SSD (SolidState Drive) - which one?

island911 · 09-11-2009, 03:16 PM

I'm looking for a 128Gb SSD RAID drive for my notebook (M6400) -- Any suggestions?

MysticLlama · 09-11-2009, 03:52 PM

RAID for a notebook? One of the twin drive ones?

Get an Intel, don't bother with the others at this point. Too many brands have issues with some and not others and it's no fun tracking down which models are which.

Intel X-25M and be done with it.

I have one in my desktop, one in my laptop, and one in the Pig Truck.

Oh, and for what it's worth, the one in my desktop is about 2-2.5x as fast as the 3x15k Cheetah array with a dedicated that it replaced.

dd74 · 09-11-2009, 03:55 PM

I've always had good luck with LaCie.

MysticLlama · 09-11-2009, 03:59 PM

Bah, need to research before posting, twin drive laptop it looks like.

island911 · 09-11-2009, 04:36 PM

Thanks Rob.

Yeah, twin-drive laptop. The Intel X-25M lock great, but looks like it's SATA only. :-/

Any other thoughts?

MysticLlama · 09-11-2009, 04:49 PM

Hrm, most of them are going to be, IDE would be saturated way under the performance levels.

I have seen a couple of Samsungs that had the old style connector, and they have pretty solid performance, not Intel levels, but stable.

The problem with tons of the benchmarks is that they look at burst speed, but random sequential writes, which totally suck on about 30% of the drives is what makes them stutter and stuff, and that's unacceptable.

Scott R · Scott R's Garage

All of our servers (hp blades) that have shipped with SDD have had Samsung under the OEM covers. No failures since we started installing them in August. We have installed a few hundred blades since then.

MysticLlama · 09-11-2009, 05:14 PM

Something like this might work:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609447&cm_re=ssd_pata-_-20-609-447-_-Product

I believe that it's the Indilinx controller, but I'm not 100% sure. Anything with a JMicron controller is not what you want, I have two, they aren't *as* bad in real life as people say, but are still plenty annoying. I use them for backup drives now since they are still very fast for sequential writes, and typical failure mode for SSDs is to read only vs. just dead with a mechanical drive.

I haven't read all of this updated one yet, though I did read the original and 2nd articles which are also linked. Some good reading material before purchase, even if you just skim it.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=1

GH85Carrera · GH85Carrera's Garage

I love the boot up speed of my SSD drive. You will never want to go back to a spinning drive.