Best SSD for Overall OS Performance

[Duekay]

Hi all,

Been a while, i have done a few builds learnt a few tricks and have had a few laughs

I am looking at doing a LGA2011 build later next year but wanted to update my current SSD array in my workstation to a more later gen, something with better overall performance as the current 3xP128 first gen Corsair SSD are loosing there grunt (tried a few things to clean then up but you really cant beat the later tech products).

I want to get 2 x SATA3 SSD with Trim support, most have it now so ill be ready for next year when Intel releases it's RST with trim support in raid (as for now i will do what i have been doing and let the drives garbage collection work its magic once a week in the BIOS startup).

I am looking for drives that show good performance in terms of access times, fast random reads of small blocks, boot times, program opening and reliability with good support, i am not to worried about Sequential Read/Write as most drives are over 300MB/s anyway.

I have read a few reviews/benchmarks and i am really leaning to these drives:
-Micron RealSSD P300 (not sure if this drive is still available? and aren't they similar to Crucial RealSSD C300?)
-OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS
-Crucial RealSSD C400
-Kingston HyperX
-Corsair Force GT

I also noticed that some drives perform better in raid0 than others, like getting close to 100% performance gain but loosing slightly on access times due to the raid controller, i will also only be using the on board controller on my x58 ud5 and my future x79 ud5.

I am not looking to buy the 2 drives till jan or feb 2012 so if anyone knows of anything hot on the cards that maybe getting released in Q1 2012, i might hold my horses and save my $$ till then, i am willing to drop up to $300 on each 120GB drive.

Any ideas and suggestions will be welcomed.

Cheers
Dave

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Is there need for raid0 with newer sata3 drives read and write being as high as 550MB/s on some, not too mention you won't have to sacrifice access time either.

 

[Duekay]

Is there need for raid0 with newer sata3 drives read and write being as high as 550MB/s on some, not too mention you won't have to sacrifice access time either.

That is true but i have seen some pretty sweet benchmarks with random read/write in raid... and with my current systems once you go raid SSDs its hard to go back to a single

I did see some some SSD that had 0.05ms access time so if a raid controller turned that to 0.2-0.5ms i think that's still reasonable with the benefits of fast random read/write times.

but i am open to ideas

 

[BrooksyX]

I have 2x Samsung 830 64gb in raid 0. In crystal diskmark read speed is like 1000 mbps and write speed is like 350 mbps. Slight overkill? Yes. But its wicked fast and windows is so responsive. Will never go back to using a HDD as operating system drive. Even my laptop has a 40gb msata intel ssd for the os and a 320gb hdd for data.

Also I can post some screens of my samsung 830 raid 0 tomorrow morning if you want.

 

[Duekay]

I have 2x Samsung 830 64gb in raid 0. In crystal diskmark read speed is like 1000 mbps and write speed is like 350 mbps. Slight overkill? Yes. But its wicked fast and windows is so responsive. Will never go back to using a HDD as operating system drive. Even my laptop has a 40gb msata intel ssd for the os and a 320gb hdd for data.

Also I can post some screens of my samsung 830 raid 0 tomorrow morning if you want.

Yea man that would be good, have you used AS SSD? what sort of 4k and 4k Q64 R/W are you getting and access times, cheers

 

[Sinzia]

if you're going to use raid with ssd's make sure you get something like a sandforce drive that does back-end garbage collection without the need for TRIM, since when you raid them, you loose out on trim altogether, and that can affect the life and speed of the drives over time!

 

[Anusha]

i'm pretty sure these "massive" sequential read write speeds don't have any effect on real world performance unless you are copying files to and from the same drive or a similar array. i would get a single 256GB drive if i were you.

 

[Duekay]

if you're going to use raid with ssd's make sure you get something like a sandforce drive that does back-end garbage collection without the need for TRIM, since when you raid them, you loose out on trim altogether, and that can affect the life and speed of the drives over time!

So the ocz would be a good choice in that regard, I just seen a lot of reviews that said to avoid them, i couldn't see any reason in my eyes.

I was going to go for the corsair gt but in all the AS SSD benchmarks they are well behind OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Crucial RealSSD C400, Kingston HyperX so I changed my support to corsair on the SSD side of things anyway.

 

[Anusha]

So the ocz would be a good choice in that regard, I just seen a lot of reviews that said to avoid them, i couldn't see any reason in my eyes.

I was going to go for the corsair gt but in all the AS SSD benchmarks they are well behind OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Crucial RealSSD C400, Kingston HyperX so I changed my support to corsair on the SSD side of things anyway.

i think they meant to tell you to avoid all the Sandforce drives because of the BSODs they were causing. but that issues is now fixed, so you don't have to worry about it.

 

[Duekay]

i think they meant to tell you to avoid all the Sandforce drives because of the BSODs they were causing. but that issues is now fixed, so you don't have to worry about it.

Oh sweet, that's good,

They seem to be real high performers... its funny how the 256GB and larger drives seem to have better performance over the smaller counter parts (64GB, 128GB).

 

[Anusha]

More flash channels = more parallelism. Flash cells themselves are slow. U know how slow the USB flash drives are, right? (it's not the interface that make them slow. USB hard drives are faster. ) SSDs use high level of parallelism to attain those speeds that we all love.

Now we are seeing highend USB 3 flash drives coming with multiple channels. Patriot has one that reaches 200MBps iirc.

 

[Duekay]

More flash channels = more parallelism. Flash cells themselves are slow. U know how slow the USB flash drives are, right? (it's not the interface that make them slow. USB hard drives are faster. ) SSDs use high level of parallelism to attain those speeds that we all love.

Now we are seeing highend USB 3 flash drives coming with multiple channels. Patriot has one that reaches 200MBps iirc.

Yea i seen that... its the only way to get them to go all nice and fast... kind of like an internal raid i guess?

I been looking at some more benchmarks; anandtech,
intel seem to have really dropped behind in the overall performance compared to the sandforce controllers with Toshiba nand haven't they,

I am really leaning towards a 240GB or 2x120GB R0 OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS drives...

also just checked the access times of my current raided SSD arrays and there are not bad:
3xP128 old skool drives = R 0.19ms / W 1.17ms
2xF60 sata 2 force drives = R 0.17ms / W 0.28ms

Pretty good i thought, is amazing how fast that one generation gap is:
3xP128----Reads----Writes
Seq...... = 575.90 | 39.32
4k........ = 23.42 | 4.55
4k64Thrd= 41.05 | 1.31

3xF60------Reads----Writes
Seq....... = 432.64 | 115.30
4k......... = 17.22 | 50.70
4k64Thrd = 175.60 | 119.24

i would think the new drives would out shine these pretty easily?

 

[Anusha]

Yea i seen that... its the only way to get them to go all nice and fast... kind of like an internal raid i guess?

More like channel interleving in RAM.

I been looking at some more benchmarks; anandtech,
intel seem to have really dropped behind in the overall performance compared to the sandforce controllers with Toshiba nand haven't they,

I am really leaning towards a 240GB or 2x120GB R0 OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS drives...

also just checked the access times of my current raided SSD arrays and there are not bad:
3xP128 old skool drives = R 0.19ms / W 1.17ms
2xF60 sata 2 force drives = R 0.17ms / W 0.28ms

Pretty good i thought, is amazing how fast that one generation gap is:
3xP128----Reads----Writes
Seq...... = 575.90 | 39.32
4k........ = 23.42 | 4.55
4k64Thrd= 41.05 | 1.31

3xF60------Reads----Writes
Seq....... = 432.64 | 115.30
4k......... = 17.22 | 50.70
4k64Thrd = 175.60 | 119.24

i would think the new drives would out shine these pretty easily?

Sure but probably won't be noticeable in real life. I got the Kingston hyperx with Toshiba toggle memory. Hardware wise identical to Vertex 3 MaxIOPS except firmware. I had a Vertex 2 50GB x2 RAID0 array before that. I hardly see any difference in performance tbh. Only difference is that I have more space now and performance don't degrade easily thanks to trim. (no trim for raid yet)

 

[twicksisted]

I say any SSD is great for OS performance...
I have a relatively slow (in benchmark terms) Kingston V100+ 64gb SSD drive in an old 2.1ghz core2duo laptop with 4gb ddr2 ramand the OS feels just as snappy as my main rig (see specs) thats got a 2600k, 16gb ram and a top end SATA III 120gb Corsair GT SSD drive.

Ther difference is so miniscule I dont think its possible for me to actually feel it to be honest.
When I was looking at the Corsair GT SSD I thought that the impressive 550 read 500 write was going to be hugely noticeable and feel different to the lesser Kingston V100+ 64gb drive but I was wrong. I couldve saved a lot of money whioch couldve been well spent elsewhere to be honest. Definately get an SSD drive for your PC but I wouldnt worry to much about getting the fastest benching one you can find that costs 4 times the price


EDIT: stay away from raid setup if youre mostly worried about OS performance as that will add latency and affect the performance of the OS somewhat.

 

[Duekay]

More like channel interleving in RAM.

QUOTE=Duekay;2491587]
I been looking at some more benchmarks; anandtech,
intel seem to have really dropped behind in the overall performance compared to the sandforce controllers with Toshiba nand haven't they,

I am really leaning towards a 240GB or 2x120GB R0 OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS drives...

also just checked the access times of my current raided SSD arrays and there are not bad:
3xP128 old skool drives = R 0.19ms / W 1.17ms
2xF60 sata 2 force drives = R 0.17ms / W 0.28ms

Pretty good i thought, is amazing how fast that one generation gap is:
3xP128----Reads----Writes
Seq...... = 575.90 | 39.32
4k........ = 23.42 | 4.55
4k64Thrd= 41.05 | 1.31

3xF60------Reads----Writes
Seq....... = 432.64 | 115.30
4k......... = 17.22 | 50.70
4k64Thrd = 175.60 | 119.24

i would think the new drives would out shine these pretty easily?

Sure but probably won't be noticeable in real life. I got the Kingston hyperx with Toshiba toggle memory. Hardware wise identical to Vertex 3 MaxIOPS except firmware. I had a Vertex 2 50GB x2 RAID0 array before that. I hardly see any difference in performance tbh. Only difference is that I have more space now and performance don't degrade easily thanks to trim. (no trim for raid yet)[/QUOTE]

Thats a true point... i am running out of space to, i was going to wipe and refresh my P128 array and use it for storing sampling software (NI Komplete 8), its about 240GB and it will only be reading from it so should still be alright from a performance side of things.

The new drive/drives are just going to be for the OS and any programs/games, i need at least 150GB for that and i like to keep 20% more free space just to keep the drives happy,
So i would be looking a 1 240 or 2 120's Raided.

As far as trim goes i am not worried as GC does a pretty fine job atm with the drive (they are coming up for there 3 year mark in raid0) and early in 2012 intel is releasing there RST 11.5 driver with support for TRIM passed through Raid arrays so not to much time of loosing out.

 

[BrooksyX]

I know its a little late but here is a screen shot of my Samsung 830 64gb SSD Raid 0 array:

I know that it is slightly overkill but my rig is so responsive and all together they both only cost me about $70 each after I sold the included software (batman AC & nero ghost). I am running these on the 2x Sata III ports on my AsRock p67 board.

 

[Duekay]

I know its a little late but here is a screen shot of my Samsung 830 64gb SSD Raid 0 array:

http://img.techpowerup.org/111223/1604.jpg

I know that it is slightly overkill but my rig is so responsive and all together they both only cost me about $70 each after I sold the included software (batman AC & nero ghost). I am running these on the 2x Sata III ports on my AsRock p67 board.

Nice man, yea i don't think i could go back to just a single SSD after having them running in raid... i hope the later SSD have better 4k writes... i guess as they have pretty much maxed Sata3.0 bandwidth its time to refine the rest of the performance and reduce manufacturing cost...

 

[twicksisted]

The synthetic benchmark scores look great but unless your rig is some kind of working server/workstation with massive I/O's or huge amounts of data being simultaneously read and written its kind of pointless to have RAID SSD's really.

If you just want a desktop machine that boots up fast and is snappy you dont need to Raid0 SSD's. Its not going to make your games any quicker and youre likely not going to feel the nanosecond of extra speed it could possibly bring you when opening up your web browser or email client.

What you will do with Raid 0 is spend more money on two drives, run the extra added risk of complications and failure, added latency and on most motherboards a slower bootup time due to onboard raid initialising.

Its your choice

 

[BrooksyX]

The synthetic benchmark scores look great but unless your rig is some kind of working server/workstation with massive I/O's or huge amounts of data being simultaneously read and written its kind of pointless to have RAID SSD's really.

If you just want a desktop machine that boots up fast and is snappy you dont need to Raid0 SSD's. Its not going to make your games any quicker and youre likely not going to feel the nanosecond of extra speed it could possibly bring you when opening up your web browser or email client.

What you will do with Raid 0 is spend more money on two drives, run the extra added risk of complications and failure, added latency and on most motherboards a slower bootup time due to onboard raid initialising.

Its your choice

haha you seem very anti raid. I have been running raid 0 for years and never had any problems and just to be safe I back all my data up on another hdd. As for price it was about $40 cheaper to get 2x 64gb Samsung 830 SSDs than a single 128gb Samsung 830 ssd. Plus I bought them about a month and a half apart. Second deal was so good I couldnt pass it up.

 

[twicksisted]

I wouldnt say im anti-raid, it definately has a purpose in professional applications.
For everyday home use im not convinced its neccessary to raid modern SSD's when you consider the speed you get with a single Sata III SSD already.

 

[Duekay]

The synthetic benchmark scores look great but unless your rig is some kind of working server/workstation with massive I/O's or huge amounts of data being simultaneously read and written its kind of pointless to have RAID SSD's really.

If you just want a desktop machine that boots up fast and is snappy you dont need to Raid0 SSD's. Its not going to make your games any quicker and youre likely not going to feel the nanosecond of extra speed it could possibly bring you when opening up your web browser or email client.

What you will do with Raid 0 is spend more money on two drives, run the extra added risk of complications and failure, added latency and on most motherboards a slower bootup time due to onboard raid initialising.

Its your choice

for me it makes the difference, i use my workstation for 3D CAD design & Audio production:
With the 3D CAD package i use (Revit) it has to save its self every 15-30min (to prevent data loss) and the files i use are upwards of 1GB and it uses about 20x that in ram so 8-10GB ends up page filing to my SSDs, have fast seq r/w and and random r/w makes all the difference.
In my audio production i use a lot of puggins that take long enough to load let alone the libraries they have to load once they are open.

But you are on the money with normal people who do everyday tasks would not see any real performance gain over a single SSD.

 

[Duekay]

I wouldnt say im anti-raid, it definately has a purpose in professional applications.
For everyday home use im not convinced its neccessary to raid modern SSD's when you consider the speed you get with a single Sata III SSD already.

Hey what type of performance are you getting from your GT drive, i was looking at getting these for a while but got a bit knocked back when i read some benchmarks on Toms Hardware

Would you mind posting up a AS SSD or CrystalDiskMark benchmark to see what you are getting, they are pretty much top of the line in corsair line up aren't they, would like to stick with corsair but the OCZ & Crucial drives are twisting my arm.

 

[radrok]

The Force GT is a very good drive, synchronous NAND, if you can afford pick the a 240GB SSD it is faster than the 120GB and you get TRIM without the issues of RAID0.
If you end up using a lot of RAM and as I've seen you are going for LGA2011 you should pick 8GB RAM sticks so you'd have 64GB of system RAM

 

[twicksisted]

Yes its a good drive now with the newer firmwares, in the beginning it was terribly unstable with random lockups & blue screens but pretty much all of the new sandforce drives had this issue.

Its a nice drive really but I feel its capabilities are wasted on normal day to day tasks and a much cheaper sataII drive would have performed as well to the naked eye.

 

[Duekay]

The Force GT is a very good drive, synchronous NAND, if you can afford pick the a 240GB SSD it is faster than the 120GB and you get TRIM without the issues of RAID0.
If you end up using a lot of RAM and as I've seen you are going for LGA2011 you should pick 8GB RAM sticks so you'd have 64GB of system RAM

Cool yes i noticed the 240GB drives get better r/w performance than the smaller ones,
I am going to hold off going to LGA2011 till ivy bridge comes out just so i can get some more time out of my current workstation, i cold fit another 3 dimms in what i have but i have it overclocked @ 4.2GHz atm so having all 6 dimms filled might hold me back on the OC's.

I will have to check out some more benchmarks of the GT drive to make my mind up i think just doing a fresh install of win7 will speed things up alot... i got to much crap loaded on this machine atm.

Cheers