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Intel and Micron SSD Reviews

Tim — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 03:56:49 +0000

Playing a bit of catch-up due to an issue that sprang up during my server migration:

AnandTech has posted reviews for two new versions of SSDs from major players:
Intel SSD 320 – While write performance is improved, it’s price and performance don’t match up with the new SandForce products.
Micron C400 / Crucial M4 – Slightly slower read speeds then the C300 and relatively lax garbage collection means for most users SandForce based products will be a better choice.

AnandTech Preview of the OCZ Vertex 3

Tim — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 12:25:35 +0000

AnandTech has posted a preview of the OCZ Vertex 3 showing it may be actually slightly faster than the much more expensive enterprise pro version for most users. Retail pricing will be at $250 for 128 GB and $500 for 256 GB.

Intel SSD Launch Date Anounced / Vertex 3 Pro Previewed

Tim — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 23:36:43 +0000

VR-Zone posts that Intel will launch their 510 Series SSDs on March 1st with capacities of 120 GB ($280) and 250 GB ($580).

Meanwhile Tom’s Hardware has posted a preview of OCZ’2 Vertex 3 Pro (100 GB – $525, 200 GB – $775, 400 GB – $1350). While the Pro line seems to be quite impressive it will be interesting to see how the regular Vertex 3 will perform that OCZ has stated will cost significantly less.

Corsair P3 SSD Preview

Tim — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 06:47:47 +0000

Legit Reviews posted a preview of Corsair latest SSD drives. In RAID 0 a pair of them hit over 880 MB/s read. No word on price though.

Next Generation SSD Announcements Start

Tim — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 03:23:34 +0000

While we still haven’t heard anything from Intel officially when they will release their next generation drives, both SandForce SF-2000 (OCZ Vertex Pro 3) and Micron RealSSD C400 have been demoed. The C400 promises 400+ MB/s reads sometime in February while the OCZ Vertex Pro 3 is boasting 500+ MB/s reads sometime 2nd quarter of this year.

OCZ IBIS HSDL SSD Preview

Tim — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 01:19:49 +0000

HotHardware has posted a preview of OCZ’s new high performance SSD line that uses a new HSDL interface to get around the limits of the SATA interface. The drives appear to be fairly expensive even for SSDs, but very fast. The 240 GB version is estimated to go for $739. Check the article for additional details.

OCZ Announces New SandForce Based “Value” SSDs

Tim — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 02:25:27 +0000

Engadget posted this article linking to OCZ’s press release regarding the release of their new Onyx 2 drives. At $189.99 for the 120 GB model and $439.99 for the 240 GB model, it looks like SSDs that have decent capacity at somewhat affordable prices are well on their way.

Need 700 MB/s of SSD Goodness?

Tim — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:10:44 +0000

Hot Hardware just posted a preview of the OCZ RevoDrive X2. It is a PCI-E card with 4 SandForce SSDs RAIDed together. According to early numbers it is capable of over 700 MB/s and 100,000 IOPs. No mention of cost though.

Seagate Reveals Hybrid SSD / HDD

Tim — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:12:55 +0000

AnandTech has a post about Seagate’s new Momentus XT hybrid drive. It is a notebook hard drive combined with a small 4 GB SSD used for read caching. The results overall are pretty good especially for notebooks that often don’t have more than one drive bay available to do a separate SSD and HDD combination. It won’t beat a decent pure SSD, but for normal day to day use it will still be generally faster than any single hard disk drive.

For more information, see AnandTech’s article here.

AnandTech Reviews OCZ’s Vertex 2

Tim — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:07:08 +0000

AnandTech has reviewed the OCZ Vertex 2. As expected, it performs better at small writes with the uncapped firmware it runs when compared to the Agility 2, but if you don’t need the best possible small file random write performance the Agility 2 is probably the better deal. In either case, SandForce based drives appear to be the SSDs of choice for now assuming you aren’t planning on using some kind of whole disk encryption software or planning on using it to store compressed video.

For the full article, click here.