stripey raid anyone :)

they are probably doing the right thing selling it to gamers not many other people are prepared to pay the premium for shaving off those few seconds load time

Must add to wedding list doubt ill get em though lol

Ah, but will it sustain 200+MB per second when coupled with the still-present DRM-related file copy bottleneck that Vista is plagued with?

(with SP2 it is less frequent, but still present from time-to-time on large file copies)

In principle, I don't see why a PC can't boot up Windows in under a second, instead of minutes these days. There's no technical reason other than lots of poor designs all combining to slow the whole lot down taking way longer than it should. Still I wonder how much faster a very fast SSD can improve current boot times?

You only need a £50 3D graphics card on your cheap AMD to run the vast majority of games perfectly acceptably. At least as well as an 360 Eggs Boxes. It gets expensive when you try to run one of those huge new flat screens at native resolution.

I have an intel X25-M with Ubuntu 9.04 installed on an EXT4 partition. From the time I press the power button to the login screen is 15 seconds. Most of that is due to the BIOS (which could be further optimized to reduce boot times). Once I log in, there simply is no waiting for the OS to continue to load whatsoever. Opening applications is instantaneous. Even very resource intensive apps completely open in just 2 or 3 seconds.

I've read up extensively on SSD controllers. Samsung's ranks 3rd. Intel is first followed by Indilinx. JMicron SSD controllers are junk and exhibit severe stuttering problems. The sequential throughput is not the most important factor in SSD performance for typical end user usage patterns. What makes the intel controller excel is small random write performance.

This is encouraging news from Samsung, however.

would be interesting to see a few of these in a raid array for the smaller size/ <1TB database storage requirements.

Guess it depends how they hold up in industrial use.

Video editing on one of these beasts would be interesting as the biggest bottleneck in the system is the HD, even with RAID.

Trouble is that the cost per GB is eye watering.

Forgot to mention - for SSDs, don't forget to set your partition offset to allow for the 4K NAND block sizes and RAID striping .. boot from winPE or similar (before installing the OS), run diskpart:

list disk

select disk # (corresponds to RAID volume)

create partition primary align=2048

select partition 1

active

exit

When installing the OS, use 'quick format' on the partition you created.

This can make *huge* performance differences for write speeds, as it helps reduce the build up of 'garbage blocks' over time, which plagues SSD performance. Some people were saying up to 300%.. I'm yet to quantify that with my own tests.

Why anyone would buy a single, expensive SSD instead of two (or four) smaller ones in a raid0 setup behind a *proper* Controller - something like the HP smartarray p410 with half a GB of write cache AND a PCIe 8x connection to actually transfer the data - is still beyond me. Maybe its the 500Eur pricetag on the controller, but you´ll have to shell out that money only once. And migrating to another board suddenly is a charm, too.

Just a thought, maybe I am completely wrong...

Or just... Stupid Expensive?

"The SSD reads data at 220MB/sec and writes it at 200MB/sec and does so across a 3Gbit/s SATA interface."

So exactly like the 120GB OCZ Summit drive I installed in my aging Vaio laptop (I know, I know) over the weekend which I suspect, from reading other comments here, is a rebadged Samsung part.

Windows Vista is almost usable now. Boots in about 15-20 seconds, shuts down in about 5. Suffice to say I will *never* buy a mechanical HD ever again. (I'm probably never going to buy another copy of Windows either, but that's another story.)

Search youtube for the 'Samsung SSD Awesomeness' video

24 of these beasts in a raid array, the speed is eyewatering!

...640Mb ought to be enough!

Not sure why everyone gets so worked up about MB/s - this is only 2x or maybe 2.5x a fast HDD... what are the IOPs numbers, then we can see if these really make a difference.

This one was a law of diminishing returns.. the reason they only saw half the performance they should have relates to the PCIe bus speed and the RAID controllers they chose. Basically this is the next bottleneck in the equation. 2.5GB/s is impressive, but they should have been able to get that with about 12 of those P256 SSDs.

A lot of the RAID controllers max out around 1GB/s, which is a pain in the backside. I've had a reasonable run with the HP P410, but seems to max out around 1GB/s also. The Adaptec 5xxx / 3xxx had similar problems. The HPT 3520 was the only one (so far) I've used (I am sure there are more) that has performed consistently well above 1GB/s... providing the motherboard allows it to!

I believe it was 640Kb, which still applies to all PCs. Everything else you have is cache memory, extended memory and of course, hard drives etc or whatever kind which is nothing to do with what he was talking about. I don't believe I just backed up Bill Gates there, but there you go.

Multicores of course, kind of expand on it but it's still basically the same architecture per core.

Not according to my extremely unscientific EB shelf percentage survey. It seems to me that as the wii, xbox and ps shelf real estate grows, the PC games section shrinks.

It's a shame actually because I hate consoles but I'm getting old now and don't have much time to play games anymore.

RTS games on a console? No thanks. World building games? No way. FPS, um no again.

The only console game I *really* loved and still play to this day is Toe Jam and Earl on the Sega Megadrive which I guess hints at my age, but I digress.