Silicon Power S60: A $50 SSD To Try Under Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Silicon Power S60: A $50 SSD To Try Under Linux

Earlier this month I posted a few benchmarks of one of the cheapest, sub-$40 SSDs under Ubuntu Linux. In needing another solid-state drive for one of the systems in the test lab that's focused on tracking other areas of the Linux kernel's performance on a daily basis, I went searching for another low-cost solution. This latest SSD purchase was the Silicon Power 120GB S60, which retails for about $50 USD.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=21920

[schmidtbag]

Honestly for the price, that's really not bad. Since most modern motherboards have more SATA ports than people know what to do with, it'd make sense to get a couple of these and put them in RAID.

[zanny]

I was going to test my 840 Pro against these to see how it stacks up, since all those are budget bin SSDs, but gosh just the flexible IO tester is an hour and a half run!

In my experience of having a few Adata / OCZ / Corsair Force SSDs... how do you justify a $50 120GB SSD when you can get extremely competitive 850 Evos / BX100 256GB drives for like $70 - $80 on a reasonable sale? You are getting usually half the performance and half the capacity to save $30. SSD diminishing returns set in below 256GB and above 512GB, but nowadays at those two sizes you can get optimal price / GB and performance drives that are just so tasty compared to what we had four years ago.

[Michael]

I was going to test my 840 Pro against these to see how it stacks up, since all those are budget bin SSDs, but gosh just the flexible IO tester is an hour and a half run!

Could restart the tests and set SKIP_TESTS=fio environment variable.

In my experience of having a few Adata / OCZ / Corsair Force SSDs... how do you justify a $50 120GB SSD when you can get extremely competitive 850 Evos / BX100 256GB drives for like $70 - $80 on a reasonable sale? You are getting usually half the performance and half the capacity to save $30. SSD diminishing returns set in below 256GB and above 512GB, but nowadays at those two sizes you can get optimal price / GB and performance drives that are just so tasty compared to what we had four years ago.

As explained, the test system isn't doing disk sensitive workloads daily and 128GB is more than sufficient for that test... When having nearly 60 systems right now in the server farm, saving 20~30$ on several systems quickly adds up, especially when I'm buying the hardware retail and am making no direct money (aside from any tips) off LinuxBenchmarking.com at the moment and am pressed for funds.

[zanny]

As explained, the test system isn't doing disk sensitive workloads daily and 128GB is more than sufficient for that test... When having nearly 60 systems right now in the server farm, saving 20~30$ on several systems quickly adds up, especially when I'm buying the hardware retail and am making no direct money (aside from any tips) off LinuxBenchmarking.com at the moment and am pressed for funds.

Not saying it ain't worth testing, but for average joe users finding maxima price / performance / capacity can net you huge returns if you just pay a little more, just as a general usability rule for quality of life. 256GB Evos / MX/BX100 drives are just insane value right now. What you save in price for a normal persons desktop or laptop you lose in how long till you fill it up or in how much speed you are losing. Unless you know specific workloads like what the PTS server farm needs its better to be safe than sorry.

Also, all the tests are clocking 30 mins to 2 hours running them individually. I can just run it overnight tonight to see how it stacks up.

[Michael]

Also, all the tests are clocking 30 mins to 2 hours running them individually. I can just run it overnight tonight to see how it stacks up.

Hmmm? On all the low-end SSDs tested with fresh EXT4 file-system could easily run all of the tests in less than 4 hours total for each drive.

[kaidenshi]

I bought the same drive on a whim earlier this year, and it's given me amazing performance for the price. The 240GB version is only $35 more on Amazon right now.

I did apply for a rebate at the time of purchase that would have dropped the price below $40 on the 120GB version, but I never received the rebate or any further information about it. That's par for the course when it comes to Amazon rebates though.

[rdnetto]

IMO, what these cheap SSDs are really useful for is accelerating mechanical HDs with bcache. The size doesn't matter that much, since you hit diminishing returns anyway, and bcache is designed to handle cache device failure gracefully in writethrough mode (the default) - it just reads the data from the backing device instead, which means you don't lose any data if the cheap SSD dies.