Hardware G.Skill Titan 256GB SSD

You didn't have the test I really wanted to see, compile an application, like (for example) the Linux kernel.

Actually, what I really want to see is how long it takes to load up the test suite (something that happens before every test is run) in a Ruby on Rails application. I found that having to wait several seconds for it to load up on a slow 5400rpm drive really slowed down my development, especially since I develop in a test-first manner. But I can't expect you to do something so specialised. But compiling a Linux kernel is similar, and much more relavent to most Linux users.

 

Whoops, forgot to say: I also wanted to see power consumption compared to regular 5400RPM laptop drives. That would have been super-interesting.

 

It took long enough, but someone finally answered my long-standing suggestion - a flash drive of RAIDed cells presented as a single "Disk".

I wonder just how this thing would perform being a 4x64 split, rather than a 2x128. And, indeed, when someone's going to make an MLC or SLC chip with integrated controller, so SSD makers can use RAID parallelism to split loads, and mitigate flash media's limited read/write bandwidth.

 

It can technically be done - there's a JMicron controller out there that will handle four, but to be honest, I think it's a combination of diminishing returns and squeezing everything through one SATA 3Gbps port :|

 

if you still have them can you test the Write latency as thats what kills them

 

Well, read speeds would run into the limitations of SATA2, but write speeds (the weak point of ssd's) should still profit. But what I think will help more is adding cache like the OCZ vertex will that will be out soon.

 

on the first page of this review covers my thought and yours

"Unlike a RAID0 array though, data is not uniformly striped across the drive - entire files can be written to specific cells."
so what that means above if data is been saved to an cell should be able to read from others or the other side of the card

 

Isn't that how Fusion-io achieve relatively much higher speeds (sustained and random) on the ioDrive?

Largely parallel access and overcoming the SATA bottleneck by moving the interface onto PCIe x4?

 

Yea.

Tbh, I've no idea why SATA 6/9Gs has taken so long?

 

I would guess since SATA doesn't lend itself as well to sexy marketeering metrics as, say, CPUs or GFX cards no manufacturer feels the need to get in there first.

After all it's only the faster SSDs and external RAID enclosures that are coming close to saturating SATA 3.0Gbps, even then the external enclosures are as likely to be Fibre or SAS, or even external PCIe.
Look at optical drives. How long have we had SATA? But PATA drives are still common enough.

 

I'm using the Gskill 256 SSD for music production on an 8 core mac with raid card. I have found a way to use the read speed. If I record the majority of my projects on any one of my 15k spin serial scsi drives I can then port over to SSD and do minimal recording while having great speed on large continuos audio files.

I was limited until Apple recently rewrote the driver and fixed the drive issue which caused a restart to not mount. Now it's all good and possibly it would be now a good test to try OSX on this drive.

Just thought I would add this experience to the conversation. I like the drive quite a bit and didn't mind the price. I do wish they would build a two drive 2.5 to 3.5 case so that I could get a second SSD in one Apple slot. I then could try some raid 0 applications and have some fun.

Thanks