Quick question: What type of SSD does Dell use for their 64GB?

I have a client that's getting a 64gb SSD as part of his E6500. I advised him to go with aftermarket RAM and an X25m, but he wanted to stick with all Dell.

 

im sure its a samsung variant not sure which one but if i recall they do use the better performing ones but wait until someone who knows for sure ,

oh an tell the client hes a fool for not going aftermarket

 

I think these are still the Samsung first-gen RBX drives (5MB/s @ 4KB random write). 64GB derivatives of the PB22-J didn't come until until fairly recently. they may have switched over recently, but Greg Ross bought a refurb E6400 recently and got the old RBX in it.

Both of the Samsung drives are fairly good, but the X25-M is significantly faster.

 

if thats the case i wouldnt even risk ordering via dell , id defo take the (risk ?? ) with an aftermarket drive i have a crucial m225 and its stunningly faster than i thought it would be

and if it goes wrong iv got a decent warranty anyways

the only reason i can see your client wanting to go all dell would be to do with the ease of warranty calls, however the probability of needing to call an issue on either an ssd or ram is very small

if nothing else it would be the ssd that i would get aftermarket to make sure i got the current best performer at time of purchase

and i dont think dell are that bad for 4GB of ram and under

 

Yeah, I bought the used Dell with the used Samsung SSD. Piece of crap if you ask me. Was barely faster than a hard drive even though latencies were low, I'm sure the 4k random read/write sucked, and it was noisy for no reason. Glad I returned it.

To be fair, I have not had much luck with any SSD. Samsung was my first SSD and I'm glad I got rid of it, and the second drive was an OCZ that got RMA'ed. Here's to hoping the third drive (OCZ replacement) is okay.

 

Pshaw, you're just unlucky with SSDs I've got two of the RBX MLCs and they're working great. The fairly consistent 5MB/s 4ks are only a little worse than the 6-7MB/s 4ks of a new PB22-J.

 

What about garbage collection? Or TRIM, or anyting? Samsung has not been very forthcoming on firmware updates, though perhaps that is why none of their drives have apparently had firmware failures.

 

Personally, I think that stuff is beneficial, but overrated. At least for these RBX Samsungs, when purchased, I was getting about 5MB/s 4ks, and now I'm still getting 4 point odd MB/s 4ks on both. The first drive is about a year old now (but quick formatted about a month ago for Win 7), but the second drive in my file server has been running torrents 24/7 for the past four months.

Even with Intel, 4k speed drops from "hella fast" to "still faster than a fresh Indilinx"; if you can't really tell the difference between the 4ks of an RBX Samsung and an Intel, you aren't going to be able to tell the difference between "hella fast" and "still faster than a fresh Indilinx".

 

I just received my new E6400 2 weeks ago with the 64GB SSD. It's a Samsung PM800 TH 64G. It's fast, first time I use an SSD. I get 196 MB/s Read and 109 MB/s Write. windows and Photoshop start up fast. I'm happy with my SSD, it was a $100 upgrade from the 250GB 7200RPM drive, so it was worth it.

Hope this helps.
-dskreet

 

personally id take the default hard drive option or maybe throw a bit extra for the next upgraded size and buy the ssd seperately along with an esata 2.5 caddy and you have really fast data storage and backup in a tiny enclosure ..