Hardware JMicron's New 612 SSD Controller

Nice one - cheers Bindi.

+1

We, the general public, are often an ungrateful and ungracious lot - but we'd soon miss you if you weren't here supplying our every techno-info whim...

 

I remember in the days when the internet was but a small sapling - and tomshardware actually managed to write a review that you could trust. Bit-Tech came on the scene and since then you have managed to bring us some superb hardware reviews and methodology (whilst Toms has gone to ****).

There will always be a case for an individual having a particular SSD over one recommended. The point of a well written review is to arm the reader with the facts to make that judgement, to accurately inform, clearly paint the picture (have I said enough?). The end conclusion thould try to roll everything up and give an overview of the picutre - not repeat everthing in the review. If you are 'Joe bloggs' - then read the conclusion, if you are Jim, need a drive that has fast random reads..... pick out the specifics...

Baz - just wondering if Bit-Tech could do an article on raid cards (at 3 price points? budget, mainstream, OMG I need to sell the wife and kids), various RAIDs (0,1,10,5) SSD performance. Whilst I have seen a few reviews of SSD RAIDs - I cant seem to find if I need to spend £300 on a 4 port RAID card - or whether a £50 cheap and cheerful will give me any improvement over the ICH? on the MB.

Also I havent quite worked out whether the raid card (if used with SSDs) needs to support TRIM - as well as the SSDs - to get full TRIM support in this type of set up. Any one know?

Keep up the good work.

 

We actually started something like this back mid year, but Baz got side tracked because we told him to do other reviews

 

Please make sure to include the 160GB G2 intel drive in the future review which has a sequential write speed of 100mb/sec.

As of late i've been turned off by the high prices of all the drives. My Christmas gift to myself looks like it will be the 160GB intel drive as the 120GB vertex is only $30 cheaper yet I lose 40GB of space.

 

Yep, sounds fair enough. We're requesting the 160GB G2 in for the new year. In terms of choosing between the two, going for whichever matches your budget sounds about right - they're both excellent drives(Indilinx faster sequential write, Intel faster random) and the Indilinx drives have been going up in value crazy crazy amounts in the last few months.

I don't dislike Intel drives, I just think offering sub hard disk sequential write speeds is a bit naff for a premium product. An SSD should surpass a hard disk drive at every turn, and the X25M 80GB (and the value Kingston versious of said drive) doesn't.

 

I'm looking forward to the Intel review - I was almost tempted to get one last week

With you on the write speed cap though, it does seem a little silly.. Have they said a reason for it at all?

 

The vertexs sure have gone up in value, bought mine for 200, sold them for 400

 

It's just the controller and firmware design.

 

Thanks i've been looking at the both intel and vertex drives for quite a while and have came to the conclusion that the 100mb/sec cap on the intel 160GB drive won't be too much of a limitation for me. With most of the other reviews the vertex was only hitting 150-160mb in the same situation. However the extra capacity and the small price different between the two and the higher availablity of the intel drive sold me. If this was april/may of this year then the Vertex drive had the advantange on price also, but now with the jacked up prices from supply and demand it made the choice easier for me.

 

I wonder how long until reviews no longer list the random seek times - ok, we get it, SSDs seek in 0.1ms (well, probably less, I assume 0.1 is the lowest the software will report)

I think it's kinda funny how in a few years from now I doubt many people will have, say, a Seagate drive. The big names in spinning platter drives really missed the boat on SSD technology although it's not altogether surprising since it's not as if any of them had a big fab just sitting around or anything like that. If I were the CEO of a drive company right now I would be seriously looking into acquiring a smaller memory manufacturer...

 

So, uh, forgive me for prodding, but are you going to do any long-term performance reviews of this or any other SSD?

Yes I know once again I'm obviously off my head and it's of coure impossible that there could be any long term issues with these things because our lovely manufacturers have said there isn't...

... but personally I'd like to see it tried.

 

We might pull some of the drives we use in the labs machines to re-run them next year, but to get reproducible results that you might see, other than a "specific snapshot" is unlikely. There's too many different user scenarios to cover everything.

Every branded memory manufacturer rebrands an OEM and buys NAND from someone else. HDD companies would have to buy a FAB to make NAND itself at a significant cost if it wanted to do it from the ground up, which is economically unfeasible.

 

I suspect that the "using it for more than a couple of days" scenario is fairly universal.

 

Will 6 months of constant reformatting and completely re-imaging do you? The problem is we only use Indilinx drives there - not the whole range. Plus, most companies don't let us keep their products that long.

 

Yes, very much so. Strikes me your corporate overlords may well need to stump up for some test articles.

The reason I'm banging on about this is simply that a lot of tech sites just like this one raved over how good many of the original SSDs initially appeared to be and encouraged everyone to go and buy them, which everyone did, then watched in empty-walleted horror as the things enthusiastically bricked themselves in the course of a few months. Personally, I wouldn't want to be even slightly responsible for that happening.

 

It's great to see Adata are supporting the product with future firmwares planned.

I can't help but feel that the 612 is just a 602 with a cache controller - my guess is that if a 602 could be paired with the equivalent cache, it would probably post similar results. Still, it's a massive improvement.

Are there any drives with dual-612's on the horizon?

And, have you or are you planning on a test to compare the size of the blocks? i.e. is 'formatting' at 128k better than 256k?

 

NAH! Don't go giving me a rep boost for that. I wasn't trying to get anything in exchange for my praises. I just like to make sure that, for all the griping some of us do in regards to your reviews, most of us actually do appreciate the hard work you guys do.

 

I'm in no rush to get SSD drives yet. There is stil no proof they will last for years. I'm still bugged by the write cycles issues.
Just look how long it took to make high quality NAND flash. Most of the USB flash storage sticks are awful and crappy and use bad flash chips.

 

Thank you very much for this review, which I found very helpful. One thing was missing, tho: power consumption. Not only you did not try to measure it (which is a very common failing of disk drive reviews) but you did not even provide the manufacturer's specification of power consumption (which I did not find on their web-site either). All SSDs claim "low-power consumption", but my experience is that this can occasionally be true but is most often a lie, unless the comparison is with a 3.5" HDD (Corsair's discontinued S128 was one of the very few drives which really consumed a lot less power than a 2.5" HDD, some SSDs consume more power than a 2.5" HDD).

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/pcs/2010/02/24/energy-efficient-hardware-investigated/5

We never comment on SSD/HDD power consumption. It's almost impossible to test accurately by isolation. Plus, no one really cares that much for desktop PCs.

Look up any JMicron 612 at a particular size and they will all be about the same, if not the same. It also depends what you're reading from in terms of power used (I would not really trust official specifications as manufacturers try to look better than others), what capacity drive you are using and what 2.5" hard drives you are reading against etc