Hardware G.Skill, Intel & Patriot SSD group test

Am I wrong here when the first graph in the Vista boot time test is incorrectly labeled (mins) instead of (secs)?

 

I was just thinking about these RAM based drives in relation to Baz's review - their write performance does look fairly impressive.

The only problem with one of these is the need to buy seperate sticks of RAM and then keeping them powered so they don't lose any data. As a benchmarking tool, it looks good on paper - as a practical alternative to an SSD or even a regular hard drive for everyday use, I imagine it won't gain as much ground as SSD's will eventually. Especially as there are many advantages to replacing volatile memory with non-volatile memory in PC's once the speeds of both converge.

 

Even then it's heavily overpriced. As soon as intel release new SSD drives, price of this will fall by 50% I guess(Tim said 160GB SSD was on the way, so we shall find out soon). It's the same thing like with new Core i7 - you'll have to pay extra $$$ for top range CPU's while slower i7 are relatively affordable. Let's hope that competition will come up with lightning fast SSD's soon for it's competition that's beating(not only Intel's) prices down
I'm sure I'll hold onto new SSD drive until there's some fast 300GB drive.

 

I didnt read the whole article being at work, but the link below may be of some interest to fellow bit-techers if it hasnt been included elsewhere already

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605259/micron-demos-ultra-fast-1gbsec-ssd.html

 

Fixed - thanks for the spot. We tried to get a velociraptor but couldn't get one in time -I'll drop it into future HDD reviews.

 

Nice link Toka.
Is it me, or was the guy in the vid stoned??

 

I don't think it's great value (yet) even though I seem to be part of a minority here. Yes, it will be cheaper in 1 year but then again everything is cheaper when it's just not top notch anymore. But I'm sorry I can't really join the 'Intel! Intel' chanting. Hell yeah, that speed is great! And woohoo I can load my games now 5-10 seconds faster! To me that's nice but spending 5-10 times the amount of money to get theoretical record speeds that end up in the above mentioned couple of seconds won... I know it's high-end and I know the higher the quality the lower the (performance/size) increase/£ but I am not willing to spend such an amount of money for that. Maybe I'm not geeky or gadget-enthusiastic enough but... nope, not for me, not now.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get my hands on 1 or 2 of those drives and have the world record performance. So if BT feels the need to get rid of those drives and nobody knows where to put them... I think I can make space in my case. But paying for those? Thanks, but no.

 

Very insteresting article indeed Toka. Thx for the link

 

The VelociRaptor definitely should have been included in the testing.

 

Sounds like it probably will be in some upcoming comparisons...

 

I'd say in about 1-2 years they will take over the leaderboard for "high end" or gaming HDD's due to the stability I would also be less afraid of putting 2 of these in raid 0.

how come there has never been a drive that's a combination between volatile and standard? with the low price of RAM these days 1-2 gigs of DDR coupled to a normal HDD or SSD would offer huge performance gains by acting as a giant buffer. Realistically, for non server use more people don't read or write files larger than 2 gigs constanstly. An algorithm could be used to preload your most common files into half of the ram which gives you essentially instant on gaming or file editing. A very small intergrated battery would offload the data on power down or in case of powerfailure so there's no chance of loss due to powerfailure.

the only downfall is the added complexity and the fact that boot and large file read/writes would not be optimized. I remember hearing a while ago about a similar stratedgy for mobile disks which coupled a few gigs of flash memory to normal 2.5" drive. It saved power by writing to the flash until it was full then bulk dumping it to the HDD, so that it didn't ahve to spin up that much

 

metarinka, the drives you describe are hybrid hard drives. They have made a few, but they never really caught on; the last time I remember hearing about one was when Samsung released a 2.5" laptop drive with 256MB flash memory in addition to regular mechanical storage [I think it was 160GB].

 

I have a hybrid hard drive in my Sony SZ650 laptop I bought last year.

One of the main reasons I would buy a solid state drive for my PC that no one seems to have mentioned yet is the fact that they are completely silent. At the moment the noisiest thing in my case is my hard drives - I'd definitely pay a (reasonable) premium to have silent drives with the same performance. Although I think I may have to wait a while to replace my TB drive...

 

While SSD's are highly attractive for Notebooks, Desktop hdd's (and especially the velociraptors in a raid setup) are much faster than notebook harddrives and the speed difference to ssd's is much smaller on desktops.
But the price difference will certainly continue to shrink and ssd's will become the future.

 

Me too - perhaps also with a couple of drives that add up to a similar cost as a SSD.
Arrayed disks seems like something that isn't beyond the technical knowledge of somebody who is considering a SSD.

 

As most reviews i see on the subject of SSDs, most of them don't consider the real world benefit of having a SSD for games.
Yes they are expensive and the MLC have no extreme benefit over normal HDs under normal windows use.

But they shine when it comes to games, because whit games its for 98% all about reads, and only some save's data that have low priority is written away the rest is all reads.

I got my self a X25-M and have to say games load a lot quicker then before, also games ware you have map loads during games are a lot smoother then before.

All in all, 600 euros was a lot of money, was it worth it, i don't know for me it was, but then i also have a car that go's in 5sec to 60, is it useful, no, but its nice to have.

 

Ooh, haven't seen those before.
I have to admit though; I am quite tempted. But at only 64Gb max ... well, I suppose for an OS only disk it would be cool. Yes, tempted.

 

HyperDrives

What enables the price is the custom designed ASIC and it does look like you can put these things into arrays.

http://www.acard.com.tw/english/newstabpop.jsp?idno=86

 

ok, so the 2.5" SSDs can't match price and warranty of 3.5" desktop drives which can be raided, but how do they match in performance, price and warranty against 2.5" HDs?

 

I think people are forgetting the inherent stability with say running 2 raptors in raid compared to one SSD. I ran 2 35 gig raptors for about 2 years when they first came out and while the drives never died I did have the array get lost once, which required a reinstall of windows.

I think another year or so and this will be ready for primetime, also I think writes for a gamer and many other uses are not nearly as critical. you only install a game once and it's a long task on even the fastest of HDD's due to the decompression. BUt loading screens in the midst of a game can really ruin the action.