new G.Skill mlc drives

[Fight Game]

Hello all, first time posting here. I ordered two 64gb FM-25S2S drives and they will arrive tomorrow. I plan to put them in raid-0 on my dfi sli-dr motherboard (using on-board nvidia raid controller). I've done alot of research so far, and there are, what seems like pretty good instructions on the ocz website about turning things off within both windows xp and vista, that will seriously help the pausing during random writes on these mlc drives. Was curious if anyone knows for sure if these drives from G.Skill have the same jmicron controller? If so, then I should definetly follow these instructions I found. If not, maybe I should try doing nothing first to see if these drives have the same issues. I also have a 4gb gc-ramdisk that I plan to use for temporary files, pagefile, etc. I will be installing 64 bit vista, and for the first time. I will use my existing drive with xp and probably partition magic to set up these new drives so that I can set up multiple stripe sizes and cluster sizes to test the performance of each before installing the OS. Curious if anyone else has already tested these new drives and could provide feedback/tips?

I'm anxious and seriously can't wait until tomorrow! I absolutely hate loading screens within my games and other applications and think these new ssd's are the best thing since....well I can't think of a comparison haha. Even my 2 raptors in raid 0 won't (shouldn't) touch these things.

[G.SKILL]

yes, we also use JMicron controller
you can use those tips you see in OCZ forum
but we don't test if these tips really works
thanks


G.S

[Fight Game]

So far they are performing well. For some reason, hd tune and hd tach aren't putting up the numbers I expected, but ATTO is right where it should be, for having 2 of these drives in raid0. I haven't played with the cluster size much, but the stripe size made a huge difference, where larger=better. So I'm currently set up at 128k stripe and default 4k cluster. I'm guessing a larger cluster will be better too.



Boot up of xp and loading my games is really, really fast.

I noticed these drives have the mini-usb thing that the ocz drives also have. A little surprised that this isn't advertised (if it's even worth anything, I don't know).

Also, I did not notice the drives stuttering or pausing. But I still moved all my temp, tmp, temporary internet, pagefile to my gc-ramdisk anyway.

[G.SKILL]

thanks for sharing your testing result


G.S

[Fight Game]

When I ran the benchmarks above, I was in windows xp 32 bit. Now I've installed vista 64 bit and the numbers change, from 180write/292read (atto bench above) to 88/220, and I can't figure out why.

And here's the weird thing, when I boot from another drive with the windows xp 32 bit and run the bench on the ssd raid-0 the numbers are right back up to the 180/292 again. I also tested the single drive, from both within xp32 and within vista64, and it reports the same numbers both times so it doesn't seem to be an issue with the atto program. Unless because it is running in a 32 bit environment in a 64 bit os? - but I see others with high atto scores within 64 bit using these ssd drives, so does this tell me that something within vista 64 bit os is the causing the slower benchmark?

I started performing some known tips for within vista to get these to perform better, and running benchmarks, but the numbers haven't got any better. It seems it's an issue within vista, and I plan to keep trying things, maybe a stripped down startup with few resources running, maybe anyone reading this has a tip?

[G.SKILL]

when we test in both 32bit XP and 64bit vista, the performance in 64bit vista is better
here is the performance we test on P5Q deluxe(with ICH10R) in 64bit vista, you can take it for reference
thanks





G.S

[Fight Game]

I narrowed my problem down to be the 64 bit drivers for my older motherboard. The 32 bit drivers run the raid about 40% faster. Unfortunetly there isn't much support for this older board and no different drivers to try. So for now I went back to using 32 bit xp, and the drives are performing good. Since I posted the screenshots above, I found that the hd tune and hd tach numbers are alot higher when you adjust the default settings to 512.
I plan to get a new motherboard, ram, and cpu in a couple months and will instal vista 64 again at that time. It seems everyone else is getting even better performance in 64 bit, as you suggested, so I can't wait. Maybe the price of these will fall even more and I could afford a third one for my raid0
With or without all the xp tricks I've read about to make the ssd's run better, I still have not had any stuttering problems with these drives.
The only thing I could suggest for these drives in the future would be some cache, like what is normally found on hard drives. Not sure if, or how, this could be implemented, but it would help the burst speed and probably any reading/writing.

[soundood]

yep its gonna be a win 7 driver issure for sure