I switched to an OCZ Summit in my laptop about 6 months ago. The difference was amazing. I actually switched back temporarily when I upgraded to Windows 7, and then returned to the SSD after a few weeks. Windows 7 understands SSD’s and it’s like running a completely different computer.
And the Summit isn’t even OCZ’s best SSD. But it’s got good bang for the buck. Great speed, low cost.
if only my laptop was SATA II and not just SATA…
Have to agree completely, in the 20+ years of purchasing hardware and chasing better performance I have never seen anything so dramatic for the price as a single SSD. I recently purchased an Intel 80 gigabyte SSD and it cut the time on my most i/o bound application in half. And that was verses a RAID 0 setup. My only concern is how long it will ast as I’m using it for swap and I do generate 20-60 gigabytes in temp files per day.
While I know RAID controllers don’t support TRIM yet, from what I understand that’s not a big deal with the Intel drives. It would be nice to see an additional performance benchmark with the SSD’s setup in RAID 0. The you would have a real apples-to-apples comparison.
Regards,
Robert
There’s something I’ve been wondering about for while now: My computer only has a 1.5Gb/s SATA interface (original MacBook Pro), but does that really matter when the Crucial disc maxes out at 250MB/s for reading and 190MB/s for writing? Or am I missing something obvious?
Jeff: It doesn’t work that way in practice. Intel drives, in particular, have been plagued by fatal failures, not to mention the recent firmware fiasco and bricking.
Great post. I totally and wholeheartedly agree with you.
A few months back I purchased a Corsair SSD drive for about the same price for my personal Black MacBook (discontinued model), and now it performs better than my brand new shiny work MacBook Pro.
Replacing my traditional 5400rpm hard drive with a SSD was definitely the most noticeable performance improvement I have experienced in long time.
IMO it is a no brainer.
Any recommendations for desktop PC’s pre-built with SSD’s as their primary hard drives or is DIY the only way to go at this point?
The only thing i’ve seen give a greater speed increase at about the same was upgrading from my motherboard RAID controller to a dedicated RAID controller chip.
Nearly tripled my speed. Though you need the raid to begin with 
I can’t tell you how much a Crucial SSD changed my humble netbook, a Asus EEE 1000h. It’s transformed it from a horrid, pesky thing I hated into a passable machine for development work on the train. And it’s silent, it’s fast (think boot WinXP from cold in 10s!!), isn’t affected by motion and is lighter than the POS it replaced. Love it, no turning back!
Intel and Crucial are not actually best performance/price SSDs. I’ve OCZ Agility which is their lower end SSD and it’s much cheaper and almost as good. OCZ vertex and summit are even better…
@Leif
You are mixing up gigabit and Gigabyte. 1.5Gb/s is only 187.5MB/s throughput. So you would be losing 25% of your read speed.
It looks like a sales add. How about a benchmark?
One word: Fusion-io.
This company is the Seymour Cray of SSDs. Even the maddeningly fast newest Intel X25-E (different from Torvalds’) is a crawler compared to their stuff. Especially the ioDrive Duo. Hey, there is a reason why a professional gamer calls it a “paradigm-changer”.
Granted, you can’t boot them, because they bypass the southbridge (another bottleneck). I don’t know for Linux support, since they require a special driver, but considering their target (large companies), one can expect this is not an issue.
Some reading:
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-vs-Intel-X25M-SSD-RAID-Grudge-Match/
Intel’s SSD is an SLC disk, Crucial’s an MLC, hence the price difference.
The Intel Jeff mentioned pricing for, the X25-M, is the mainstream drive and it uses MLC like the Crucial. It’s the X25-E series that uses the more reliable SLC.
SSDs based on NAND don’t excel at random writes. This is a fundamental difference in how the technology works indeed. Indeed, there is very little diffrence between random wires and sequential writes. Image fact, many “sequential” writes aren’t. Also, many writes can incur a delay because of the need to write to an empty page. I’m not sure why everyone has so many misunderstandings about NAND and SSDs.
Also, everyone is neglecting that so far operating systems, file systems, bus interfaces, are not optimize for SSD workloads. Indeed, unless you’re on an embedded device, you are using all your Flash devices are being treated as block devices.
I’m very excited about this drive here:
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_z_drive_m84_pci_express_ssd
If their claims are accurate, this thing gets up to 600MB/s sustained write speed. Hasn’t been released yet though.
For an absolutely brilliant description on the the technical ins and outs of SSDs the following article (VERY LONG) is a must read.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531
Seth
@Dzamir
Don’t worry were working on that - the ext version of Windows will run WGA individually on each system file as it loads it then download a HD movie advert for all the new features on every boot.
Great post, especially the deep performance characterization of the different manufacturers.
I am considering getting the SSD version of the MacBook Air - does anyone know what kind of SSD they use?
@JC
The last time I checked up on SSD lifetime it wasn’t even a problem anymore. I did the math and I think the drive came out to last more than 50 years. Can anyone help me out with some documentation for this? I’ve been digging a little bit but can’t find what I was originally reading.