SSD Help..

Need some help on picking some ssds to install windows 7 in October. I'm thinking ocz or intel.... Are the new intel ssds better performers then the ocz vertexes?

According to this article from AnandTech the new intel drives are out performing the competition in most categories, however the squential write performance is awful. I mean 78.1... Even the raptor has 120.2...

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated..

I'm in the same boat as you.
I've been complicating
Intel & OCZ for awhile now.

Intel in my book is the better way to go but its pricey.

Good news boys and girls (and bad news for DS)

Doesn't mean you can't be happy at seeing pricing about to scale down

If the biggest competitor out there cuts their prices and undercuts all the little people, then they HAVE to respond. It'd be like if NVidia suddenly made an awesome card cheaper than ATI. ATI would be scrambling and dancing around trying to cut prices again just to keep up. If you're entire business theme is "we're cheaper than the quality guy" and the quality guy undercuts YOU... you have a serious problem.

Originally posted by DST4ME Well the OCZ is still cheaper, I'm not the type to assume, all I said was lets wait and see. Intel is not cheaper.

Ok. lol Makes no sense to me.. Hard drives should alway be priced out by the GB.. lol  By your reasoning then the Intel is still cheaper. the 80 Gb intel is less than the 120 Vertex,. and its only a 40gb difefrence .

How come the intel has such low sequential write and what does sequential write translate to anyways? 

I just picked up a Corsair P256, which is a rebadged Samsung with Corsair firmware.

The OCZ Vertex drives are faster but too many people report lockups so I decided not to go there. There's also the Summit drives, which are slightly slower than Vertex but have no lockup issues. They're hard to find though.

Intel would be my No. 1 choice if I didn't need more space for my primary drive. I could never fit all my programs and games onto a 160gb hard drive and it's still prohibitively expensive to buy in pairs. Intel does not plan on joining the rest of the market in capacity until Q2 2010, when they will release some performance updated drives including a 300/320GB one.


Edited by angelicvoices - 25 Jul 2009 at 2:15pm

I've still seen a lot of reports of lockups but I do know people who are quite happy with their Vertex drives. Personally, was too much of a gamble for me. Especially coming off 3 DOA RE3s. I just want something that works already.

Intel's new drives are quite cheap. $229 for 80GB and $449 for the 160GB through Newegg.. when they get more stock. They're out right now, and I think they're prob waiting on the firmware updated drives to address the BIOS password issue.

Edited by angelicvoices - 25 Jul 2009 at 2:22pm

That's very true. $450 isn't cheap to me, but I was just thinking from the perspective of someone who is buying an SSD for sure. Intel has gone from one of the most expensive to the cheapest with the new release. Biggest problem for Intel in being competitive now is capacity. Personally, I think they shot themselves in the foot choosing to hold off an additional 8-11mo (april to june of next year) before catching up with the rest of the market. By then, it's very likely another company will have topped them in overall performance. They're already lagging in write speeds and capacity. They did a great thing for consumers by forcing down prices, but they're likely to suffer long term if they don't address the low capacity soon. To me, 250GB is very minimal, and that's just to hold my programs and games.

Corsair has recently released their new extreme series SSDs boasting 240/170 speeds. I can't find any review, but if they live up to hype they could officially take Intel off its crown. Some issue with low capacity, however.


Edited by angelicvoices - 25 Jul 2009 at 2:56pm

What makes you say that Samsung/Corsair is not that great? Every review I found was very favorable.  I have not heard anything negative about them and I have not seen anything about them wearing out faster than others. While they don't benchmark as well as OCZ or Intel, but it's very close if not superior in real world aps. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/06/05/corsair-p256-256gb-ssd-review/9 It beat even Intel in Vista boot time and Crysis load time tests.

I really would be interested in any negative reviews and reports as I've just bought one.


Edited by angelicvoices - 25 Jul 2009 at 4:24pm

Corsair will be releasing firmware update that will support TRIM once Windows 7 is released. Already checked on that. Never seen anything about Samsung bug. Will have to see if I can find some info on that. I know Vertex benchmarks faster. Not concerned about that since Corsair benchmarks still aren't shabby (being beaten only by OCZ and Intel) and RL tests I've seen don't show that much difference, with sometimes Corsair on top. Even if it's only by a little, what I'm saying is that Corsair is hanging right in there when it comes to real usage.

Password bug is is being fixed before any more Intel drives are delivered and in about 2 weeks Intel is planning on releasing firmware update to the people who purchased in the first ~24 hours before it was caught. It only affects people who both have a hard drive password already set in BIOS and then decide to change it later. Prob won't affect anyone since Intel caught it so early.

ETA: Well I found a review that accessed the performance drop of used drives. According to AnandTech, OCZ had equally bad performance drop: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=13 They won the worst performance drop in both tests, one with Vertex and one with Summit. Samsung had it's own large drop but nothing that stands out over OCZ. JMicron had the best score with Intel in second. Still can't find anything that says Samsung's performance is quickly degrade after a full reformat. I wouldn't reformat anyway without a secure erase, and there'd be no need to reformat at all unless I'm clean installing Windows. I can't find a review specifically about the P256 that addresses anything about performance decreases.

Edited by angelicvoices - 25 Jul 2009 at 8:32pm