I know this drive is probably not too applicable to an unRAID server, but still, one can appreciate a good drive.

 

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB

Indeed, a very nice drive.  I look forward to the day in which it is economically feasible for me to start building unRAID servers out of SSDs alone.  I'm imagining a small form factor, completely silent, insanely efficient (pico PSU?) server packed with these full of SSDs.  I believe a completely silent server would be within grasp as SSDs produce so much less heat than HDDs, I'll bet you could get away without any active cooling, just passive cooling and clever thermodynamics in the case.

 

I give this dream 3 years at most before I make it a reality.  Coming soon to an upstart company near you

Raj is gonna start making servers that run off of 8 D cells.  I can see it now, "Batteries not included."

 

 

Raj is gonna start making servers that run off of 8 D cells.  I can see it now, "Batteries not included."

 

Possible 6 months ago.  Only costs $1M!

 

If price falls to 1/500th that cost, you could have one for $2K.  3 years?  Maybe so, maybe not.

 

50 TB SSD Array

I am still using Windows XP Pro and is itching to build a tower workstation using a P67 motherboard with an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU and the OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD as the system boot drive.  From what I have been reading, SSDs on the native SATA II and SATA III controlers of the P67 will perform much faster.  Heck, I could probably go with an OCZ Vertex 2 SATA II drive and still be impressed.

I'm still on a Pentium Dual Core e2160 OC'd to 2.7gHz and it's still slow. The old school 5400rpm 40gb SATA drive is the definite bottleneck though, as things wait for the drive to churn away before anything happens. I want an SSD for a boot drive, but I've read too many stories of them all of a sudden disappearing from the BIOS and the data is completely lost.

I would say now, an SSD is a pretty safe bet. In some cases we are now seeing the 6th generation of SSD drives coming to market since they were made commercially available/affordable. If you have an issues with an SSD drive, just like any drive, you may have a "bad" one. But for other issues, like disappearing, I would blame that more on the motherboard/BIOS now then the SSD itself. I have been running a Vertex for two years with zero issues. Just keep the firmware up-to-date. This original drive can still pretty much saturate my Sata II controller if I try.   The new Sata 6Gb drives will be pretty impressive. I am just waiting for the price to come down on these PCI-E monsters and then will try one in my gaming system. May actually be able to play Crysis at max everything. 

 

Shawn

 

^^ Your sample size of 1 isn't a good basis for all SSD devices   Now that OCZ used cheaper 25nm chips on their SSD's the speed is less, the formatted capacity is less, and the read/write cycles is less. Just because SSD's have been around for a few years now has no bearing on quality. Just look at hard drives, several models are terrible and hard drives have been out for over 20 years. And, hard drives almost never disappear compared to SSD drives which do. I wouldn't blame that problem on the motherboard.

I actually have many clients running these in laptops and systems, all with no issues. The one thing I have been diligent about is only using OCZ or Intel until recently. Those were always rated the fastest and most reliable. The reliability numbers on the Intel series is actually quite spectacular.

Yes, about the 25nm is correct, when thinking about the jump from other various models, the vertex to vertex2 for instance, but still blow away anything a mechanical disk can do. I read a review recently on the new Intel drive at anandtech and that was one of their biggest issues with the drive, that the performance jump wasn't as significant as when previous generations came out, and in some cases the numbers were the same or a bit less. But, overall, better performance and with the smaller manufacturing size, we are getting better pricing per GB now.  Plus, the new SandForce controllers should really help boost performance.

 

I think some of the original issues were the crappy JMicron controller and then some of the complexity around upgrade a firmware. If you were in AHCI or Raid mode, you had to flip back to IDE and was pretty easy to brick one in the early days. And don't forget, desctructive upgrades. That didn't help. The performance hit issues as you filled a drive to near capacity due to delete cycles needing to be completed... Those were fun times.

 

All in all I would say using a SSD is as safe as using a traditional hard drive. But that is my opinion. Just make sure you get a good quality brand/controller...

 

Cheers,

Shawn

 

 

I've only looked at Sandforce controller SSD's. I'm getting to a point where I can't stand my boot drive any longer. Max read is under 45MB/s so that's a huge bottleneck.

Well I pulled the trigger and purchased my very first SSD, the OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB.  I am building a new tower workstation using the Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard and will be using the SSD as my system drive connected to the P67 native SATA III port.

 

I guess the next best thing would have been a PCIe based SSD like the one mentioned my Whaler_99.

 

Oh well, I will have to settle for now.

Finnaly finished building my system with a Vertex 3 as the system drive on the Intel SATA III port of a Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard.  Here is the HD Tune results:

 

Holy crap that is FAST! How much did it run ya?

I want that.. er several. for my desktops, my laptops.. and my unraid cache drive!

Another benefit of this new workstation is that my network file transfers went from low 40's MB/s (from a Supermicro PT3DLR motherboard) to low 90's MB/s when copying files to the cache drive, a Samsung 1TB 7200 rpm HD103SJ.

 

The source disks (various 7200 rpm drives) were moved from the old Supermicro PT3DLR dual Pentium III system to the new Asus P8P67 deluxe i7 2600K system.  Looked like the old motherboard was the bottleneck.

Looked like the old motherboard was the bottleneck.

I bet it also had 10/100 only. I still have one SuperServer 6010H on my network.

It was a beast back in the day. now my cellphone is more powerfull. I can see it as a bottleneck.

A 100mbit connection would theoretically max out at 12.5MB/s.

The SuperMicro PT3DLR motherboard had dual 10/100 LAN which I disabled and installed an Intel Gigabit PCI card.  This boosted by transfer from 11 MB/s to 40-45 MB/s.  Since it did not have any onboard SATA ports, I had to install a  PCI-X 66 MHz SATA controller.  My guess is that the PCI bus where the Gigabit LAN card was installed was the bottleneck.

 

It is now regulated to running educational programs for my two year old.

Holy crap that is FAST! How much did it run ya?

 

The drive is about $300 at NewEgg plus shipping.  I figured this is my first SSD and since I was using a P67 motherboard, I might as well spend a little more to fully utilize the native Intel SATA III port from the P67 chipset.  It took less than 10 minutes to install Windows 7 64-bit from a USB flash drive.  Booting into Windows 7 is fast (12 seconds?) with most of the time attributed to the BIOS.

Just make sure you back up your SSD.

 

I have yet to have a problem personally, but we had several of the OCZ and Crucial SSD's just die with no warning at work. They were all in thinkpads and mac mini's for average  joe blow users.

 

I would order one of these Vertex3's for work. unfortunately, due to the amount of issues we had, now we are only allowed to order intel SSD's. no where near as fast writing, but the read speed is  decent. we have had no issues with those yet. I think we are going to try some kingston's with the next batch of laptops.

 

I am going to bite the bullet and get a Vertex 3 for myself. I'll probably put it in my unraid  just to test it, then put it on my I7.

 

^^ Yup. Several reviews on Newegg with the same problem, on boot the SSD is no longer recognized by the BIOS and you've gotta RMA the drive. And this happens with all brand, even IBM from what I've found.

I plan to only install the OS and applications on the SSD.  Data will remain on my unRAID server.  So the wort case is have to install the OS and applications again.  Once I am done tweaking, I will create an image of the disk as a backup.

 

As far as the disk no longer being recognized by the BIOS, this happened to me too, but it turned out to be the boot order in the BIOS.  With the drive, a lot of people are probably using a recent motherboard were the BIOS is still a work in progress.  In my case, all of a sudden, the BIOS did not like multiple devices in the boot list.  Everything was fine when I only had the SSD listed in the boot list.

 

I am now contemplating getting a second SSD to setup a RAID 0 system drive to double my throughput...

 

As far as the disk no longer being recognized by the BIOS, this happened to me too, but it turned out to be the boot order in the BIOS.  With the drive, a lot of people are probably using a recent motherboard were the BIOS is still a work in progress.  In my case, all of a sudden, the BIOS did not like multiple devices in the boot list.  Everything was fine when I only had the SSD listed in the boot list.

 

 

This is not the same. Your BIOS still saw the drive. The problem I'm talking about is that the drive completely disappears from the BIOS on any motherboard regardless of settings in the BIOS.

So I decided to get a second OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB and configured the two drives in a RAID 0 as my system drive.

 

Here is the HD Tune results:

Test Speed - Fast

Block Size - 8 MB

 

I assume this is on your Motherboard raid chipset?

if not, what card did you use?

 

and umm yeah.. fast. my photoshop and 3Dmax is very jealous