The performance chart actually includes a momenus XT, and it scores like the other spinning rust drives. Perhaps there are some situations where it performs better than a normal drive but overall it seems more similar to a HDD than a SSD.
A data point - I have dual Intel X25-M SSDs in my MacbookPro in a striped RAID configuration, and the performance improvement is surprisingly minimal over a single SSD.
BUT, having a RAID’d laptop gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside!
Adding to what @Henbo said, hybrid drives are also not as dead-quiet as pure SSD. The spinning of the discs makes a noticeable low frequency hum, making them much less suitable for sound related applications (Cubase etc) AND for your home theater PC.
I would go for a pure SSD, when the price is right.
It’s worth noting that the C300 only gets a performance crown if you’re running on a SATA 6 GB/s controller. If you’re still on 3 GB/s, the slightly cheaper OCZ Vertex 2 can be faster, and also suffers less performance degradation. It’s interesting that you posted this today, as I just ordered my first-ever SSD (a Vertex 2) two days ago. My Velociraptor just isn’t that impressive any more, and it’ll be nice to get rid of the delicate bungee-suspension arrangement keeping it quiet.
btw the latest versions of Linux actually do support TRIM, at least since February 2010. http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_33
I’ve been using a Corsair P128 for about a year now and it’s still amazing. The firmware back then didn’t support TRIM, so I’m surprised I haven’t noticed any degradation.
I’ve bought a new one to clone the existing drive to, then upgrade the firmware on the old one (upgrade wipes the drive) and will put that in my wife’s computer once she upgrades to Win7.
What’s the consensus on SSD reliability? Right now I run all my spinning rust drives in RAID1 due to paranoia and bad experiences. I’m guessing maybe 1) I wouldn’t need to do that with an SSD and 2) the way a RAID controller (a real one, not mobo integrated crap) intermediates access to disks probably isn’t even smart for an SSD?
I think the warning about lack of TRIM needs a few caveats.
- OS X doesn’t seem to suffer from the performance degradation. I’ve been using an Intel X25-M 1st generation with OS X for almost 2 years and haven’t experienced slowdowns.
- Drives with a Sandforce controller (e.g. OCZ Vertex 2) seem to be mostly immune to the problem. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/3812/the-ssd-diaries-crucials-realssd-c300/8
@Lee Treveil:
The only reason you may want to wait on that SSD purchase is that Intel is launching their new 25nm NAND process in December. This should give us higher capacities, better performance, and lower prices for the lower capacity drives.
I’d like to say that I agree with everything Jeff has said.
I’d like to say that, but I can’t.
I had one of those “state of the art” Crucial SSD’s. The exact one pictured, 256GB.
Died on me after less than two months.
Since this was my primary drive on my laptop, I couldn’t wait for a replacement from Crucial, so I went to my local store and got a nice, fast 7200 500 GB Seagate drive with a nice big fat cache.
And you know what? It’s noisier than the SSD, but for some things it’s actually quite a bit faster. Some things a bit slower. Basically a wash for me in real world use.
And it cost $500 less.
@Flavius Chis you have no idea what you are talking about. The Intel ones have a Sata 2 (3 gigabit) interface and pretty much max it out on sequential read. The C300 has a Sata 3 (6 gigabit) interface and is implemented well enough to use some of that extra bandwidth.
Also the read rate is based on the interface quality not drive size for instance intels for sata 2 is pretty good it has a good size cache and 10 parallel channels meaning it is reading from ten places in memory. The value ones being cheaper use less channels and that is why they are slower.
When intel later this year bring out their new X25’s with a sata 6 interface and small processing node (sub 25nm) and whatever other speed improvements no doubt they will be top of the list again.
Above metrics are bare numbers. I wonder, do you really subjectively feel a performance boost when doing computer intense work like programming (IDEs and compilation and running scripts on command-line are harddisk intense)?
The thing about the Intel X-25M that appealed to me was its superior performance with handling tons of simultaneous operations. It doesn’t have the highest peak transfer numbers, but it’s the performance in my real-world scenarios where it shines. Intel’s implementation of native command queueing has played a big part in this.
There’s a good example of that in action shown in this comparison test with a “fast” WD Raptor hard drive…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Jz7IMwBt4
The nice thing is that this drive has withstood the test time. It was top dog when it was introduced 2 years ago, and it’s still among the best. Since it’s such a mature product I think it has proven itself to be a reliable one as well. So we’ve outfitted over 25 workstations at our office with the 80GB version of this drive. It’s only been 6 months but they’ve been fine so far.
I concur, getting a SSD in the new Thinkpad I just bought was one of the wisest purchases I’ve made. No more clicking from HD seeks, the laptop is very much cooler (as in temperature ;]) and I notice that boot times are noticeably faster.
I am excited for the prices of these things to drop to a level when we can start substituting them in more and more applications.
“Where it gets trickier, though, is when you need more than 128 GB of storage, or when you are limited to one 2.5” hard drive – like in a laptop"
That’s when you pull out your optical drive and go for RAID 0!
http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-array-with-2-intel-x25-m-ssds
Thought it was interesting that you recommended the Seagate Momentus XT. On your own chart of HD scores it’s very nearly at the bottom of the list. I’m curious about the Intel 25nm process that is coming out in December. How long will it take for that to drop prices on mid-range SSDs across the board, and what kind of drop will we see?
Great, so now that you’ve endorsed these drives we’ll probably see them go up in price. 
I read the Feedback at Newegg, it’s not good for both drives. I’m interested to see how long these will last in your laptops.
Regarding hybrid drives, Windows (Vista and above) supports that implicitly with ReadyBoost. I’m a Linux guy at home, but stuck on Win7 at work. I was shocked at how much my system performance improved when I added a 4GB flash drive for ReadyBoost. (My main disks are all of the ‘green’ spinning variety.)
From what I can find, Windows caches all disk I/O on the ReadyBoost device, so if I were to use, e.g. a 40GB SSD, I’d have a 40GB cache against my 840GB spinning mess of virtual machines and visual studio projects. That’d speed up my builds like nobody’s business…
Totally agree - I just put in an A-DATA S599 100GB SSD. My previous main drive was a 300GB VelociRaptor. I can’t believe how much faster the whole machine is. By far and above the best upgrade I have ever done, period. My compile times (Visual Studio) are a third of what they were before, the whole thing flies!!!
“After all this analysis, it’s clear to me that traditional hard drives and flash memory are quite complimentary; they’re strong in different areas. But flash drives are the future. They will definitely replace hard drives in almost all low end and low power devices-- and future high performance hard drives will need to have a substantial chunk of flash memory on board to stay competitive.”
might be a slightly different story with memristor in the game … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
HP is investing time and money in it : http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100831c.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11165087