While I was at CES I had a chance to visit the OCZ suite and check out all of their cool SSD products including the classic Vertex, Aglity, and Colossus products as well as some really cool new stuff including Vertex 2, Solid 2, and the Z-Drive P88!

Much like the other Indilinx based SSDs out there, the G.Skill Falcon II series drives are top performers and a great value compared to the other solutions on the market.

Today I’m unboxing the OCZ Vertex. I actually already have one of these that I’m very happy with (it’s a 120GB), but I bought it before I started doing unboxing videos, so I didn’t have one that was still sealed to unbox for you all. This 60GB is destined for my media PC when I move into my new house, but I’m jumping the gun a little bit on unwrapping it :p

Today I’ll unbox the hottest SSD on the market right now. The new “generation 2″ model of the Intel X25-M. I’ll also show you the adapter you need to mount it in your case

Well I’m not sure yet if I can replicate this or not but it’s been annoying me enough over the last 5 minutes that I thought I’d post about it. System is running Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 (64-bit) and I kept running into issues transferring some files over from another hard drive that also has a boot partition on it where the board kept booting to the other drive. Since I’m also tweaking some BIOS settings and whatnot, the boot order keeps rearranging, so the solution I came up with (clever me) was to switch SATA cables so that the system would always automatically boot from the correct drive.

The drive in question is an OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD, so it’s a plenty fast drive. Man was I ever suprised to see 10,000ms access times in the resource monitor when all I was doing was downloading adobe flash player with literally nothing else open. Switching back to the SATA port that the drive was originally on has everything back to normal, but those 10s response times were VERY noticeable and it was not mis-reporting.

I  also know that the issue was not caused by putting the drive on a different SATA controller. They are both connected to the ICH10R southbridge and drivers are installed for that as well. Very random. I would have taken a screenshot but the system was soooo painfully slow I had to do something. It would respond just fine for about a second (I could type into search fields, click things, etc) but then it would become completely unresponsive for 5-10 seconds.

Well for the PCIe slot repair I’ve hit a pretty big obstacle. I can’t seem to get a hot enough soldering iron at the local “DIY” stores, so I will have to try to go somewhere more specialized. If anyone has an idea where I could find a soldering iron that’s hot enough to work with lead-free solder on a PCB, please hit me with an email. It’s my name at NCIX.com (don’t want the spam screenscrapers grabbing my email addy from my blog)

Also, I’m very disappointed in Corsair. I’m currently in the middle of doing an upgrade on my girlfriend’s computer (she’s moving to i7 on account of I got my hands on a shipping damage eVGA X58 with a broken PCIe slot that I bent back into shape and wedged closed with a white eraser and some bent CPU socket pins that I bent back) and I decided to go SSD while I’m at it because for some reason she’s a stone cold hard drive killer. I remembered the briefing I got from Corsair on their S128 SSD and it seems to me it was all about “oem grade, high quality, high durability components”. I observed some “hitching”, something I hadn’t yet experienced having only used Intel X25-M drives and Corsair “S” series drives. Seems like the M64 mean “Jmicron 64GB drive” I did my best to replicate the IOmeter tests that Anand performed in his epic tale of SSD performance and I observed maximum latencies of up to one second when writing random 4k files over a 4GB section of the disk (100% random writes). It’s a little better than the two second latencies that he was observing, but with inconsistent test benches and methodologies it’s impossible to replicate the results exactly. Either way one second is FAR too high for an SSD.

I guess the most disappointing thing is that (I swear the bit about “uses high quality samsung controller” used to be right on the product page, but the Google cache doesn’t have it) Corsair made such a fuss about their drives using better quality controllers than the competition, so I bought one and here’s what I end up with.

After writing this I did some reading on the Corsair support forum. It looks like the “M” series drives are “not controller specific” and right now they are using a Jmicron controller. Fail.

As mentioned to me in the comments under the Tech Tips video we did on the Corsair S128 SSD hard drive, the drive does NOT read at 150MB/s sustained and the reason for the WAY out of spec performance numbers is that the drive had not yet been fully formatted. That’s my mistake and when I did some follow up testing, it read at a normal ~90MB/s….. Or so I thought.

Enter the X25-M, on which we have a Tech Tips coming out shortly. I was doing some testing with this drive, moving files from the Corsair SSD to a RAID-0 array with two X25-M 80GB drives, and I observed the transfer speeds you see above. They were verified using the good ‘ol fashioned “calculator + file size + stop watch” method and it looks the drive will actually read at about 120MB/s, but only if you’re doing more than one concurrent read. Transferring just one file (as you can see) will cap at 90MB/s. Still not the 150MB/s I originally reported, but it’s better than spec by a long shot…

I was just curious what it would look like once I removed the metal shroud. It’s very similar to the Samsung 128GB drive, but it’s kinda interesting to note that this MLC X25-M 80GB drive uses 20 4GB chips to achieve its capacity, rather than 8 16GB flash chips.

Also of note is the big Intel controller that is at least partially responsible for the terrific write speeds of this model. Expect a tech tips that covers a little bit about Intel’s mainstream series SSD as well as RAID performance!

It looks like they don’t have a “warranty void if removed sticker” on this drive, so one of the first things I did was open it up, but it’s taken me unti now to get around to posting it up.

As you can see it’s 100% Samsung inside. It seems like kind of a strange branding exercise that Corsair would call their own drive out as “Samsung”, since Samsung is not only a supplier, but also a competitor. I guess it’s not that different from Kingston calling out their drives as “Intel”. Speaking of Intel, we’ll be covering a couple of the Intel SSD drives in an upcoming Tech Tips, so stay tuned!!

I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I just thought it was really cool. One of our Corsair contacts sent me a link that showed my feature in their media section of the website, but I didn’t realize I was actually one of the links on the front page.

The video also got a lot of positive comments on YouTube as well. It’s just awesome to see Tech Tips really gaining some traction.