# Good SSD for HS



## Dan Mott (Nov 22, 2011)

Time to buy one. I'm getting a little sick of waiting ages for patches too load and I also want better performance when all the powerful patches are played together, plus I'd like to give my poor Caviar black WD drive a break. Poor thing :(

I'm looking for an SSD that will simply do the job, nothing overkill like 1GB a second :D

Prehaps a read and write speed of 500MB a second or something? 

I'm not sure. Just want to be able to get a great performance.

Thanks.


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## EastWest Lurker (Nov 22, 2011)

The OCZ Agility 3 is working really well here with HS and HB in VE Pro on my new PC.


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## Dan Mott (Nov 22, 2011)

Hello Jay.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Do you find the drive overkill? Or do you think you wouldn't go any slower than say 400MB read and write for HS?


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## EastWest Lurker (Nov 22, 2011)

In all candor,I didn't concern myself with the specs, it just seemed like a good drive for the money.


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## Dan Mott (Nov 22, 2011)

Another question

How long does it take to load, for example - violas - powerful system - Leg slur??


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## EastWest Lurker (Nov 22, 2011)

Dan-Jay @ Tue Nov 22 said:


> Another question
> 
> How long does it take to load, for example - violas - powerful system - Leg slur??



11 seconds.


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## Dan Mott (Nov 22, 2011)

Cheers


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## dedersen (Nov 22, 2011)

Note that the OCZ have had some reliability issues previously. I'm not aware of whether they have been sorted out now. You should consider the Corsair Force Series 3 also.


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## Dan Mott (Nov 23, 2011)

I noticed that you get better performance with two smaller drives, plus you can save money. What if you don't have enough room in your case for another two drives? Can I run the drives externally and still maintain max performance?


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 23, 2011)

Why would you get better performance with two SSD drives? I can't think of a logical reason - which isn't to say there isn't one, just that I can't think of one.

With standard drives, sure - each one is doing less seeking. But solid-state drives don't have seek times for all intents and purposes.


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## rgames (Nov 23, 2011)

Dan-Jay @ Wed Nov 23 said:


> Can I run the drives externally and still maintain max performance?


Probably not. External interfaces are almost always slower than those on the motherboard. I'm about 99% certain that USB or Firewire 400 would put a big dent in the performance. Not sure about eSATA or Firewire 800 but I'm willing to bet they're not much better.

Regarding why multiple drives are better than one: it's the same reason that it's true for HDD's. If you have 2x128 GB drives then each one has 400 - 500 MB/s bandwidth, so the total bandwidth is 800 - 1000 MB/s. A single 256 GB drive will have bandwidth of only 400 - 500 MB/s. So for 2x128 GB drives you have 256 GB storage and bandwidth of 800 - 1000 MB/s. With 1x256 GB drive you have 256 GB storage and bandwidth of 400 - 500 MB/s. The exceptions are the setups like the RevoDrive which have 800 - 1000 MB/s from an array of drives that act like a single drive (assuming it's on a 4x or 8x interface). Basically the RevoDrive is a pre-packaged multiple drive setup (in RAID, I believe).

Same holds true for seek times: more drives = less time per GB spent seeking. The seek times on SSD's are low compared to HDD's but they're not zero.

There's also the maintenance/upgrade advantage: swapping/upgrading a single 128 GB drive is cheaper than swapping/upgrading a 256 GB drive. With a technology that's moving as quickly as SSD's, I think that's a major consideration.

The other thing to think about is that setups like the RevoDrive use the PCI bus, along with your soundcard, video card, UAD card, whatever. So your 900 MB/s RevoDrive might actually be a 300 MB/s drive when all those devices are competing for the same bandwidth. That's why the dedicated SATA ports are probably a better choice: they have a dedicated bus separate from the PCI bus.

rgames


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 23, 2011)

I would have thought the seek times are close enough to zero that it may as well be. And using two drives doesn't increase the throughput of the bus.

Again, I'm only speculating and using the Socratic method - I don't have SSDs to measure.


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## rgames (Nov 23, 2011)

Nick Batzdorf @ Wed Nov 23 said:


> And using two drives doesn't increase the throughput of the bus.


Which is precisely why you use the onboard SATA controllers, which don't use the PCI bus.

I think each lane in PCIe 2.0 has close to the bandwidth of the SATA III lanes (5 Gb/s vs. 6 Gb/s for SATA III). However, my guess is that the number of different things dumping data across the PCI bus can drastically reduce its real transfer rate (and latency, therefore seek time).

It's like the old SCSI drives: though the bandwidth on SCSI devices was never that much more than IDE, the fact that they had a dedicated controller made them a *lot* more efficient while other operations were going on.

rgames


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 23, 2011)

I've always understood that everything eventually feeds the same über-bus?


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## Dan Mott (Nov 23, 2011)

Thanks for the information guys.

In the end, I actually might go with the corsair force GT. Seems like a good option.

I had a friend who took 3 OCZ drives back and I have hadvery good luck with corsair in the past so I mat aswell.

Cheers.


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## Scrianinoff (Nov 24, 2011)

Nick Batzdorf @ Thu 24 Nov said:


> I've always understood that everything eventually feeds the same über-bus?


Indeed, everything, except the traffic of the CPU-connected-PCIe ports. See below.



rgames @ Wed 23 Nov said:


> The other thing to think about is that setups like the RevoDrive use the PCI bus, along with your soundcard, video card, UAD card, whatever. So your 900 MB/s RevoDrive might actually be a 300 MB/s drive when all those devices are competing for the same bandwidth. That's why the dedicated SATA ports are probably a better choice: they have a dedicated bus separate from the PCI bus.


Sorry, I have to disagree here. It's the other way around. The Revo has a dedicated bus and the onboard Sata ports compete for DMI bus bandwidth. See below.



rgames @ Wed 21 Sep said:


> If you have a video card, sound card, USB controller, FireWire controller, and disk controller on the same bus, they're all fighting for the same link to the processor.


That's true if they're on the same bus. But you're wise enough not to put them on the same bus. The "same link to the processor" you are refferring to is the DMI bus through which the chipset is connected. Everything connected to the chipset has to go though DMI, that is, USB, *all* onboard Sata ports, the non-CPU-connected PCIe ports. Therefore, I am sure you would put a high bandwidth storage controller, whether a Raid, or an extra Sata controller, or a Revo, in the PCIe ports connected directly to the CPU. Those are mostly the first two PCIe x16 slots on a Sandy Bridge board (P67/Z68), or the first three on a Sandy Bridge-E board (X79). Here, have a look at my rant in which I highlight a few things about CPU-connected-PCIe, DMI and chipset-connected-PCIe: http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtop ... 44#3587844


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## Scrianinoff (Nov 24, 2011)

To put this in perspective:
The chipset can transfer a maximum of 2GBytes/s. This means the onboard Sata ports, the USB ports, Firewire, Ethernet and the third (or fourth) and further PCIe ports have to share this 2GBytes/s. To be clear, it's 2GBytes/s input and 2GBytes/s output. It goes without saying that we're mostly interested in 2GBytes/s from the drives into the CPU and memory. Even if you buy 6 Agility drives you won't reach it. Huh? Yes, I can count.  Although 6 x 500MB/s is more than 2GBytes/s. 500MB/s or even 525MB/s is not the bandwidth value of the Agility 3 that we are interested in. Sample data is incompressible. Have a look here for my rant about the measured values of incompressible data:
http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtop ... 42#3587342
Beware though that if you connect 6 Vertex 3, HyperX, the firmware-updated-M4 or any other 500MB/s incompressible bandwidth drives, you will saturate the DMI bus.

The cpu-connected PCIe ports have to share 8GBytes/s. As you see in the diagram in the first link, Intel specifies 16GBytes/s, but that is input and output added together. So if you have a graphics card in PCIe port 1 and a storage controller in PCIe port 2, both ports operate in PCIe x8 and have a maximum theoretical input bandwidth of 4GB/s. That's twice the bandwidth for the whole chipset with everything connected to it.

So what is the *maximum theoretical storage input bandwidth for a Z68 solution*? Well, if you have a Z68, you have the graphics onboard, uhm I mean oncpu, so you don't need a graphics card in PCIe port 1. So that's 8GB/s for the cpu-connected-PCIe ports and _only _2GB/s for everything connected through the not-quite-so-über DMI bus. That's a total *10GBytes/s*. That's really close the the 21GB/s memory bandwidth of the 2600k by the way, and of course, a crazy number.


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## Scrianinoff (Nov 24, 2011)

On a more practical note. If you're not going the PCIe route and you want to buy let's say some 500GB of SSD. I would always go for multiple drives. For example a software raid in Windows of 4 Agility 120GB drives leaves a single Vertex 3 480GB drive in the dust. And you have the freedom to connect them to the Sata 3Gb/s ports, since they won't output more than 203 MByte/s anyhow, and that's sequential incompressible read performance. The 4 - 128 kBytes/s reads will be even lower. So don't get worked up about not connecting these drives to 6Gb/s ports.

Some time ago, the Agility 3 was the best deal simply because of the extremely low prices. Raiding or junction-linking them overcomes their lacklustre incompressible data performance. Perhaps now, the best deal is the Corsair of the Crucial or the Kingston, just check it when you want to order, while not forgetting about the incompressible data (AS-SSD) scores and any hard evidence you can get about reliability. If you don't write a lot to your sample drives, then wear-levelling performance is not important.


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## Gerd Kaeding (Nov 24, 2011)

Question ( ... from a non-tech guy ... ) :

I just saw this SSD solution for both PC and Mac on VSL's website :

http://www.vsl.co.at/en/65/71/2025/1712.vsl

( http://www.angelbird.com/store/ )

What do you think of this concerning price & performance ?


I'm interested in a solution for upgrading my 2008 MacPro ( _... although I've read the other threads/entries from Jay and Jack Weaver ..._ ) .


Best
Gerd


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## Scrianinoff (Nov 24, 2011)

Gerd Kaeding @ Thu 24 Nov said:


> http://www.vsl.co.at/en/65/71/2025/1712.vsl
> 
> ( http://www.angelbird.com/store/ )
> 
> What do you think of this concerning price & performance ?



The price for the SSD storage cards isn't that expensive per se, although not exactly cheap either. But before you click the Buy link, consider that it's based on the old SF-1222 controller, that's also in the yesteryears Vertex 2, Agility 2, etc.. Have a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce#SSDs

Having never heard of the Wings interface, this sounds to me like buyer lock-in. Are there any other vendors offering Wings interface cards or Wings storage cards, just in case Angelbird goes bankrupt for example? Did you see any reviews of this thing? Ah, I just read on Tomshardware that you're supposed to be able to connect other vendors' SSDs... http://www.tomshardware.com/news/angelb ... 13403.html Is this true, or a 'promise'.

Here they're are not that enthusiastic about it's performance: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/23/ange ... enchmarks/
In this article they also say that "third-party SSDs are supported (sans casing)". Interesting! So it's up to you whether you want to void the warranty on the SSDs by removing their cases to be able to hook them up to this thing.

I would rather go for something like this, if I would want to put a Raid solution in a Mac: http://www.hptmac.com/product.php?_index=76 It's cheaper, it's reviewed and youtubed, it's firmware-upgraded, it's selling like hot cakes, has twice the amount of Sata ports ( 8 ). Then connect it with several ( think 4 to 8 ) 64 or 128 GB SSDs. Before people start thinking I am affiliated with Highpoint, I am not.


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## Gerd Kaeding (Nov 24, 2011)

Scrianinoff @ Thu Nov 24 said:


> Gerd Kaeding @ Thu 24 Nov said:
> 
> 
> > http://www.vsl.co.at/en/65/71/2025/1712.vsl
> ...



Hey Scrianinoff ,

thanks for your help and for taking your time to provide all this detailed info and additional links!
Much appreciated !!! 

Best wishes
Gerd


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## Scrianinoff (Nov 24, 2011)

You're welcome! You encouraged me to expand my post  By the way, what's interesting is that VSL and Angelbird are both Austrian companies.


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## rgames (Nov 24, 2011)

Scrianinoff @ Thu Nov 24 said:


> Nick Batzdorf @ Thu 24 Nov said:
> 
> 
> > I've always understood that everything eventually feeds the same über-bus?
> ...


So what's the point of coding using DMA? The point of using DMA in your code is to bypass that problem, so everything is limited by its own bus and not the bandwidth going over DMI (or FSB back in the day). You don't need to add the CPU into the transfer process for playback (unless they are compressed, which brings up the interesting questions once again of whether compressed audio formats are still compressed in memory - still seems like they can't be for this reason, but that's a separate topic.)

When you use DMA, the data transfer is independent of the CPU. If that's true then the individual bus bandwidths are, indeed, the major factors.

Regarding the RevoDrive, if it has only an x1 interface then it doesn't matter how fast the controller is, it's bandwidth-limited by the x1 limitation. Like I said, if they have x4 or x8 or x16 interfaces then yes, you can get more bandwidth. However, I haven't seen a streaming difference in drives that benchmark at 450 MB/s and those at 550 MB/s. So anything over that might be overkill.

rgames


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## Scrianinoff (Nov 24, 2011)

rgames @ Thu 24 Nov said:


> So what's the point of coding using DMA? The point of using DMA in your code is to bypass that problem, so everything is limited by its own bus and not the bandwidth going over DMI (or FSB back in the day). You don't need to add the CPU into the transfer process for playback



Uhm, I am having trouble to understand why you are saying this. A few reasons that come to mind are, 1, you are in the mood for flame baiting , 2, you are caught in a time rift and live in the year 2006, or 3, you honestly don't know that from Nehalem onwards Intel integrated the memory controller into the CPU, instead of in the memory controller hub (MCH). It was and still is the memory controller that takes care of DMA. It just resides now in a chip that's much better connected. Since I hold you into high esteem I do not consider the third option and it might therefore remain a mystery as to why you raised this comment. If it's option 2, I am glad we can still communicate though this forum, if you need any help, just say. If it's option 1, you got me!


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## Scrianinoff (Nov 24, 2011)

rgames @ Thu 24 Nov said:


> I haven't seen a streaming difference in drives that benchmark at 450 MB/s and those at 550 MB/s. So anything over that might be overkill.
> 
> rgames



Well, sometime early next year (2012), the time travel brigade of VI Control will have rescued you from your time rift mishap. Then you'll learn that EW just released their Quantum Leap Tin Whistle Centurion Optimus Prime edition in 384 kHz 128 bit format with 187 mic positions, requiring storage with a minimum sustained throughput of 2.3 GBytes/s. Then we will see you write: "Rachmabin, you were right."


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## EastWest Lurker (Nov 24, 2011)

Scrianinoff @ Thu Nov 24 said:


> rgames @ Thu 24 Nov said:
> 
> 
> > I haven't seen a streaming difference in drives that benchmark at 450 MB/s and those at 550 MB/s. So anything over that might be overkill.
> ...



ROTFL! :lol:


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## rgames (Nov 24, 2011)

Scrianinoff @ Thu Nov 24 said:


> Uhm, I am having trouble to understand why you are saying this. A few reasons that come to mind are, 1, you are in the mood for flame baiting , 2, you are caught in a time rift and live in the year 2006, or 3, you honestly don't know that from Nehalem onwards Intel integrated the memory controller into the CPU, instead of in the memory controller hub (MCH). It was and still is the memory controller that takes care of DMA. It just resides now in a chip that's much better connected. Since I hold you into high esteem I do not consider the third option and it might therefore remain a mystery as to why you raised this comment. If it's option 2, I am glad we can still communicate though this forum, if you need any help, just say. If it's option 1, you got me!


Yes, the memory controller is on the chip but it still allows for DMA, correct? Maybe DMA is not the right term with the newer architectures, but it must allow for something that's the equivalent of what used to be called DMA, right?

After all, if you need to take something from disk and dump it into a soundcard buffer in RAM, why mess with the CPU? I'm not flame-baiting (not sure where you got that...) I just don't understand why you wouldn't use DMA (or whatever you want to call it that does the same thing).

It's been a while since I've written code at that level but it seems silly not to keep that same capability. Are you saying that the newer architectures have no way to do the equivalent of what used to be called DMA? I find that hard to believe.

Really, though, the question is academic (but still interesting). What we really care about is how many voices you can stream from a given setup. Unfortunately I haven't seen a lot of good data in that regard.

rgames


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