Great deals on SSD?

[Mango1970]

Been seeing a lot of sales (local) for various OCZ SSD's lately. Mainly the Summit and in some cases the Apex. I can get a 60GB Summit for about $170 CAD. Now my question, since most of the talk is about the Vertex and lately more so towards the newish Intel SSD, how good are the Summit and to a leser extent the Apex? I have read so many reviews (Anand's been just one), but the focus is on the Vertex and Intel ones.

The Summit has 128 MB of cache.. seems to do ok but is a bit slower in random reads/writes. I currently have one 60 GB Vertex and one ORIGINAL Core OCZ in my system. I can't tell you how much I never ever want to go back to a plain old regular drive. Anyhow I need to get another SSD drive. I have one on "hold" (intel newer one) at NCIX but the Intel SSD's are not shipping due to the firmware issue. Rather than waiting I can get a 120 GB or 60 GB Summit like now. Again the reviews on these are spotty at best. Anyhow have any good feelings about them or are using them? For the price it's hard to pass up.

 

[rcpratt]

The X25-M firmware update is ready, I expect that Intel shipped the fixed drives back out to retailers yesterday or the day before. Retailers will probably be shipping them by this weekend.

 

[Mango1970]

ohhh...ohhhh... ok well then no sense in cancelling. I might just pick up a Summit for my HTPC for its main C drive and see how that works. Nothing wrong with that.

Edit: Rcpratt, your sig has a 160 GB G2 Intel SSD drive. Are you loving it? I take it's your OS drive?

 

[rcpratt]

It's great, I love it. I traded up from a 80GB G1 and while the performance is pretty much the same, the extra 80GB for the ~$100 difference is awesome.

 

[silverpig]

Nice timing

I just picked up my 60GB Summit from ncix yesterday. I'm putting it in my soon-to-be acquired macbook pro and will take the 160 GB drive from that and put it in an enclosure.

I went with the Summit because apparently the Vertex has problems with some systems, mainly the macbook pro and other laptops. The Summit uses a Samsung controller, which Samsung puts in their OEM drives that Apple actually uses in the macbook pros. Because of this, the Summit apparently works great for the macbooks. I am a little worried that there's no garbage collection or trim yet, and am further worried that Samsung is dragging its heels about providing a way to flash the firmware of these drives, but it seems OCZ is really on them to get it done and that ability is in the works.

Maybe Samsung is waiting for windows7 and snow leopard to be released before they release a new firmware and flash utility.

 

[jkresh]

Mango1970, apex is actually similar to vertex (same controller slower flash) and faster then summit in random read/writes (slower for sustained), seems that for most users the summit is 3rd (behind intel (1st), vertex (2nd)), but its not a bad drive (and quite a bit faster then your core).

 

[taltamir]

isn't the "core" a shitty jmicron controller? those are WORSE than a spindle drive.

 

[silverpig]

Just to update:

I got my macbook pro 13" yesterday and the first thing I did was to take out the hard drive and install the 60 GB Summit. OSX took a while to install (dvd limited of course) and it also took a while to install all my apps.

After that though, I must say I am impressed with the speed. Safari loads instantly. Like, as though it was sitting in RAM. iLife apps take a second or two to load and that's it.

Apparently others have Summits in their macbook pros and they don't notice any slowdowns after several months. Samsung is also working on new firmware and a flash utility which will support TRIM etc.

 

[Nahsavtoo]

I am looking hard at the various SSds that are coming out. How do you tell which SSD has the TRIM featur and which does not? It has been said that is why Intel pulled their G2 SSds back. Are there other SSds that perform as well as the G2 Intel SSDs? If so could you list a few? I see the GSkill advert at the top of the forums screen here and I hear alot about the OCZ.

Just curious as to what the difference is in performance vs price. If the performance factor isn't huge I will likely go with a cheaper SSD than the newest Intel to save myself some cash. But if it is considerably noticeable I will likely stick with the G2 Intel 80GB SSD whenever it becomes available again.

 

[taltamir]

It has been said that is why Intel pulled their G2 SSds back.

No, intel pulled their G2 back because a bug where if you set a password in bios and then changed it you will loose all your data on the G2... They have since released an updated firmware that does not have this bug.

Are there other SSds that perform as well as the G2 Intel SSDs

No, there aren't. The vertex is a good second best drive to get though.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: taltamir

It has been said that is why Intel pulled their G2 SSds back.

No, intel pulled their G2 back because a bug where if you set a password in bios and then changed it you will loose all your data on the G2... They have since released an updated firmware that does not have this bug.

From an engineering perspective, I would probably call that "working as designed", and not, a "bug".

Think about it. If you want your HD protected, using the password to hardware-encrypt the contents of the data before ever being written to the HD, then what happens if you change or input the incorrect password? Everything is unreadable.

In my mind, for a secure HD implementation, that should be the way that it is. If you need to change the password for whatever reason, you would have to back up your system to removable (destroyable) media, and then change the password and then restore.

Now, it appears that the data is going to be written to disk, un-encrypted, and the password is only used as an access token. What a thin layer of protection, probably easily hackable.
If nothing else, desolding the chips and placing them into an EEPROM reader will let the contents be read.

I guess this "bug fix" is a good thing for the feds, having a hardware-encrypted HD was probably too scary for them to contemplate.

My opion is that ALL "software RAID" implementations should prompt at system boot for the password, and do the same thing, real-time encryption of data before being sent to the HD. You wouldn't even have to wipe your drives before you sold them, the data would be random bytes without the correct password.

 

[Modelworks]

Wait if you can on SSD. There are several manufacturers that have 128GB chips in sampling. That means they will ship soon. Once the flood of 128GB chips hit the market then expect prices to drop significantly.

 

[betaflame]

you mean 128GB drives? or 128Gb chips?

 

[Forumpanda]

I would assume you must input the old password to change it, otherwise setting a password in the first place would be a giant waste of time every time you type it.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: betaflame
you mean 128GB drives? or 128Gb chips?

128GB chips that go in those 128GB + drives.
The cheaper the chips the lower the cost the drive will be. A lot of the drives on the market right now use 32GB and smaller chips.

 

[betaflame]

GB or Gb?

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: betaflame
GB or Gb?

128 Gigabit chips or 16 Gigabytes per chip. So a 320GB SSD could be made with 20 chips rather than 80 chips of previous drives.


May also be faster/more reliable since you can get rid of a lot of extra logic in the controller when using less chips.

 

[SeanFL]

The OCZ Summit 60 gb is the shell shocker on newegg right now for $129 after rebate. Seems like a good deal?
Sean

 

[Nahsavtoo]

2.15 per gig. Not too bad. If the firmware supports TRIM then I would say it isnt a bad deal at all with the Intel coming in at $100 more for an additional 20 gig.

Of course other than the Intel G2 vs G1 I can't tell which other SSD brands supports TRIM.

 

[Nahsavtoo]

I have been looking at various reviews and benchmarks for the SSDs. Anyone able to tell me which SSDs will support the TRIM feature other than the newest Intel? Some reviews talk about updated firmware and such but it still doesn't come right out and state what I am sure is obvious to someone else. Maybe I am just not comprehending what I am reading.

 

[jkresh]

ocz and one of the other indilinx using companies have firmware with trim out now, all other manufacturers using that controller should eventually support trim, not sure about any of the samsung based drives (including summit).

 

[Ualdayan]

Vertex already has TRIM with the latest BIOS posted on the OCZ forums.