Storage [Advice Needed] on what SSD to use for OS

Hi guys,

If its at all possible, i'd like some advice on which of these two drives to use as my OS SSD.

I have the "Sandisk Pulse 128gb" (SATA III 6Gb/s, MLC-Flash, Read 490MB/s, Write 350MB/s, 8000 IOPS)

and the "OCZ 60GB Vertex 2E" (SATA-II Read = 285MB/s, Write = 275MB/s, 50,000 IOPS)

I know the answer is probably so blatant...but its the IOPS that have me confused, as what I have read suggests that IOPS is the stat for quick booting times and application snappyness.

Any help would be amazing!

Thanks in advance for any reply,
Nubb

 

I just bought a Sandisk Extreme II 240GB and I'm very pleased with it. I have no other drive in my computer and use my NAS to store pics, music and movies.

 

Thanks for the reply Guille, but that SSD of yours is waaaaay ahead of my two SSD in terms of performance :/

 

What is your budget ? Did you look at the new Crucial MX100 ?

 

My budget is 0 - I have the above drives and am looking to know which one is better suited as a boot drive.

 

I'd use the Vertex as your boot drive, and the Pulse for games, applications etc.

Don't read too much into IOPS or outright speeds unless you are a power user to be honest, either of these drives will leave even the fastest mechanical drives in the dust when it comes to user experience.

I'm no expert but I suspect the OS will benefit from the random read/write advantages of the OCZ, whereas loading games, media atc will benefit from the faster sequential speeds of the Sandisk.

 

My bad, didn't notice that you already have the drives

As Shirty said, OS will benefit from higher random speed.

 

Cool, thanks for info guys I'll probs do that!

 

the simple way to put it, if you're currently using a HDD, ANY SSD will work.

 

I wouldn't take the manufacturer stats as gospel... I would hook them both up and run them through atto with queue depth of 10 and take whichever has the best 4K results.

 

That wouldn't be overly informative in general as you're then not looking at a sensible QD & 4Ks certainly aren't all & everything unless the OP's got a really unusual specific usage...

...& ATTO would unfairly favour the V2 as it uses entirely compressible data.


The problem is that there's almost no useful data on the Sandisk Pulse, as no one appears to have reviewed it...

...however, looking earlier at the only user b/ms that i could find, the AS SSD results for 4Ks & latency (skip to 6:03) are so poor in comparison to the V2 that it was abundantly clear that the advice given was correct...

...so i didn't bother to comment.


This doesn't change my long standing opinion that AS SSD isn't great in giving overall results for comparing SSDs (without a highly unusual usage), but it is possible to draw a pretty clear conclusion when there's this much variance...

...esp since it's giving the worst case for the V2, as AS SSD sends incredibly incompressible data.