5 month Core SSD v1 review

[On_Wisconsin]

With all the talk this past year about SSDs, no one outside of PC Perspective has taken a serious look of the long term usage, so I thought I'd might write about my experiences.

I won't write the story why I got the Core v1 64GB since the story can be read here. Basically after I got it, I was amazed. My laptop, once a (relatively) slower machine, was now booting faster and more responsive than the 2 computers I've built.

I do not have the actual HDTune benchmarks from the first run, but the max was around 100mb and the average was probably 90ishMB

2 months later I ran the same test:

And now tonite I ran it again:

Since the 3 months since I ran the test, I've installed Inventor and MS Office 2007. There has been little loss of performance than other than can be expected from a computer. I have never ran into the problems that other users have had. Could it be luck? Probably. Still after 5 months of usage, I still am happy with the purchase

 

[Rob Williams]

The loss in performance is interesting enough though, even though it's small. I believe a lot of it just has to do with fragmentation, but originally, I thought this would have been an issue SSDs could get around, since they can read from different portions of the drive extremely quickly, whereas mechanical drives have a needle to move around, hence the high latency.

Your latency remained the same though, so it must be sub-level fragmentation...so, no real way to fix it other than a complete reformat. It's really too bad that the speed degrades like that... it would almost make me not want to use my PC to its full potential just to avoid the inevitable speed degradation.

Once SSDs become larger, this should become even less of an issue. The upcoming S-ATA 6 spec should help things a little bit as well. You should test again in another three months and see where you stand. Should be interesting.

 

[On_Wisconsin]

I probably will test every 3-6 months at least. The loss of performance seems normal as Anand pointed out, traditional computers seem to slow down as well. I'll probably test my non-ssd computer as well, seeing I'm planning on doing a format as soon as I replace the coolant on my tidewater VGA cooler.

IIRC, even with the performance loss, the read speed was still fast 3x faster than my 7200RPM WD HD setup, and that computer has a C2Q (vs a P-DC...)

 

[Kougar]

Since you've linked to his article... if you wish to do tests I highly suggest doing random read and random write tests. HD Tune and HD Tach both perform sequential tests, therefore the results you would get from them aren't going to be actual performance numbers. Especially once the drive has had enough data written to it that the page tables are filled.

 

[Rob Williams]

Since you've linked to his article... if you wish to do tests I highly suggest doing random read and random write tests. HD Tune and HD Tach both perform sequential tests, therefore the results you would get from them aren't going to be actual performance numbers. Especially once the drive has had enough data written to it that the page tables are filled.

I believe the "Burst" test in HD Tune is essentially a random test, since the yellow dots are spotted all over the place. I could be wrong though. Another idea would be to use IOmeter... maybe. I could always upload the exact version we'll be using in our upcoming storage reviews along with the profiles if anyone is interested.

 

[On_Wisconsin]

So, apparently I did the test back in April, results:

And as suggested by Rob, 3 mos after I ran the test again...

I'm seeing faster results, with files and programs getting added. I can't recall any performance upgrades done as far as OS, etc.

 

[Rob Williams]

Hmm, it really looks like you have nothing to worry about, then... speed is still kick-ass, especially for a notebook. I'm really, really temped to toss an SSD in my main machine and use it for a few months and relay my own experiences. I don't have typical benchmarks under Linux to run, but given I use the PC all day and night, you'd imagine I'd see some slowdown at some point.

Of course, that would require a ton of work just to get up and running, so maybe I'll hold off ;-)