Third generation SSD, next generation RevoDrive?

[DarthTengil]

Is there a third generation in the corner of these 2.5" SSD thats on the market today? The first had some kind of problems, the second have troubble with the SandForce controller to some MB and SATA 6 ports. Corsair and OCZ is the dominant manufactors sins their SSDs in (allmost) every SATA 6 modell have both read & write speed over 500 MB/s but use the SandForce controller, Intel and Kingston is only depressingly slow in comparence but use a "more stable" controller. In my mind the most logical question is if every one of these manufactors are going to produce a third wave of the SATA 6 bus interface or just keep on milking out the market untill the next bus (SATA 4) is standard?

Sins a good quality SSD is VERY expensive, you can get a WD VelociRaptor 300 GB HDD (still a extremely fast HDD) for the same price as an OZC Vertex 3 120 GB (both with the same bus speed of SATA 6), I still feel some resistence against those overprized SSDs what ever a benchmark shows. I use two SATA2 WD VelociRaptor 74 GB ICE in RAID 0 as system disk and when booting, Windows 7 plus every programs and apps, is up and running in only 30 seconds thus I have used my new PC for over a month! My old PC took over 2 minutes to completly boot up and in that chassi I used two 7200 RPM HDDs in RAID 0 mode. How much faster can a SATA3 SSD boot up with every normal Windows and apps running? The main question with my resoning is to make sure if I should wait a year or two to get more GB/money or just buy a SSD right now?

Of couse I have wet dreams about getting a OCZ RevoDrive That would be the best thing of all. Thus I wonder why they are so incredebly expensive? In fact a RevoDrive simply is based on a an idéa of using an old PCI card as a "HDD" instead of a mechanicle unit. Why this PCI-e 4x slot thinking? Why not simply build a BIG GPU-shaped flash storage (280x111x38mm like the 590GTX) and use it in a PCI-e 16x slot and use both sides of it as a "club sandwich"? Can someone please tell me what the difference between a SSD and a RevoDrive is (when not including the speed difference), when both of them use flash memorys? Is there a next generation of those drives comming using the same bus (SATA6) or must they first make a SATA 4 bus to get those existing cards to become cheeper?

 

[RealBeast]

AFAIK, the issues with all of the current crop of high end SSDs has been fixed with firmware updates (Vertex 3, Crucial M4, even Intel SATA 2 models), other perhaps than for some crazy-high overclockers that can issues with any hardware.

The Revo drives are just raided ssds on a pci-e card. For most consumer users there would be no reason to buy one, indeed any SSD is adequate for most users -- you will not notice any significant difference other than benchmarks between the "best" SATA 3 drives and a good SATA 2 SSD.

My crystal disk benchmarks tell me that my Vertex 3 240 is a lot faster than my old Intel X25M 80's but in real use there is no apparent difference.

It is not just an issue of fast boots, any programs on the ssd launch fast and the computer will feel much quicker overall.

You can use a Revo drive in a pci-e 16 slots, most of my 8x RAID controller cards go into x16 slots, but they will work in lesser slots, which may make a difference is your motherboard only has x4 slots that are open.

 

[a4mula]

4x500MB/s = 2GB/s transfers. The Revodrive maxes at 1700/1400 so there's no sense in using a larger pci-e bus.

The other downside to the Revodrive is that it's using the asynchronous nands from the Agility 3, not the better performing synchronous ones from the Vertex 3.

A superior solution would be picking up an HBA like the IBM M1015 ($150) and running 4x 60gb Vertex 3 ($440). For $590 you come out cheaper than the Revo 3x2 240 ($650), you'll have better performance and still have the ability to upgrade to a 8x RAID0 configuration down the road.

Of course this is all just for show, as this type of performance is really wasted on a typical desktop configuration. It doesn't have the capacity for rendering, nor the reliability for client/server transfers so what would you use it for? I guess I could maybe justify it in a small business environment if they were doing a ton of SQL queries or other sequential reads/writes but outside of that... waste of money.

It's not going to give you any noticeable difference in general everyday tasks or gaming.

 

[DarthTengil]

Thanks! Gives me even more flesh to the bones in that fact that only beacouse a product gets high benchmarks scores it is not always that much faster or better in real world usage.

a4mula: What brand/manufactor is your ABS 850W PSU? Have never before heard about that name.

 

[a4mula]

The ABS SL850 is the oem version of the Enermax Revolution 850. It also has the newer 5 year warranty over the original 3 year warranty. It's been a few years but I'm pretty sure I got this as part of a newegg combo deal or special and only gave 149.99 for it. Considering the Enermax went for $229 at that time it was a great value. Full modularity, 74a single 12v rail. I've never once had any issues with it at all. Quiet and runs cool.