Reader's input requested on SSD reviews.

[AkG]

Hi guys, in another thread a good couple points came up and instead of completely thread jacking it and I think its best to start a new thread.

The goal of this thread is to hear YOUR opinion what you want to see added to HWC's SSD reviews. No guarantees on anything (all depends on mfg'ers sending the drives) and please dont expect changes over night. I have (IIRC) five or so drives to do now and any changes (if it happens) will not happen to after those reviews. The poll just contains some ideas that were brought up in the other thread.

Please feel free to voice your opinion and throw any ideas out. At the very least it will help us gauge the pulse of our readers and what to focus in on more in the future.

[_dangtx_]

i would like to see more bread and butter tests(real world tests) but thats pushing it since its only you with a bunch of reviews on your back :)

as in save up firefox with 50-100 windows open,then pop it open.

or write a script that opens up several proggies in succession of x seconds apart,or all at the same time and

see how the drives copes. this could separate the better drives from the rest of the pack easily,i reckon. use a 64 bit os with

massive ammounts of ram of course to eliminate any bottleneck there.

or maybe im looking at it wrong :p

[AkG]

Any programs in specific you want added? I dont want to use anything which has the Internet as a variable. I have a 5mb/s wireless connection...but it would make for a huge variable I would not be able to eliminate from the tests (server load, weather conditions, etc). So I cant see Firefox being a viable option. Sorry dan.

[ilya]

Originally Posted by AkG

Any programs in specific you want added? I dont want to use anything which has the Internet as a variable. I have a 5mb/s wireless connection...but it would make for a huge variable I would not be able to eliminate from the tests (server load, weather conditions, etc). So I cant see Firefox being a viable option. Sorry dan.

Wouldn't saved offline web pages work?

[PerryC]

I voted sata2 performance, however I didn't see a box that said "All of the above".

[_dangtx_]

indeed. offline pages could work. so you can store those and firefox for exemple on a cd, copy it to the drive in question and launch.
average out i guess from 3 tries?

i know my mechanical drive takes a dump when i open up the lot

as for other programs, we could put together a list of stuff.


edit : like some tests today are standard,like winrar and the like when reviewing a cpu,so it should be with drives.

i remember back in the day when i was pushing reviewers to use winrar in their articles about cpus..took a whole lot of bitching lol but look now.

[dma0991]

Is there any possible way to test the SSDs read and write durability? It would be nice to test the drive's durability in that matter but I think it is unlikely as the SSD might be dead by the end of that test. Or maybe a partial read and write durability test to see how much the NAND degrades after a certain amount of data is read and written.

[Keywork]

Durability is a difficult thing to test accurately in a short period of time....

[ipaine]

I said go for the sata 2 performance. I still think that the sata 2 drives are on their way out. I know they are great deals and such but generally they have been reviewed plenty elsewhere. As for the Intel drives , I could see the 510 as it is a sata 3 drive but the 320 is just an expensive sata 2 drive. That said if Intel comes out with another one, then yes it should be reviewed.

As for sizes I still think that you should center more on the 240 size, but 120 is also very important. I know it would be great to see both sizes 120GB and 240GB together so we can see the real difference between the different sizes.

[EmptyMellon]

Thought RAID with SSD always produces impressive numbers, however, untill TRIM is a norm for SSDs in RAID, I purely see it as a wow factor.

As for SATA II, that horse has been beaten to death, especially if you have 240-300 hours of testing ahead of you with the new SSDs - unless you truely have nothing better to do ;).

I do care to see performance comparisons of different size-drives of the same model (i.e. 128GB M4 vs 256GB M4); as it gives a greater perspecitive of the product line, and one is less swept away by the performance of the 256/512GB drives, leading to disappointment when they buy their smaller-sized brothers (64/128GB).