Product Review: Update – 120GB OCZ Nocti Died :(

Go figure, our first OCZ mSATA product, the 120GB Nocti that went into our new Toshiba Portege Z830 Ultrabook died sometime during the night.

We had set up Windows 7 Enterprise, all of our apps, and domain configurations a few days prior.

The Ultrabook was staying at a client site since we were going to be back early the following morning.

The last thing to be done on that Ultrabook prior to leaving was to initiate a BitLocker encryption of the entire drive.

Sometime during that process the drive outright died.

The RMA process on OCZ’s Web Site requires us to create a ticket before making any efforts to get in touch.

NOTE: If advanced swap is going to be a part of the RMA process make sure to put that in the ticket’s notes _first_ or things just do not go too well.

Intel, Kingston, and Crucial have one up on OCZ: Real people on this continent (almost for Intel) that answer the phone.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Toshiba Portege Z830-00P: Some mSATA SSD Testing to Come

We are just in the process of reloading Windows 7 Enterprise x64 on a newly received Toshiba Portege Z830-00P Ultrabook onto the 128GB Toshiba SSD that comes with.

When we did so we formatted a partition at a little over 70GB so that once all drivers are loaded and the Ultrabook is ready for bear we will image that partition using ShadowProtect.

We will then restore that partition to the 120GB OCZ Nocti mSATA SSD that showed up at our shop and eventually to an Intel 80GB 310 series mSATA SSD that should arrive here via Intel Demo sometime in the next couple of weeks.

We purchased the OCZ Nocti outright because we are pretty sure that the OCZ will far out-perform the Toshiba SSD that comes with the Portege.

Once we have the performance numbers we will publish them here. For now we will use the default WinSAT utility built into Windows to get an idea of the numbers just as we have done for previous systems that we tested.

The packaging for the OCZ:

The Canadian and US quarters are about the same size. As we can see, these drives are _small_ in size.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Kingston DTR500 Series USB 2.0 Gives Great Performance For the Money

We have been looking for a USB 2.0 replacement for the OCZ ATV Turbo USB 2.0 flash drives that give us consistent 35MB/Second read and 30MB/Second writes.

At the recommendation of one of our local suppliers we picked up a 16GB DTR500 flash drive to do some testing with.

Their advertised read/write is 30MB/Second and 20MB/Second respectively.

• Kingston DataTraveler R500 Datasheet page

So far in our testing the flash drive has come pretty close to their claimed read and write speeds. Because we use these flash drives for OS loading we need the read speeds much more than the write speeds.

So, we will be picking up more of these flash drives soon.

By the way, cost wise they are quite reasonable for the size of the drives too. We can now store the required OSs on the flash drive itself and move the required OS to the root to boot and load it with in seconds.

Plus we can augment with the required drivers for the specific boards we work with all on one device. This will make our system loading setup a lot more efficient.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Product Review – Intel’s New 510 Series SSDs At AnandTech

We have been anticipating Intel’s third generation (G3 code) SSDs for quite a while now. They were due to be released late last year, or at least they were initially.

AnandTech has a great review of the interim product release of the Intel SSD 510 Series that utilizes a third party’s controller (Marvell) but still relies on Intel 34nm (G2 code) NAND.

• The Intel SSD 510 Review

Note the initial lackluster performance reports in the review. Though, later on in the article AnandTech goes through a series of built in-house performance tests that show the Intel SSD 510 to be a much stronger performer.

So far, we have been installing the 160GB Intel X25-M SSD into almost all laptops that go out the shop door due to their exponential performance increase over a standard spindle based hard disk.

Since most, if not all, of our clients host their data on an SBS server and the 160GB of space more than meets our client’s laptop storage needs needs we will be hard pressed to install a 250GB Intel 510 Series SSD (currently around $695/unit).

For now, we will wait to see what the third generation SSDs bring to market.

In the mean time we are looking into sourcing an OCZ 240GB Vertex 3! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

80GB 2nd Gen Intel SSD in an Asus Eee PC Netbook

A while back, we blogged about installing Windows 7 Ultimate x86 on an Asus Eee PC:

• Windows 7 Ultimate x86 On An Eee PC with N280 Atom and 2GB RAM

The fact that the OS ran really smooth on the Netbook with 2GB of RAM installed on it was pretty kewl.

Well, we just received a shipment of second generation 80GB Intel X25-M SATA Solid-State Drives just before I came back from Vegas.

With a little bit of time on my hands, I decided to install one of the SSDs into the above mentioned Asus Eee PC and install Windows 7 Professional x86 instead of Ultimate.

The box:

The package is seemingly larger than would be expected for a 2.5” SATA drive form factor.

But, once the box was opened, there was a good reason for the extra packaging space:

Underneath the cardboard tray the drive itself sat in was space for an adapter to install the drive into a standard 3.5” hard drive space along with the needed mounting screws.

Rounding things out are the installation manual on paper and CD as well as a MY SSD ROCKS! sticker that went onto the LCD cover of the Eee PC once the OS was installed successfully.

The Eee PC came with a weak 160GB 5400RPM Hitachi (we have a 50%+ fail rate for their drives in laptops) though the actual space utilized by the OS, Office 2007, and the Live applications was about 25GB-35GB. So, there would be lots of room to spare on the 80GB SSD.

The installation method of choice for spot Windows 7 OS installs is via USB flash drive.

Now, no two USB flash drives are alike. And, for any shop that depends on timely file transfers to and from a USB flash drive the cheap 8-12MB/Sec drives are out of the picture.

We bench tested a number of USB flash drives and came out with the 4GB OCZ ATV Turbo (OCZUSBATVT4G) as having the best overall performance at 35MB/Sec read speeds and 30-35MB/Sec Write speeds.

The 4GB OCZ ATV Turbo was the flash drive that was used to install Windows 7 Professional x86 on the Asus Eee PC.

Okay, so we have the OS on the ATV Turbo, it is active and good to boot from. Once we had booted into the setup process we clicked through and assigned the full 80GB to the OS.

Can anyone guess how long it took the OS to install on the Netbook from the point where we clicked Next?

Well, during the first part of the OS install the ATV Turbo’s LED was blinking pretty furiously with the Eee PC’s HDD light blinking intermittently.

Once the first reboot happened the HDD light remained lit almost constantly.

The entire OS install routine from the point where the Next button was clicked and we could click on the Start button after the OS desktop appeared and have it respond was 14 minutes.

That is just mindboggling for an Intel Atom N280 processor in a Netbook!

The next test for the SSD will be to see how it affects the battery life in the Netbook. With the Hitachi SATA installed we were getting an average of 7 hours of battery life. So, this will be the next step.

Once back in the shop we will run some hard drive benchmarks to get some real world numbers.

The next machine to get an SSD will be the Toshiba Tecra S10 that this blog post is being written on. Since 80GB is a bit too small, an external laptop sized USB/eSATA hard drive will be levelled with BitLocker To Go and travel with it for extra storage.

Again, it will be interesting to see what kind of performance increases as well as battery life increases the SSD installation will yield.

So far, we are very impressed with the Intel X25-M SATA Solid-State Drive.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Product Review: OCZ ATV Turbo Flash Drive

When a business depends on a system or component's horsepower to accomplish things faster to improve efficiency and cost effectiveness, one looks for items that can help along those lines.

For 3DS Max (3D Studio Max), more cores plus RAM plus GHz means more frames rendered per minute. Having more cores across the corporate rendering "farm" means more frames rendered as well.

As we are delving into the creation, management, and deployment of Windows Vista WIM images via network share, we need to have a quick device to boot the system with since we have not graduated to Windows Deployment Services yet.

Using a network share based deployment will be the environment we will be working with at our smaller client sites where server transitions may not be as frequent as the larger ones.

So far, we have used an 8GB Transcend (JF V10) which had dismal performance. We did not keep this one too long.

The 1GB Kingston Elite Pro did pretty good. It managed to boot the WinPE environment is a respectable amount of time.

We ended up bringing in an 8GB and a couple of 4GB OCZ ATV Turbo flash drives to test out their ability to boot WinPE quicker.

We were pleasantly surprised. They are fast!

The online reviews were accurate. They definitely can pull their own weight when it comes to bringing the WinPE environment up at least 20-30% faster than the Kingston Elite Pro did!

This speed improvement will save our client's money where we will be required to be on-site for their deployments. It will also save us a lot of time for our training lab deployments.

They will also be our Technician's Thumb Drive and for booting DOS for BIOS updates and the like.

Links:

• Virtual-Hideout.net: OCZ ATV Turbo Review
• OCZ Site (Site down at the time of this writing)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.