Not worth waiting for a price drop. That 830 will provide 95% of the 520's value. And after three years, 120GB SSD prices will likely be cut to at least 50% to 25%, which should be quite affordable and we assume that your 830 dies by then. Furthermore, unless Intel bothers to react to the market, I am not expecting them to change their price significantly in the next couple of months.

I'd recommend getting an SSD now, so that you may fall in love with it and agree that getting your first SSD now (when there is no expected price drops or market correction) is much better than getting it a few months down the line. This statement only applies for your first SSD. Once you have lost your SSD virginity, it is acceptable to be conservative because subsequent SSDs will likely not be as life changing as your first one.

You mean local sellers?

Here's one: [WTS][SSD]CRUCIAL M4 64gb - 128gb - 256gb - 512gb, 3 YEARS LOCAL WARRANTY!

Try this: [WTS][SSD]CRUCIAL M4 64gb - 128gb - 256gb - 512gb, 3 YEARS LOCAL WARRANTY!

RM 559 for a good 128GB SSD, not including shipping.

I'm surprised that OCZ would choose to replace their flagship SF-based product with an unproven Indilinx controller. I would have thought they'd replaced the Agility controller with their own. Or maybe perhaps OCZ will create a new branding line for premium SF-based SSDs?

Even with 10,000 RPM HDDs, you will still feel the difference.

Here is a performance comparison video from three years ago.



And SSDs have improved tremendously since then, while HDDs look stagnant except for increased capacity.

You shouldn't need to optimise your SSD in order to feel the difference. The difference should be as clear as day and night.

My CPU and SSD is older and slower than yours and I can feel the difference.

Sometimes faster doesn't mean better too. For example, by skipping error checking, it would be faster at the cost of not catching any potential errors.

If the price isn't that far apart, it'll be better to take the SATA 6.0 Gbps. At least when you upgrade to a system that has SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, you could enjoy the extra performance without paying for another SSD. You just need to define how much cash you're willing to 'waste'.

The flash NAND lifespan issue is still irrelevant at this time. There are reports of people being able to write petabytes to an old 40GB SSD - more data than you have written since your birth. I wouldn't worry about it and I intentionally abuse my SSDs to spare my HDDs.

Two years.

That Mushkin Callisto Deluxe 240GB looks interesting at RM769 at Viewnet. But it's using the older SF-1200 series controller...

True. And laptop users could really use the extra space. But the SF-1200's poor reputation is worrying. If updated to the latest firmware, will it be reliable enough for general or work use without worrying about data backups?

The performance of SSDs have become less meaningful as they get faster. A minority of users can feel the difference, and a minority of this minority can meaningfully use the extra performance.

If you are new to the market, reliability, cost and capacity are more important than performance.

Wasn't this data from a few years ago? I'd like to see the current state of affairs, particularly for today's SF-1200 controllers. There is a 240GB SF-1200-based Mushkin SSD at Viewnet for only RM769. Tempted to buy, but also scared of its old reputation.

Incorrect. The SSD configuration is in fact faster by so and so amount. You are just bottlenecked by your processor or your usage and that the unfortunate fact that performance over time is reciprocal.



This is the reason why I said "The performance of SSDs have become less meaningful as they get faster." You need ridiculous task loads to justify the performance, especially tasks that is heavy on random reads/writes. Have fun copying your 1080p movies from one SSD partition to another SSD partition in less than ten seconds and think to yourself that "this is so worth paying RM2k" or setting up RAID-0 SSD arrays.

I think there are only two places where SSD's random read/write is very noticeable, fragmented HDDs and working with thousands of tiny little files. This is why SSDs are extremely beneficial for programmers, loaded database servers, multimedia artists, and normal users (eg: computer illiterate or average office worker) who do not know how to maintain their computer's performance (eg: do not know to defragment, install tons of crapware, runs daily full anti-virus scans). And you do not even need a high performance SSDs for these users; reliable, cheap and high capacity ones will do just fine for most.

Gamers or users who knows how to maintain their computer's performance actually benefits less from SSDs, because once you have good boot times and application start times, you have nothing left to improve on.

This post has been edited by everling: Apr 2 2012, 12:44 PM

Subjective views are not very useful in setting the ground rules. We see that everyday when people complain about the unreliability of this and that manufacturer. Most of it is irrelevant. I have two WD Greens that are past their third year, does that mean WD Greens are reliable and should be highly recommended?

If you want SSD anecdotes, I have personally poisoned a friend by selling him my old SSD. That's one more person who won't be going back to HDDs for his primary drive.

1. SSD is beneficial for everyone because the bottleneck in the computer is the I/O, not the processor.
   My statement does not disagree. I stated 'extremely beneficial' for so and so - these are the users that will get the most out of SSDs. My follow-up paragraph, including the gamers and savvy users also state that they would benefit, but they will get a lot less ROI.
   
   "My computer can now boot up in 10 seconds! My desktop is ready to go the moment I see it! Chrome starts instantaneously!"
   
   Yeah, real big ROI for savvy users. </sarcasm> Contrast that to non-savvy users, whose boot to desktop can take fifteen minutes on HDD but reduced to about a minute on SSDs. Or multimedia artists going through thousands of fonts or other media files. Or programmers working with tens of thousands of little files. Now that's real ROI.
   
   
2. Do you know what is the main reason they designed SSD? What are the main advantages of SSD versus a platter drive?
   Access times. A good portion of the crazy fast random/sequential read/write is derived from the low access times provided by solid state memory.
   
   
3. Who told you that enterprise solution database servers are using SSD? Are you sure SSD is the mainstream for data centres today?
   Other than the occasional news about the SSD manufacturers working to gain acceptance at the data centres, some big enterprise using SSDs in their servers or Anandtech's analysis, no one. Do you have something to share?
   
   
4. How many home users would buy multiple SSD's and to copy huge files from SSD disk 1 to SSD disk 2 daily and how does your example above even bothers a home user?
   I would hope that the average would be one SSD per computer. And the example was just to illustrate how useless RAIDing SSDs is for most users.
   
   
5. How would 3 seconds slower impact a home user?
   What is the context of the "3 seconds"?

You're preaching to the choir here.


MySpace shifted from HDDs to PCIe SSDs. There was also some news about Facebook, but I couldn't find it in a quick search. SSD manufacturers have already put millions into getting their products into the enterprise with SLC and eMLC over the years, so it would seem disingenuous to claim that SSDs have no place in the enterprise. But it is not particularly relevant anyway because our concern here and now is the home users, right?

That little table of mine wasn't a benchmark, but it does show why doubling SSD performance won't improve real world performance significantly for most scenarios. Which was part of my overall point that today's SSD performance should be of secondary concern to most home users.

But other than that, I agree with your points, even your RAID ones. Although I view RAID-0 as not useful to the average user; if RAID-0 is useful to you, you're not an average user. It was this quote that I had a problem with.

Here it suggested that SSDs were not faster, which was incorrect. In my post, I was clarifying your point. The SSDs are indeed faster by so and so, but that won't translate linearly to real performance because of so and so reasons. Maybe I should have ditched the 'Incorrect', but it was done.

I didn't. I stated that they were most useful to specific groups and non-savvy users. And that other savvy users will not get as much as the first group. I've owned three retail SSDs, and waiting on price drops for my fourth. 160GB is getting cramped for my laptop.


All I said was that RAID-0 was not useful for the average user. And for the millions of Intel and AMD motherboards with hardware RAID support, I wonder what percentage of owners actually make use of any RAID level. It seems to me that the main reason RAID is ubiquitously available is because it doesn't cost much to include. If I am wrong, please correct me so I may better appreciate the value of my motherboard's built-in RAID support.


Well, I'm sorry for misreading your sentence. And I was wondering why you were testing me, after all, I do agree with most of your own points.

This post has been edited by everling: Apr 2 2012, 07:52 PM

Same here. I have learned too. Thanks.

Looks interesting. Hopefully there is a 256GB and 300GB edition to drool over as well.

OCZ's new Vertex 4 based on Indilinx controllers is to be launched by 9pm today. Might be interesting.

@bad melatonin, why not check the firmware version first? Or ask CyntrixTech about the firmware.

This post has been edited by everling: Apr 4 2012, 02:26 PM

It's interesting that they got that high a performance without resorting to compression.

Here's to OCZ doing well in their attempt to rock the SSD boat! Cheers!