G.Skill Titan 256GB SSD

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: TimBob

Unfortunately, I'm also experiencing some stuttering at times. Hippie, when the stuttering happens the system basically freezes for a couple seconds and is completely unresponsive. You just have to wait it out.

Other than the occasional stuttering which can be pretty annoying, I'm pretty happy with it. Everything loads so quickly.

That is un acceptable! This should not happen, PERIOD!

Saying you're happy with it is like a car guy saying he's happy with his 10 second 'Vette that stalls out every other intersection!

These things have a serious Achilles heel that needs to be addressed before they become a serious contender IMO.

 

[aka1nas]

This is with the 128Gb Titan model.

Regarding Superfetch/Prefetch, I actually used an SSD config utility off the OCZ forum, and then when I went back and confirmed the setings I noticed that it hadn't actually disabled Superfetch in the registry. I might give it a try today just to see the difference, but I do have 3 regular hard disks too, so I might still want it enabled. I actually think it might be helping now that my RAM has been populated.

When I was getting stuttering, it was usually just a specific app freezing up for a few seconds. Occasionally, Opening up a folder residing on the SSD in explorer would take 3-5 seconds before anything showed up.

I was a little iffy about it on friday due to the initial performance, but I think I will be keeping this drive to replace my 74GB Raptor.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: TimBob

Unfortunately, I'm also experiencing some stuttering at times. Hippie, when the stuttering happens the system basically freezes for a couple seconds and is completely unresponsive. You just have to wait it out.

Other than the occasional stuttering which can be pretty annoying, I'm pretty happy with it. Everything loads so quickly.

That is un acceptable! This should not happen, PERIOD!

Saying you're happy with it is like a car guy saying he's happy with his 10 second 'Vette that stalls out every other intersection!

These things have a serious Achilles heel that needs to be addressed before they become a serious contender IMO.

I am perfectly happy with my spindle drive that does NOT stall out. and I am not lying to myself to justify hundreds of dollars wasted. I guess the titan is just as much BS as the other Jmicron controllers.

 

[Old Hippie]

That is un acceptable! This should not happen, PERIOD!

+10000

The was supposed to be resolved.

Does it matter whether you set the controller in your BIOS to Raid, AHCI or IDE? I first installed with Raid since that's what I had before with my 2 74gb Raptors. I tried reinstalling with AHCI and didn't notice a difference.

RAID includes AHCI.

 

[taltamir]

and all ahci gives is native command queuing and hotswap.

 

[Old Hippie]

Originally posted by: taltamir
and all ahci gives is native command queuing and hotswap.

Well yes, but if you have RAID enabled, wouldn't AHCI be enabled by default?

 

[noname98967]

Looks like my impatience got the best of me and I ordered a Titan do to the positive early "reviews". This is my fault of course for not waiting for a AA review. This thing is staying in the box and going on Ebay ASAP.

OCZ, G.Skill you guys are ruining this technology and I hope Intel kicks your a**es.

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: noname98967
OCZ, G.Skill you guys are ruining this technology and I hope Intel kicks your a**es.

You should tell that to the OCZ employees who surf the web and spam forums like AT!

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie

Originally posted by: taltamir
and all ahci gives is native command queuing and hotswap.

Well yes, but if you have RAID enabled, wouldn't AHCI be enabled by default?

yes it is.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I am perfectly happy with my spindle drive that does NOT stall out. and I am not lying to myself to justify hundreds of dollars wasted. I guess the titan is just as much BS as the other Jmicron controllers.

I don't know why this is something new to you guys. You get what you pay for. The Titan and the new Vertex might seem faster than Intel drives by the max sequential read and writes, but that's the only thing its faster at.

Once enough data is written to the drive and the controller needs to start erasing blocks, the performance will plummet. The difference is Intel drive has been out there for some time and we know the quirks but the Titan and the Vertex is new and people know nothing about them.

This is why some OCZ Core users report no stuttering while others do.

Every SSD review out there are terrible, even the Anandtech review. Those tests only do short 5-10 min tests which does not show real SSD usage.

 

[taltamir]

You get what you pay for.

you pay 300$ for a TRIPLE controller built in raid0 drive that claims to eliminate stutter and you get something slower than a 60$ PC drive... definitely slower than a 150$ velociraptor... and most definitely slower than two velociraptors in raid0... oh slower and SMALLER.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: taltamir

You get what you pay for.

you pay 300$ for a TRIPLE controller built in raid0 drive that claims to eliminate stutter and you get something slower than a 60$ PC drive... definitely slower than a 150$ velociraptor... and most definitely slower than two velociraptors in raid0... oh slower and SMALLER.

It's only a dual JMicron controller on the Titan.

FWIW, I've had my machine up for about 38 hours and the thing has been lightning fast. The only stuttering potentially occurs during the first 5 minutes or so until Superfetch is done filling up my RAM.

I probably would not recommend this drive to someone who will use it as their only storage volume, but if you do have another mechanical drive that you can offload things like the Firefox profile and pagefile to, this drives works well.

 

[taltamir]

its two jmicron controllers and a third controller that does both SATA splitting and raid between the two as well as load balancing.

 

[allthatisman]

Well it seems that I am the only person that is happy with this purchase... So far I have seen no NOTICABLE stuttering, all that I have noticed is that every function of Vista 64 is quicker and more brisk that it was on my Maxtor terabyte, which replaced a 150gb Raptor X(good riddance). Perhaps some of you are having problems because you are using an old image of a previous OS on another drive. May sound silly but with computers it always seems to be something silly.... So far if you have the money I would recommend TWO of these, as 128 gb goes fast. With Vista, Service Packone, CAtalyst Suite, Office 2007 and Warhammer Online I have 86gb remaining. Granted I have other storage means, but Vista seems to grow and grow as you use it so we shall see. I think this has been an awesome purchase, my computer finally feels fast in every operation it does.

 

[imported_TimBob]

Originally posted by: allthatisman
Well it seems that I am the only person that is happy with this purchase... So far I have seen no NOTICABLE stuttering, all that I have noticed is that every function of Vista 64 is quicker and more brisk that it was on my Maxtor terabyte, which replaced a 150gb Raptor X(good riddance). Perhaps some of you are having problems because you are using an old image of a previous OS on another drive. May sound silly but with computers it always seems to be something silly.... So far if you have the money I would recommend TWO of these, as 128 gb goes fast. With Vista, Service Packone, CAtalyst Suite, Office 2007 and Warhammer Online I have 86gb remaining. Granted I have other storage means, but Vista seems to grow and grow as you use it so we shall see. I think this has been an awesome purchase, my computer finally feels fast in every operation it does.

While I did say there is occasional stuttering, overall I prefer it to my two 74gb raptors in Raid 0. Obviously I'd prefer no stuttering at all though. 95+% of the time it works perfectly. I still may try out a 30gb vertex for my OS drive and use the Titan for all my game installs which take up the majority of my space.

Intelluser2000: I've noticed here and another site that you are comparing the Vertex with the Titan. The Vertex has cache so it cannot be using a Jmicron controller since their controllers do not support cache yet.

Also, I do not clone. When it takes 20 minutes to do a fresh install of Vista SP1, I don't see any need for it.

 

[exar333]

Originally posted by: taltamir
oh, since its cheaper than the intel AND outperforms it, we can expect the intels to drop in price!
Which will make the intels a viable choice, and leave the titan for the high end. Since the intel is the MINIMUM for an SSD to outperform a velociraptor that means we will have two viable SSD drives to choose from. That of course all depends on intel reducing their price, otherwise the titan is the only worthwhile choice.

I can't wait for the anandtech dissection of this drive.

Hmm...makes you wonder why Intel can charge what they do for their drives and people will pay it? Maybe someone else needs to spend the time engineering a solution rather than marketing one? I have had the opportunity to use both a standard JMicron SSD and the MLC-Intel SSD. If I could justify the cost, the Intel would be in my rig in a heartbeat. The JMicron SSD? I would rather grab a standard 1TB drive for ~$100 and have more reliable performance and no stuttering AND the extra storage.

I am hoping for a serious competitior to Intel's offerings so I can either buy their SSD or get the Intel drive at a cheaper price. Right now, I don't see price cuts coming...

 

[taltamir]

Hmm...makes you wonder why Intel can charge what they do for their drives and people will pay it? Maybe someone else needs to spend the time engineering a solution rather than marketing one? I have had the opportunity to use both a standard JMicron SSD and the MLC-Intel SSD. If I could justify the cost, the Intel would be in my rig in a heartbeat.

The titan is NOT a standard Jmicron SSD, the standard JMicron SSDs are pure crap... however the titan was shown to be... overrated. Some review sites just didn't test it well.
So I would say Jmicron SSD < Normal Drive < raptor < intel SSD
With the titan being either better or worse than the raptor depending on your tastes. But for most... worst.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
Saying you're happy with it is like a car guy saying he's happy with his 10 second 'Vette that stalls out every other intersection!

I love that analogy.

I think I'll be sticking with my VelociRaptors for now.

 

[allthatisman]

Originally posted by: Zap

Originally posted by: Rubycon
Saying you're happy with it is like a car guy saying he's happy with his 10 second 'Vette that stalls out every other intersection!

I love that analogy.

I think I'll be sticking with my VelociRaptors for now.

It's not an accurate one(at least from my point of view), but since you already have your Velociraptors... Day 3 and so far I can wait to RAID another one, but hey, thats just me.

 

[imported_TimBob]

Originally posted by: allthatisman

Originally posted by: Zap

Originally posted by: Rubycon
Saying you're happy with it is like a car guy saying he's happy with his 10 second 'Vette that stalls out every other intersection!

I love that analogy.

I think I'll be sticking with my VelociRaptors for now.

It's not an accurate one(at least from my point of view), but since you already have your Velociraptors... Day 3 and so far I can wait to RAID another one, but hey, thats just me.

So, you've never had any stutter with your Titan? Did you do any tweaks?

I was attempting to recreate a stutter this morning and did it pretty easily by just copying my Fallout 3 folder to the desktop and then trying to multitask.

 

[VaultDweller]

Got this e-mail from Gary Key in response to an inquiry about a possible SSD roundup:

Anand is planning on a huge SSD roundup in February. We still have the latest drives arriving, but should cover all of the new controller chipsets available in this article. Right now, it appears the new Samsung controller that will be on their upcoming 128GB/256GB drives will probably be the best, unless Intel decides to increase capacities quickly. Right now, it appears Intel might go to 160GB in the spring. The newer JMicron controllers are decent, the first drive we have based on one is doing better, still some stuttering but we are expecting new firmware for it next week.

Sincerely,
Gary

So, looks like a good roundup will be coming soon. Looking forward to it.

 

[taltamir]

spring? isn't intel already selling a 160GB drive?
http://www.nowdirect.com/exec/...art=IDRSSDSA2MH160G1C5

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Originally posted by: taltamir
spring? isn't intel already selling a 160GB drive?
http://www.nowdirect.com/exec/...art=IDRSSDSA2MH160G1C5

Actually, yes. Maybe he meant 320GB...

 

[taltamir]

mmm, well, that is supposed to also be the first 32nm MLC chips...

 

[imported_TimBob]

Well, the more time I spend with this thing, the more stuttering I see and the less I like it. Seems like the majority of Titan owners don't have of a problem, but for some reason it doesn't seem to like my system. I've tried pretty much all the tweaks from the OCZ forums, but it all amounts to the same slow downs.

Any of you successful Titan users feel like adding another Titan for Raid 0?