SSD Help! Intel 25-M vs?

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nastyskillz

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Hey guys, my friend told me how great this forum was, so i thought I would give it a try. :) I am in the market for a solid state drive and I have a few questions. I want to get a really good one with out spending more than about $300-350. I would prefer around 64Gb or 80Gb, maybe more or less depending on how good these drives really are. I have heard everyone say that the intel X25 M g2 was the best. But I have also taken a look at the Corsair P128 and some of the Patriot Torqx. They all look pretty good to me. The most important thing for me with a solid state drive is how fast my computer boots up and how fast my applications open up. That is really the main reason I am going to buy it. And from what I understand, the read speed on the ssd is really important for this matter and the intel X25 M would seem to satisfy that. If I am totally wrong here, please correct me. I would also like the drive to support the TRIM command so my drive doesn't get slower as it fills up. I don't want to go too expensive now because I know they will get cheaper and better before I look into getting another one.Basically I guess what I am trying to say is what is the absolute best ssd for my price range?

Thanks a lot guys for the help!
 
Easy, buy the OCZ Agility/Vertex/Vertex Turbo 64 GB

They are all within your price range and OCZ just released firmware 1.4 which supports TRIM. Don't even look at Corsair or Patriot, its exactly the same hardware as OCZ except OCZ has better support and custom (read faster) firmware.

But if I were going to spend that much money I would just get a 120 GB Agility. The 120 GB are faster than the 60 and 30 GB models
 
The X-25 G2 remains the best drive in real world use though the margins are getting closer. The only aspect of performance where it doesn't lead the pack is sequential writes which has a lot less impact on the "feel" of the computer that random reads does. As you say, you want to boot quickly into your OS and that and opening programs and files involves only reads which the Intel is faster at.

Choosing between and Intel product and a private label product like Patriot or Corsair when the performance is the same or better is a no brainer.
oc
 
Actually, its backwards. Its true random read is very important for real world performance, but the OCZ drives already have plenty. Its actually the seq write that holds the Intel drives back in real world performance. Check this out:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/review/19929-intel-x25-m-ssd-review/Real-world-tests-7/

Its slower than the agility in every real world test except for vista bootup/shutdown which are they are extremely close. That test depends on random read, which as you can see both drives are comparable.

Intel overcompensated with high random write which is actually pretty rare. You just need a little (read more than first gen jmicron) to match the real world need.
 
Pyrolistical said:
Actually, its backwards. Its true random read is very important for real world performance, but the OCZ drives already have plenty. Its actually the seq write that holds the Intel drives back in real world performance. Check this out:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/review/19929-intel-x25-m-ssd-review/Real-world-tests-7/

Its slower than the agility in every real world test except for vista bootup/shutdown which are they are extremely close. That test depends on random read, which as you can see both drives are comparable.

Intel overcompensated with high random write which is actually pretty rare. You just need a little (read more than first gen jmicron) to match the real world need.
Click to expand...

Hey I checked out that review at it seems really bias to me. They are trying to compare an 80 GB drive with the higher performing 120GB drives? Seems to me like they should be comparing to 64 GB drives or something.
 
i just got a intel 80gb g2 i love it
i have not tried any other ssd
but from all the reviews and my own experience running vista right now until win 7 comes in
I would get the intel drive because i believe its the best drive to run a OS on
with critical apps on it
the price difference between the ocz 64gb and the intel 80gb g2 is not enough for me to not go with intel. The 120gb ocz drives are 300 and over and alot more expensive than the intel drives that seem to bench better. I mean yea if you could find a 120gb ocz drive clost to the intel drive price by all means get it as its alot more disk space and still has great speed.
but where as the ocz 64gb are selling between 200-230 and you cna buy a intel drive for $250 I would go with intel that would be easy because your getting extra 26gb of space for 20 or 30 dollars
 
Well as far as I am concerned, I would want at least 64 GB space. From what I have been reading, the intel ssd drives are bar none when it comes to random reads. This is what is most crucial in day to day computing. that is probably the reason why an intel drive will turn on or shut down a computer faster than any other drive. The only place intel will lack is the copying of files, which is about double the time it would take on an OCZ drive.
 
From what I've seen/read I doubt anyone, including me, could tell the difference between Intel and Indilinx in a blind test unless someone goes straight for a large sequential write where the difference would be obvious.

I'm waiting for 100GB+ drives to become affordable. I don't really care which one it is. Bank account balance is a difference I'd actually see.
 
aldamon said:
From what I've seen/read I doubt anyone, including me, could tell the difference between Intel and Indilinx in a blind test unless someone goes straight for a large sequential write where the difference would be obvious.
Click to expand...

This is most likely true.

At this point with the Vertez community and OCZ especially being so proactive, OCZ is a great value. Garbage collection and all. But at the end of the day I think you should go for the best bang for the buck. And Intel will win if it can be in stock.

That said, I think the extra IOPS and the way its performance degrades less, the Intel is a better OS drive in that respect also.
 
I am biased because I already have a Intel G2 SSD drive, but in truth you will not really notice the slower writes because you only write to the disk in large amounts when you are installing programs, which is not everyday. In addition, you should not be downloading large amounts of data to the SSD you should have a conventional secondary drive for this purpose. I had a Patriot Torqx drive which I returned for the Intel drive because I had issues with the Torqx drive not being recognized.
 
Megalomaniac said:
That said, I think the extra IOPS and the way its performance degrades less, the Intel is a better OS drive in that respect also.
Click to expand...

What will the extra IOPS do for me? Where is that recognized (ie installing programs or opening applications)?

You guys don't think think that intel will make any firmware changes to improve write times on these drives do you?

I wish intel made this drive with better write times, then it would be king. There are just too many choices
 
The Indilinix (OCZ Agility, Vertex) drives are more suited for daily use given higher sequential write performance.

The Intel drive has faster multi-threaded random reads and writes. I'm not sure where exactly this comes in during daily use. The sequential write speeds are lower. The X25-E is certainly the best SSD on the market; I'm not entirely sure about the X18/25M though.

Oh yeah, and in steady state, the G1 drives are faster than the G2s with it's aggressive firmware. The G2s will have a firmware revision with Windows 7 TRIM support, although if you are not going with Windows 7 the G1s are going to be faster drives.
 
Pyrolistical said:
Actually, its backwards. Its true random read is very important for real world performance, but the OCZ drives already have plenty. Its actually the seq write that holds the Intel drives back in real world performance. Check this out:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/review/19929-intel-x25-m-ssd-review/Real-world-tests-7/

Its slower than the agility in every real world test except for vista bootup/shutdown which are they are extremely close. That test depends on random read, which as you can see both drives are comparable.

Intel overcompensated with high random write which is actually pretty rare. You just need a little (read more than first gen jmicron) to match the real world need.
Click to expand...

Hey, you're right. I'll just disregard all those other reviews that recommended the X25-M as "the" drive to get if you want the best real world performance with the lowest performance degredation over time.

The review also says: "While the Intel X25-M does have far superior 4K random writing performance over the Indilinx drives, it doesn’t make the Intel drive feel faster in mainstream use, simply because 4k random writing performance in the Intel X25-M remains largely untapped."

I thought 4k random writes made up the vast majority of the writes that occur in the OS? If that's the case, even if the X25-M doesn't feel a lot faster I wouldn't say that the 4k random write performance remains largely untapped...

Don't get me wrong, some of those other drives are nice SSDs but this review isn't really consistent with most other reviews. The OCZ Apex beats the Intel drive in a few of those tests but there's no way any sane person would recommend one of those over the X25-M if performance is the foremost concern, lol.
 
Y'all keep forgetting, Intel still has the lead on the read performance in any category, and that's the most important for OS. I mean, you don't want to do too many large sequential writes on any SSD, do you? Because only then Intel will worse than anything else.
 
Please read the information below and you will understand why Intel put so much effort into random read & write speeds as well as raw IO instead of sequential write speed.

Engineering Windows 7
Welcome to our blog dedicated to the engineering of Microsoft Windows 7

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Sequential Reads and Writes: Also Good

Sequential read and write operations range between quite good to superb. Because flash chips can be configured in parallel and data spread across the chips, today’s better SSDs can read sequentially at rates greater than 200 MB/s, which is close to double the rate many 7200 RPM drives can deliver. For sequential writes, we see some devices greatly exceeding the rates of typical HDDs, and most SSDs doing fairly well in comparison. In today’s market, there are still considerable differences in sequential write rates between SSDs. Some greatly outperform the typical HDD, others lag by a bit, and a few are poor in comparison.

Random Writes & Flushes: Your mileage will vary greatly

The differences in sequential write rates are interesting to note, but for most users they won’t make for as notable a difference in overall performance as random writes.

What’s a long time for a random write? Well, an average HDD can typically move 4 KB random writes to its spinning media in 7 to 15 milliseconds, which has proven to be largely unacceptable. As a result, most HDDs come with 4, 8 or more megabytes of internal memory and attempt to cache small random writes rather than wait the full 7 to 15 milliseconds. When they do cache a write, they return success to the OS even though the bytes haven’t been moved to the spinning media. We typically see these cached writes completing in a few hundred microseconds (so 10X, 20X or faster than actually writing to spinning media). In looking at millions of disk writes from thousands of telemetry traces, we observe 92% of 4 KB or smaller IOs taking less than 1 millisecond, 80% taking less than 600 microseconds, and an impressive 48% taking less than 200 microseconds. Caching works!

On occasion, we’ll see HDDs struggle with bursts of random writes and flushes. Drives that cache too much for too long and then get caught with too much of a backlog of work to complete when a flush comes along, have proven to be problematic. These flushes and surrounding IOs can have considerably lengthened response times. We’ve seen some devices take a half second to a full second to complete individual IOs and take 10’s of seconds to return to a more consistently responsive state. For the user, this can be awful to endure as responsiveness drops to painful levels. Think of it, the response time for a single I/O can range from 200 microseconds up to a whopping 1,000,000 microseconds (1 second).

When presented with realistic workloads, we see the worst of the SSDs producing very long IO times as well, as much as one half to one full second to complete individual random write and flush requests. This is abysmal for many workloads and can make the entire system feel choppy, unresponsive and sluggish.
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
It's hilarious how backwards most of the people in this thread have it.

Let Linus Torvalds educate you - http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/ssd-followup.html
Click to expand...
Agreed, latency is a killer, and that's why my first SSD was an X-25M, but a lot has happened since I bought that first one and Linus wrote that last spring. The SSD's with JMicron controllers he refers to that had the high latency/stutter issues are all but gone from the market and the SSD's with Indilinx controller chips are much more competitive. I still like the Intel G2 overall but at this point there is indeed a real competition.

What I would tell people at this point is that which one is up to their own preferences but the important thing is to get one. This is the biggest single upgrade the average person has every been able to do. Storage performance has lagged CPU and memory performance ever since the first PC with a 20MB MFM drive rolled out the door and got sold to some poor schlub for $12,000...

oc
 
I just picked up an Intel X25-M 80GB G2 and replaced my Cuda 7200.10's in RAID 0. I just installed Windows Vista 64bit, Sp1, MS Office 07, Need For Speed Shift, and Prototype..(I have 22GB free space left) I installed the games on the system to see how fast the games loaded.. I can tell the difference big time in load times.. not so much in install(write) times, I think install times are about the same.

I LOVE the boot and shutdown times.. as soon as I see the background I open IE or Firefox and it opens immediately. Opening and closing apps is lightning fast. I look forward to faster write times(in future) as I am kind of obsessive when it comes to install times.. so I might pick up a second one and run it in RAID0.. but I'll have to save some money for that purchase.

I currently have the 80GB g2 as the OS/app drive, and a Cuda 7200.10 as secondary.. Im thinking I'll pick up a 300GB VRaptor and install my games and store my files on that.
Waiting for W7 optimizations for the SSD :)
 
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The average random write performance of a mechanical hard drive is around 0.4MB/s.

Most SSDs have a random write performance in the 10MB/s range these days. Intel's is closer to 50MB/s. If you ever check out the speed of system writes in Resource Monitor it's roughly 170KB/s, which isn't going to challenge your hard drive that much. Now if that were to come in a 0.2 second burst; you come up with about 0.9MB/s which a mechanical HD will certainly struggle at.

It really depends on your use. For me, since SSDs don't have much space, I do a lot of file swapping for games from my storage drive to my SSDs. The faster sequential write performance helps a lot here. Your mileage will vary based on use. I personally don't need 50MB/s of random writes because I'm not hosting a webserver. One thing you should probably consider is, if you are hosting a web server on an MLC drive; probably not the greatest idea.
 
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astrallite said:
The average random write performance of a mechanical hard drive is around 0.4MB/s.

Most SSDs have a random write performance in the 10MB/s range these days. Intel's is closer to 50MB/s. If you ever check out the speed of system writes in Resource Monitor it's roughly 170KB/s, which isn't going to challenge your hard drive that much.

It really depends on your use. For me, since SSDs don't have much space, I do a lot of file swapping for games from my storage drive to my SSDs. The faster sequential write performance helps a lot here. Your mileage will vary based on use. I personally don't need 50MB/s of random writes because I'm not hosting a webserver. One thing you should probably consider is, if you are hosting a web server on an MLC drive; probably not the greatest idea.
Click to expand...


i totally agree with you here !
 
astrallite said:
The average random write performance of a mechanical hard drive is around 0.4MB/s.

Most SSDs have a random write performance in the 10MB/s range these days. Intel's is closer to 50MB/s. If you ever check out the speed of system writes in Resource Monitor it's roughly 170KB/s, which isn't going to challenge your hard drive that much.

It really depends on your use. For me, since SSDs don't have much space, I do a lot of file swapping for games from my storage drive to my SSDs. The faster sequential write performance helps a lot here. Your mileage will vary based on use. I personally don't need 50MB/s of random writes because I'm not hosting a webserver. One thing you should probably consider is, if you are hosting a web server on an MLC drive; probably not the greatest idea.
Click to expand...

I'd correct you, but the facts are already out there, so if you're still this ignorant of them, it must be willful.
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
Your point? Sequential writes are not that important in overall SSD performance, only in large file transfers.
Click to expand...

In just benches or actual perceptible performance differences? I stick by what I typed earlier. It's obvious the largest perceptible difference is just going from a mechanical drive to a good SSD. After that we're talking about diminishing returns to the extreme.
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
I'd correct you, but the facts are already out there, so if you're still this ignorant of them, it must be willful.
Click to expand...

Please explain? I own the X25-E, X18-M, X25-M G2, OCZ Vertex EX, OCZ Vertex, and Samsung G2s. I've done extensive benching in every drive and have real-life experience. If you own these drives and have something interesting to add, please do so.
 
astrallite said:
For me, since SSDs don't have much space, I do a lot of file swapping for games from my storage drive to my SSDs.
Click to expand...

So, if running a webserver on MLC SSD is not the greatest idea, then swapping large files back and forth is?:confused:
 
nastyskillz said:
Hey I checked out that review at it seems really bias to me. They are trying to compare an 80 GB drive with the higher performing 120GB drives? Seems to me like they should be comparing to 64 GB drives or something.
Click to expand...

Here's a better review:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=8

Even with the now upgraded +20% seq write, the Intel drives are still worst than Indilinx in terms of heavy real world performance.
 
I am still on the fence about choosing intel over OCZ, especially with the recent firmware problems. All I want is the best solid state drive for OS and apps. Thats why I was thinking of the intel drive. I will not be transferring GB files to my ssd very often, if at all. And even so, it is still light years faster than a HDD, so I can stand to wait 30 seconds for it to copy. But I want a drive that boots up my computer and opens my apps as fast as possible, and from what I understand, the intel drive is king for that. If anybody has any comments on this statement, please add.
 
That video is a cold boot.

I opened all programs and placed them in order on the screen (where I wanted them)
I closed them all in place
I placed the shortcuts for all those programs in the "startup" directory,
I rebooted the machine,
I pressed record while after machine had "posted", and that's what you're seeing

It's not from hibernate.. thats from restart / cold boot.. and a fresh install of W7 after running HDDErase3.3 on the drives.

I would be interested to see somebody do similar with some OCZ drives, just to see how similar the results would be.
 
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Also here is a video that shows the boot time with only 1 intel ssd g2 80 gb and it is about 23 seconds, almost double the raid. But the only thing is with raid, you can't have TRIM...

vid:
Code: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5LkX3xejJ4
 
TehQuick said:
So, if running a webserver on MLC SSD is not the greatest idea, then swapping large files back and forth is?:confused:
Click to expand...

Running a webserver on an MLC ssd vs using a swap file on a storage drive have nothing to do with each other. If there is, I'd like to hear your reasoning. I am also confused.
 
astrallite said:
Running a webserver on an MLC ssd vs using a swap file on a storage drive have nothing to do with each other. If there is, I'd like to hear your reasoning. I am also confused.
Click to expand...

I don't know how you got "swap file" out of the statement "swapping large files back and forth." He was clearly contrasting 4k small writes with sequential write speeds.
 
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