[ltp] SSDs and AHCI?

[Richard Neill]

Dear Ted,

Thank you for an extremely informative explanation.

I am running it in the main disk drive, not the ultrabay.

 > So for the OCZ Core 2, sure, NCQ isn't going to make a difference at all.

Indeed - it doesn't help, but avoiding compatibility mode in the BIOS 
does have one beneficial effect: it exposes the SATA interface for 
link-power management, so I can save battery.

The Core 2 has no firmware updates available anyway, so the problem of 
being unable to flash firmware updates doesn't matter.

  It seems that if it works, though, AHCI won't degrade the
> performance of the Vertex (as it apparently can do with the OCZ Core
> SSD's.  However, the OCZ Vertex has much better random write latencies
> compared to the OCZ Core.  

Do you have any details on AHCI doing harm to the OCZ Core SSDs? All I 
can find are references that say it won't help (and it confuses benchmarks).

How much do write latencies matter? Doesn't Linux batch them up anyway 
(especially in laptop-mode?)

I know I should really get some proper expensive disks. But so far, the 
performance of the Core SSD is substantially better than the regular 
SATA 7200 disk I replaced with it, and for the £105 I paid on eBay, I'm 
very happy with it.

Best wishes,

Richard