Legit Reviews

• E8500 Q740A479T 2L7 / 1313
• CPU Cooling: Dtek Fuzion Rad Tower Box
• Gigabyte GA-EP45 Extreme rev 1.0 F6c bios
• 128MB Gainward FX5200 PCI
• 2x1GB Crucial Ballistix PC2-8500 dual channel kit
• Memory cooling: 120x25mm Thermaltake 81cfm fan
• 4x 32GB OCZ Core SSD 2.5" solid state disks raid 0 - 128K stripe
• Pioneer 215 DVD-RW
• 1200W Silverstone OP1200
• WinXP Pro SP3 Nlite with integrated Intel Storage Manger 8.5.0.1032 raid drivers

DMB2000uk wrote:That thing must fly!

Do you get to keep those or are they on loan?

Dan

MasterDrive OX: Blazing Fast new SATA-II SSD

We introduced our third generation SATA SSD this month. Dubbed the MasterDrive OX, this SSD incorporates a new multi-channel controller and improved firmware that boost maximum sequential read/write speeds to a sprightly 150/100 MB/sec, enough horsepower to overtake the fastest hard drives. The OX is our fastest SSD yet, at more than double the sustained read and write speed of our first generation SATA SSD.

Some of the MasterDrive's other advantages over hard drives include extreme resistance to shock and vibration, zero noise, less power consumption, and less heat produced. The MasterDrive also supports higher altitudes and wider temperature ranges compared to hard drives.

FTM32GL25H - 32GB 2.5" MasterDrive OX $149
FTM64GL25H - 64GB 2.5" MasterDrive OX $259
FTM28GL25H - 128GB 2.5" MasterDrive OX $419

This solution is aimed at fixing the stuttering and stalling problem under Windows XP (32-bit and 64-bit) and is based on aligning the system partition on the disk and optimizing the Unit Allocation Size for 4 kilobyte writes. In theory this “fix” should result in a performance boost of around 10 – 15%. However, on my system (Thinkpad T60p (ICH7-M)) the performance increased with approx 300% (see benchmarks in post #2) and stuttering and stalling disappeared.

Because of this discrepancy between theoretical and actual performance increase, I have chosen to term this solution as “possible” until others can confirm my findings on their systems (my theory is that the partition alignment reduces write overhead just enough so the SSD controller does not stall and that this is the reason for 300% increase (instead of 15%) in small file copy performance where heavy random writes are involved).