The Solid State Drive market continues to grow rapidly and we are reporting on new models several times a week. The thing most people are talking about, both manufacturers and consumers, is that the transfer rates have widely surpassed the potential of mechanical harddrives many times over. What makes SSDs unique is the incredibly fast access times. But even if most SSDs specified to 0.1-0.2ms access time, the fastest mechanical desktop harddrives are around 6ms, it doesn’t paint the whole picture.
When Anandtech published its review of Intel’s X25-M SSD in September last year it put a lot or emphasis on the SSD-specific problems with so called stuttering and freezes at regular use. Unlike most other Anandtech blamed the SSD markers and the only company that had managed to avoid these problems was Intel with its new offerings.
Several manufacturers using the JMicron SSD controllers that was pointed out became upset (basically everyone except Intel) and especially OCZ who is one of the leading actors today. Six months later Anandtech has published a new article that not only walks you through the Solid State Drive technology and how these drives actually work. They talk about how the tension that appeared, especially between them and OCZ who has now shown that it intends to please the consumers.
OCZ Vertex with specially designed firmware for no stuttering
In the over 30 pages long article we get a lot of useful information on the pros and cons of the SSD technology, Among others the reports of SSDs dropping in performance after being filled with data. And of course lots of benchmarks with OCZ’s latest creation in comparison to Intel’s older contribution. A very interesting article that we can recommend to anyone who wants to know more about the SSD market today.
“Drives will get better and although we’re still looking at SSDs in their infancy, as a boot/application drive I still believe it’s the single best upgrade you can do to your machine today. I’ve moved all of my testbeds to SSDs as well as my personal desktop. At least now we have two options to choose from: the X25-M and the Vertex.” – Anand Lal Shimp, Anandtech
:: The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
