Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Crucial BX100 500GB SSD - a deal for $182 shipped? [Purchased for $172!]
Currently rocking a 1TB WD Blue with Crystalmark random Read/Writes coming back in the 160s/130s on a fresh windows install. Is it worth it for me to spend $182 for this to roughly triple the read/writes to 500s/400s? I thought SSDs were suppposed to be 10-15 times faster?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148946
Thanks for any input. Also if you have a better SSD recommendation I'd like that as well. Currently in the market for a 500/512 GB SSD to use as my main OS/Gaming drive. Budget up to $250.
Thanks!
Comments
I buy Intel SSD, because I know they're reliable.
The random read and writes deal with milliseconds, you're not going to see any gains on that unless you can slow down time like the matrix.
The big jump will be when SATA express comes out, which should be soon, Gigabyte's new gaming motherboard now has Sata express on it.
That will unlock sequential reads and writes, SSD are capable of much much higher sequential reads, it's the SATA 3.0 bus holding them back. I would spend money on that, random read and writes is good on all new SSD. Or SSD that fit in the M.2 socket.
If you're seeing hard drive numbers over 100 MB/s, that's sequential or nearly so. It might be "random" 2 MB writes or some such, but that's still mostly testing sequential throughput, not seek times. A 4 KB random read or write benchmark will shove most hard drives under 1 MB/s and nearly all of them under 2 MB/s, while SSDs typically get at least into the tens of MB/s, or maybe higher with higher queue depths.
If that's your budget and desired capacity, then sure, get it. It's a Silicon Motion controller, which has become popular recently as they sell to anyone and it performs reasonably well. Crucial makes their own NAND, so you know exactly what NAND you're getting and that they understand the NAND very well. I'm not sure if they write their own firmware for that drive.
If you're seeing hard drive numbers over 100 MB/s, that's sequential or nearly so. It might be "random" 2 MB writes or some such, but that's still mostly testing sequential throughput, not seek times. A 4 KB random read or write benchmark will shove most hard drives under 1 MB/s and nearly all of them under 2 MB/s, while SSDs typically get at least into the tens of MB/s, or maybe higher with higher queue depths.
If that's your budget and desired capacity, then sure, get it. It's a Silicon Motion controller, which has become popular recently as they sell to anyone and it performs reasonably well. Crucial makes their own NAND, so you know exactly what NAND you're getting and that they understand the NAND very well. I'm not sure if they write their own firmware for that drive.
How about this Samsung for $20 more (actually $34 more with tax in my state since amazon built a warehouse recently)?http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E500B-AM/dp/B00OBRE5UE
The only ways you'd ever be able to tell the difference are by reading the label and by running synthetic benchmarks. And you might not be able to tell the difference from the synthetic benchmarks, either, if you don't know exactly what to look for.
Thanks for your advice as always. Purchased the BX100 500GB SSD from Newegg for $171.98 shipped with a $10 off promo code.
Deal runs until Thursday @ midnight PST if anyone else wants to take advantage.
Thanks to everyone else for your encouragement as well! Looking forward to reducing my Dragon Age Inquisition loading screens!
I trust the Crucial brand (as I do Samsung and Intel). I have a preferential bias towards brand names that I trust, but I have to admit, most SSDs are pretty darn similar. It's kinda like RAM - there isn't a lot of difference between Brand X and Brand Y right now - the item itself is commodity and buying anything over the cheapest item and your paying for Support/Warranty/Brand Name.
That being said, I do place some value on Support/Warranty/Brand Name. Not everyone does. There are a few bad apples, but mostly the field has pretty well homogenized in the last couple of SSD generations, and the difference in performance in most "latest generation" SATA3 SSD products is only going to be academic.
To the OP:
The main difference you see in benchmarks versus real world performance on SSD vs HDD
Yeah, the sequential numbers are pretty close. The Random IO difference is the kicker though.
An HDD can plausibly equal or even out perform an SSD on sequential. You get a good run and the read head just trucks along the platter like a record player needle, and on the outer edge of the disc you have great platter speeds. But it's very rare that in typical use that you get a nice long sequential block to read. Recording a video stream to a clean HD is one common example a gamer might see an advantage with a traditional HDD.
Every time you have to move the read head off the sequential track, you incur the "seek time" penalty. On a good HDD, it's on the order of 10ms. The fastest consumer drive I know of, WD VelociRaptor, has a seek time of 6.8ms. An SSD has no read head that has to mechanically reposition - it just goes to the correct address in it's random access memory. That puts SSDs on the order of microseconds. That's an increase in performance on the order of 2-3 magnitudes.
Think about your Windows Install - it's large, on the order of 20-30Gb. But it's broke up into hundreds, if not thousands, of files. Those files don't get read sequentially (although a good defragmenter may attempt to place them sequentially based on historical usage). Every time you ask for a different file that doesn't happen to just occur "next" physically on the disc, or have a file that becomes fragmented and jumps to a different spot on the disc, you incur the seek time penalty. Multiple 10ms by hundreds or thousands of files, and that rapidly turns from milliseconds into tens of seconds.
Video games are similar - they may be anywhere from 1G-50Gb+ in size, but usually they are hundreds/thousands of files. Even the rare exceptions that are stuffed into WAD/PIGG/etc wrappers still get accessed randomly due to file fragmentation and however the internals of the file may be implemented.
That's why SSDs are such a big deal, even if the numbers don't quite look that impressive on paper. I think you will be pleased with your purchase. My first SSD was a very old OCZ model (I think an Agility or Vertex, it was back in 09 or 10) - it's still faster than any current HDD, and it had a very early generation Indilinx controller.