Spring 2010 Solid State Drive Roundup, Part 2
In part one of our SSD roundup, we looked at drives from Crucial, OCZ, Intel, Solidata, and Toshiba. To those results, we're adding Crucial's first 6 Gb/s SSD, WD's first SSD, and Kingston's 128GB SSDNow V-series, along with 'fresh' and 'used' scores.
Access Time And I/O Performance
None of the three new drives is particularly strong on providing quick read access time.
There are three performance bands when it comes to SSDs and I/O. The Intel X25-M and especially Crucial’s RealSSD C300 dominate. Solidata’s K5 manages to get close, but it requires SLC flash memory. The drives running Indilinx controllers still offer excellent I/O performance, but they’re already worlds away from Crucial and Intel. Finally, there are the new drives based on JMicron’s JM610 series and the Toshiba HG2. None of these are capable of delivering I/O performance worth mentioning. Even beating hard drives proves challenging, so if you multitask a lot (think of P2P downloads, virus scanning, file compression or encryption, or running multiple virtualized systems concurrently), don’t even think about getting one of these products.
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