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

[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]

[s]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.

[/s]I found this post to answer my question http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=118256&highlight=symb olic+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/...ve,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/...ve,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?