[ale] Value SSDs - price/perf

[Pat Regan]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2010 16:35:39 -0500
Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> All,
> 
> What's a good choice for a value SSD for a laptop upgrade?

I love my 80 GB X25-M G2.

Mine failed twice, though...  This one in my laptop is the second
replacement.  They both died between reboots.  The first one I shutdown
(might have suspended), the next day the machine couldn't detect the
drive.  The last one wouldn't boot up after a kernel update.

They both died in different laptops.

> ===
> With Christmas coming up, I was thinking a SSD for my laptop would be
> a good present from my wife!
> 
> But looking at the $100 items, I'm not as impressed as I expected to
> be.
> 
> Intel for instance has the Intel X25-V, 40GB for $100.
> 
> The write performance is only 35MB/sec (or about 2GB / min).

I would think the -V would be a pretty good drive.  The total read and
write throughput aren't what makes an SSD feel fast.  The thing you
notice most is how fast the small random reads and (hopefully) writes
are.  I don't know about the -V, but my -M clocks in at over 4000 IOPS.

> I can write sequentially to a hdd at about 6GB / min, so that is not
> impressive at all.
> 
> But I fully realize sequential access is not the key speed for generic
> laptop use, and 2 GB/min random access is pretty fast.
> 
> Per slide 7 of
> http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/value/prodbrf/X25-V_40GB_Performance_Guide.pdf,
> this SSD will make a productivity based workload about 2.44x faster.

I don't care what the benchmarks say (even though I recorded a bunch of
my own).  The days while I waited for my last RMA were awful.  My
laptop felt so damned slow running on a 7200 RPM drive.  It really is
like night and day.

> The other couple value SSDs I looked at were even lower performing,
> but I haven't spent too much time looking yet.

I'm a far on Intel's SSDs.  The new ones are finally matching the
random write performance of the X25.  They also aren't prone to slowing
down over time as much as they used to be.

I like the X25-V, even though it isn't as fast as the -M.  

Pat