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back to article OCZ's low price Onyx SSD

OCZ has a sub-$100 SSD offered as a netbook, laptop and desktop hard drive replacement. It only comes in a 32GB capacity for now, using multi-level cell (MLC) NAND, and has a SATA II interface, TRIM support so it works better with Windows, and poor-to-respectable performance. The read speed is up to 125MB/sec with writing …

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  1. Jolyon Ralph

    mistake in article

    At the other end of the scale is SuperTalent's SuperSpeed USB 3.0 SSD. which is expected to come in around $70 for 64GB

    The linked article claims this price for the 16GB item

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  2. Dick Emery
    Thumb Down

    Crap speeds

    Even my Samsung F1 1TB is faster than that.

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    1. Dr. Mouse
      Reply Icon

      You miss the point

      Your HDD will produce better peak streaming transfers, but I doubt it will come close to the access time on an SSD. For random IO, the SSD will likely be better, hence it is probably a good choice for a system drive (at a low enough price point 2 in RAID0 will be a possibility)

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  3. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    @Crap speeds

    Yes if you are streaming GBs of data to an empty drive.

    Now do a compile - where you are seeking to 1000s of possibly fragmented, small files, spread all over the disk - in your build tree, in the compiler directories and temp.

    Install visual studio + your src on even the slowest of these and you see an amazing improvement.

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    1. LawLessLessLaw
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Hmmm

      My compile tree happily fits in RAM so why not use a ramdisk.

      Much easier on Linux but Windows can have it to :

      http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000ddk/sample01/1/NT5/EN-US/Ramdisk.exe

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  4. NogginTheNog
    Thumb Up

    Not to mention the benefit to battery life...

    ...when you do away with all that old fashioned motorised spinning disc and rotor arm stuff.

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  5. Bill Cumming
    Thumb Up

    They are not fast...

    ...but on the cheaper side of £65 ($100).

    Which makes it slightly more economical to get a few of these on a good RAID card and you'll never notice how slow they are. Heck even when using a MoBo based RAID.

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    1. seven of five
      Reply Icon

      negative on that:

      You will max out the onboard controller and its interconnect (actually, you will run it into the ground and stomp the remains), thus limiting the benefit rather harshly.

      As an added drawback, raid controllers won´t let the SSD-specific command pass onto the drives.

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  6. Farai
    IT Angle

    are ANY

    of the mentioned drives available to buy right now online, even in the US?

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  7. MrMacman2u
    Boffin

    Dumb question.

    The article asks "SATA or USB for SSD drives?". Frankly, this isn't even a valid question until USB supports some form of DMA.

    Unlike PATA, SATA, Firewire, SAS and every other internal mass storage standard, USB does not have any form of Direct Memory Access and relies heavily on the processor for it's data transfer, the more saturated the processor, the more your transfer rate capacity suffers.

    USB is great for consumer level where most computer systems are severely overpowered for the demanding task of checking email and/or facebook so a bit of overhead for transferring data from a mouse, keyboard and maybe a USB flash drive and/or a printer is flat out ignorable.

    However, when you're using your system for more demanding tasks and require more data throughput the additional cycles required begin to make a larger impact from an already taxed processor.

    End of spiel.

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  8. Goat Jam
    Stop

    There is no question mark.

    "There's a question mark over whether we need both SATA II and USB 3.0 for SSD interfaces, and if one predominates which one will it be?"

    If USB 3.0 has the same or similar CPU destroying ability that USB2 has then SATA will be the winner by a country mile.

    Have you tried to write large amounts to a USB HDD while using the same PC for other stuff?

    The performance is ridiculous and and completely negates the benefits of the however many hundred megabytes per second transfer speeds that are claimed by the theoretical technical specifications.

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