
The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD - blasdel
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3631
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smanek
I've been trying to get an 80GB Intel X25-M G2 for a few days. They are going
for well over double MSRP ($600 versus $230) at several retailers (e.g.,
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167023))

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spydez
Newegg has an autopricing algorithm that ramps the price up into the
stratosphere if a lot of people are buying something. It takes a while for the
price to settle back down to 'reasonable'.

Either find it elsewhere, or wait it out... Amazon has had good prices on hard
drives recently. The magnetic kind; I haven't been paying attention to SSDs.

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spolsky
They are pretty surprisingly hard to get. At the beginning of the summer I
tried to buy, I think, 20 drives, to upgrade all the developers to SSDs and I
remember being surprised that I cleared out Amazon AND NewEgg completely to
get the drives I needed.

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vicaya
According to his benchmarks, compilation of C code (Pidgin at least) doesn't
seem to benefit from SSD, even the 5400RPM drive performs the same.

SSD for developers is usually waste of money from technical POV, as the
working set usually fits in the fs page cache.

30" IPS panels, OTOH, would be money well spent.

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dagw
Developers often do more than simply compile code. For example if I could cut
the start up time of the app I'm developing in half that would be really quite
nice indeed, even if compile times stay the same.

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ubernostrum
One minor quibble: as far as I can tell, Apple is actually mostly shipping
drives manufactured by Toshiba, which don't seem to be rebrands of Samsung's
tech. The way to tell is to look in System Profiler; Toshiba drives will be
labeled "Apple SSD TS128" or "Apple SSD TS256", while Samsung will be "Apple
SSD SM256" (they only seem to show up in the 256GB option, and even most of
those are Toshiba).

Anyway. I recently picked up a new MacBook Pro and went for the (256GB, ended
up with Toshiba) SSD option, and I've got to say I don't ever plan to go back
to a mechanical drive if I have the choice. It's not just the flashy-but-
pointless things like boot time or first-time application launching. It's the
fact that most of my life consists of reading, paging and grepping through
lots of files, and that is _stupid_ fast with the SSD. I don't worry too much
about write performance, because typically I'm in an incredibly read-heavy
workflow.

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miles
After several hours of researching SSD options, I recently bought a Corsair
P128 from Amazon. Firmware version was VBM18C1Q (which supports background
garbage collection as the article points out).

Price is currently identical on both Amazon and NewEgg ($330.99), but NewEgg
has tons of user reviews. Affiliate-free links:

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16820233087)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B002CI41US/>

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chrisbolt
I can't wait for the new X25-M. Recently threw a 160GB X25-M (first gen) in a
datamining database server to replace a 6x15k SCSI RAID 10 array, and it was
2.5x faster. One disk faster than six.

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riobard
Interesting! Can you elaborate a little bit on the usage pattern and how you
measured the speedup, please?

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chrisbolt
It was a very simple, unscientific test: ran a MySQL query with the old
drives, then ran it on the new drive. Old drives took 5 minutes, new drive
took less than 2 minutes.

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po
"There’s a Mac Edition of the Vertex, unfortunately it’s no different than the
regular drive - it just has a different sticker on it and a higher pricetag."

As a longtime mac user, this kind of thing drives me crazy.

Also the article talks about Windows XP and Windows 7 but doesn't mention
anything about TRIM support in Mac OS X. Is this something that needs to be
enabled at the kernel level? Does anyone know the status of this command with
the Snow Leopard kernel?

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wmf
IIRC older kernels blocked any unknown ATA commands, including TRIM. Newer
kernels no longer block TRIM, so someone is working on a third-party utility.

[http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=409...](http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=409366#post409366)

