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

[Maklar]

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

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227343

[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/...as,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/...as,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.