500GB SSD drives

[David FarkasNewbie Hollywood, FL Join Date: Aug 2014 Posts: 414 Currently using: Leica M, Leica S, Leica SL, Leica CL Offline]

I’ve enjoyed SSDs for two years now in the shape of my first-gen Samsung 256GB drives in RAID 0 config.

What was fast then…

…is pretty slow today for a single SSD (still much faster than HDD). And, what’s worse, TRIM doesn’t work on SSDs when in a RAID array. This means that my performance today is not anywhere as good as it was when I first installed these drives and ran this benchmark.

So, for my next laptop workstation, I’m considering going to a single, faster 500GB SSD. I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to having a good amount of space so I really wouldn’t like to take a step backwards with regards to capacity.

The top contenders are:

512MB Crucial M4 – $800
480GB OCZ Vertex 3 – $1200
480GB OWC Mercury Pro 6G – $1200

The OCZ and OWC drives are both based on the second-generation SandForce controller and the Crucial uses a Marvell controller. Performance-wise, the SandForce drives seem to have a small speed advantage, but all three drives manage over 100MB/s in 4K writes (compared to my current 4.2MB/s spec). For sequential reads/writes the drives are in the 400-500 MB/s range. Again, very impressive.

I’m curious to hear any feedback from owners of any of these drives.

[David FarkasNewbie Hollywood, FL Join Date: Aug 2014 Posts: 414 Currently using: Leica M, Leica S, Leica SL, Leica CL Offline]

David Farkas
Red Dot Forum
Leica Store Miami

[David FarkasNewbie Hollywood, FL Join Date: Aug 2014 Posts: 414 Currently using: Leica M, Leica S, Leica SL, Leica CL Offline]

Well… I made a decision and went for two Crucial m4 512GB drives and configured them in RAID 0 on my current laptop. Just got finished cloning my system back over and ran CrystalDiskMark:

As you can see, it’s much faster overall. I’m a little surprised that the 4K random reads was actually 2MB/s better on the old drives. Where the drive really shines is in 4K random writes with a high workload (queue depth 32). 200MB/s 4K read/write is insanely fast! This is where much of the OS and programs do their work.

When I rebooted the computer after the disk image restore, I’ve never had my desktop come up so fast. Just tried some S2 DNGs in LR. Everything feels faster, especially 1:1 rendering.

Overall, I’m pretty happy so far. I know that I’d get much better performance if I was using a newer computer with SATA3 vs. mine with SATA2, but in RAID I am still exceeding the total single drive max bandwidth as each drive has its own bus. Oh, I also like the fact that I now have 954GB of formatted fast SSD capacity. 😀 Plenty of speed and plenty of space.

[David FarkasNewbie Hollywood, FL Join Date: Aug 2014 Posts: 414 Currently using: Leica M, Leica S, Leica SL, Leica CL Offline]

David Farkas
Red Dot Forum
Leica Store Miami

[Imran520New Member Join Date: Oct 2013 Posts: 11 Offline]

Western Digital Scorpio Black. After two years, the 320GB Scorpio Black is still a great drive, bested only by the recent release of its bigger brother, the 500GB SSd drives.

[Imran520New Member Join Date: Oct 2013 Posts: 11 Offline]