170 MB/s official, 150 MB/s measured read performance SSD

[magwo]

So, there's a "V2" drive from OCZ.
http://www.komplett.se/k/ki.aspx?sku=367356

Pretty tasty IMO sick read speeds.


However, a friend of mine suggested that some SSDs' performance goes down drastically as the drive fills up.. so that at 50-70% full drive you notice drastic performance drops.
Anyone aware of this, and where it happens?

[Worthless]

A quick google search reveals the below articles detailing degraded performance over time:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/04/25/LaptopSSDPerformanceDegradationProblems.aspx

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/flash/ssd/pdf/datacenter_ssds.pdf

In the end though I think it's a judgement call, based on your trust of the company producing the product (much like anything). OCZ seems to have put together a nice drive, the question is whether they approach the "enterprise" class devices which are built to account for write degredation over time. I doubt you'll find much hard evidence either way without some insider perspective. Good luck!

[HPAVC]

There will be sexy raid setups soon (now if you have zfs) to make the writes less abusive on the drives. Where the SSD will only be written to by the raid and the SSD will always be used by the OS for reading if its insync with the parity drive.

I think its really in the driver / os camp on this technology, controllers cannot treat these drives and normal drives. And right now the drive makers have to hack a lot of the calls to protect the drives from doing stupid stuff. Using a filesystem that has gross journaling or snapshotting and what not.

This is perfect however for wow, where the \data will only be written to one per month or so, combined with symlinking. You could pretty much make the drive read-only and rock on. And at the price of some of the smaller drives its not all that bad, especially given the defect rate on some of the faster drives out there and the time bullshitting around with them.

[puppychow]

its been discussed many times in the other thread, but for purposes of WoW players the degradation does not come into play. You should learn how junctioning works, and junction your DATA\ folder(s) to a copy of the DATA\ folder on the SSD drive. That way you only write once to the SSD (once per WoW patch), and all the time you are playing WoW its treated as a read-only device.

Having said that I have the v1 OCZ and achieve 120 MB/s read speeds. OTOH it has improved my wow perf a little bit, but not dramatically - I am more CPU/GPU bound with a c2duo 2.6ghz and 8800GT under XP.

[Fortis]

There was a large SSD-Test in a german magazine last week and they conclude that current SSDs will not result in a performance boost, but most likely slow down your system. However there is one exception: the new SSDs from Intel. They are pricy, but very fast. Intel developed a new controller from scratch and apparently they did a good job. The test showed that a system with the OS on one of these babys was 15% faster than the system with a conventional HD.

[wowphreak]

Here's something that blow the stuffing outta the fastest flash based ssd

Its got 800MB/s read speed and 680MB/s write speed.

http://www.dvnation.com/Fusion-IO-IODrive-SSD-Solid-State-Disk-Drive.html

Just dont look at the sticker price

[Multibocks]

Hmm there is no sticker price...

[Noids99]

Apparently its about $3k for 80GB or $5k for 160GB. Only works in 64bit environments.

[-silencer-]

There was a large SSD-Test in a german magazine last week and they conclude that current SSDs will not result in a performance boost, but most likely slow down your system. However there is one exception: the new SSDs from Intel. They are pricy, but very fast. Intel developed a new controller from scratch and apparently they did a good job. The test showed that a system with the OS on one of these babys was 15% faster than the system with a conventional HD.
This is referring to using an SSD as a main drive, which I've never been fond of. However, the SSD has a substantial boost when used as a "read-only" drive for symlinking the /data folder of WoW, and quite a few users have PM'd me with their fantastic results, especially in data-intensive areas - Outlands, especially Shatt, and other cities & BGs..