Which Brand For SSD is the Best and Fastest and Most Stable

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Intel of course. The SSD brand doesn't mean anything; for example Kingston makes some SSDs with the Intel controller; which are good SSD for a low price.

Its more like videocards; you have a zillion brands (Club3D, Sapphire, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Gainward, EVGA, HIS, Palit, PNY, Point of View, Powercolor, Sparkle, XFX, Zotac) but that brand means nothing - its about the nVidia GeForce chip that powers the videocard. All the 'brands' do is put their logo on the card and add some crappy games to the product package.

With SSDs its not much different, there are only few controller brands. Ordered from best to worst:
- Intel
- Sandforce
- Indilinx
- Samsung (crappy)
- JMicron (crappy)

So the best SSD you can buy now probably is still the Intel X25-M G2 80GB/160GB. Intel will be refreshing its SSDs though with a new generation controller. If you can wait a bit still, i would.
 
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OKAY.. What about brands like kingston and g skil where would they rate???
 
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None of these two brands make their own controllers. Kingston makes SSDs with multiple controllers; like OCZ. So it depends per product. The Kingston 40GB SSDNow V-series is a Intel-controller SSD. But the 60GB/120GB versions do not use an Intel controller but Indilinx if i'm not mistaken.

If you want a good SSD; right now you can't really go wrong picking Intel X25-M 80GB/160GB. Just make sure you get the G2 version (34nm flash memory).
 
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Sandforce still doesn't beat Intel in random read IOps, and those are the most important spec for a system disk. So by any means the Intel X25-M G2 is still 'alive and kicking'. But Intel will refresh their SSD line soon; just don't know when exactly.
 
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Those are the new Sandforce-controller units, which are pretty decent. But their random IOps is comparable and sometimes lower than Intel X25-M G2, so its by no means a great revolution. Probably when Intel releases its new generation SSD controller, with capacities up to 600GB, will you see more IOps.

As we all know, IOps is most important for the system drive, which is what SSDs are mainly used for. The additional sequential performance the Sandforce-controller provides, is nice for larger SSDs acting as mass-storage also.

A 1TB SSD would satisfy the storage needs for all but the most capacity-hungry users and has the benefit of longer lifetime due to more flash cells being available, and has all the potential for many flash channels operating in parallel - meaning great IOps if you got a smart controller.

Right now the Intel controller has 8 channels. I could imagine that could be 64. That would mean the queue-depth has to rise also, meaning Windows and software has to change to allow this performance potential. The operating system can increase the queue depth even with 'dumb' applications. The low latency of SSDs would also help cope with applications that use blocking I/O. Writes could be buffered into RAM efficiently, so they appear to be extremely fast. To make that safe in terms of filesystem corruption protection, NTFS needs to be modified also.

It's very sad to see Windows is lagging so much in terms of advanced storage technology. Every other OS has more advanced filesystems and when you worked with Sun's ZFS you start trusting data stored on NTFS less and less. Also performance suffers because there are so many optimizations for serial-operation HDDs, that the parallel-operation SSDs suffer in terms of lost potential performance.
 
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Pailin

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no, the C300 uses the new Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2 SATA-III SSD controller.

These drives seem to outdo the Intel in terms of IOps (by 4 times in some tests) and the new sandforce controlled SSD's which have no (nead for any) cache at all.

The 128GB has slower writes than the tested 256GB C300 and write IOps.

The C300:
128GB Sequential Read 355MB/s Write 140MB/s $399
256GB Sequential Read 355MB/s Write 215MB/s$799

I'd like to see some more real reviews once this hits retail as I have seen some conflicting IOps results from different places. Some make it look amazing!!! some pretty avg or even below avg...

Its Sequential speed has tested at 378read and 226Write in various sized test runs on ATTO.
 
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Oh my mistake then. I haven't seen a good review of that Marvell controller yet, i'm skeptical of four times the IOps though. In the review of Tweaktown the Intel wasn't included in the comparison.

Probably when its available in the wild more reviews will pop up.
 
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Pailin

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heh

well, we shall have to learn to read between the bars of their data manipulation as best we can I guess ~_^

The links for the benchmarkreviews & TweakTown reviews should be real though - since they had a chance for some hands on testing... Will wait to see some more tests though.

Am also contemplating being Really patient and waiting for the new 25nm 4th Qtr SSD next gen drives... and gettting some other upgrades in the mean time :D

not sure I can wait that long though LOL
 
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"Micron only showed off peak numbers for a very short iometer run so we'll have to wait for me to get a drive before I can get a good idea of random performance."

So these 'benchmarks' actually originate from Micron and i think i'm not paranoid when i say you should wait for real reviews. Probably its very competitive to the Intel in random IOps, but 4 times the IOps sounds a little over the top. :)

It does appear to hold its performance level quite good though, from the other benchmark links you posted. But a real test comes when the 20-page reviews pop up. :)
 
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Personally, i'm much more excited towards the next 25nm generation NAND flash SSD's coming in Q4 of this year, where Intel will refresh its Postville-series SSD's called the X25-M. The first generation used 50nm flash, the G2 uses 34nm flash, and the new generation will use 25nm.

Now that would boost either capacity or lower price-per-GB. But the real thrill is when Intel manages to improve their already successful controller even more. All the technology is here today to make 100.000IOps performing SSDs for the consumer market.

I'm just guessing Intel doesn't want to boost performance too quickly; to have a selling point when newer generations pop up so people have a reason to upgrade. They already have many of the initial SSD curlpits under control - write amplification, wear leveling, write remapping, buffering, command queueing, multi-channel flash, garbage collection, trim, etc. The limited 75MB/s sequential write speed of the X25-M is pretty 'artificial' if you ask me. If Intel wanted, they could have easily boosted that to 200MB/s. But then the difference between newer generations would be smaller too, and maybe not even worth the effort/cost. But to go from 75MB/s to something 300MB/s+ that's an upgrade, of course.

Time will tell, as always.
 
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