For reads, practically infinite reads within ten years since the data was last written. For example, if you bought the SSD this year and write the last piece of data 5 years from now, that last piece of data will be readable for ten years.

For writes, you get an estimate of 3,000 writes. An average person should see three years of writes without changing their usage habit. For a 120GB SSD, you will need to write more than 120GB everyday to kill their SSD prematurely. For a 160GB SSD, it's 160GB everyday. Are you up to the challenge?

Last I heard, OCZ had a hidden feature to support that as it was revealed to Anand weeks ago. No sign of it since then.

You need to wait much longer. It's about half the price every eighteen months. I had bought a 128GB SSD for about RM900 eleven months ago. That same model is now available for about RM600.

If your laptop doesn't support USB3.0, larger storage capacity should be a priority, as you won't normally add a second internal storage device to a laptop. Chances are that you will regret much less.

Then anything will do. However, I would personally still prefer a larger capacity, even though I'm using a desktop and have a few TB of spare HDD. It is nice to be able to dump everything onto it.

It is not the formatting that "reduces" the raw size as they were that small to begin with.

There are two systems for calculating file system sizes. One is based on base-10 and the other is base-2.



HDD and SSD manufacturers uses base-10 when working with storage capacity numbers. To them, 120GB = 120,000,000,000 bytes. Windows and Linux however uses base-2 when working with data. To them, 120GiB = 120 x 2^30 bytes = 128,849,018,880 bytes. The OSX of Apple however changed their definition a few years ago to use base-10 when calculating file system sizes a few years back. To OSX, 120GB = 120,000,000,000 bytes, so it may report to you 120GB but you don't actually "regained" the "lost" capacity.

So where the 93% came from? 120,000,000,000 bytes / 128,849,018,880 bytes = 93% and this is before you even touched the device. This ratio is also non-linear, slowly changing as storage increases. 1000 bytes / 1024 bytes = 97.6% and 1TB / 1TiB = 90%. You will also lose a bit more after formatting for the actual formatted file system overheads.

Using this information, a 120GB SSD will have 120,000,000,000 bytes, which converts to 111.75GiB and that 111GiB is what your Windows OS will use when reporting to you. You can work out the values for the others, as this is only high school maths. However, there can be technical issues that alters the actual raw capacity. For example, OCZ's new SSDs based on the 25nm NAND Flash process will have an even smaller raw capacity.

That percentage is variable, depending on the stated storage capacity. And not useful for most people, which is why that number rarely comes up in discussions. It's useful if you want to understand how things work and why your OS, with the exception of OSX, never reports 1TB or 120GB.

Most people don't even care about the actual raw capacity, all they needed to know is the number on the packaging and they will ignore the fact that Windows only reports 931.51GB available on their 1TB drive.

Now that you know the real reason why there is a "93%" difference, you can now return to your previously blissfully pleasant state of ignorance.

If reliability is a concern, buy Intel. Their G2 series had a failure rate of 0.4%, about 1 in 250 SSDs.

This post has been edited by everling: Apr 30 2011, 01:23 PM

IOPS is much more important. We have HDDs that can hit 150MB/s but nobody talks about SSDs being only twice better than HDDs. But there are also diminishing returns in high IOPS, as we're getting bottlenecked elsewhere like the CPU, GPU or even humans.

The funny thing is that most games don't actually load 550MB of anything. And they're also optimised to reduce random read/writes, further blunting the impact of SSDs on most games. For example, "Medieval 2: Total War" reads less than 100MB to get to the campaign map and have little to no discernible performance difference between a HDD and SSD. For me, most of the wait time was spent on the CPU. I've tested it.

From HDD to SSD, it's like breathing new life into an old machine. From entry level SSD to SATA 6.0gbps SSD, be prepared to be underwhelmed. As always, I recommend investing in capacity than in performance. More solid state capacity will always be useful. More performance is highly situational and of dubious value. Do you really need 550MB/s read/write for your web browsing? Or to launch a game that spends most of its time waiting on the CPU?

But it has gotten better. A year ago, it was about RM10/GB. Today, Intel's G3 can hit RM6/GB and we even have cheaper SSDs that goes for below RM5/GB.

The question here, what is your selling point?

If it is only for gaming, I suppose that will be fine. But if you have other possible usage for that, you might discover yourself banging your head on your table for not giving in to the dark side years earlier.

Welcome to the club.

You ran into the CPU bottleneck. SSDs are fast, but the data stored on them still needs to be interpreted and processed by your CPU. This is a reason why better performing SSDs do not matter very much for most people.

Try watching your Task Manager. If it ever hits 100%, that's a bottleneck.

The i7 2630QM has four real cores and HyperThreading. To be stuck at 50%, it means that two (if without HT) or four (if with HT) of your cores have hit 100%. I could be wrong, but it looks to me like you are bottlenecked by the CPU. I don't know of any games that can use more than four cores. And Firefox should be using only one core.

At 12.5% usage, that suggests that one single threaded application is bottlenecked by the CPU.

This post has been edited by everling: May 13 2011, 10:20 PM

It is probably a normal thing. I wouldn't worry about it.

It is not going to magically speed up your game.

Ten seconds is possible for a limited number of OS and hardware configurations, usually Linux-based ones and the new Chromium OS.



Oh, if IOPS was everything than you would see some insane performance. Both my Samsung F3 1TB and my WD Green 1TB can do about 70 IOPS. Let's compare with an Intel SSD 320 that claims 40,000 IOPS and this new Corsair with 85,000 IOPS.

Say we have a task that requires 85,000 IOPS. The Corsair would have taken 1 second to complete it, the Intel would take about 2.125 seconds and either HDDs would take 20 minutes. But are we seeing such insane performance? Other than raw IO work like file copy, no, because we are bottlenecked at the CPU and other places.

This post has been edited by everling: May 19 2011, 12:33 AM

You can treat your SSD like an ordinary HDD, except that it is more rugged and a lot more faster and responsive. Feel free to use full format. You would need to do a full format once per day for three years to come close to killing your SSD prematurely via write exhaustion. But you only really need to do a full format once (for the first time) and then use the quick format for subsequent formats.

If the CPU is the AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ as per your sig, then you are probably bottlenecked by the CPU. In any case, your computer should still feel a lot more snappier and responsive to operations that were previously bottlenecked by the HDD; like your boot time.

Intel doesn't have 60GB SSDs.

Their 80GB SSD is at RM549. Is this still too much? What about Kingston V 100 64GB at RM379 at Viewnet? If this is still too much, then you might need to buy a second hand SSD or forget about getting an SSD this year.

If your primary use case is games and you seem to have a tight budget, then I strongly recommend that you do not buy an SSD. People who work with hundreds or thousands of small files, like office workers, programmers or even photographers will feel the benefit. In other words, SSDs are good for work. But pure gamers will be underwhelmed as most of your performance bottleneck are on the CPU and GPU, as game designers optimise their games to avoid the HDDs (and by extension SSDs) as much as possible.

If you have spare cash, I would recommend getting a cheap SSD because it is an excellent overall performer for any HDD/SSD task you can throw at it. But since you don't, it would be better for you to save your money and wait for the SSD prices to come down to you. It should drop by 50% in another year or two.

The "best" have two camps. One is the performance camp and the other is the capacity camp. A lot of people here would be in the performance camp, buying Vertex 3 and the like. You pay a lot of money for a lot of performance for a given capacity. The capacity camp, prefers to buy cost effective SSDs. Since any SSDs are superior to any HDDs in performance, you could just buy the cheapest SSD for a given capacity and be highly amazed (if you're a first timer) for good reason.

Kingston SSDs are cheap for any given capacity. Intel SSDs are both reliable and cheap, not as cheap as Kingston though. And then we have the performance SSDs, typically based on the SandForce controllers like Vertex 2, Vertex 3.

Personally, I recommend giving serious thought to buy on capacity because capacity is always useful. Performance is a lot less useful for daily use for 99% of the population.

This post has been edited by everling: May 26 2011, 12:50 PM

Needs a little refinement. SATA 6.0 Gbps isn't the reason the 510 can hit 200+ MB/s writes. A lot of SSDs have hit 200+ MB/s write on SATA 3.0 Gbps long before the 510. The 450 MB/s read though is clearly because of the SATA 6.0 Gbps.