Help me pick the right PCIe SSD that'll serve me for along, long time...

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A6TH

A6TH

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So, I'm at the tablet right now, it's 1 a.m., I'm really tired, I've tried to write this post 3 times, but something always happens like me hitting the back button accidently or reloading the page etc. So the last time I wrote the post, I copied it and, guess what, I clicked the reload again, but hey, I had the copy. But, as I tried to paste it, guess what, it wasn't in the clipboard, so I decided to write this post and hopefully succeed in posting this thread xD So there are two PCIe SSDs that have caught my eye, ASUS Raidr Express 240GB and OCZ RevoDrive 3 240GB. But Raidr is $450 and RevoDrive is $650. Please help me with the decision, is $200 really worth the cost? Btw, ASUS won't be available for at least 2 months, but I can wait, kinda, if you persuade me that it's better to wait than to get the OCZ one. Please help, this is big money, I don't wanna make a mistake.
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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The big benefit from a SSD is the minimal latency which is important on small reads and writes.
That is what the os does mostly.

The big benefit from a pcie attachment is the greater sequential capability.

If you have an app that does massive sequential processing, a pcie drive might make sense.

But, for normal work, any SSD will do the job, and they all perform about the same.

And...
Do not be much swayed by vendor synthetic SSD benchmarks.
They are done with apps that push the SSD to it's maximum using queue lengths of 30 or so.
Most desktop users will do one or two things at a time, so they will see queue lengths of one or two.
What really counts is the response times, particularly for small random I/O. That is what the os does mostly.
For that, the response times of current SSD's are remarkably similar. And quick. They will be 50X faster than a hard drive.
In sequential operations, they will be 2x faster than a hard drive, perhaps 3x if you have a sata3 interface.
Larger SSD's are preferable. They have more nand chips that can be accessed in parallel. Sort of an internal raid-0 if you will.
Also, a SSD will slow down as it approaches full. That is because it will have a harder time finding free nand blocks to do an update without a read/write operation.



For any sort of d
 
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A6TH

A6TH

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Since ASUS Raidr costs $450 and SATA 3 SSD $350, I could give $100 more for noticeably different performance, but waiting two months... I do pretty much data transfer and modelling, an SSD would be a life saver, I just want bigger transfer speeds :) The bigger, the better. Would OCZ one do better than, for example, Kingston HyperX 240GB?
 
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A6TH

A6TH

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I've decided to go with SATA 3. Even though the price difference is about $120, i still don't think that price is worth the PCIe drive. I think i won't notice any difference in real-work performance, I mean, maybe slight difference, but nothing to pay $120 more :D
 
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JohnnyLucky

JohnnyLucky

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May 30, 2007
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The Asus ROG Raidr Express PCIe solid state drive is not considered to be an excellent ssd. The problem is the interface. It is PCIe 2.0 x2 instead of PCIe 2.0 x 4 which is the minimum requirement for good performance.

The OCZ RevoDrive 3 is no longer in production. Others have already mentioned that OCZ has declared bankruptcy.

You mentioned SATA 3 6Gb/s solid state drives. I maintain the ssd database listed in a sticky at the very top of this forum section. Here is the link:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

Scroll down to brands and models you are interested in and follow the links to the technical reviews.
 
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J

jmac_789

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As others have said stay away from OCZ and the Gskill Phoenix Blade (Basically same as revodrive 350, but slightly cheaper). in general stay away from SandForce controllers if you care about your data and your time. The engineers of that controller played some nasty tricks to sell that controller and you will suffer in your day to day usage (and down the track when the raid 0 array fails and you lose all your data.)
If you want quick performance for daily usage, even the PCIe SSDs with x8 interface claiming 2000MB/s (Phoenix Blade) will not outperform high end ssds (eg Samsung 840/850 PRO/EVO). Infact the Samsung drives will perform twice as fast as the fastest consumer PCIe ssds in daily usage.
If you use your computer to edit high quality video or you are running a server with high access rates you will see some benefit from PCIe SSD but that's about it. (and you are still risking losing all your data when the controllers eventually fail - even with the firmware upgrades from 2011.)
I find it really sad that these companies create these synthetic benchmarks to trick customers, but thats commercialism for you - often these benchmarks are faked, using custom firmware, custom chunks of data, pre-prepared drives, specially set up systems, and only perform to the level they claim in that exact scenario (benchmarking).

I think maybe one other instance where a PCIe SSD with high sequential reads may be of use is if you don't have enough ram for what you are doing, and then as a cache drive they might serve some purpose.

At the end of the day, these PCIe SSDs are just an experiment, and any consumer who buys them is a guinea pig.

If your goal is to build a PC that ranks highly in benchmarking then you could go for this, but the machine you build for this will not necessarily perform well for daily use.
 
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