While just about any
SSD will make your average computing experience a fair bit more awesome, it takes a really unique device to make said experience Animal-Style-Triple-From-In-N-Out special. Up until now, the general consensus was that Intel's
X-25M was the crème de la crème, but it seems that Corsair's recently launched
P256 may just be giving that very drive a real run for its money. After seeing a pre-production unit
deliver some respectable early results, we figured it prudent to pass along
bit-tech's full-on review. In most cases, the 256GB P256 either topped or fell just behind Intel's 80GB unit, though the drive did seem to suffer a bit in the random read / write tests. Still, critics felt comfortable recommending the drive, and while pricey, noted that it offered better value per gigabyte in comparison to similar 256GB units on the market.
posted June 6th 2009 8:08AM
most of your random writes and reads are on the order of 4K blocks. With that worst-case scenario the speed difference between the fine Intel SSD and the bitchin' Corsair SSD is negligible. especially where seek times are in microseconds (as opposed to milliseconds in mechanical HDD). What this means in real-world computing is that both drives are so fast that you will see a palpable difference between your blender drive and your new electronic drive. The SSDs today are so fast that the only thing you need to worry about in actual usage is how the benchmarks make you feel about yourself.
The Corsair, OCZ, and Intel are all so fast that you will not see appreciable speed differences in actual desktop computing since your system is constrained to all sorts of other bottlenecks that are on par with normal spinning HDD performance.
Believe me, any of the best SSDs out there will knock your socks off.
Hell yeah baby.
These "drives" are faster, but, until the price comes down to what the average joe can afford, I don't think a lot of people will buy them. For the price of one of these fast storage devices, you can buy 2,3,4 traditional drives. Yeah, the drive could crash, but so could a flash drive, so if you don't have it backed up, what's the point, unless you are like countless iPhone fanboys that have to shove it in your face...I'll wait the early adopters out and wait until the price comes down to a realistic level.
@Rusty - I agree... You can probably get 2-3 velociraptors for the same price as one of the 256gb corsairs. In fact you can buy 2 - 300gb velociraptors and use them in Raid 0 - it will make your machine SCREAM...and you will still have spent less then $699 (approx).
SSD's aren't meant for the average joe.
They are meant for some very specific situations where traditional rotational platter harddrives fail utterly.
1. Rough service situations. Like the Panasonic Toughbook computers will integrate them very quickly (and have) to eliminate the problem that a moving platter with a read head positioned over it will utterly destroy itself if the shock level is exceeded.
This also makes them extremely useful in regular laptops for people who routinely move their laptops around and travel a lot.
2. Transsactional based programs like databases. These types of applications need as much IOPS as possible to support multiple users making multiple requests of the same dataset. This would also hold true for high end modeling applications like Maya and 3DS Max.
These programs are routinely choked by the hard drive and not the cpu (or GPGPU) and need the ability to RANDOMLY read and write their data as quick as possible to speed the overall rendering time.
simply playing a game, or streaming a video file doesn't exceed the capabilties of most modern hard drives (except at the very high end of games) and thus, replacing a modern HDD with an SSD drive for these situations is not really worth it.
Now come see my database server running RAID volumes of the Intel X-25M drives and see how it is simply blowing away what i could get for transfer rates out of even 15k rpm SAS drives and the real reason for creating these comes to light.
Actually you order from In-N-Out like so: 3x3 or 3x2 or 4x4, etc. First number is hamburger patty quantity and second number is cheese slice quantity.
my question is:
Will this new SSD be able to fit a Dell Mini Hackintosh withouth having to mod the casing and destroying the warranty in the process?
Why would you want a 256GB SSD for a netbook? A laptop, maybe, but this thing will cost at least twice as much as the mini. You'll probably be bottlenecked by the ram/cpu instead of the hard drive.
It'll fit in a Dell Mini 10. It will NOT fit in a Dell Mini 9, which I suspect you're refering to by the Hackintosh remark.
The Mini 9 only takes 5mm long PCIe SSDs from a limited number of vendors. This is a full size 2.5" laptop drive.
If you have a Dell Mini 10 be aware that the SATA interface on this computer tops out around 60Mbps so you'll get less benefit from an SSD than you otherwise might, at least as far as sequential read/write is concerned.
P-256? Who makes this, Sig Sauer?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=animal+style
http://www.bunrab.com/dailyfeed/dailyfeed_sep-05.html
I love living in CA
In N Out... the reason California is the greatest state in the union.
mmmm, just had a triple myself.
what would i need to buy if i want an ssd that i only use for my linux distro?
256gb is overkill i would only need like 10gb...