Since this a review, apart from the benchmarks I would have been happier to see a few words about the hibernate/sleep situation as someone mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, while buying an SSD (or any other drive and computer hardware in general), mostly no reviews cover that situation.
A few words about the manufacturer support would also be helpful. I have bought 2 SSD's sometime back. One was a G-Skill Phoenix Pro 120GB SSD. As most SSDs, performance is good and most features work, except for hibernate. Even the situation in Windows and OSX wasn't that good. While their forums have good moderators and users are vocal, most of the information there is random junk, like many of the Ubuntu forum and bug posts that contain "me too" (hope that doesn't offend anyone, since they sometimes contain very valuable info too). Firmware upgrades were often broken and it was "strongly recommended" to backup everything before an update. Moreover, the entire responsibility of updates and solving any bugs were left to Sandforce, since they make the controller -- and the manufacturer pretty much claimed to be helpless about the situation. Overall, a bad experience given that SSDs are so pricey, and I would try to avoid Sandforce controller based SSDs in future, as I was not convinced about their quality and support.
On the other hand, I also got a Intel X-25M 120GB SSD which is supposed to be an average performance SSD at that time (and I am not even sure about its TRIM and "garbage collection" situation), but I have nothing but praise for it. Hibernate and suspend used to work on my old notebook (Asus G50VT), but no luck on my new notebook (Asus G53SW).
Also, somebody brought up the point of using SSD's for Gentoo compilation. I have to say that surprisingly, it lead to worse performance on my system, although I haven't played with it much - I even forgot whether I did it on my Intel SSD or the G-Skill one. (I do my emerging on a regular hard drive mostly that has tons of space.) The only plausible explanation, if true, is that the garbage collection or some other operations end up taking time -- seemed to choke at times. (It was for sure on a ext4 file system with the "discard" mount option and trim working.) May be Michael can also run a heavy compiling benchmark (with and without extraction time) and one that potentially does a lot of disk grinding -- not sure linux kernel is a good example, but libreoffice potentially should be a good one, that takes about 30-40 minutes on a Core i5 750 @ 3.5GHz.
It might have been mentioned earlier in Phoronix articles or forums, but the now famous article by Theodre Tso: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-...ase-block-size was pretty helpful, especially the "-h 224 -s 56" while creating the partition table.
A few words about the manufacturer support would also be helpful. I have bought 2 SSD's sometime back. One was a G-Skill Phoenix Pro 120GB SSD. As most SSDs, performance is good and most features work, except for hibernate. Even the situation in Windows and OSX wasn't that good. While their forums have good moderators and users are vocal, most of the information there is random junk, like many of the Ubuntu forum and bug posts that contain "me too" (hope that doesn't offend anyone, since they sometimes contain very valuable info too). Firmware upgrades were often broken and it was "strongly recommended" to backup everything before an update. Moreover, the entire responsibility of updates and solving any bugs were left to Sandforce, since they make the controller -- and the manufacturer pretty much claimed to be helpless about the situation. Overall, a bad experience given that SSDs are so pricey, and I would try to avoid Sandforce controller based SSDs in future, as I was not convinced about their quality and support.
On the other hand, I also got a Intel X-25M 120GB SSD which is supposed to be an average performance SSD at that time (and I am not even sure about its TRIM and "garbage collection" situation), but I have nothing but praise for it. Hibernate and suspend used to work on my old notebook (Asus G50VT), but no luck on my new notebook (Asus G53SW).
Also, somebody brought up the point of using SSD's for Gentoo compilation. I have to say that surprisingly, it lead to worse performance on my system, although I haven't played with it much - I even forgot whether I did it on my Intel SSD or the G-Skill one. (I do my emerging on a regular hard drive mostly that has tons of space.) The only plausible explanation, if true, is that the garbage collection or some other operations end up taking time -- seemed to choke at times. (It was for sure on a ext4 file system with the "discard" mount option and trim working.) May be Michael can also run a heavy compiling benchmark (with and without extraction time) and one that potentially does a lot of disk grinding -- not sure linux kernel is a good example, but libreoffice potentially should be a good one, that takes about 30-40 minutes on a Core i5 750 @ 3.5GHz.
It might have been mentioned earlier in Phoronix articles or forums, but the now famous article by Theodre Tso: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-...ase-block-size was pretty helpful, especially the "-h 224 -s 56" while creating the partition table.
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