Mini Review of 3 SSD's--Samsung, Sandisk and Mtron

[hmsrolst]

In the last month I've purchased and used 3 SSD's, and thought it would be helpful to post my experience. It's quite in line with what reviews have shown, so rather than repeating numbers, I'll provide how different it feels. At the outset, I should clarify that I don't game at all, and use my systems primarily for office applications and web-surfing.

Samsung 32GB 1.8" PATA SSD--Following pure's suggestion on the notebook forum, I purchased a used Latitude X1 and installed this drive. My primary goal was no moving parts and silence, but the drive also booted somewhat faster, and programs and files also opened faster. I was somewhat surprised that the performance, although clearly improved, wasn't even more dramatic, given that I was replacing a 4,200 rpm drive.

32GB Sandisk 5000 SATA--I put this in the system I use throughout the day for work. The system basics are an AOpen MB i945GTm-VHL mobo, T7400 Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM. Here there were very noticeable improvements over the Samsung 5,400 rpm laptop drive I was replacing. Boot times were quicker, with 28 seconds between the XP crawl starting and the desktop appearing. Programs opened quickly. At the same time, one consistently annoying issue was that when the system would come out of standby, trying to use Outlook or Firefox would initially cause about a 30-45 second delay with both frozen up. Perhaps there was some kind of indexing going on that required lots of writes (this is just speculation).

32GB Mtron 6000 SATA--I replaced the Sandisk with this drive. and it takes performance to another level. Now there are only 7 seconds between the XP crawl and the appearance of the desktop. Office programs and Firefox open in a flash, as do individual files. And when the system comes out of standby (which it does very quickly), there is no pause with anything. Last year I was playing around with an IRAM and the performance with this drive is very close. It is the biggest leap forward in improving everyday experience using a PC that I've come across. (The IRAM was spectacular, but I couldn't get the stability I needed for serious work.) Bottom line--this is expensive (about $600 shipped), but having invested a lot more in hardware over the years, this really returns by far the most bang for the buck.

I'm sure that these will be coming down in price. (I'm an old guy and don't want to wait.) If you don't want to bite the bullet now, hold out for the Mtron, or something newer and better, to come down in price. It's everything that the reviews at Tomshardware and Anandtech say, and will improve your every day computing experience like nothing else.

[frostedflakes]

Pretty interesting, I wonder how much effect controller and firmware has on SSD performance. Going by the basic benchmarks, I wouldn't think the MTron should be a whole lot faster than the Sandisk. Sure, the MTron does have about a 30MB/s advantage over the Sandisk in sequential read/write, but access times are similar (both 0.1ms according to reviews I've seen). If you compared a mechanical HDD that read at 70MB/s and one that read at 100MB/s, I doubt there would be such a significant increase in performance.

So perhaps the controller and/or firmware on the MTron are able to more efficiently handle real world read/write scenarios than most other SSDs. Just my $0.02 on the matter.

Anyways, thanks a bunch for posting this.

[Moogles]

May I ask where you purchased the Mtron MSD 6000? And did it come in some kind of retail packaging?

Good to know you like it btw.

[hmsrolst]

May I ask where you purchased the Mtron MSD 6000? And did it come in some kind of retail packaging?

I purchased it here: http://rocketdisk.com/products_new.php, and it came with retail packaging.

[Capsaicin]

Sweet. Thanks for posting this. Did you get close to filling up the SSDs (and was there a performance penalty)?

[hmsrolst]

Did you get close to filling up the SSDs (and was there a performance penalty)?

I've only got 6GB on it. Since there's no inner and outer part of a spinning disk, I don't see why there'd be a performance penalty as you fill it up, but I don't have any real expertise on it.

[Luminair]

Thanks for the reviews! I imagine we'll be immersed in a world of wonderful SSDs in 5 years.

[ginahoy]

...one consistently annoying issue was that when the system would come out of standby, trying to use Outlook or Firefox would initially cause about a 30-45 second delay with both frozen up. Perhaps there was some kind of indexing going on that required lots of writes...

Was this new behavior, or was it also happening with the Samsung HDD?

[david25]

Thanks this is very useful info, time to save up!

[Capsaicin]

I don't see why there'd be a performance penalty as you fill it up, but I don't have any real expertise on it.

There's conjecture that there might be a penalty due to wear-leveling. /shrug

[hmsrolst]

...one consistently annoying issue was that when the system would come out of standby, trying to use Outlook or Firefox would initially cause about a 30-45 second delay with both frozen up. Perhaps there was some kind of indexing going on that required lots of writes...

Was this new behavior, or was it also happening with the Samsung HDD?

It was new behavior.

On balance, for my use, I would definitely take the Sandisk over the regular disk drive, because the problem is just an annoyance compared to the perfomance gain. It's just that the MTron is so much better than both. I'll be quite happy putting the Sandisk in another machine that I have on all day and very seldom put on standby, because doing so kills my VPN connection.

[ginahoy]

There's conjecture that there might be a penalty due to wear-leveling. /shrug

Who cares about wear leveling! No sense in buying a larger drive at today's prices, just to be able to implement wear leveling. By the time you'd see damage from write cycles, prices will have dropped an order of magnitude!

Hopefully there's a way to disable that feature so you won't see performance penalty if drive is mostly full.

[Edwood]

Thanks for the high end review.

SSD prices need to be cut in half before I'll even consider them.

A 64GB Mtron would be on my short list to buy if it was at least $600 or less.

But $1200+? No thanks. I'd rather get really creative with silencing two Raptors in RAID 0.

-Ed

[jessekopelman]

There's conjecture that there might be a penalty due to wear-leveling. /shrug

Who cares about wear leveling! No sense in buying a larger drive at today's prices, just to be able to implement wear leveling. By the time you'd see damage from write cycles, prices will have dropped an order of magnitude!

Hopefully there's a way to disable that feature so you won't see performance penalty if drive is mostly full.

Why would wear leveling give you a performance penalty as the drive fills? If anything, performance should increase, as there are fewer and fewer unused cells to choose from. Although I'd expect no effect either way, since the table of all possible cells that counts how many times they been written and which ones are bad should remain a constant. The only penalty from wear leveling that I know of is a slight impact on write speeds, since the drive needs to do this lookup before writing each bit and that could certainly be negated by a faster embedded processor in the drive (this is one of the reasons some drives have better throughput than others despite having identical access times).