for example, which used the flawed JMicron controller.

The Samsung 256GB SSD, then, exhibits blazing-fast read speeds, and its write speeds are not just fast but consistently fast, at an average of 150MB/s, which is a nice change from the status quo. Even better, this SSD has a high enough capacity to run both the OS and applications (like games and media-creation apps) that can benefit from its high read and write speeds and low latency.

Samsung doesn’t currently plan to offer the 256GB MLC SSD through normal retail channels, but the Corsair P256 SSD, which features the same hardware, is available on NewEgg and other retailers, and the Samsung OEM version is available as an add-in in some Dell and Alienware computers. Its read speeds are nearly on par with the X-25M, its writes are much faster, and it has three times the capacity. If you’ve got the scratch, this is one of the few SSDs currently out that we can unreservedly recommend.

Editor's Note: Added language indicating Corsair P256 as rebranded version of this drive.