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Fastest, Best Hard Drives, and SSDs
There has been a great deal of discussion from time to time regarding SSDs and hard drives. I cannot dismiss all statements made in this forum because SATA III is a little scarce at the moment.
Here are top picks from StorageReview, a site that has been reviewing drives for many years:
http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives
I hope you enjoy the info.
Intel Core i7 7700K, MB is Gigabyte Z270X-UD5
SSD x2, 4TB WD Black HHD, 32GB RAM, MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning LE video card
Comments
Not bad. Just not very good, either. Let me explain.
Let's go back to when the Radeon HD 5850 launched. It was a tremendous deal--indeed, perhaps too good, as prices rose shortly after launch and are still mostly above the launch prices nearly a year later. Basically, any review site gave that about as strong of an endorsement as they're willing to give an AMD video card.
Anyway, at launch, there wasn't time for all of AMD's board partners to design their own cards. Windows 7 was coming, and AMD wanted some DirectX 11 cards on the market by then. So AMD built a bunch of cards themselves (actually, the cards were manufactured by Sapphire's parent company, PC Partner, but it was for AMD) and sold them to their various board partners. Sapphire, Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, PowerColor, HIS, and so forth thus all had identical cards. They put their own stickers on the cards and designed their own packaging and sold the cards. The cards differed in packaging and warranty service, but they were all physically the same cards off of the same assembly line, so build quality and binning didn't vary at all.
Now suppose that a video card review site requested a Radeon HD 5850 to review, and happened to get sent one by MSI. If they didn't happen to be Nvidia fanboys or know that the initial stocks would quickly sell out, prices would rise, and general retail availability wouldn't happen until around the start of December, then they gave the card a hearty endorsement.
But which card should they have endorsed? Should they have endorsed MSI's Radeon HD 5850 only? Or should they have endorsed the reference model Radeon HD 5850 in general, regardless of which company's packaging it comes in? This isn't a trick question. If MSI will sell you one card, and PowerColor will sell you exactly the same card (not just same GPU die bin, but same cooler, BIOS, VRMs, memory, etc.) for $30 cheaper, why buy the MSI card?
It's not a trick question. One could justify paying more for a premium cooler. A lot of board vendors have their own special sauce cooling systems that they use to try to justify a price premium. But if it's going to be a reference card, then you buy whichever is the cheapest, unless perhaps you're willing to pay a slight premium for a better warranty. Otherwise, it's like endorsing buying a given card from New Egg, but not from Tiger Direct, even if it's exactly the same product and the latter happens to be cheaper.
So back to the site you linked. In the "mainstream" section, they recommend the OWC Mercury Extreme and the Corsair Force. Why those two, and not the Mushkin Callisto, G.Skill Phoenix, Patriot Inferno, or OCZ Vertex 2 or Agility 2? They're all based on exactly the same SandForce controller. None of those companies make their own flash memory; it's likely that they all buy exactly the same 34 nm IMFT NAND flash for use in the drives. All of those drives are cheaper than the OWC Mercury Extreme. And they're exactly the same drive inside. The main differences are the packaging, the warranty service, and the firmware updates.
Speaking of firmware updates, that's the reason I'd rule out the Corsair Force even if you are getting a SandForce drive. This perhaps needs an explanation, too.
Suppose that you have a choice of buying two otherwise identical video cards. One ships with fairly recent drivers, and will let you update the drivers as AMD or Nvidia release new ones. The other ships with pre-release beta drivers and will not let you update the drivers, ever. Which do you prefer? Even if the former comes at a bit of a price premium, it's still far better.
The Corsair Force ships with pre-release firmware that was used for testing the drives. SandForce didn't want drives with such firmware sold to the general public, because it was still buggy. But Corsair went ahead and shipped drives with that firmware anyway. Corsair hasn't been good about offering firmware updates in the past, either; their Extreme series drives apparently still don't offer TRIM support, even though OCZ has offered it in firmware on basically identical drives for nearly a year.
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The choice of an SSD is mostly about the controller and the capacity, and they're nearly independent things. So how did they pick the controllers to recommend?
The two best controllers on the market are the Marvell and SandForce controllers. The Marvell controller supports SATA 3, while the SandForce controller is bottlenecked by SATA 2 on both reads and writes. If you have SATA 3, the Marvell controller is faster at reads and the SandForce controller is faster at writes, though they're both very fast at both. If you don't have SATA 3, the Marvell controller's read advantage essentially vanishes, and the SandForce controller is better.
And perhaps I should say something stronger than merely "have SATA 3". If you have SATA 3 in the chipset (which currently means an AMD 800 series chipset), then I'd recommend the Marvell controller over the SandForce one. If you have SATA 3 elsewhere on the motherboard, then the SATA 3 chip has to use up PCI Express lanes, which means those PCI Express lanes aren't available for other purposes. Depending on the motherboard, this would sometimes mean that the video card only gets PCI Express x8 bandwidth, not x16. I'd sooner plug the SSD into a SATA 2 port than do that, in which case, the SandForce controller wins.
So what about the value choice? Intel's controller would be a pretty good value choice if it were cheaper than the Marvell or SandForce controllers. It isn't. Intel actually charges a higher price per GB of capacity than you'd pay for SSDs with the faster controllers. That's not such a good value. Intel charges price premiums for their products just because they figure people will buy them anyway because they're Intel. They sell some mediocre motherboards that way, too, by living off their reputation for fast processors.
There is a value pick that is sometimes better, though: the Indilinx Barefoot controller. Yes, it's slower than the Marvell or SandForce controllers. But it's still plenty fast, and performs like a good SSD ought to. Certainly, there's no sense in buying the Indilinx controller over a SandForce or Marvell one for the same price. But if the same capacity is $30 cheaper for an Indilinx controller (as it sometimes is), that's not a bad value pick.
But then it's the boot drive where they go completely awry, recommending the 40 GB Corsair Force. For the same price on New Egg right now, you can get a 60 GB Mushkin Callisto Deluxe--which is a better drive even apart from the extra capacity. Add $2 shipping and you can get a 64 GB Crucial RealSSD C300.
There is a good boot drive that they're ignoring, though. For $59 cheaper, you can get a 32 GB OCZ Onyx. The Onyx also offers a $20 mail-in rebate. The OCZ Onyx is based on the Indilinx Amigos controller, which is basically half of a Barefoot controller. Yes, the Onyx is slower, but it still offers real SSD performance at barely half the price of their recommended boot drive.
I am interested in finding out what Intel’s chip choices in soon to be released next generation motherboards will actually do regarding PCIe and peripherals, such as SATA 3, and how it will be implemented.
I continue to be concerned regarding P67 and H67 motherboards ability to utilize all of the "goodies" at the same time, including but not limited to USB 3.0, SATA 3, and PCIe x16. I have heard rumors that Intel will use a NEC USB 3.0 controller, but time will tell what will actually be on motherboards, especially with third party manufacturers.
This motherboard has me scratching my head, a 24-phase VRM when, within a few %, Intel will allow only "K" CPUs to be overclockable...
Gigabyte's GA-P55A-UD7 use of, "an NVIDIA nForce 200 bridge chip multiplies the processor's 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes intro 32 PCI-E 2.0 lanes"? Who says nVidia is dead ...
http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/f22/gigabyte-displays-ga-p67a-ud7-socket-lga-1155-motherboard-72631/
Interesting to be sure. I think things are just getting warmed up and third party motherboard manufacturers will strive to solve problems, and I hope they do. In the mean time, I am not holding my breath.
Intel Core i7 7700K, MB is Gigabyte Z270X-UD5
SSD x2, 4TB WD Black HHD, 32GB RAM, MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning LE video card
Intel will sell you a higher end chipset with more PCI Express lanes to pair with a Sandy Bridge processor, won't they? Oh, that's right, they won't. Or at least not until they release a higher end chipset that requires a higher end, more expensive processor much later. At least AMD will let you mix and match desktop processors and chipsets freely, and let you pair a single core Sempron with the high end 890FX chipset and its 42 PCI Express 2.0 lanes and six SATA 3 slots of goodness if you like.
At least P67 will actually get PCI Express 2.0 in the chipset, unlike the PCI Express 1.0 of the P55 chipset. That should make it possible for USB 3.0 to just steal one PCI Express 2.0 lane, rather than needing to take an x4 or x8 connection. And two SATA 3 ports off of the chipset are better than none, even if they're not as good as the six in AMD's low end 870 chipset today.
Yes, Intel's one of Intel's reference motherboard configuration will involve a separate USB 3.0 chip. But AMD is reportedly licensing Renesas' own USB 3.0 controller for use in AMD's chipsets proper, rather than needing a separate chip or to swipe PCI Express lanes. Since when are Intel chipsets superior, again?
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That motherboard is meant to be paired with a K series processor so that some nutty enthusiast can load up on liquid nitrogen and hit 5.7 GHz on it. Hence the UD7 designation on the end. There is a market for such things, even if it's not a big market. And there are also people who think a high end motherboard is just automatically better for no real reason in particular, and Gigabyte will happily let such people pay $300 or so for a bunch of features that they'll never use.
There are motherboards already on the market with the NF200 chip, but it really doesn't fix the lack of PCI Express lanes problem. Having to pass the PCI Express lanes through an extra chip adds latency, which hurts performance, so you'll actually get worse performance from having the chip than not having it if you only use one video card, and sometimes even if you use two. It does help a lot if you use three cards, but that's what higher end chipsets are for, without needing a PCI Express decelerator chip.