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Discussion on Article:
SanDisk Extreme SSD 240 GB Review

Started by: beenthere | Date 08/20/12 06:03:24 PM
Comments: 7 | Last Comment:  01/17/13 07:18:00 AM

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1. 
There are a lot of half-baked SSD designs being rushed to market for naive consumers to lap up at great profits for the SSD makers. It's unfortunate that after years of this, the SSD tech has yet to mature and become very reliable and compatible. Maybe in a few more years they will get their act together...or not?
0 2 [Posted by: beenthere  | Date: 08/20/12 06:03:24 PM]
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2. 
Ilya,

Thank you for the review. X-Bit truly puts much of the Online tech reviews to shame.

Regarding the steady-state performance after the initial "out-of-box" state, would securing erasing the drive [via PartedMagic, say] regularly address the situation? I regularly re-image the OS [SSD] drive from an archived "freshly installed and stable" copy which is way better than the anti this and that option which destroys the registry.

In addition, would installing 2 x 120GB SSDs in RAID0 overcome the deficit of this lobotomised memory interleave ?
0 0 [Posted by: cummulus  | Date: 08/22/12 10:18:08 AM]
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Yes, secure erase will return the SSD to out-of-box state. And you could do it every time before restoring the system from backup.

As for RAID 0, this is a more difficult question. TRIM command doesn't work with SSD joined in RAID in most cases. I have written an article about it: http://www.xbitlabs.com/a...ton-hyperx-ssd-raid0.html
But now Intel has released new RST driver (ver. 11.2), which eliminates this issue with Z77 chipset. I haven't tested it yet, but you can try RAID 0, if you have Z77-mainboard and use chipset's SATA controller.
1 0 [Posted by: Gavric  | Date: 08/22/12 02:09:04 PM]
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Hi Ilya

This might be a simple question but I'm not that tech savvy.

Do you know if secure erase via. OS X's Disk Utility would do the same thing as secure erase via. PartedMagic that cummulus mentions above?

Thanks in advance.
0 0 [Posted by: ChiliXC  | Date: 01/17/13 07:18:00 AM]
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3. 
I hate to rain on your review unprovoked but some of your conclusions and facts are inaccurate.

The reason why your drive is not performing as it should is obvious, TRIM is not working. When you brought the drive down into steady state you simulated six months to a year of typical writes to the flash (mainstream users).

With TRIM not working the drive never had a chance to recover but many of your other drives did. You mentioned garbage collection as being a problem area for you in the review but SandForce drives do not have a 'normal' idle time garbage collection scheme. Idle time GC only happens when certain perimeters are met, like the drive is XX% full. This is done to reduce write amplification thus increasing product life.

Firmware 5.0.3 is now available from Kingston and 5.0.4 is on the way soon as well. Both fix the TRIM issue. If you contact SanDisk they may send you a drive with the fix. SanDisk just wants to make sure everything is working as it should before releasing it to the public.

You can see how TRIM affects performance over time here:

http://www.tweaktown.com/...e_investigated/index.html

And you can see the SanDisk Extreme 240GB with working TRIM here:

http://www.tweaktown.com/...e_drive_review/index.html

If you want send me an email and I'll assist in getting you the proper assets for a retest. The public release of 503/504 should be really soon though.
1 2 [Posted by: ChrisRam  | Date: 08/30/12 03:37:13 PM]
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Thank you for the good comment. But I have a different opinion on few points.

First of all, I have described the TRIM issue in the review. I cannot say that TRIM does not works at all. It works, but less aggressively than on other SF-drives. Yes, SanDisk will correct this issue sometime in their future firmware releases. But the drive was tested "as is". End users have no chance to get "special" samples from manufacturers or get access to beta firmware. At this moment the latest public firmware for SandForce Extreme SSD is R201, and I reviewed the SSD with this version.

Secondly, the 5.03 firmware does not produce a magic boost. I tested this firmware version with Corsair Force GS SSD, which uses 24nm Toggle NAND like SandForce SSD. Yes, TRIM works better, but not as well as in non-SF drives. And overall performance of the SSDs does not differ greatly. That is why I think that SanDisk TRIM issue does not have a noticeable impact on the review conclusion.

PS. You can contact me personally via this link: http://www.xbitlabs.com/contact/Gavric
1 0 [Posted by: Gavric  | Date: 09/03/12 01:50:55 AM]
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4. 
Hey Chris , I agree with you there.

The link you have mentioned does a 404, I believe this is the correct link

http://www.tweaktown.com/...e_drive_review/index.html
0 2 [Posted by: DanDrive  | Date: 09/02/12 08:48:47 PM]
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