Please help me pick a SSD

[noobz1lla]

Guys what are enterprise class SSDs? Who are people with enterprising needs? Lol.

Here is what I am considering.

Intel X25 (160gigs @ $420)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167024

OCZ Vertex Turbo (120gigs @ $390)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227470

Kingston V series+ (128gigs @ $303 with Bing)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139113

Kingston V series (128gigs @ $240 with Bing)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139136


Are there any new Intels coming out anytime soon? Or any other promising product releases in the SSD market?

 

[eloric]

Enterprise refers to business applications with multiple users (maybe a 1000), usually accessing a common hard drive farm called a Storage Attached Network aka SAN.

Typical Enterprise drives spin at 15000 rpm, and are linked together in a striped RAID array for extra speed and reliability. They cost a lot of money because they are over-engineered to reduce chances of failure.

Solid state enterprise solutions have been limited to I/O intensive applications that require the utmost spped. Here are some players at the enterprise level, working with PCI based interfaces to overcome the SATA bottlenecks:

http://www.violin-memory.com/

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1350363,00.html

http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/lsisas3801e/

The manufacturers referenced in your post are trying to break into the market and will surly succeed as the technology becomes cheaper, faster and more widely adopted.

As for your own personal play toy, I recommend Intel. They still have the market dominated. I love mine.

Anybody know if Intel is coming out with any new models soon?

 

[sub mesa]

2010 Q4 comes 25nm Intel products with a new 6Gbps controller as well, called Postville Refresh.

 

[noobz1lla]

2010 Q4 comes 25nm Intel products with a new 6Gbps controller as well, called Postville Refresh.

Is Q4 around Christmas? I may have to wait in that case.

 

[noobz1lla]

Enterprise refers to business applications with multiple users (maybe a 1000), usually accessing a common hard drive farm called a Storage Attached Network aka SAN.

Typical Enterprise drives spin at 15000 rpm, and are linked together in a striped RAID array for extra speed and reliability. They cost a lot of money because they are over-engineered to reduce chances of failure.

Solid state enterprise solutions have been limited to I/O intensive applications that require the utmost spped. Here are some players at the enterprise level, working with PCI based interfaces to overcome the SATA bottlenecks:

http://www.violin-memory.com/

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1350363,00.html

http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/lsisas3801e/

The manufacturers referenced in your post are trying to break into the market and will surly succeed as the technology becomes cheaper, faster and more widely adopted.

As for your own personal play toy, I recommend Intel. They still have the market dominated. I love mine.

Anybody know if Intel is coming out with any new models soon?

I've heard a lot about Intels I/O performance being supreme. Can someone please explain to me what I/O performance is. What does I/O stand for? Interface? Sorry I'm a newb when it comes to SSDs. Thanks.

 

[sub mesa]

I/O = Input / Output. An I/O request is one command for the SSD to either read or write something.

When talking about SSD or HDD performance, you can distinguish sequential performance from random I/O performance.

Sequential performance is important when reading or writing large files such as copy tasks or playing a movie. SSDs are only twice as fast as HDDs in this.

Random I/O performance is much different. This is most frequent on desktop system disks and common on server systems. Random I/O is called random because it cannot be predicted what will be written or read next; unlike with sequential 1-2-3-4-5 pattern where you can guess the next block read will be block 6. So it is unpredictable and thus similar to a random pattern.

So Random I/O is about transferring small files or just small chunks contained in large files. For example a game called World of Warcraft will read textures during playing the game. Also things like booting, installing and launching applications would fall into this category.

Random I/O performance is measured in IOps; I/O operations per second. This relates to MB/s in the sense that 100 IOps of 4KiB equals 0,4MB/s. This is generally the random read performance you'll get from a mechanical harddrive. You'll notice your SSD being much faster.

A nice and easy windows benchmarks are CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD; they are free downloadable via google.

 

[noobz1lla]

Best answer selected by NOOBZ1LLA.