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Monday, November 14, 2011

New SSD - Back to Kingston

Yesterday I bought my 4th SSD. But I sold the two Vertex 2 50GB drives today, albeit cheaply, so I only have two SSDs with me now.

The new drive is a Kingston HyperX 120GB drive. It's identical to Vertex 3 Max IOPS in that both use the same Sandforce Controller and more reliable and faster Toshiba Toggle Flash chips.

 IMG_0041

While I only got like 18GB more the old setup, new one is not only faster but allows me to Trim. There were times when the old RAID setup performed bad after heavy writing such as installing several 10s of GBs of games. I have seen the WEI score to drop to 5.9 which is what you get for normal HDDs. Of course, the Vertex 2 alone was a very fast SSD and there was no reason to upgrade (even though i was running out of space with all these massive game installations) if Intel was able to pass the Trim command to the SSDs. I had to rely on Sandforce's garbage collection. That only worked when the PC was idle for a long time. CPU being idle and PC being idle are two different things and GC only worked in the latter case.

Anyways, I will not buy a second SSD unless there was a way to use Trim. All I'm saying is that if anyone is thinking of going for RAID setup, just to increase the capacity, sell the old small drive and buy a bigger drive. :)

About the new drive though, this is not full performance drive. It is a bit slower than the 240GB variant. I didn't need that much space and by the time I need that much space, there would be much faster and cheaper SSDs. I'll get one then. I'd rather not do any benchmarks because you should not write unnecessary data to the SSD, especially these new drives are based on the fragile 25nm tech (compared to the 34nm of the Vertex 2 I had).

Edit: OK, I had to see. Just one time. XD

2 comments:

  1. why do they have a big box like that? what was in it? candy?

    ReplyDelete
  2. it's not that big. it looks like that because it is closer to the camera i guess. but it is somewhat bigger. it has a lot of padding, as if it was made to be handled by Sri Lankan couriers. :D

    ReplyDelete

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