OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)

[-silencer-]

(Just skip to the end if you want to know if MLC SSDs are better than RAID0 Raptors and multiple separate hard drives.)

Preface:
The hard drive is by far the slowest aspect of your computer, in all forms of data access and transfer (well, except an optical/floppy drive). There are a few ways to improve performance. First, we need to clarify hard drive performance, because there are two main measurements for two different purposes.
- Access time. This is the time it takes for a hard drive to locate a file when it is requested.
- Transfer rate. This is the speed at which a file is transferred after it has been found.
Faster hard drives, 5400rpm to 7200rpm to 10000rpm to 15000rpm, usually result in lower (better) access times and sometimes faster transfer rates.
Transfer rate is usually limited by the hard drive's internal controller and data connection: ATA66/100/133, SATA 1.5Gb/s, SATA 3.0Gb/s, etc.
Once we have the stats on a particular drive (my Raptor 36.7GB drive is 10,000rpm & SATA 1.5), we have a choice to RAID0 them. RAID1 is for data redundancy and does little to affect performance. RAID0 splits the files over both drives, using a slight overhead to split/combine files while transferring (in theory) at twice the speed. RAID0 does *nothing* to improve access time.
Solid State Drives (SSDs) have the benefit of having very low access times, respectable read speeds, and usually sub-par write speeds.
MLC SSDs are slightly slower and have a lower number of lifetime writes than SLC SSDs, but they're much less expensive and our purpose for WoW won't be using writes often - only during patches including changes to /Data.

The lag in large cities of WoW is caused by the game having to retrieve hundreds (or thousands) of very small data files quickly - think of all the world & player object models & textures that are coming and going while you're in a city. Each displayed piece of a player's gear has to be loaded when they enter your client's area. These data requests are not in any particular order, so random access and transfer times are very important, especially the access times because there are so many I/O requests. Even on Raptors, the time required to access each of these files is too long, resulting in city lag as they're loaded. RAID0 does very little to reduce this lag, since the majority of the time is spend *finding* the data, not *transferring* it.
I had considered spending $600 on a couple 300GB 10k rpm Velociraptors to combat this lag, but then I considered an SSD. OCZ Core SSDs can locate ~14 files in the time it takes for a Velociraptor to find one (0.3ms to 4.2ms access time), and the transfer rate for file to be read is similar. (SSDs can be in a RAID0 array like Velociraptors, so the comparison I'm making is drive to drive.) For our use in WoW - many small reads in a short period of time, but not needing to write to disk - the SSD was an easy choice over the Velociraptor. Based on known results of SSD vs 10k rpm hard drive testing, and the fact that I want to use the drive as data storage for extremely quick random reads, the SSD should be a MAJOR upgrade over any mechanical hard drive.

My OCZ Core 64GB Solid State Drive arrived today from Newegg. The 32GB drive was just lowered to under $200 today, and I'm sure that one would have worked fine for WoW as well. Here's the drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227344 ($249)

These were the primary links that convinced me to try out an OCZ Core SSD for WoW:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-core-sata-64gb-solid-state-drive-review/8
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/storage/ocz_ssd_64gb_core_series_solid_state_disk/1

Package:
I'm glad I had some old laptop 2.5"->3.5" drive bay brackets. The SSD comes in a small retail box and small info pamphlet, but that's it. You'll need to provide your own SATA2 data/power cables, mounting brackets, and screws. I'm surprised how light the drive is - think of just a few ram sticks.

Install:
Install is identical to any other SATA drive, except you'll want 2.5"->3.5" mounting brackets for a proper install. The drive comes pre-formatted NTFS, which means I had no work on the Windows side once I finished the hardware install. Opening the Computer Management screen in Windows, the drive shows 56.33GB free, which is expected with the standard advertised space. Keep in mind that my 36.7x2 GB Raptors only show up as 68.93GB, and my 250GB drive is 232.88GB. This is due to the way *all* drives are advertised and the difference between base 2 and base 10 number systems. Expect around 28GB space on the 32GB model. Since WoW's data directory only needs ~8GB space, that's far more than enough. Even with the extra content of WotLK, I seriously doubt it'll go beyond 15GB. I opted for the 64GB model simply because it was twice the capacity of 32GB for only $50 more.

WoW Setup:
I renamed my main WoW/Data directory to WoW/Data-bak, then removed the /Data link in all my other WoW directories. I'm using symlinks, as everyone should, especially if you decide to get an SSD. Next, I copied the WoW/Data-bak directory to the SSD, which took about 2 minutes. This is an acceptable time for 8GB of data - approximately 67MB/s write speed. I renamed this file to WoW/Data, then symlinked this directory in all my other WoW directories. For reference, my main WoW install is on a RAID0 (striped) array of 2 36.7GB 10k rpm Raptors. My other WoW installs are on a 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 7200rpm drive, symlinked to the Data directory on the Raptor array.

Initial testing:
I'll need to re-test the load times of WoW to the login screen, because if there was any improvement here it's not easily obvious. I didn't expect the game to load any quicker.

I loaded up all 5 instances of WoW on my oc'd Q6600, 4GB memory, Windows XP, 8800GTX, 2x 24" LCDs in span-view mode. I started out in the Allerian Stronghold in Terokkar, which usually isn't too bad for lag, so I hopped on a gryph flight to Shatt. Usually, this results in me having to wait at the flight master after landing in Shatt for 20-45 seconds as the city is loaded, then it is extremely slow moving around as objects/players come into and out of view. I was STUNNED - I was IMMEDIATELY able to move around, fly around, and enjoy the game as it should be played. Although frame rates naturally aren't as good in the city, the fps hit I'm sure is due to my videocard struggling over 3840x1200 resolution with so many polygons to render. In any case, Shatt is now very playable - not once did I lose /follow on my alts! Before the SSD, it was barely playable. I then loaded up 4 WoW instances on just 1 24" (to reduce the fps hit I was taking in span-mode), and all 4 WoW instances were smooth in Shatt.


Conclusion:
Performance (in reducing lag in cities/Shatt) was even better than I had expected. The cause of the lag absolutely must be the vast amount of random reads being requested on the hard drive. Don't bother with Raptors if you don't have them yet. I loaded up 4 WoW instances from my 7200rpm Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB drive, symlinked to the Data directory on the OCZ Core SSD, and Shatt was smooth. Using the Raptor RAID0 array instead of one 7200 drive made little difference. Using the SSD to host the Data directory made a world of difference. One 32GB SSD for under $200 with a symlinked Data directory is all you need to remove the hard drive bottleneck for smooth performance in Shatt.

If you're building a new computer primarily for multiboxing WoW, save $200 on a high-end videocard (go HD4850 instead of GTX 280 or 4870x2) and get an OCZ Core 32GB (or larger model, but unnessary for the size of WoW's data) SSD to host the WoW/Data directory. Find a way to reduce other expenses for such a major upgrade.

I'm loving this so much, I've got plans to order an Areca ARC-1200 RAID controller (on-board processor and memory, so little overhead on the CPU) and another OCZ Core 64GB SSD.

[Mosg2]

Absolutely awesome review man! Very well constructed and thought out with incredible results.

I'm saving now for a completely new machine and this'll help tremendously--I absolutely hate lagging in AV when our raid runs by their raid at IBGY.

[BobGnarly]

Nice review, man. I've been waiting for it ever since you said you were ordering the SSD. Thanks a bunch for the write-up.

I'm about to order some parts (or maybe a whole new computer, you know thaaat goes hehe), and I think I might put one of these in just for WoW.

I just have one question: Do you have any thoughts wrt how this compares to say Vista 64 with 8G of RAM so you are RAM caching all those textures? I mean, on paper it seems like it should be a win.

[Stabface]

We just got a few of these in at work to test out as a local store for transaction logs... there's a spare, and I'm hoping to get my grubby paws on it for a few days if I can ;)

[Lowvez]

i have 8gb ram installed on Vista 64 and i don't lag in shat. But i DO if i have my 3 shamans all there at once..i drop to about 20fps.. But if i'm only on one account i usually have 60 at least. I have thought about these SSD drives for a long time now and OCZ is finally getting these types of drives into a price segment i can afford.

Do you think putting 2 of the 32gb versions in RAID0 would be better then the 64gb version? (I'm assuming yes here)

[BobGnarly]

But if all of these textures are stored in RAM, there should be NO lag, regardless of how many toons you are running - or at least less lag than even an SSD.

Unless, of course, these textures take > 4-5G that an 8G system should have left over after 5 clients. Then you are still paging from disk. I just have a hard time believing there are THAT many, even in shat.

hmmm

[beyond-tec]

hmm

4 solid state disks in raid0.......

... sounds excellent :-D

[Talos]

But if all of these textures are stored in RAM, there should be NO lag, regardless of how many toons you are running - or at least less lag than even an SSD.

Unless, of course, these textures take > 4-5G that an 8G system should have left over after 5 clients. Then you are still paging from disk. I just have a hard time believing there are THAT many, even in shat.

hmmm
The problem in question is Flying INTO SHattrah or Loading Alterac Vally
when its loading all those textures into your ram it takes a LONG LONG time to do it, while searching for each small texture file

once its in the memory everything is good, as long as there is no use of swap filing

[moog]

Great review... have been waiting for the price on these things to come down to more 'reasonable' levels :)


I loaded up 4 WoW instances from my 7200rpm Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB drive, symlinked to the Data directory on the OCZ Core SSD, and Shatt was smooth. Using the Raptor RAID0 array instead of one 7200 drive made little difference. Using the SSD to host the Data directory made a world of difference. One 32GB SSD for under $200 with a symlinked Data directory is all you need to remove the hard drive bottleneck for smooth performance in Shatt.
Quick question, why only put your wow/data directory on the SSD... why not put the OS and your complete WoW directories on the SSD?

[Otlecs]

Don't bother with Raptors if you don't have them yet.
Doh! Curse my impatience.... ;)

Thanks for the enjoyable write-up. As I have no spare bays left in my main rig, I'm going to have to think very carefully about what to do if the shiny new raptors I have on order don't live up to expectations! I suspect they'll be shelved in favour of this setup to be honest.

[-silencer-]

I just have one question: Do you have any thoughts wrt how this compares to say Vista 64 with 8G of RAM so you are RAM caching all those textures? I mean, on paper it seems like it should be a win.
I would think with Vista and 8GB of RAM, performance would be even better for 5-boxing since you'll have more RAM available to store loaded data. I'm still on the fence about upgrading to a Q9450, 8GB, Vista64, etc right now or holding off until Nehalem/i7 in 6 months or so. I'm leaning on holding off for awhile, since the performance difference with the new architecture should be worth it.


We just got a few of these in at work to test out as a local store for transaction logs... there's a spare, and I'm hoping to get my grubby paws on it for a few days if I can ;)
It literally only took about 15 minutes for the install - if you could borrow one for a night that's all the time you'd need.



Do you think putting 2 of the 32gb versions in RAID0 would be better then the 64gb version? (I'm assuming yes here)
Definitely, but it'd cost much more. The 32GB version is around $199, and the 64GB version is around $250. That's why I went with 64GB - I didn't want to drop $400 on something that I hadn't tested yet. Now I can get another 64GB for 128GB of RAID0 loveliness. Keep in mind that most motherboards just allow for one RAID array, and I like my RAID0 Raptors. So I'd need a separate controller card to put in a RAID0 of SSDs. RAID0 of SSDs would easily improve the read transfer rates, so it would be faster for reading random data and large sequential data than one Raptor, but it'll still likely be slower than sequential reads than RAID0 Raptors and possibly slower on write speed than one Raptor. Do not get an SSD to be a drive you'll need to write to with any performance hopes - that means don't use them for OS/swap/full installs, even if you RAID0 them.


But if all of these textures are stored in RAM, there should be NO lag, regardless of how many toons you are running - or at least less lag than even an SSD.

Unless, of course, these textures take > 4-5G that an 8G system should have left over after 5 clients. Then you are still paging from disk. I just have a hard time believing there are THAT many, even in shat.

hmmm
I have a feeling that the data structures and algorithms the WoW developers have used limit performance on high-end machines in order to have decent performance on low-end machines. Beyond the OS's ability to cache data, I think WoW probably does too good of a job at releasing memory too soon..



The problem in question is Flying INTO SHattrah or Loading Alterac Vally
when its loading all those textures into your ram it takes a LONG LONG time to do it, while searching for each small texture file

once its in the memory everything is good, as long as there is no use of swap filing
This is true - it's the initial load of town that is bad, but I also find a boost in fps the entire time I'm in town. Unfortunately it varies too much due to the amount of players in town and how many polygons I'm trying to render to put a number on it, but I'd guess somewhere in the 10-40% range for an increase in fps after the initial load.


Great review... have been waiting for the price on these things to come down to more 'reasonable' levels :)
Quick question, why only put your wow/data directory on the SSD... why not put the OS and your complete WoW directories on the SSD?
Because SSDs are NOT better than Raptors for writing data, which the OS does on its drive, and you definitely don't want a swapfile on an SSD. A lot of writing gets done to your config/Add-On folders in WoW - keep in mind that SSDs have a limited amount of writes in their lifetime (millions of writes, so more likely a longer lifespan than standard hard drive anyway). The space isn't large, so I want more room available for other games as well. The main issue was solving the lag in Shatt/cities, and that's done. Other large files that need to be loaded - like the WoW.exe, will be faster on a RAID0 of Raptors since the transfer rate is higher - access time doesn't really come into play because it only has to find one file.



Don't bother with Raptors if you don't have them yet.
Doh! Curse my impatience.... ;)

Thanks for the enjoyable write-up. As I have no spare bays left in my main rig, I'm going to have to think very carefully about what to do if the shiny new raptors I have on order don't live up to expectations! I suspect they'll be shelved in favour of this setup to be honest.
Don't feel too bad about it - the Raptors are still the best option for an OS/swapfile drive. You can always easily add in a 32GB SSD later. That's what I've done - I still have my RAID0 Raptors. :) Honestly, the SSD is so small (think of about 10-15 credit cards stacked together), even if you don't have a spare drive bay, you could find some place to mount the thing. My main point was that if I were building a new rig and limited on cash, I'd get one Raptor (OS/swap/main installs) and one SSD (storing random data that needs to be quickly loaded) over two Raptors. The SSD has very limited use - you don't want to store data that will be read sequentially, since Raptors will be faster in loading sequential data. You only want to use the SSD for data that needs to be randomly read many times in short amounts. That makes it perfect for game data like WoW. Some other games, like Counterstrike maps, would be better stored on a Raptor RAID0 array, since the data is sequential and only has to be found once, then depends on transfer rate (RAID0 Raptors!) to load.

[Sarduci]

Bummer, I was hoping for performance data and not just a review. The OCZ 64GB is still the rebranded Samsung 64GB unit. There's a lot more data out there under that. We've tested them at work for high read I/O database applications but unfortunately they dont come in big enough sizes for us.....

NOTE TO ALL READERS:

This unit is an SLC unit, not the cheaper MLC unit. MLC units are much slower than the SLC units by design. You will never find this kind of performance out of the current generation of MLC drives. Not all SSD's are created equal.


As far as a lack of mounting hardware, these are intended out of the box as laptop drive replacements or 2.5" server drives. Most laptops have friction mounts (i.e. they just fit in there) and 2.5" drive bays on servers come with all of the mounting gear you need.

This is the OEM version from Samsung:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147054

Edit:
Sorry, this is the SLC version from OCZ
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227295
That has the same stats as the Samsung unit.

[-silencer-]

Bummer, I was hoping for performance data and not just a review. The OCZ 64GB is still the rebranded Samsung 64GB unit. There's a lot more data out there under that. We've tested them at work for high read I/O database applications but unfortunately they dont come in big enough sizes for us.....

NOTE TO ALL READERS:

This unit is an SLC unit, not the cheaper MLC unit. MLC units are much slower than the SLC units by design. You will never find this kind of performance out of the current generation of MLC drives. Not all SSD's are created equal.


As far as a lack of mounting hardware, these are intended out of the box as laptop drive replacements or 2.5" server drives. Most laptops have friction mounts (i.e. they just fit in there) and 2.5" drive bays on servers come with all of the mounting gear you need.

This is the OEM version from Samsung:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147054
Wrong. This OCZ Core 64GB model is an MLC unit, but yes, it's a rebranded Samsung for the consumer market. That's why it's 0.3ms access time and only $250 for 64GB compared to the SLC models with 0.1ms access time by Samsung/OCZ for around $700+.

That Samsung model you listed is an SLC. This link is the rebranded SLC OCZ of that model:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227295 ($795)

This is the rebranded MLC OCZ model I purchased:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227344 ($249)

The OCZ *Core* series is MLC - that's why the price is so low. Performance isn't as good as SLC SSDs, but it's still FAR better than RAID0 Raptors. Look at the difference:
4.2ms for Raptor 150GB access time.. $170. ($295 for 300GB)
0.3ms for OCZ Core 32GB MLC access time.. $199. ($250 for 64GB)
0.1ms for Samsung/OCZ 32GB SLC access time.. $400+. ($600-795 for 64GB)

Transfer rates are comparable between the three. SSDs don't have the problem of losing transfer speed the further from the center of the disc either.

NOTE TO ALL READERS (including the above poster):
As stated in the title, it's still a test in progress - I only had an hour or so last night to play around with it, and since so many have commented that they want a review, this was my initial impression. I fully plan on detailed performance differences in the near future with various configurations of my machine. I wouldn't have jumped into this purchase without fully researching the product. There are plenty of online reviews comparing the MLC OCZ Core SSDs to Raptors, SAS drives, SCSI drives, and SLC drives. For the price/performance, you'll be hard pressed to find something else better to solve our lag issues due to hard drive seek times in busy areas.

[Sarduci]

Linky to the MLC version would have been helpful. ../forum/images/smilies/biggrin.png You may want to edit your post again.

The one other thing that should be known is that MLC units have a greater rate of cell failure than SLC units. If any one layer of a multilayer cell fails the whole thing is bad. It increases the chance of data loss when (not if) it happens. This is true with any technology though.

[-silencer-]

Linky to the MLC version would have been helpful. ../forum/images/smilies/biggrin.png You may want to edit your post again.

The one other thing that should be known is that MLC units have a greater rate of cell failure than SLC units. If any one layer of a multilayer cell fails the whole thing is bad. It increases the chance of data loss when (not if) it happens. This is true with any technology though.
The failure rate is due to limited number of maximum writes - something we won't ever come anywhere close to hitting if we're just using the drive to read random data from games - which is exactly my stated use for the drive. I've had plenty of standard hard drives fail within 3-5 years, so what makes standard drives more special than SSDs with this regard? There are advantages and disadvantages to using standard hard drives vs SSDs depending on the situation. Using an SSD as a data host for random reads is a perfect scenario.

[Sarduci]

Sectors in a HDD is a single unit of data. A cell in a MLC is multiple units of data.

Cell failure can come from overuse, which like you said is highly unlikely, or from a stuck bit in the cell, which is more likely. All storage mediums have data corruption issues, hence the phrase that it's true with any technology. A stuck bit isn't an issue with that directly, since the bit was written correctly and is only detected when new data with a different value is written there. Then the entire cell, not the one sector of the drive, is marked as bad.

To combat this issue, HDD have up to 20% slack space to redirect to reserved clusters. That 1TB disk drive? Yeah, it's more like 1.1 or 1.2TB at full usage. SSDs, as far as all of the documentation I've read from the OEMs, do not contain this and you can actually see a decrease in overall compacity when a section or group of cells fails.

This is really all heading away from your origional point, which is that SSD's are faster at random seek I/O than platter based drives. Both types of SSD's win that hands down.

[BobGnarly]

But if all of these textures are stored in RAM, there should be NO lag, regardless of how many toons you are running - or at least less lag than even an SSD.

Unless, of course, these textures take > 4-5G that an 8G system should have left over after 5 clients. Then you are still paging from disk. I just have a hard time believing there are THAT many, even in shat.

hmmm
The problem in question is Flying INTO SHattrah or Loading Alterac Vally
when its loading all those textures into your ram it takes a LONG LONG time to do it, while searching for each small texture file

once its in the memory everything is good, as long as there is no use of swap filing

My hypothesis was based on a particular functionality present in Vista. Vista attempts to "cache" parts of your drive into unused RAM. This is why Vista will usually appear to be using all the RAM you have, even if your applications really aren't. So my thought was, as you were running around in the game and reading textures, it should be caching all the textures into RAM. Then, when you zone to shat, org, w/e, those textures are in cache and you'd be retrieving them at RAM access speeds.

Again, this is all on paper, just thinking out loud.

I'm with you silencer on the wait for i7, but man, shat (and to a lesser degree, all the outlands) are soooo painful right now. :(

[-silencer-]

I'm with you silencer on the wait for i7, but man, shat (and to a lesser degree, all the outlands) are soooo painful right now. :(
If you've got a spare $200.. try out the 32GB OCZ Core SSD. Since it's just being used to host some data files, it'll be easy to transfer to the new i7 machines when we get them. I don't dread going to Shatt now. :)

[Thaeds]

I have a question. Can you achieve this same effect by just loading your data file on a USB flash drive and reference it from there? Seems a lot cheaper, even if it's not quite as fast. (Would still be much faster than a HD, right?)

[wowphreak]

USB flash drive is kinda a generic term what yeh talking about the the flash drive yeh can put on yer keyring if so no the thru put them really sucks , yeh seek time are fast but the thru put is like a fraction of "32GB OCZ Core SSD"

[Thaeds]

Right but isn't the seek time the whole point of using a SSD instead of a 10000 rpm drive in raid 0?

I mean, I wouldn't expect using a USB flash drive to be as fast as a SSD, but maybe faster than loading the data file from a HDD? Would be awesome if someone would test it or something.

[Sarduci]

My hypothesis was based on a particular functionality present in Vista. Vista attempts to "cache" parts of your drive into unused RAM. This is why Vista will usually appear to be using all the RAM you have, even if your applications really aren't. So my thought was, as you were running around in the game and reading textures, it should be caching all the textures into RAM. Then, when you zone to shat, org, w/e, those textures are in cache and you'd be retrieving them at RAM access speeds.

Again, this is all on paper, just thinking out loud.

I'm with you silencer on the wait for i7, but man, shat (and to a lesser degree, all the outlands) are soooo painful right now. :(Correct, Vista will preload commonly used programs into RAM for quicker access. If the memory is needed then the precache is dumped to make room for programs.

[Sarduci]

I have a question. Can you achieve this same effect by just loading your data file on a USB flash drive and reference it from there? Seems a lot cheaper, even if it's not quite as fast. (Would still be much faster than a HD, right?)No, the USB bus is polled and not bi-directional. The bus itself is silly inefficient and is slower than a IDE or SATA connection.

[Thaeds]

I have a question. Can you achieve this same effect by just loading your data file on a USB flash drive and reference it from there? Seems a lot cheaper, even if it's not quite as fast. (Would still be much faster than a HD, right?)No, the USB bus is polled and not bi-directional. The bus itself is silly inefficient and is slower than a IDE or SATA connection.

Right but it's access times still destroy the HDD right? Each time you answer me it seems you're only talking about transfer speed, and not addressing access times.

I know Vista made that Ready Boost technology just exactly for this purpose, to read small bits of data off flash drives for faster performance due to access times so I'm having a hard time seeing how this would be different.

[Talos]

to read small bits of data off flash drives for faster performance
thats the problem

were not talking about small bits of date (for which it would be an improvement indeed)
we are talking about a 8.5gig /data/ folder....

seek time will indeed be better, but it is offset by the loading time it takes to get the 500mb texture file trough the usb bus into the ram....

[mikiurban]

Update on 32GB Price Slo-mo version. It is on sale + Mail In rebate:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227343

Original Price: $219.00

After $45 Sale: Price $174.00

After $60 Mail In Rebate: $114.00 ('http://images10.newegg.com/uploadfilesfornewegg/rebate/SH/OCZ6MIRsSep3Sep1608ll97.pdf')

Hurry :)

Looks like all models have some kind of sale/rebate going on: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=50001550%2040000636&Manufactory=1550&SubCategory=636&SpeTabStoreType=0

[-silencer-]

Just a quick update.. I haven't had much of a block of WoW time this last week - work & political research the last couple weeks is only eating more of my time lately.

I'm glad to see the price of SSDs (especially the Core series) decrease - it's a perfect solution for our use. The main thing I wanted to point out that I've noticed the past few times I've logged in, I haven't *ever* lost /follow since installing the SSD. I used to have to stop walking every 3-5 seconds while moving around in Shatt or the start of AV or I'd lose /follow, but now I can ride around with crusader aura or fly all around Shatt and never worry about having lost a /follower. Infamous Platforms is smart in offering SSDs to the multibox community - I'm sure they've done the testing to understand that the reduction in city lag from using a symlinked SSD over RAID0 Raptors is *far* greater than the benefit of going from a single typical 7200rpm drive to RAID0 Raptors.

[Thaeds]

to read small bits of data off flash drives for faster performance
thats the problem

were not talking about small bits of date (for which it would be an improvement indeed)
we are talking about a 8.5gig /data/ folder....

seek time will indeed be better, but it is offset by the loading time it takes to get the 500mb texture file trough the usb bus into the ram....

See, I'm not sure if you really understand what's going on, because if the files loaded were 500mb big then a 10,000 rpm drive would smoke a SSD. The reason the OP has such a huge performance gain from a SSD is because the files in the data folder are small enough that the gains in access times make up for the losses in sequential read or throughput. So it seems to me these same type of gains, maybe on a smaller level could be made with USB flash instead.

I'm not completely sure I know what I'm talking about either, but I want to make sure you're following my logic here!

[wowphreak]

actually the thru put of the ssd is about 60 megs per second with no seek time seek time where as the thru put of a decent hard drive is around 60 megs per second with seek time.

These ssd are basically flash drives that are raided together to get better thruput yer basic flash drive gets about anywhere from 5-15 megs a second thru put.

So using a flash drive aint gonna cut it if yeh hit a major city and have to load 100 megs of textures times that by 5 and yer looking at a slide show.

[Boylston]

If these devices improved the quality of the Trade Channel as much as the framerate in a big city, I'd be more excited about them!!

[Maklar]

You can get the 32 GB version for $99 AR from newegg now.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227343&Tpk=N82E16820227343

[Sarduci]

I have a question. Can you achieve this same effect by just loading your data file on a USB flash drive and reference it from there? Seems a lot cheaper, even if it's not quite as fast. (Would still be much faster than a HD, right?)No, the USB bus is polled and not bi-directional. The bus itself is silly inefficient and is slower than a IDE or SATA connection.

Right but it's access times still destroy the HDD right? Each time you answer me it seems you're only talking about transfer speed, and not addressing access times.

I know Vista made that Ready Boost technology just exactly for this purpose, to read small bits of data off flash drives for faster performance due to access times so I'm having a hard time seeing how this would be different.If the bus isn't as fast as a physical drive, then I really don't care squat about access time since you'll never be able to get it out in time. USB is slower than a standard platter based drive regardless of access time unless you're talking about sending the same exact amount of data or less than USB can send in one chunk. Anything over that gets slaughtered by the physical drives ability to bulk send through or read/write at the same time. USB 2.0 is fail compaired to IDE/SATA/SATAII/Firewire800 simply because of design limitations.

Now, if you are compairing something like sustained data transfer in a continous block segment on the drive (aka MSSQL database) and you have a large read (say 4TB+ to a backup file) you lose all advantage in a SSD. No random seek takes away any kind of edge it has against the platter based system. Then it's all about shear throughput, and 15,000rpm SAS (serial attached SCSI) using a fiber switched infrastructure would blow it out of the water hands down. The limiting factor then in the controler interface of the drive system.

[puppychow]

The best way to use a SSD, imo, is to copy a single full WoW install onto it. Then symlink/junction as many new directories off it as you want WoW installs (4 more for a 5 boxer). I keep WTF\Accounts symlinked, and WTF\ itself "unlinked", so every account has its own config.wtf (so each can have different graphic and audio settings), but its up to you. I also keep cache, errors, and logs unlinked since they are directories where data is written to, and I don't want data conflicts.

Remember, the operating system does a good job recognizing a symbolic link and caching it "correctly" when opened in read-only mode. And all the wow data\ files, the largest chunk of data, is opened in read only mode. There is no point in creating 3-4 copies of the same directory, you are in fact being extremely inefficient when you do this. Creating a raid0 out of SSDs is a waste of money, the only reason to hook it up to a raid controller is if the controller has a write cache, the way the SSDs work is that in order to write data (after a while) it has to first read a segment of flash memory, make the changes, then write it back, especially with small changes. Basically it takes an extra 1-2 hits of reading to make writes. But again, in WoW, the only times you are writing to disk is the cache\ directory, and wtf\ upon logout, these are minimal and trivial (even the cache\ directory is probably lazy-write, so it only writes every now and then).

A 16GB ssd is more than enough space for wow+wotlk, a 32GB would let you put the PTRs and the betas on it as well. I would backup your wtf\ folder every now and then to the hard drive, just to be on the safe side.

A flash/thumb drive would operate worse than a regular hard drive, its easy to test yourself, just run any benchmark hard drive in burst read mode. Its an order of magnitude slower than a hard drive almost (at least mine are). Its not just the USB interface, USB2.0 is pretty fast as evinced by things like Drobo, its simply that regular flash drives are not meant for high speed read/write. There are of course better flash drives that can operate faster (meant for fast SLR cameras), but they start approaching the price points of SSDs.

[puppychow]

btw very good writeup on OCZ 1 SSDs here

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

I have a SSD at work (Samsung gen2, expensive as hell) and imo the $99 for the OCZ v1 at Newegg is a good price, and some people will see a perf improvement in WoW by putting (at least) the data directory on it. But the SSD is gen1, OCZ has already released generation 2, and Intel just released a few days ago its own SSD implementation. The OCZ v1 is supposed to have relatively high failure rates. I'm on the fence of buying one at home, but I think i'll just wait until I buy my next PC and put a SSD in there, by the time I build it the Intel SSDs should be out and hopefully lower in price.

The OCZ v1 SSDs (the one at Newegg for $99) suffers huge write penaltys for small files, don't think of putting stuff like your operating system or browser on it.

[defactoman]

What mounting solution did you use? Ijust got the 32 GB version delivered today.

[wowphreak]

I have a question. Can you achieve this same effect by just loading your data file on a USB flash drive and reference it from there? Seems a lot cheaper, even if it's not quite as fast. (Would still be much faster than a HD, right?)No, the USB bus is polled and not bi-directional. The bus itself is silly inefficient and is slower than a IDE or SATA connection.

Right but it's access times still destroy the HDD right? Each time you answer me it seems you're only talking about transfer speed, and not addressing access times.

I know Vista made that Ready Boost technology just exactly for this purpose, to read small bits of data off flash drives for faster performance due to access times so I'm having a hard time seeing how this would be different.If the bus isn't as fast as a physical drive, then I really don't care squat about access time since you'll never be able to get it out in time. USB is slower than a standard platter based drive regardless of access time unless you're talking about sending the same exact amount of data or less than USB can send in one chunk. Anything over that gets slaughtered by the physical drives ability to bulk send through or read/write at the same time. USB 2.0 is fail compaired to IDE/SATA/SATAII/Firewire800 simply because of design limitations.

Now, if you are compairing something like sustained data transfer in a continous block segment on the drive (aka MSSQL database) and you have a large read (say 4TB+ to a backup file) you lose all advantage in a SSD. No random seek takes away any kind of edge it has against the platter based system. Then it's all about shear throughput, and 15,000rpm SAS (serial attached SCSI) using a fiber switched infrastructure would blow it out of the water hands down. The limiting factor then in the controler interface of the drive system.


Last time I check usb 2.0 top theoretical thruput was 480Mbps.

if yeh check out http://techreport.com/articles.x/15433 yeh see an ssd drive with a thruput of 250MB/s
from the looks of http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ultrastar-cheetah-sas,2004-6.html the fastest sas 15k drive read is 174 MB/s

So at this point the only thing that platter drives do better is in write speeds and storage space.

[-silencer-]

Last time I check usb 2.0 top theoretical thruput was 480Mbps.

if yeh check out http://techreport.com/articles.x/15433 yeh see an ssd drive with a thruput of 250MB/s
from the looks of http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ultrastar-cheetah-sas,2004-6.html the fastest sas 15k drive read is 174 MB/s

So at this point the only thing that platter drives do better is in write speeds and storage space.
480 Megabits (Mb) per second is only 480 / 8 = 60 Megabytes (MB) per second. I'm not sure if you're implying USB 2.0 is 480 MB/s or 480 Mb/s, but there's a significant difference. If there weren't, people would have been using USB 2.0 for internal drive connections long before SATA, but that didn't happen because parallel ATA 66/100/133 is faster than USB 2.0.
Without a doubt, I'd take one relatively generic WD SE16 7200rpm drive (or other large capacity 7200rpm drive) and one MLC SSD (something comparable to OCZ Core) over multiple Raptors for multiboxing. I can't stress enough how important extremely low read access times and decent read transfer rate can be for eliminating the significant hard drive bottleneck in Shatt/AV. I'm working on getting a video capture card on a 2nd PC so I can capture video without having fraps affect performance.. then everyone can see the massive benefit of the SSD for hosting data. I've bought a lot of "experimental" computer components over the years for the sake of testing out breakthrough capabilities that either turned out to be a waste of money (SCSI scanner, Jaz Jet 1GB external disk drive, Bigfoot Killer NIC, Rambus memory) or a fantastic improvement over available technology (original Athlon and Core2, Voodoo2 SLI 3D cards, SSD for hosting data). I obviously have no regrets at all with the OCZ Core purchase, and I don't ever dread traveling to cities like I used to.

Regarding a post above, I listed in the original review post that I used 2.5"-> 3.5" laptop to standard hard drive brackets to mount the Core in my case. You could use any method though - an external laptop hard drive case, or securing the drive with rubber bands. With no moving parts, it's much more durable for mounting solutions than relatively fragile platter-based hard drives.

I still have *never* lost /follow since installing the SSD.

[Wide]

Thanks alot for this review.

Ordered my new SSD drive a few minutes ago, cant wait :)

[Mosg2]

I just want to chime in at this point on the SSD debate now that I've got a chance to play around with mine:

The difference is... Stunning. Amazing. Unbelievable. I'm maxing FPS in Shatt on 5 wow instances. When using the zeppeling, sometimes I don't even really see the load screen it's so fast--Just a blur of yellow.

[mikiurban]

Just a heads up to people ordering the OCZ drive, remember to get a 2.5" -> 3.5" mounting bracket and SATA data cable, neither are included in the box. And naturally, you will need a free power cable, so make sure your power supply has it.

[firest4rter]

Just ordered myself a SSD and plan to implement this soon. Question : I my 4 followers from the same WoW dir and my main from a seperate dir. I have never bothered with symlinked data, would I really need to bother with this given I am running 4 from the one dir anyway? I am comfortable with my current dir config so changing it would be a hassle as apposed to just copying my 2 WoW dirs across to the SSD.

[Wide]

Mine should arrive today and i will put the Data folder on my SSD drive and symlink to it from my existing wow folders.

[Otlecs]

I succumbed and bought one of these as well. I took out one of my striped Raptors to make space for it, so I now have a stripeset consisting of two 512GB "normal" disks, a single Raptor and a single 64GB SSD.

I have no idea what the best configuration for this sort of setup is, but I'll find out over the next week or two! I ran some benchmarks on all disks this morning, but ran out of time to actually analyse the results. They should at least nudge me in the right direction though.

[Wide]

Keep us updated :)

[-silencer-]

Just ordered myself a SSD and plan to implement this soon. Question : I my 4 followers from the same WoW dir and my main from a seperate dir. I have never bothered with symlinked data, would I really need to bother with this given I am running 4 from the one dir anyway? I am comfortable with my current dir config so changing it would be a hassle as apposed to just copying my 2 WoW dirs across to the SSD.
Eh.. I wouldn't use the SSD for anything other than hosting the /data folder with symlinks. The write speeds are not as fast as a 7200rpm drive, some people have trouble with multitasking on MLC SSDs (the alternating reads/writes aren't handled very well), and you'll shorten the life of the drive with the writes. The whole purpose of the SSD is to symlink just the /data directory so you get the best of both worlds - blazing fast reads of /data, and standard writes and folder options on a regular hard drive.

[Noids99]

Sounds like there are some hard drive/storage gurus in this thread, so I though I would throw an inquiry into the mix.

I am foolish enough to box from my laptop currently. Performance is great in general, but like you mentioned, Shatt and AV smash my puny 7200rpm mobile drive. An SSD is perfect for fit into a laptop given its durability and low power consumption, but I would still like a conventional drive for storage/OS etc.

In my search for said conventional drive I stumbled upon the new 300MB 10000rpm velociraptors. These area a 2.5" form factor drive intended for use in blade servers or using a 3.5" adaptor for high performance gear. I am wondering if anybody is aware of the reason that these drives are not marketed as notebook options. Looking at the shock ratings, they are similar to drives 12months old that do not have any of the current shock protection/fall sensor technology built in.

If I could have a 10000rpm 300MB drive with a 64GB SSD I could stretch this lappy out for another couple of years I reckon.

Cheers

[Eloxy]

are u running it with windows vista? if not what os are u using and why?`

Im realy concidering getting one of these, thx for a good review!





Eloxy

[-silencer-]

Sounds like there are some hard drive/storage gurus in this thread, so I though I would throw an inquiry into the mix.

I am foolish enough to box from my laptop currently. Performance is great in general, but like you mentioned, Shatt and AV smash my puny 7200rpm mobile drive. An SSD is perfect for fit into a laptop given its durability and low power consumption, but I would still like a conventional drive for storage/OS etc.

In my search for said conventional drive I stumbled upon the new 300MB 10000rpm velociraptors. These area a 2.5" form factor drive intended for use in blade servers or using a 3.5" adaptor for high performance gear. I am wondering if anybody is aware of the reason that these drives are not marketed as notebook options. Looking at the shock ratings, they are similar to drives 12months old that do not have any of the current shock protection/fall sensor technology built in.

If I could have a 10000rpm 300MB drive with a 64GB SSD I could stretch this lappy out for another couple of years I reckon.

Cheers
The Velociraptor is physically 2.5", but is housed in a 3.5" heatsink. Removing this heatsink will void the warranty. Also, even though it's 2.5" wide, it's thicker than standard laptop hard drives, so that's why it's not marketed as a laptop drive.


are u running it with windows vista? if not what os are u using and why?`
Im realy concidering getting one of these, thx for a good review!

XP.. but others have PM'd me using Vista and loving it.

[noir]

Has anyone put these into their laptops? Is it the standard 2.5" laptop mount?

[Eloxy]

XP.. but others have PM'd me using Vista and loving it.

thats the nail in the coffin for me.. im ordering one right now. And a new graphic card while im at it.

Ty for answer m8.



Eloxy

[Noids99]

Bad forum etiquette, but thought I'd post a reply to my enquiry that I discovered after posting it if anyone was interested :P



As Silencer mentioned the heat sink is 3.5" on the velociraptor, but it actually produces 35% less heat than the older raptors and draws about 4.5W, so approximately twice that of a normal lappy drive. A largish 17" lappy should be able to cope with the heat reasonably well even with the heat sink off and the adaptors do match up. The one sticking point is that lappy drives run off a 5V rail generally and the raptor requires 12V. This would require a bit of MB modding in most cases, although some 17" chassis do offer this currently. I have an oldish Dell XPS at home, so I might give this a try. In combo with the SSD it should give me a great mobile boxing setup IMO :D

Cheers

[puppychow]

save your money and dont buy the raptor. 90% of the drive operations WoW does is against the Data\ folder, everything else is lazy writes (WTF, Cache folders) or accessed upon world creation (Interface, Fonts, etc). With just a SSD in your laptop and Data\ symlinked to it, you will get virtually all the performance gains. Of course your OS will be faster, but does it really matter if Windows boots in 30 secs or 60 seconds?

[Wide]

Have been using my new SSD drive for a few days now and i must say its worth it. Alot find the price for this drive rather expensive, but considering the performance boost - its just insane what you get from those $200!

One problem though (not related to the SSD drive) - everything load fast in shattath/Orgrimmar when I login, but after 2-3 hours it start to lag alot and i can hear the computer doing alot of writing/reading. This must be an issue with the pagefile, which i hope extra RAM will fix. So desided "upgrade" vista to the 64bit one and get an extra 4GB ram (8GB total). Hope this will fix the issue :)

[mikiurban]

64GB Version now $99 after rebate ... naturally: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227344

[Wide]

$99? No excuse to not buy one then ;)

pfft... paying 385 in denmark for that drive (and thats from the cheapest internet store aswell) :(

[puppychow]

I ordered the 64GB version from newegg, should be arriving in a day or two (woot). I'll also post my findings, pre-SSD I get 20-30fps in outlands, which drops to 8-10 fps in shattrah, with 5 clients running under Octopus.

$99 for a 64GB SSD is a crazy deal, even if its the slightly disreputable OCZ v1.0 SSD

[Eloxy]

Hey! i just picked up the ssd at the post and installed all my wow dir's onto it. And i must say......silencer.....THANK YOU SOOOOOO MUCH FOR LETTING ME KNOW!!!!!

this is so awesome av is smooth like a dream shatt is totaly playable and i didnt loose my slaves even when the horde ally cross in av ;D IMBAH!!!



eloxy

[noir]

Wewt. Mine just came in the mail.

Ordered the OCZ V2 60GB SDD -- now I need to figure out how to copy my boot 100GB on my Dell XPS 1730 and clone it over to make my SSD the boot drive. Does Norton Ghost do that?

I can't put it in the 2nd HD slot -- I've got a 500GB there. =D

[-silencer-]

Wewt. Mine just came in the mail.

Ordered the OCZ V2 60GB SDD -- now I need to figure out how to copy my boot 100GB on my Dell XPS 1730 and clone it over to make my SSD the boot drive. Does Norton Ghost do that?

I can't put it in the 2nd HD slot -- I've got a 500GB there. =D
I wouldn't use it as a boot drive. I've already mentioned why in the main post.. the writes will likely be worse, and I suspect alternating read/writes is what causes some people to complain about hangups with the drives. I've specified exactly how I feel the drive should be used for gaming, and it appears that others are discovering this as well. My point is.. don't be surprised if performance is worse if you have ANY writes to the drive during gameplay, which the OS will be doing.

[-silencer-]

Hey! i just picked up the ssd at the post and installed all my wow dir's onto it. And i must say......silencer.....THANK YOU SOOOOOO MUCH FOR LETTING ME KNOW!!!!!

this is so awesome av is smooth like a dream shatt is totaly playable and i didnt loose my slaves even when the horde ally cross in av ;D IMBAH!!!



eloxy

You're welcome! I'm glad more and more people are eliminating this bottleneck.

As for this review, I probably will not be posting anything new. I'm still blown away by the smoothness in Shatt and AV - I wouldn't have believed it would be this good if someone else put up this review. Performance numbers are very dependent on other aspects of hardware, and I don't have a newer system that would really demonstrate how fast these drives are for our purpose. (That, and I simply don't have time.. way too busy with work the last few weeks. I've played maybe 10 hours of WoW in the last 3 weeks.)

[BobGnarly]

So I finally got around to getting this, as well as Vista and more RAM. Here's the results:

I upgraded things one at a time and tried it, this order Vista -> SSD -> 8G RAM.

After moving to vista and getting everything setup again, I found the play experience to be much improved. As we speculated, Vista seems to cache the textures when you have a true 4G of RAM so it had some RAM to cache. Shat was much better than before. Still a few hitches, but definitely better. Honestly, this upgrade alone would probably have solved the problem well enough fore me, however...

Next I installed the SSD drive, and did something similar to what silencer did. I did, however, also move my Interface directory over too as I have a few addons, and I know (from loading without them) that they take a while to load. Result was definitely better. Shat was a little smoother, load times were much better, general play was improved, but not a ton. Again, I attribute much of this to the fact that I now had enough RAM (and vista) so I could cache those textures in RAM. Nevertheless, I think it was a worthy upgrade.

Last, 8G of RAM. Best thing here is that I could move my display setting back up and not worry about the large RAM consumed by the higher quality textures. Overall, my play in the outlands is a lot better because of this RAM. I'm very sold on 8G. Not just for Wow, but Vegas, and many other things I do can use it, so it's all good.

One very unexpected bonus I got from all this was MUCH improved PiP switching rates (like 1/2 second or so). I have a fairly large main monitor with slaves all on another monitor. They are consistent in aspect ratio (which costs you because of the scaling). I had just resigned myself to poor performance due to the monitor size and scaling, but I wasn't willing to sacrafice the main display size, so I had been living with it. Now, it totally workable. I knew it'd be better thanks to vista, but wasn't expecting this much better.

So anyway, the SSD is definitely worth it imo. I think I would have noticed much larger gains if I hadn't upgraded the other things as well. As it is, it was still a noticeable improvement, and I'm all about that! :)

[Coltimar]

Is there a good Wiki for making symbolic links in Vista? I found a few that tell how to make the link but they don't explain how they work.

I found this post to answer my question http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=118256&highlight=symbolic+link#post118256 ('question%20http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=118256&highlight=symbolic+link#post118256')

[puppychow]

I've had mine running now for a day, the 64GB (53GB real) model from newegg for $99 AR. My system is a E6400 at 2.6ghz (slightly OC'd), 4 gigs RAM, 8800GT w/ 512MB, and XP. I run 5 copies of wow (pally + 4 shamans).

Feelings are mixed. I used to get 30-45 fps in regular outland areas, a little less in instances, and I would crawl down to 4-6 fps around the banks in shattrah. This is with low gfx settings on all the wow windows.

Now with the DATA\ and Interface\ folders linked to the SSD, I get around 50-70 fps in outlands, and 30-45 in most of shattrah. However, the bank area still crawls down to 4-6 fps.

One nice thing, I upped my graphic settings to high while in outlands on my main, and my FPS dropped only by 10. Before it would drop a good 20-30.

I am using Octopus and stacking all my WoW windows, except one which is off to the side (hes my herbalist and my "sanity checker"). I recently switched from Keyclone to Octopus so still getting used to that.

Anyways I think its a decent performance boost, but I think a CPU upgrade would have been more significant. For WOTLK I do plan on building a new machine and getting a new video card, the SSD will fit nicely into the new machine and hopefully improve the performance even more, since my CPU at the moment I believe is the bottleneck, especially when there are tons of characters around.

Still for $100, what my wife will spend in a month on her toenails (I DIDNT SAY THAT), its a nice upgrade. My SSD is hanging inside my machine in the floppy bay area, I don't have a cage for it. It doesn't come with a power or SATA cable, so be sure to have those handy (both SATA type).

The biggest performance improvement I've gotten frankly is moving from 5 PIP/Maximizer windows in Keyclone to 4 "stacked" windows in Octopus, and using a focus macro system that lets me instantly switch any character to my main using F1-F5. I no longer see all my windows at once, but frankly it was too much information anyways. With 5 active, shown windows I was getting 10-15 fps on my main, which was really, really not fun to play, especially in crappy low graphics mode (FOG EVERYWHERE OMG!). Now with overlapping windows I get 40-60 fps on my main most of the time and its nice and looks good.

[Jelatin]

Have any of you SSD users noticed the 1second "pause" that happens? It might not apply since we are using them for reading only...

[Xzin]

Are you guys aware that there ARE SSDs out there that offer faster reads AND writes? Not all of them have poor quality writing. It just depends on how much you are willing to spend.

"The MemoRight MR25.2 GT series is currently one of the fastest flash SSD options available. MemoRight specifies both 120 MB/s for sequential read and write operations, which we verified on our storage test system. In fact, we hit 116 MB/s read throughput and 121 MB/s for writes. The 0.1 ms average access time is almost nonexistent."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-hard-drive,2000-5.html

Writing speeds on a normal hard drive will wind up being around 40 megs a second. This offers nearly triple that, with 0.1 ms average access times.

Mtron Pro

"It also does superbly at the PCMark05 application benchmarks when it comes to writing files and in Windows XP startup performance: 117 MB/s read throughput and 116 MB/s write performance are excellent results. This drive will make you forget your old hard drive quickly if you are willing to fork out the $1,300 price tag."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-hard-drive,2000-6.html

[Seraphaw]

Well -silencer-, kickass review - worth the wait!

Will order one for myself :).

[puppychow]

I just ran hdtach against my OCZ and 400GB sata150 hard drive with 8mb quick bench:

SATA150: 209.9 MB/s burst speed, 14.6ms access speed, 2% cpu utilization, average read 45.2 MB/s
OCZ: 126.6 MB/s burst speed, 0.4ms access speed, 4% cpu utilization, average read 105.7 MB/s

I didn't bother doing write tests since I know the OCZ will fail and thats not what I bought it for, I bought it for read only.

So dunno how much faster those other SSD drives are at reading, if their benchmark is 116 MB/s read thats only 10MB/s more than this one. Not that impressive if it costs $500+ more.

Jelatin: I have been running WoW off the OCZ for 4 days now, 3-4 hour gaming sessions a day. Not noticed a single slowdown, once. I only have my DATA\ and INTERFACE\ folders on it, and they are junction linked. I also made them both read-only folders, to ensure WoW (or me) aren't writing to them.

[Jelatin]

Ooo, read only switch. Good idea. I'll make sure when i get mine in to do that. Thanks Puppy!

[sthar]

A alternativ to the SSD is using 16GB of DDR2 RAM! and loading kernel and the wow folder, and runing 5xwow.exe from RAM.
Just now 16GB is around the same price as a small/medium SSD. But the DDR2 RAM totaly kicks SSD in performance, and you get 16GB for other stuff :P
Well anyways that is what I'm using in a few days, order inc.

[ChaoticMonk]

A alternativ to the SSD is using 16GB of DDR2 RAM! and loading kernel and the wow folder, and runing 5xwow.exe from RAM.
Just now 16GB is around the same price as a small/medium SSD. But the DDR2 RAM totaly kicks SSD in performance, and you get 16GB for other stuff :P
Well anyways that is what I'm using in a few days, order inc.how does that work?

[Saevio]

how does that work?Although I've never read heavily into it or tried it myself, this link may help you. ('http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/w-p/system/devicedriverdevelopment/article.php/c5789/')

[sthar]

"OK, here is the latest file and how to install;

1. download the updated version at this link;
http://vista.inoxa.de/Dateien/Gavotte_RAMdisk__v.1.0.4096.4_25.01.2008.zip
The version posted here might also work, but anyway. Extract the archive to a directory.
2. Go to the Control Panel and click Add Hardware
3. Click Next and wait for the search to complete.
4. Choose “Yes, I have already connected the hardware” and click Next
5. Scroll to the very bottom and highlight “Add a new hardware device” and click Next
6. Choose “Install the hardware that I manually select from a list” and click Next
7. Wait for the search to complete and click Next
8. Highlight “Show All Devices” and click Next (warning: this part may take a few minutes)
9. Click Have Disk… (Important! Be sure not to click on anything else or scroll through the lists before you click Have Disk. Doing so will screw up this process.)
10. Click Browse and locate the folder you saved the rramdisk.inf file in, select ramdisk.inf and click Open
11. Click OK, then Next and Next again.
12. Click Continue Anyway if a warning pops up and then Finish
13. Right click on the “ram4g.reg” file in the extracted directory and “merge”.
14. Now when you launch the ramdisk.exe utility, you should be able to see the options properly enabled. Set the desired ramdisk size and click OK. It should be ready to use at the default drive R:

Good luck!"
There are other disks that are not freeware, if this is not working.

[Sarduci]

You do know if you MOVE things there instead of copying them it'll be gone when you power off, right?

[sthar]

Ofc, that is why you use a hd and a image backup there. That you can load when you restart.

[ChaoticMonk]

So in order to take advantage of the Ramdisk you'd need to copy your data folder onto the ram disk after each reboot (and perhaps relink the files)? Would the performance gain be benificial enough to warrent doing this?

[Sarduci]

Ofc, that is why you use a hd and a image backup there. That you can load when you restart.If it was that obvious that you should do that then personally you should not need to be told how to setup a ramdisk.

[ChaoticMonk]

Now, I understand that vista 32bit wont see more than 4gigs of ram (3.7 or whatever) but if I was to install more than 4gigs of ram could I utalize the extra ram that windows does see as ramdisk or would windows need to be able to see it?

And since the Data folder in WoW is almost 9gigs (more when WotLK comes out), how are ramdisks beneficial when you can only have so much?

[sthar]

Ofc, that is why you use a hd and a image backup there. That you can load when you restart.If it was that obvious that you should do that then personally you should not need to be told how to setup a ramdisk.
What? Who told me to do what? Please read who has posted what. :P
------
I have nlited a XP 64 and ruing that from a gigabyte i-ram. So i can "use" all the 16GB, and yes lets say wotlk will take 10GB, I still have 6GB left, and I don't need as much running wow from the RAM.

And with a image and hardlinks it wont take much time to set up if you restart.
Well I'm just saying it is a quicker alternative. And it works for me, as I almost never restarts my comp.

[Coltimar]

Does anyone have a good mounting solution? I haven't found anything at newegg.com that excites me.

[Igthorn]

Does anyone have a good mounting solution? I haven't found anything at newegg.com that excites me.Simple 2.5" to 3.5" bracket ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811993005') internal
Simple 2.5" to 3.5" bracket ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200176') internal
Addonics AAMKHD25B/AAMKHD25W ('http://www.addonics.com/products/io/aa25ide35.asp') simple 2.5" to 3.5" bracket
Atech Fabrication 2.5" mounts ('http://atechfabrication.com/products/drive_mounting_kits.htm') pci bracket mounts and 2x 2.5" to 1 3.5" internal
SuperMicro 4x 2.5" rack ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101189&Tpk=M14T') 5.25" bay. Looks like a nice option for raid-0 SSD + raid-0 VRs (gotta remove the icepak voiding warranty or get BLFS VRs)..
AthenaPower 4x 2.5" rack ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816119006') 5.25" bay. Same as SuperMicro, but most people recommend the SuperMicro one over this one. I've never used either, so I can't really say.
Addonics 2x 2.5" rack ('http://www.addonics.com/products/mobile_rack/doubledrive.asp') 3.5" bay

[Coltimar]

So just any old 2.5" to 3.5" bracket will do? No trouble with vibration or any other garbage?

I guess I was just looking for something built for this purpose.

[ChaoticMonk]

So whats the cheapest solution when it comes to SSDs? for example, if you only intend on using it for WoW then maybe 16GB is enough?

[puppychow]

the 32GB OCZ drive is on sale for $99 afaik on newegg, the $70 rebate ends today I think though. I've been running one for 2 weeks now, and tbh I'd only buy one if you have a quad core CPU, a good GPU (the latest gen ATI/nvidia), and running under Vista with 8GB of memory or more. For those of us with dual core, 8800GTs (or lower), frankly the performance improvements are not that huge.

This is for people 5 boxing on a single PC, if you have fewer of course I think it may help more.

I do plan on upgrading to vista/8gb/quad core in a month or so, so that'll let me just carry my drive forward into my new rig.

[ChaoticMonk]

Well I do have a quadcore cpu and a 8800GT but I'm only running vista 32bit with 3gigs of ram...I'll go ahead and up it to 4gigs and save up for vista+4gigs of ram for the future.

[alcattle]

The prices have really dropped since you first wrote the review. Would the >$100 upgrade be noticable on a 1 HD system? The HD is newer, SATA II 3.0. Most are rated at 100MHZ read which is the one used in WOW.

[-silencer-]

The prices have really dropped since you first wrote the review. Would the >$100 upgrade be noticable on a 1 HD system? The HD is newer, SATA II 3.0. Most are rated at 100MHZ read which is the one used in WOW.
Yes, prices have changed a ton in 6 months. However, for our purposes, the only specs on the SSD we really care about is access time and read transfer rate to be overall better than 10k rpm drives. The specs on the OCZ Solid 30GB SSD for $75-90 look fine. I've installed two of them into computers I've built for people, and although I didn't get to test it out for more than a day, it appeared to work just as well as my 64GB model. Since WotLK only uses about 12GB, 30GB is plenty for now.

100MHz? You mean 100 MB/s? Many inexpensive SSDs are rated at 150-170 MB/s and are SATA 3.0. The higher-end SSDs (like the Intel X25-M 80GB for $400+) are 250MB/s. Also, SSD's don't get slower as data is read further from the center of a disk like standard hard drives. The real benefit is that the SSD random access time (time it takes to find and start transferring a file) is around 0.1-0.3 ms, while the fastest 10k rpm drives are just over 4ms. Since this is latency, lower is better. Some people like to point out that SSDs have a limited amount of writes before blocks of memory are no longer usable, but I've had quite a few standard hard drives fail over the years due to use. Since we're not going to be doing much writing to the drive (only during patches/expansions), this negative aspect doesn't matter.

[Mukade]

I'm considering getting a couple of 30GB drives. Would certainly be a good way to make use of the spare PERC 5i I've got sitting around, and get rid of the single figure FPS I get every time I log in in a town. My HDDs are probably the oldest parts in the computer, being rather old 300GB SATA1 maxtors (one for OS, one for games). At the moment I'm having to log each character in separately and wait for the FPS to stabilise, otherwise having all 3 trying to load at the same time has me seeing a max of 4Fps on each window for at least 10 minutes, where I usually get 60/30/30.

[Clanked]

Some people like to point out that SSDs have a limited amount of writes before blocks of memory are no longer usable, but I've had quite a few standard hard drives fail over the years due to use. Since we're not going to be doing much writing to the drive (only during patches/expansions), this negative aspect doesn't matter.

Please, stop posting this myth. The limited amount of writes on affected the very first few SSD's. They all have wear leveling algorithms now, which even assuming constant reads and writes, will easily outlast your computer. It will take 50 years for you to render the drive unusable due to read/writes. If you are still using a 64GB drive in 50 years, you have issues. [Citation] ('http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html') Couple that with the fact that you will in no way shape or form be constantly reading and writing to the drive, 24hrs a day, at the fastest rate the drive will allow, and you can easily see that the lifetime will outlast even you.

So please stop running around shouting "SSDs Will Die! They have limited read/writes!!1"
Every time you post it, someone who doesn't know any better gets it in their head that SSDs will wear out. Technically, they do, but it will take 50+ years for it to even possibly affect you.

[-silencer-]

Some people like to point out that SSDs have a limited amount of writes before blocks of memory are no longer usable, but I've had quite a few standard hard drives fail over the years due to use. Since we're not going to be doing much writing to the drive (only during patches/expansions), this negative aspect doesn't matter.

Please, stop posting this myth. The limited amount of writes on affected the very first few SSD's. They all have wear leveling algorithms now, which even assuming constant reads and writes, will easily outlast your computer. It will take 50 years for you to render the drive unusable due to read/writes. If you are still using a 64GB drive in 50 years, you have issues. [Citation] ('http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html') Couple that with the fact that you will in no way shape or form be constantly reading and writing to the drive, 24hrs a day, at the fastest rate the drive will allow, and you can easily see that the lifetime will outlast even you.

So please stop running around shouting "SSDs Will Die! They have limited read/writes!!1"
Every time you post it, someone who doesn't know any better gets it in their head that SSDs will wear out. Technically, they do, but it will take 50+ years for it to even possibly affect you.
Please, go back to high school reading comprehension. I'm not shouting that SSDs have limited writes - I'm stating that even though some people like to say they do, it doesn't matter either way in our application. In fact, I'm saying that reliability of mechanical hard drives is no better than SSDs, and believe mechanical drives are actually WORSE for reliability.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Between this thread and the Evilseed thread


I did some digging into why these intel SSDs provide such a massive performance gain and it is all about the IOPS and seek times. The real strain on a PC is that running multiple wows, symlinked or not, requires a ton of random reads from random files. The more reads that exist, the lower your throughput will be. For example, while 1 read constant may yield you 100mbs, 10 reads will NOT yield you 10mbps per read. Rather, it'll do maybe 1.5mbps per read. The reason for the througput cut is the seek time latency. With my raid0/1 array using 4x x25e SSDs, I'm able to hit over 1000mb/s read *and* write, and can have 10,000 open file handlers reading/writing and still obtain over 400mbs. My wow multiboxing is now insane.

I am considering selling my raptors.

Is there any way to confirm that wow does in fact get its texturs and what not from a lot of tiny files and not one big one?


Here $83:

http://www.hkepc.com/1955 (145 mb/sec transfer .2ms seek time)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ADATA-300-series-SSD-HDD-32GB-MLC-2-5-SATAII-32-GB-New_W0QQitemZ330300472933QQihZ014QQcategoryZ31567Q QssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Hey anyone want to go in on some I bet if we buy like 20 at the same time we could get for less then $83 each (I need 6).