Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SATA 3.0 SSD

[mercutio]

My eyes glaze over now when reading SSD reviews now, they're pretty much all the same at around ~500mb/s read. There's some variance, but nothing that's going to make much difference to real-world performance.

The difference between a HDD and an SSD is massive. The difference between a bad SSD and a good SSD is slight (when it comes to recent releases).

Things will only get interesting again once the SATA spec is upgraded, SATA 3 is really crippling progress. That or PCIe SSDs come down in price, or some other interface becomes viable. Whomever does the SATA spec really dropped the ball between versions 2 and 3. At the time, the change from 1 to 2 was fairly redundant. 2 to 3 seemed redundant, but boy did they really misjudge the headroom they needed. A doubling of throughput turned out to be woefully short of requirements.

There's a bit of difference in read and write latency, both in regular situations, and unregular situations. 4k testing is often how people check these things, but for real usage I think it's good to look at 1 request depth 4k requests rather than 32. (although slightly higher can be interesting too for multitasking etc)

I've seen a terrible ssd - it was so slow, that to get reasonable performance with it the file system had to be mounted with nobarrier. It was slower than a hard-disk. And in the 120gb space there is quite a lot of variance.

ATM there is a bandwidth limitation on intel onboard sata ports of 2 gigabytes/sec total - even if you have 6 ports that can each do 500mb/sec, you won't be able to read from them all at once in full. in the real world it seems to be more like 1600mb/sec from what I could gather. The same limits apply from sandy bridge to haswell.

maybe PCI-e SSD will mean Intel finally move to PCI-e v3 for peripherals, which would fix most of the bandwidth limitations.

I'd like to see more of the inner ssd works exposed - and more predictability in the system. ATM garbage collection can be kind of random and can add random spikes in latency while it operates. I'd also like to see data being put direct into application memory, from the disk - like infiniband etc support. As you start going up in bandwidth, doing all these memory copies does impact performance.

Even if bandwidth stays the same latency can most likely come down a little and most applications aren't designed to leverage many simultaneous requests at once, and even then sata limitations of 31 requests at once isn't enough to maximise performance.

[uid313]

My eyes glaze over now when reading SSD reviews now, they're pretty much all the same at around ~500mb/s read. There's some variance, but nothing that's going to make much difference to real-world performance.

The difference between a HDD and an SSD is massive. The difference between a bad SSD and a good SSD is slight (when it comes to recent releases).

Things will only get interesting again once the SATA spec is upgraded, SATA 3 is really crippling progress. That or PCIe SSDs come down in price, or some other interface becomes viable. Whomever does the SATA spec really dropped the ball between versions 2 and 3. At the time, the change from 1 to 2 was fairly redundant. 2 to 3 seemed redundant, but boy did they really misjudge the headroom they needed. A doubling of throughput turned out to be woefully short of requirements.

They're working on SATA Express, a new SATA bus powered by PCI Express.

[zanny]

They're working on SATA Express, a new SATA bus powered by PCI Express.

They had boards at CES with it already, so next year it should be "premium" rather than exclusive, and by 2016 it will be standard. So most people will have it by 2018 - 2020. But at the same time, the market for faster than 550MB/s reads / writes isn't that big in the consumer segment, and anywhere else money isn't usually that much of an issue that buying a raid of PCIE ssds is a problem.

[CiPHER]

/sigh

Did you the paper linked in that post? What they did was essentially testing how the drives would respond to 3000 power failures in a row. Seriously, three-freaking-key. If you really care about data integrity, one is too many (that's why you'll never see a server rack without a UPS standing next to it).

SSDs are the best thing that happened to personal computing since cheap RAM.

This is a common misconception. You seem to think that power-safe capacitors are used to protect against power failure. It doesn't. It protects against unexpected power-loss.

You can have 0 times a power failure (i.e. wall sockets do not provide AC power) but have hundreds of unsafe shutdowns.

You can count how many times this happened already. Run CrystalDiskInfo on Windows or smartmontools on Linux and look for the attribute 'Unexpected Power-Loss'. The raw value for this attribute will give you the number of times that power was lost without the SSD being shutdown properly first, by sending an ATA STANDBY IMMEDIATE command to the SSD. Every power loss without first sending this command will count as unexpected power loss. Some mac users have OS bugs causing all shutdowns to be 'unexpected' shutdowns.

If you have a protected SSD like the Crucial M500 or Intel 320, you should be fine after power failure. If you have a Samsung SSD then it can either fail or revert to older mapping tables; causing it to be ill suited for RAID arrays. Unprotected SSDs can fail on the first power failure, or after hundreds of failures. But by definition those SSDs are not reliable. A storage device should not become defect just by losing power. To me that doesn't appear to fall in the category of 'reliable storage'. But opinions may vary.

For this reason, Crucial M500 is a much better buy than the ever-popular Samsung. It also sports RAID5 bitcorrection and has protected DRAM write-back, while Samsung uses dirty write-back and lacks RAID5 bitcorrection. Samsung SSDs certainly are not bad SSDs but they are not as sophisticated as other SSDs. Most people seem to buy them because of their higher sequential write performance, which is the least important performance attribute, but also the only one where modern SSDs can make a difference. The more important sequential read and random read are virtually interface-capped.

[JS987]

Did you the paper linked in that post? What they did was essentially testing how the drives would respond to 3000 power failures in a row. Seriously, three-freaking-key. If you really care about data integrity, one is too many (that's why you'll never see a server rack without a UPS standing next to it

UPS isn't good option for desktop PC because of possible:
1. incompatibility between offline / line interactive UPS and PSU
2. high noise
3. increased power consumption
4. high price of online UPS

[prodigy_]

UPS isn't good option for desktop PC because of possible:
1. incompatibility between offline / line interactive UPS and PSU
2. high noise
3. increased power consumption
4. high price of online UPS

Desktop PCs are mostly gaming rigs or HTPCs these days. You're not likely to find anything "mission critical" on any of those. Corporations and non-gamers prefer laptops for many reasons.

Anyway, SSDs are already mainstream. And with the advent of the SATA Express era the throughput gap between SSD and HDD will increase even further. HDDs are still good as cheap data storage but having OS installed on HDD is a poor choice today and it'll be an outright mistake tomorrow.

[JS987]

Desktop PCs are mostly gaming rigs or HTPCs these days. You're not likely to find anything "mission critical" on any of those. Corporations and non-gamers prefer laptops for many reasons.
Anyway, SSDs are already mainstream. And with the advent of the SATA Express era the throughput gap between SSD and HDD will increase even further. HDDs are still good as cheap data storage but having OS installed on HDD is a poor choice today and it'll be an outright mistake tomorrow.

There are also a lot of desktop PCs used by corporations. Desktop PC isn't 2nd class computer which can get random file system corruption because many gamers use them. I always preferred desktop PC because laptop is too limited when portability isn't needed. Laptops are too big and/or heavy to be really portable. SSD won't help me in CPU bound applications which are much more common for me than disk bound ones. SSD would save me less than 10 minutes per day which is irrelevant.

[Tgui]

@mercutio: looks like Samsung does not recommend/support running 840EVOs in RAID, yeah, lol

Regarding Kingston V300 read this post by Maxgadgetguy: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answer....html#11492819
So like buyers beware, I had a China made 120Gb one given as a gift to a friend ( also forced him to upgrade the whole system as we though SATA2 was the issue ) and the store clerk did not even asked my friend why he was returning it, just nodded and asked for a little bit more money for a Kingston HyperX 3K 120Gb that works as expected. I also got 2 more HyperX 3K 120Gb for a RAID0 on a SATA2 system and they get 500MB/s as expected.

I run 2x Samsung EVO 250 in RAID 0 without issue on a SATA 3 system. Its cute to provide links, others like me have real world experience. The performance is phenominal. 6+ VMs with a 6 core 4930k & 32 GB RAM without a hiccup. Of course I have a nightly backup to RAID 1 HDDs.

FWIW simple read/write tests are consistently 1GB/s for both.



I'm not trying to be a jerk, but really, sometimes you just have to try it.

[Tgui]

UPS isn't good option for desktop PC because of possible:
1. incompatibility between offline / line interactive UPS and PSU
2. high noise
3. increased power consumption
4. high price of online UPS

You're trying too hard. I have a UPS with active PFC that provides up to 60 min uptime with a power outage. My computer is setup to shutdown gracefully far before that. No noise. No high power consumption, ~$150 USD only. Get your facts straight.

[Tgui]

There are also a lot of desktop PCs used by corporations. Desktop PC isn't 2nd class computer which can get random file system corruption because many gamers use them. I always preferred desktop PC because laptop is too limited when portability isn't needed. Laptops are too big and/or heavy to be really portable. SSD won't help me in CPU bound applications which are much more common for me than disk bound ones. SSD would save me less than 10 minutes per day which is irrelevant.

Most applications make the CPU starved for data. Which applications are you using that aren't like this?!