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One recent contact form question was regarding the alleged 660MB/s limitation on the Intel ICH10R chipset (also known as the 82801JR I/O controller), especially in conjunction with X58 based chipsets which currently represent the big iron of Intel’s lineup until the LGA 2011 parts come out in Q3 or Q4 2011. When the ICH10R was released in 2008, there was little need for more than 660MB/s as SSDs were still not hitting the SATA II bandwidth caps. When platter drives peaked around 120MB/s having a six port (one likely occupied by an optical drive) that could put out 660MB/s was fine. In 2010, 660MB/s is barely more than two ~$100 SSDs can put out. With all of that being said, I decided to throw the stable of ADATA S599 64GB drives at the ICH10R and see what they could do. Read the full story

One of the most annoying things in SSDs these days is the fact that virtually every manufacturer uses mail-in rebates to make their SSDs appear more affordable. The ADATA S599 64GB is based on the Sandforce SF-1222 controller like many other popular Sandforce consumer drives such as the OCZ Agility 2 and OCZ Vertex 2, Corsair Force, Patriot Inferno, and G.Skill Phoenix Pro. With the internals being largely the same between manufacturers the two main differentiators are warranty and price. Since I needed an additional drive for a ZFS L2ARC SSD for my NexentaCore + napp-it build, I decided to go with another Sandforce based drive. The ADATA’s low price and lack of a mail-in rebate attracted me immediately. The big question I had was whether the ADATA S599 would perform as well as my OCZ Agility 2 which I reviewed earlier.

A few things should be mentioned off the bat. First, the ADATA S599 retail package comes with a blue 2.5″ to 3.5″ converter. For those that need one, this is a great bonus for a SSD that costs just over $100.

Second, the SSD may advertise being 64GB, but after the 1,000 to 1,024 base conversion, and formatting are taken into account, the usable drive size is actually 55.8GB usable. That is not bad, it is just a lot lower than some users may expect. Read the full story

A few weeks ago, I had my main system’s OCZ Vertex 120GB drive die after a Firmware version 1.5 update. After applying the allegedly successful v1.5 firmware update, I started seeing data corruption issues. A few days later, the drive failed to be recognized by any system I own regardless of which onboard SATA controller I tried or even with raid card was used. Just to give an idea of the timeline:

1. Day 0- the SSD drive died, RMA request sent to OCZ (past working hours)
2. Day 1- SSD information such as serial numbers was given to OCZ and a RMA number was issued
3. Day 2 (Friday)- SSD was shipped to OCZ’s San Jose, CA facility (which is <20 miles away)
4. Day 5 (Monday)- SSD was delivered to OCZ
5. Day 9 (Friday)- Another SSD arrived via FedEx from OCZ in shrinkwraped retail packaging

Somewhere in there I ordered another 120GB Vertex from Amazon.com which arrived on Day 8 of the timeline above since I was running out of space anyway.

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I was checking Amazon the other day and saw both the 100GB and 200GB versions of the OCZ Vertex LE are available for pre-order. Both drives are next-gen (as of Feb 2010) performance wise and are said to be shipping sometime late February or early March.

I preordered the 100GB Vertex LE from Amazon.com. I’m guessing it will be available less expensively, but I wanted to get one of the 5,000 before they are sold out. It looks like these are going to be the only low-cost SF-1500 controller based drives for awhile, depending on what Other World Computing (OWC) does with their drives.

A 32GB SSD drive for $60 after MiR sounded like a good idea, especially since that would be great for a Windows Home Server C:\ drive, so I purchased a Patriot PS-100 32GB. (It should be noted that I have not seen the price for $60 again in the following 3 months) 64MB of cache sounded better than a JMicron JMF602 based drive, and surely Patriot would not release in the fall of 2009 a JMicron branded drive. I assumed that the drive would be Samsung, Indilinx (akin to an OCZ Core V2) since 32GB was not an Intel controller sounding size (40GB, 80GB, 160GB MLC to date). My conjecture proved to be inaccurate.

Also, just for comparison here are Raid 0 Benchmarks with the PS-100 32GB and for a comparison (to a much higher-end setup) see: Two OCZ Vertex v1.5 Firmware Raid 0 Benchmarks and see two Intel X25-V 40GB’s in Raid 0 benchmarks for comparison of the Patriot PS-100 32GB to the popular Intel X25-V 40GB.

UPDATE 05 April 2010: See performance with new Patriot firmware #2.008 here

UPDATE 06 June 2010: New Patriot PS-100 32GB Firmware v3.000 benchmarks are up (single drive). This release had significant performance improvements.

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SSD’s are becoming more commonplace and are available from a multitude of vendors. Despite a high level of vendor diversity for the drives themselves, there are only a few SSD controller options available, and the vendors do not necessarily list which controller a given drive has. In an effort to simplify the research process, the following list will be updated with which drives contain which controllers to make comparisons easier.
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Question: How does a OCZ Vertex 120GB compare to an 8 drive 15k RPM 2.5″ SAS Raid 5 array with a fast Adaptec 5805 controller?

Answer: It is slower… kind of… but both options have some great features! Read the full story