SSD amazing price.

D

DT-525

New member
Hi guys, just a quick one for you. If you haven't got a SSD in your rig now is the time to get one. eBuyer is doing a amazing deal on Corsair Force3 120gb SSD. Only £84.99. That's a amazing price for these high performance SSD's. I have 2 of them and if you guy get one this weekend you wont be disappointed.

The link for the deal: http://www.ebuyer.co...end-deals?hpb=1
 
Wicked price. Nice find DT
smile.png
 
Hi,

There have been a few deals like this lately I've noticed from a few eTailers - each week someone else seems to beat the last deal. Competition = Good!

One thing I have noticed however that the drives on offer often aren't what I'd consider "premium" drives. Digging a little deeper into a couple fo the examples offered I was initially impressed by the 120gb capacity and more so by the high read/write speeds. They also seemed to sport the "right" Sandforce Controller - which is highly regarded in the world of SSD's but there WAS a catch - not a huge one, but something to be aware of... Checking out various benchmarks it seems that these drives only get near their advertised speeds with data that's highly compressible - Imagine a bitmap being the perfect example. If say you were transferring a 1gb bitmap you could expect to see the drive report if's full potential performance. if however you were transferring a 1gb .zip file you'd be lucky to see half the rated performance.

Now, I'm not dissing the deal here - even at their worst these drives would be comfortably faster than a mechanical drive, as well as use less power and be silent of course. I just think it's important to note that you'd likely not get the headline figures in performance in real world usage, whereas the more expensive SSD's that are still going for more than £1 per gb would.

I think these more expensive drives effectively have a higher level of internal RAID, if you get what I mean, basically internalyl striping the NAND chips. Though I imagine even the more expensive drive do a degree of on the fly compression to improve throughput.

Btw: I did almost buy a pair of drives to run in RAID 0 at the £84.99 price tag, but was put off a little after some additional reading on my part.

OP: I'd be interested to hear how you're getting on with your drives. During a lot of the research I did I found an awful lot of posts from people who were surprised that their drives weren't a lot faster - the compressed data issues being the culprit for the most part. Still, these users were still getting far better performance that a mechanical drive & now these particualr drives are so very cheap I think they're a bargain - IF you go into the purchase with an understanding of the tech.

I still might actually buy a couple of these drives as at this price point they are so very tempting.

Cheers,

Scoob.
 
Scoob said:
Hi,

There have been a few deals like this lately I've noticed from a few eTailers - each week someone else seems to beat the last deal. Competition = Good!

One thing I have noticed however that the drives on offer often aren't what I'd consider "premium" drives. Digging a little deeper into a couple fo the examples offered I was initially impressed by the 120gb capacity and more so by the high read/write speeds. They also seemed to sport the "right" Sandforce Controller - which is highly regarded in the world of SSD's but there WAS a catch - not a huge one, but something to be aware of... Checking out various benchmarks it seems that these drives only get near their advertised speeds with data that's highly compressible - Imagine a bitmap being the perfect example. If say you were transferring a 1gb bitmap you could expect to see the drive report if's full potential performance. if however you were transferring a 1gb .zip file you'd be lucky to see half the rated performance.

Now, I'm not dissing the deal here - even at their worst these drives would be comfortably faster than a mechanical drive, as well as use less power and be silent of course. I just think it's important to note that you'd likely not get the headline figures in performance in real world usage, whereas the more expensive SSD's that are still going for more than £1 per gb would.

I think these more expensive drives effectively have a higher level of internal RAID, if you get what I mean, basically internalyl striping the NAND chips. Though I imagine even the more expensive drive do a degree of on the fly compression to improve throughput.

Btw: I did almost buy a pair of drives to run in RAID 0 at the £84.99 price tag, but was put off a little after some additional reading on my part.

OP: I'd be interested to hear how you're getting on with your drives. During a lot of the research I did I found an awful lot of posts from people who were surprised that their drives weren't a lot faster - the compressed data issues being the culprit for the most part. Still, these users were still getting far better performance that a mechanical drive & now these particualr drives are so very cheap I think they're a bargain - IF you go into the purchase with an understanding of the tech.

I still might actually buy a couple of these drives as at this price point they are so very tempting.

Cheers,

Scoob.
Click to expand...

i bought a single 240gb kingston sata 3 drive of ebay a couple of weeks ago, it was imported from the states and only cost me £130 odd quid including shipping and its not the quickest but in real world time its hard to tell the difference between a decent SSD and a high end SSD.
 
Scoob said:
Hi,

There have been a few deals like this lately I've noticed from a few eTailers - each week someone else seems to beat the last deal. Competition = Good!

One thing I have noticed however that the drives on offer often aren't what I'd consider "premium" drives. Digging a little deeper into a couple fo the examples offered I was initially impressed by the 120gb capacity and more so by the high read/write speeds. They also seemed to sport the "right" Sandforce Controller - which is highly regarded in the world of SSD's but there WAS a catch - not a huge one, but something to be aware of... Checking out various benchmarks it seems that these drives only get near their advertised speeds with data that's highly compressible - Imagine a bitmap being the perfect example. If say you were transferring a 1gb bitmap you could expect to see the drive report if's full potential performance. if however you were transferring a 1gb .zip file you'd be lucky to see half the rated performance.

Now, I'm not dissing the deal here - even at their worst these drives would be comfortably faster than a mechanical drive, as well as use less power and be silent of course. I just think it's important to note that you'd likely not get the headline figures in performance in real world usage, whereas the more expensive SSD's that are still going for more than £1 per gb would.

I think these more expensive drives effectively have a higher level of internal RAID, if you get what I mean, basically internalyl striping the NAND chips. Though I imagine even the more expensive drive do a degree of on the fly compression to improve throughput.

Btw: I did almost buy a pair of drives to run in RAID 0 at the £84.99 price tag, but was put off a little after some additional reading on my part.

OP: I'd be interested to hear how you're getting on with your drives. During a lot of the research I did I found an awful lot of posts from people who were surprised that their drives weren't a lot faster - the compressed data issues being the culprit for the most part. Still, these users were still getting far better performance that a mechanical drive & now these particualr drives are so very cheap I think they're a bargain - IF you go into the purchase with an understanding of the tech.

I still might actually buy a couple of these drives as at this price point they are so very tempting.

Cheers,

Scoob.
Click to expand...

Dont listen to benchmarks. They don't represent real world speeds. I have two of them in raid so it will be faster that one but still windows only takes 7/8 seconds to boot. Most programs start as soon as you click them, Photoshop for instance takes less that 5 seconds to boot. With a mechanical drive you would be lucky to get under 15 seconds. Just think about it if you listend to benchmark results for every product you were going to buy you would never buy anything.

Personally i would go for it at that price.

Hears what my SSD's put out after 6 month use and only 50gb left on them.

capture.png


capture1.png
 
DT-525 said:
Not really in the same league as the Force 3.

Force 3:

Read Performance: 550 MB/s

Write Performance: 510 MB/s

Interface Type: SATA 6.0 Gb/s (SATA 3)

Sandsik Ultra:

Upto 280MB/sec Read performance

Upto 270MB/sec Write performance

SATA-II (3Gb/s)

For £15 less you would be mad to but that over the Force 3
Click to expand...

Yup the force 3 deffo worth the extra money. I might put an order in for two, great value for money
smile.png
 
My friend actually picked up a Vertex 3 quite some time back. It was supposed to be one of the premium drives at the time and he paid quite a premium for it. However, he's been largely underwhelmed by its performance - though it does bench well. Equally he had a rather unstable system which turned out to be the drive. Thankfully updating to the latest firmware appears to have resolved his blue screen issues, though the drive still really isn't that impressive. His PC (2600k @ 4.8, 2x GTX 480 - water cooled) does not feel any more responsive than mine in day to day desktop type activities - something that really did surprise me. Maybe the Vertex 3 isn't quite as good as I thought, or he has some other odd system issue.

I am still tempted by getting a pair of these cheap SSD's but I'm sorta hoping some of the higher-end drives will start to come down in price soon. I run my games from a ram drive at the moment and, in back to back tests, streaming the data from physical drive to ram drive my friends Vertex 3 is only about 60% faster than my mechanical drive. Loading Skyrim (modded) for example to Ram Drive takes me about two and a half minutes, it takes him about 1 minute 20. Any drive that's not so good with compressed data would be a fair bit slower than that - but having two in RAID0 should keep it ahead.

It's good to hear peoples real world experience with these drives, as the benchmark figures really don't paint a valid picture in my view. Really, my friend should be loading Skyrim from SSD to Ram Drive in under 30 seconds if they reflected actual performance.

Btw: those Sandisk drives appear to be an ok deal but are currently on pre-order only. Personally, from the reading I've done, I'd be more tempted by the Force 3 as I feel I understand the drive, where it's strong and where it's slightly weaker vs other drives.

Just to be clear: I'm not trying to put down these cheaper SSD, I think they're a great deal & am very tempted myself. I did however want people to understand why they are quite a bit cheaper than other 120gb SSD that report the SAME peek read/wring speeds - this compression thing is worth being aware of.

Anyone here tried RAID0 with these Force 3's yet? That's what I'm particularly keen on.

Scoob.
 
I have a single Force 3 and I have had little to no issues with it so far. This is my first SSD so I can't really compare it to any other SSD, but I can compare it to my WD Caviar Black and compared to that it is much, much faster.

Windows loads in about 13 - 16 seconds and every program I have stored on there opens very quickly (not as fast as DT-525, but very quick indeed). I've had the drive for about 9 months now and I haven't noticed any performance issues in terms of windows/program loading times. Overall I've been extremely happy with my purchase and at £85 it is a massive bargain. I recently bought another Force 3 for £120 for a future folding rig because I was so happy with it. I just wish I waited a little longer and I could have saved £35.
 
Scoob said:
My friend actually picked up a Vertex 3 quite some time back. It was supposed to be one of the premium drives at the time and he paid quite a premium for it. However, he's been largely underwhelmed by its performance - though it does bench well. Equally he had a rather unstable system which turned out to be the drive. Thankfully updating to the latest firmware appears to have resolved his blue screen issues, though the drive still really isn't that impressive. His PC (2600k @ 4.8, 2x GTX 480 - water cooled) does not feel any more responsive than mine in day to day desktop type activities - something that really did surprise me. Maybe the Vertex 3 isn't quite as good as I thought, or he has some other odd system issue.

I am still tempted by getting a pair of these cheap SSD's but I'm sorta hoping some of the higher-end drives will start to come down in price soon. I run my games from a ram drive at the moment and, in back to back tests, streaming the data from physical drive to ram drive my friends Vertex 3 is only about 60% faster than my mechanical drive. Loading Skyrim (modded) for example to Ram Drive takes me about two and a half minutes, it takes him about 1 minute 20. Any drive that's not so good with compressed data would be a fair bit slower than that - but having two in RAID0 should keep it ahead.

It's good to hear peoples real world experience with these drives, as the benchmark figures really don't paint a valid picture in my view. Really, my friend should be loading Skyrim from SSD to Ram Drive in under 30 seconds if they reflected actual performance.

Btw: those Sandisk drives appear to be an ok deal but are currently on pre-order only. Personally, from the reading I've done, I'd be more tempted by the Force 3 as I feel I understand the drive, where it's strong and where it's slightly weaker vs other drives.

Just to be clear: I'm not trying to put down these cheaper SSD, I think they're a great deal & am very tempted myself. I did however want people to understand why they are quite a bit cheaper than other 120gb SSD that report the SAME peek read/wring speeds - this compression thing is worth being aware of.

Anyone here tried RAID0 with these Force 3's yet? That's what I'm particularly keen on.

Scoob.
Click to expand...

Skyrim takes you 2 and a half minutes to load? O.O or did i read that wrong ?? lol Im into the game slashing people within 20seconds?
 
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