The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL
Our analysis today will be conducted with our Asus Z77 Premium Test Bench. Clicking on any pictures or benchmarks will bring up a more easily viewable high resolution image.
In testing, our main objective is to obtain results as pure and as accurate as possible and we want to ensure that no anomalies slip through. Simply put, we want to provide you with the absolute best results the tested hardware can provide. Repetition in testing is standard and, if necessary, we may conduct specific tests in Windows 7 ‘safe mode’ to ensure the OS has little to no influence on the end result.
In order to validate and confirm our findings, testing is supported by industry accepted benchmark programs. All results are displayed through capture of the actual benchmark for better understanding of the testing process by the reader.
We would like to thank ASUS (P8Z77-V Premium
), Intel (Core i7-3770K), Crucial (Ballistix), Corsair (H100) and Be Quiet (PSU/Fans) for supporting the build of our Z77 Premium Test Bench.
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
The software we will be using for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities and PCMark Vantage. We rely on these as they each have a way of supporting one another yet, at the same time, adding a new performance benchmark to the total picture. Much of the software is free and can be downloaded simply by clicking on the linked title.
THE LSI SANDFORCE SF-2281 FLASH STORAGE PROCESSOR
The heart and soul of the SSD is its controller. In today’s SSD arena, we see consumer level SSD controllers available from companies such as LSI SandForce, Marvell, Samsung, Phison, JMicron, Indilinx (owned by OCZ) and Link A Media (LAMD), with one or two possible additions in the future. To date, the only SSD controller that uses compression techniques in it’s storage is LSI SandForce. This creates a bit of confusion when enthusiasts test the drive with random data through benchmarking programs such as AS SSD and Crystal DiskMark. The results seem to be lower than the listed specifications, when testing in highly incompressible data.
If we were to somehow utilize our PC systems with transfer of only highly incompressible data, this may be a significant point, however, computers transfer both compressible and incompressible data on a regular basis and the importance of overall scoring cannot be underrated. To choose an SSD solely on transfer results of highly incompressible data is to completely ignore the importance of system OS, application load times and performance. Throughout our testing, we will display results with both compressible and incompressible data testing to assist the reader in their own final determination of this SSD.
Crystal Disk Info provides some excellent information about the SSD itself to include its health, product information, power on information as well as the characteristics of the SSD. Having received this SSD brand new as a sample for review from KingSpec, we can see that it has undergone burn in and quality tests even before reaching us, as it already contained 5GB host reads and 90GB host writes.
Why is it that the majority of “Enterprise” SSDs are only available SATA interfaces and not SAS?
It is a combination of the fact that SATA is more common and, with respect to enterprise, there are much fewer SAS SSDs to be tested. We can compound this even further with the fact that these drives usually value considerably higher and many companies have yet to rely on such testing by SSD review sites.
This is correct. Just like PNY there will be shallow support for firmware and they will never get on the LSI supported drive list. If you are not on the LSI or Adaptec supported list, the first answer from support will be – you are not using a supported drive. End of support. The PNY Prevail reviewed here, I had to return due to ghetto wire (patch wires) which is pretty scary. I can only hope this company will update their firmware and fix the bugs quickly. PNY did not and was an epic fail.
Also remember Mixing sata and sas will result in SAS dropping its LVD voltage down to SATA levels causing less stability. This is why many companies still use interposers so you do not have the STP protocol overhead and SATA voltage levels. LSI controllers let you mix sata and sas withing a raid-set. I have found that many oem’s have problems with generic sata drives but not their own custom firmware drives.
LSI based cards, say PERC H700 with samsung 840 pro – have problems with drives dropping? I’ll tell you exactly why. The 830 ignored the SAS commands that dell added to their samsung drives. The 840 pro resets and is marked for failure.
You really need to be careful when you mix consumer chipsets and try to use them with enterprise controllers.
That’s not entirely correct. All SF SSDs are on the supported drive list and FW is forwarded as validated. PNY is up to date and had to wait for exactly that.
Thanks for the input!
gotta love the black pcb 😀
Awesome the black PCB and the 10 000 times P/E nand chip