Maximum PC

I've joined you guys in the "glorious" era of SSDs, having a Vertex 3 Solid in my netbook and a kick-ass new Vertex 4 in my desktop.

I have to use an older, ah, computer due to circumstances and it has a HDD in it. A slow HDD, an HDD slower than even the HDD that came in my netbook!

This computer doesn't have SATA 3 so the newest and greatest drives would be a waste. Tragically older generation SSDs of capacity seem to be neither plentiful nor cheap so my only recourse seems to be to buy a lower end modern SSD. As I remember the SSD advocates saying in the beginning, over 50% of disk use is 4k random reads for application loading and such, so even though I won't get the glorious 400 MB/sec+ sustained sequential read speeds I will be seeing massive improvements, namely not having to wait for seconds apps to load and removing lag on the autocomplete drop down menus when coding.

On the main page I see that the Vertex 4 Agility 256 GB is retailing at an affordable $130. Will an SSD like that be "smart enough" to not blast out data at SATA 3 speed on a slower interface?

Does the Vertex 4 Agility suck? The Vertex 4 normal is kick-ass but I was badly burned by TigerDirect the last time I bought into their sale of cheaper SSDs (Corsair Nova 2, with its POS firmware).

I was somewhat interested in the Samsung 840 for this, but seeing as how it is similarly priced to the full-fledged Vertex 4, despite its promise to be the cheaper SSD with greater performance, my interest has waned.

OCZ has worked well for me, but I'll investigate all the drives of ~250 GB capacity that are close to the price I'm looking for. I paid 200 bucks for my Vertex 4 256 GB, so paying anything close to 200 is money that is better spent expanding my Vertex 4 RAID. I don't need 200-dollar performance in a non-SATA III computer, I'd feel bad about squandering its potential, but the market seems to tell me that I do as, until this rebate on the Agility 4, I hadn't seen drives that were of similar capacity but still modern and cheaper (at the expense of sequential read performance).

Before the sale, and before rebate, the Agility 4 is 160 bucks. I can get a Vertex 4 for 190 bucks @ Amazon. The situation is similar with non-OCZ manufacturers. Why would I buy the "budget" drives when they're only insignificantly cheaper than the real deal? It's a brutal conundrum.

No real world benefit? I disagree.

Going from my Solid 3 to my Vertex 4 doubled my sequential read speed and gave significant performance boosts in all other categories in CrystalDiskMark. This was noticeable long before I ran the bechmarks. Boot time decreased, load time in my frequently played games decreased, and my computer was a better place.

RAID stands to double my performance in key areas again, and gives me more high speed space to play with.

*sigh* When will some people stop looking at benchmark scores and go "see? my performance is better!" A benchmark score only measures the theoretical performance of the part. Testing your part against a real world scenario is a better indicator of performance.

Take for instance, we should just stock up on as much RAM as possible, because having a RAM disk is at least 10 times faster than any SSD, right? Well, various people who have ran real world tests with this say that you don't get 10 times the performance. For instance, loading the OS takes 40 seconds on an HDD, 25 seconds or so on an SSD, and maybe 15 seconds on RAM.

That's not MaximumPC talk

A benchmark doesn't necessarily only measure "theoretical performance", testing against a "real world scenario" which as you say "is a better indicator of performance" is also a benchmark.

Higher sequential read speeds were immediately noticeable by me in a "real world" test of boot times and loading games. Creating a RAID with SSDs makes sense as it allows me to have a much larger and faster SSD than I could buy individually.


. . .

Go Google it. I've had a bout with mister kleinkinstein. But from what I found, few programs actually load ungodly fast. The rest show exponential decay.

Anyway, I'm not sure the extent of how OS's treat RAM disks. They don't run anything directly from it as much as you'd like to think. So you already have a transfer hit.

YES, NO REAL WORLD BENEFIT... Which is faster, 50% faster, or 90% faster??? Simple, 90% is faster than 50%... but which "seems" faster, 50% faster than 0.7 seconds, or 90% faster than 0.7 seconds??? That's what you're facing when you step up to the level of SATA III SSD's.

I own a pair of Vertex 4 128GB SSD's running in RAID-0 on an X79 chipset using the two Intel 6Gbit SATA III ports. Unless you are Lt Commander Data and your "father" is Dr Noonien Soong, you're not going to "see" any real-world benefit. Sure the benchmarks look pretty...



You can get the same capacity from 2 drives whether their in RAID or not, and by not using RAID, if one of them dies, you still have your data on the other one intact.

If this were to be used in a media server & you're using Thunderbolt or 10GbE connections, then yes, you can see some benefit from RAID, but for such a thing I would recommend a 5 drive (or better) RAID-5 which gives you both parity & performance. But for a regular PC, no noticeable benefit, unless you're that one in 100 million people who can readily notice the difference of 1/2 second without using a stopwatch...

Even going from a single slow Mushkin Chronos SSD (about half as fast as a single Vertex 4) to RAID-0 on the Vertex 4's above (about 4x as fast as a single Chronos) the speed is barely noticeable in daily computing. Maya, 3ds Max, Premiere Pro CS6 all open about 1 second faster on the RAID array than they do on a single Chronos, actually, by stop-watch, 0.89 to 1.08 seconds faster +/- 0.1 sec reaction time. Of course going from a Solid to single Vertex 4 could be much more noticeable, but once you hit the SATA III SSD's, the drive speed is no longer your limiting factor.

Bottom line, when I re-configure my system in a couple of days, I will be pulling the Vertex 4 drives out of RAID & just have them as 2 separate drives.

Wow. Stay classy. How do you know I'm incorrect? If you were there, staring over my shoulder as I measured load times in games like Orcs Must Die 2 (the only way that you could have a chance of knowing), you should have said something as I am having difficulty 5-skulling every level in the Nightmare campaign solo. War Mage solo was easy IMO but Nightmare is giving me some issues. As far as I'm concerned, the game is 5 skull/level or bust. BTW Orcs Must Die 2 loads twice as fast as it did before and my sequential read speed doubled while my 4K random access stayed almost constant. I'm also noticing demonstrable and confirmed improvement all around over the OCZ solid 3, and again 4K read speed stayed pretty much the same between the 2 drives according to CrystalDiskMark. That's grounds for investigating causation IMO.

That's all RAID0 does in any environment, so what's your point? I want a large SSD but I don't want to shell out the mega-cash required for one, and why should I when I can combine 2 smaller drives into one larger logical drive for less cost and more performance in basically every access benchmark except 4k random reads? I might not always notice the speed increases, as you guys contend, but I'm getting them for free so why not?

Sure the odds of failure go up dramatically, but the drive is still small enough that I can make backups to an external HDD effortlessly. Besides (sarcasm), the odds of failure can't increase for me as I'm using OCZ drives and if you believe the OCZ "haters" who flood the internet the odds of an OCZ SSD failing are so great that every second an OCZ drive runs without failure is a divine miracle. (/sarcasm)

You guys insist that there is "no real world benefit" of having uber-fast SSD RAID0s, due to the majority of our disk activity being 4K random reads (which don't increase during RAID0), but what about the ~40% of the time that I'm doing something with my disks besides 4k random reads? There I should be noticing dramatic improvement, which I contend that I am with games.

I'm skeptical of this RAM drive boot statistic y'all are throwing out. When you turn the computer on, as you do to boot it, the RAM is devoid of data. The data for the OS would have to be loaded into it from the permanent storage. So if the permanent storage is an SSD it seems obvious that the RAM drive wouldn't be significantly faster than an SSD, which would make your boot time comparison statistic more or less moot.

Anyhow, I'm concerned about putting a new SSD into an old computer that lacks for SATA III as I've seen some horror stories on the internet about the OS and hardware having issues dealing with a drive trying to blast out data at 400 some MB/sec when the interface can't even handle half of that. Supposedly some SSDs had jumpers to set them to run at lower SATA specs to deal with this. Windows itself isn't exactly intelligent about handling file I/O across devices with speed differences (copying from my SSD to a USB 2.0 pendrive via win7 default copy utility is ridiculous), which while not the same as my potential scenario is close enough to give me concern.

i hate to step into a flame war, but you both have good points, back in the day i had 2 60g ssd drives(then about $150 each) raided 0 together, i did it because 120g ssd's were $$$. i had a 250g hdd that i would auto backup my raid daily. i wasnt concerned with super top speed, because is was a way better solution than my old vraptor hdd.

now with 250g ssd at semi reasonable prices, i think IMHO raid0 is over kill, still if you need the volume on your boot hdd, go for it.

peace

ed

First off there's no such thing as a Vertex 3 Solid. Vertex is not the company, OCZ is the company, Vertex, Solid, Agility, Petrol, Octane, Synapse, etc... are each individual models. You either have an OCZ Vertex 3(Vertex is their flagship model), or an OCZ Solid 3(their bottom-feeder), you either have an OCZ Agility 4(budget performance), or you have a OCZ Vertex 4.

Keep an eye out for sales, I've seen 256GB drives down to $130 & 512GB drives droping as low as $280. As the end of the year aproaches, I believe that we'll see the 480/512's hitting the $0.50/GB mark durring the Christmas sales push, & the 240/256 drives going even lower.

I went back over the old posts in this thread & noticed you're running SATA II instead of SATA III, that does change things a bit... The only "Trick" to running a SATA III SSD on a SATA II controller is that you need to make sure you have the latest firmware for your SATA III SSD, and the latest BIOS for your motherboard. Firmware & BIOS updates have fixed 99.99% of the known issues of using a SATA III SSD on a SATA II controller, the majority of which came from the SandForce chipsets used in the majority of the early SATA III SSD's. Go here to update the SSD firmware http://www.ocztechnology.com/ssd_tools/

Finally, since you're not on a SATA III controller, you might actually see some improvements from running a RAID-0 array. I'm still running a RAID-0 on my old 790 board (SATA II) with my Mushkin Chronos drives & Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and in that system, there is a bit of difference between single drive & RAID-0 performance & not just in benchmarks. System boots faster despite the added delay of the RAID controller having to be initiallized prior to starting Windows. Games & programs seem to start faster, game levels seem to load faster, and everything just feels a little more 'peppy'. Which is why I was so dissapointed when I got my second Vertex 4 & was able to RAID on a SATA III controller. It posts huge numbers in benchmarks, but the real-world just doesn't show the performance.

The OCZ drive I have is indeed an "OCZ Solid". However, that doesn't tell much about the drive, so I include the "3". The "Agility" and the "Vertex" were included because that's how the drive reports itself. I should have taken a picture before I put that old thing into my netbook (where, interestingly enough, its performance in 4k reads is massively gimped compared to its performance on my desktop. Another failure for the Atom chipset).

To clarify, my Vertex 4 is in my AMD 990fx based system and happily running on SATA III. That would be the system in which I'd run RAID0. My original question didn't have anything to do with RAID, that was a tangent that the thread was taken on by another poster and I obliged. Lesson learned

The system that I want to install the Agility 4 into has only one SATA bay so RAID doesn't apply to it. My concern is that while SATA is backwards compatible I've seen some cautionary tales about SATA 3 drives having issues with the throttled transfer speeds of SATA 1/2. Since SATA 3 drives are all that are really available (and their random read speeds are much improved over their sata 1/2 brethren anyhow) I figured I ask.

Anyhow, I went ahead and purchased the Agility 4 to pop into the old laptop. Even the worst benchmarks I've seen for it still show it saturating the laptop's SATA setup in most all tests, so its decreased performance over the "top shelf" SATA 3 SSDs is something that I can ignore as it prevents me from wasting 60 bucks.

I'll see how it works when it arrives.

Like I said, the majority if issues came from using early SandForce controller based SATA III SSD's running on SATA II interfaces. Those issues are long since cured, as long as you update your motherboard BIOS & SSD firmware. With updated SandForce based SSD's & new drives like the Agility 4 or Vertex 4 which use an Indilinx Everest 2 controller, there are no issues with running on a SATA II interface other than you don't get full performance.

The equivalent of BIOS on this computer is as up-to-date as it is going to get.

I think that I can live without full performance on this machine, this POS 5400 RPM HDD sets the bar very low for performance.

Besides (sarcasm follows), according to the "pundits" in this thread, 4K random read performance is the sole attribute of SSD performance that matters, and that is still well below any SATA speed cap per CDM benchmarks. Statistics like 512K read speed and sequential read speed don't matter, according to these "enlightened few", and increases in system performance associated with increases in those assessments cannot be noticed by the end user unless they OK it. (/sarcasm)

I'm anxious to see how well this performs. It'll be nice to see 4k random read speeds that are actually greater than 1 MB/sec coming from this machine.

Just to conclude here, I put the OCZ Agility 4 256 GB (SATA 3.0 6 Gb/s) into my old "sata 1.5" machine and it works flawlessly and has greatly improved the usability of the computer. Games load MUCH faster, as do programs, and the little annoyances like drop-down "autocomplete" menus causing program hang for a few seconds while they loaded from the horribly slow HDD are long gone. So the horror stories I've heard about modern SSDs on older interfaces are bogus, at least with this OCZ drive (which would almost be ironic given OCZ's not-yet-seen-by-me-personally reputation for reliability and technical issues).

Even though this machine is an ancient Core 2 Duo computer it is quite usable now with just this upgrade. SSDs are a godsend to computing.

Disappointingly, and I continue to blame Intel for this, I notice somewhat lower numbers on disk benchmarks, benchmarks which shouldn't be held back by the bandwidth (or lack thereof) of the SATA 1.5 interface, on this drive on Sata 1.5 as compared to Sata 3.0 & USB 3.0 testing.