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  • Alkapwn - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    I, for one, am a faithful Anandite exactly because you and the Anandtech team take your reputations seriously, constantly post excellent articles and investigations, and do top notch work.

    Thanks for the clarifications.

    = )
  • enderwiggin21 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    +1
  • vol7ron - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Agreed and it still kicks Intel's ass.

    I'd like to see Intel license the SandForce so it could use it's compression method and apply Intel's wear-leveling method.
  • Samus - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    if only politicians were this honest...
  • james.jwb - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Mistakes happen, it's how they are handled that count, and Anandtech never makes excuses for it's mistakes, just learns from them, so it's all good in my book :)
  • DarkKnight_Y2K - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    +1
  • marraco - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    I wanted to say the same, so I just agree with Alkapwn.

    Thumbs up for Anandtech.
  • angavar - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link

    +1
  • lurker265 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link

    Can't say it better.
    Everyone makes mistakes. Very few go out of their way to publicly correct them.
  • pattycake0147 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    It is because of your honesty, hard work, and quality articles that I keep visiting AnandTech. This article just shows that your best characteristic is still in tact.
  • One_Hertz - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link

    Thanks for the quick fix (:
  • LeTiger - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    This is precisely the reason that I have been coming to Anand first, time and time again for my tech related news and reviews. - Thank you again for the transparency and honesty you bring to your review process.
  • LyCannon - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Anand-

    It's because you admit your errors, fix the data, and apologize that will keep us coming back for more and keep us trusting your tests and your opinion!
  • Calin - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Just what I wanted to say - to err is common, and acceptable - but to accept those errors and let everyone see them (instead of silently update them, or add an update to the article that maybe nobody will see), that's why I like to visit the site.
  • Bigu - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    And the fact that tech enthusiasts are spending time to point out odd numbers from Anand's review is a good sign that there are real supporters to Anandtech and its reputation.

    Anandtech is the only site I trust in terms of SSD reviews.
  • TheRealAnvil - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    "And the fact that tech enthusiasts are spending time to point out odd numbers from Anand's review is a good sign that there are real supporters to Anandtech and its reputation."

    Exactly!

    Keep up the good work.
  • Frallan - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link


    We know you are human stop trying to act flawless :0)

    It is not in making the errors you stand out from the crowd it is in the way you own up to them you place yourselfs at peak of credibility in the Internet IT community.

    Keep up the good work

    BR
    /F
  • Calabros - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    your wealth, is your readers !
  • iwod - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    I think someone started the propaganda that Random Read Write equals the Holy Grail of SSD Performance. And we start losing sight of actual Real World Performance that SSD give us. I really hope Anand could bump out an article about it.

    I started by asking why Toshiba SSD perform better then Sandforce in number of test.
    ( Those who read some of my comments will known i have been shouting about it for a long time ) And i had received no response. Of coz everyone looking at those silly Toshiba Random Write Number didn't pay much attention anyway.

    So with Intel 510 SSD, Intel Wins on Most of the Write Test and lose out a lot on Read test, which resulted in Intel losing overall. However if we take a closer look;

    Random write, Using Non compressible data Sandforce is faster by roughly 380% on QD3 to 490% on QD32. That is the minimal wins for Sandforce, if any of those data were compressible you will get 420% to 660% faster. These are HUGE numbers.

    On Seq Write, if they were all compressible data you are 12% faster on Sandforce, however if the data are non Compressible Intel actually wins by 22%.

    In today's general notion, everyone would have thought the relatively small win for Intel SSD during WORST case scenario, would have been trashed by Sandfoce due to the Huge win in Random Write and 12% win on Compressible Data.

    It turns out, with Anand High Workload trace, Intel manage to beat Sandfoce, by a 7% difference. In Light workload, Intel still wins by 2%.

    So yea, Random Write doesn't really matter when we pass 50MB/s given todays "HIGH End" work load. Which i think Anand didn't emphasis enough. We could give it 20 - 50% headroom, but that is still only 75MB/s. It also seems like Intel has known this all along and artificially make the limit with firmware.

    With Random Read, Sandforce is 55% faster then Intel.
    The king of Random Read is actually a C300 which is based on similar chipset as Intel 510, 20% faster compare to Sandforce,

    On Seq Read Sandforce does a marginal 5.5% win compare to Intel.
    And it should be noted king of Random Read C300 does very bad here and is 50% slower then Sandforce.

    On Heavy Workload resulted in 24.5% win for Sandforce ( 50% of its advantage in Random Read ) and 52% win for Light Workload ( Nearly 100% of its advantage in Random Read )

    For C300, it is 60% !! Slower then Sandforce in Heavy Workload and 56% for Light Workload.

    The truth is Seq performance matters. And it matters a lot. But not many review got to this conclusion. The World of SSD has its focus on Random Read Write. And it is Sandforce the benefits most.
  • neotiger - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    "Real world" performance according to whom? Just because Anand created a benchmark doesn't mean there's anything "real world" about it.

    I know this website is mostly populated by gamers who care mostly about how fast their games run. But in reality the vast vast majority of the world don't play games other than browser-based ones like Farmville. They don't care about 3D graphics and FPS. And they certainly aren't going to pay $250 for a SSD so they could boot their computer 30 seconds faster or rip a movie a minute faster.

    Most people who pay the huge premium for SSD do so because SSD gives them something HHD simply cannot: IOPS. I could spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a disk array that would give me a maybe 5,000 IOPS, or I could spend $250 on a SSD that gives me 50,000 IOPS. For the real world uses of SSD like database and VM, random IO is king and will always be king.
  • iwod - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Read on What Anand Benchmark does, it is as close to real world performance benchmark as it can be. And no where is it Gamers related.

    DB and VM? Sorry they are even worst then your Real World examples of gamers etc. DB and VM are for IT.
  • neotiger - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    SSD *are* for IT.

    Mainstream users use their computers for web browsing, email, watching videos, playing farmville, shopping, word processing. They have no use for SSD.
  • HibyPrime1 - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link

    Just because a massive VM will make better use of an SSD, absolutely does not mean that a SSD is useless to a facebook/youtube user. The benefit to an average user for an SSD is faster application load times, faster boot times, faster return from standby, and faster app install times (some of the time). With games that make heavy use of caching (I'd imagine farmville does), you may even see improvements there.

    There are even relatively high iops scenarios for the average user, under fairly uncommon circumstances. For example; if you were to sync an ipod and download movies/music in the backround, while watching an HD movie in the foreground. On a fragmented HDD, you'd be screwed here, while using an SSD you'd have plenty of headroom to spare, in addition to never worrying about fragmentation in the first place.

    I'm also fairly sure that the majority of readers here aren't heavy gamers trying to squeeze every last FPS out of their system. You're probably thinking of Toms Hardware or something like that. No offense to Toms.
  • iwod - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    My friend, Storage ( HDD ) is the BIGGEST bottleneck in todays computer performance. Time and time again Anand recommend you to spend less budget on other part of your Computer and buy an SSD.

    And Anandtech is not xxx or &*^* site. ( No offence to them ),
  • marraco - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    I agree that Toshiba results are weird, and hard to explain with the other tests.
  • iwod - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    Yes, and there have to be a reason Apple Choose Toshiba over others, right?

    Unless my conclusion is wrong, there is a fifth factor in SSD Performance.
  • Solema - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    I echo everyone else's sentiments. It's your honesty and transparency that makes AT my most trusted source of reviews and news. That you not only corrected the error, but also took out an entirely separate news piece to acknowledge the mistake that those that discovered it shows that you and your crew have the utmost integrity. Keep up the excellent work!
  • dhanson8652 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    A similar issue happened in the Kingston V+100 review. I'm still waiting to see updated test results for that drive. Particularly the random R/W at low queue depths and sequential R/W.

    We need a recap article with ALL the drives tested. Don't leave the value drives on a separate chart. Don't force us to go to 7 different reviews to find data for all the drives.

    And yes people want to see the 25nm OCZ sandforce drives tested. They don't need all 40 test results you put in the most recent article but the 4 corners + one overview test (Anandtech StorageBench?) would probably be enough.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    I'm on it :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • marraco - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    And ----->PLEASE<----- include RAID0.

    It's very important, since SSD are so expensive.

    By the way, I bought a Vertex 2 120Gb (32nm) and Anandtech was very influential on my choice. But I was lacking an important piece of information: OCZ advice to leave 20% of the drive unformatted, to enhance performance and improve reliability.

    So in the end I only have 90 Gb available (windows have access only to 111 Gb)
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    I just wanted to chime in and express my sincere gratitude to all of you. It's extremely embarrassing to have something like this happen and your outpouring of support always makes it much, much easier to deal with. All of us at AT wait with bated breath whenever we post an article - we're always so nervous to see how you all will respond. Our aim is to always do right by you, so I do appreciate that you guys take the time to let us know when you feel like we're doing a good job (and when you feel like we aren't).

    One of the first things I tell new folks who join the AT family is that you have to check your ego at the door. We are serve the readership and this idea of writers putting themselves above and beyond the readers is ridiculous. We're all on the same team here and there's no room for ego on said team :-P

    Thanks again for your support and for reading the site :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • cynic783 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Anand is excellent and here's why: Making a small error is inevitable. To correct the error requires acknowledging the error. That's a BIG deal in my life experience. If you have the humility to acknowledge an error then you are still open to learning, and if you are still open to learning, then you are still improving. Anand, good a site as it is, is still improving!

    Bravo Anand for acknowledging and fixing errors like this.

    I have an Intel G2 160 and X25-32G and have not decided what my next drives will be yet. Leaning towards Vertex 3 but the reliability question is, well, "it's out there".
  • neotiger - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    This is very disappointing.

    Any reason why SandForce 2000 is so slow (or why C300 is so fast)?
  • TheExodu5 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Thanks for fixing that up! It's nice to see true integrity is still around these days.

    I have a question, if you will. Why was QD = 3 chosen for the test? I have seen other reviews for the Vertex 3 and it actually performs quite poorly at QD = 1...almost 50% slower than the Intel drive, at around 13MB/s. Is QD = 3 simply more common in a real world scenario?
  • dhanson8652 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    I'd say it's common. More common? I don't know but, common enough to be valid, Yes.

    QD=1 assumes nothing at all is happening on your PC when you make a request.

    QD=3 is more likely with all the background updaters (AV, quicktime, adobe, firefox, stream, etcetera) plus any background activity like Windows Search indexing, Torrents, AV scans, and such.
  • iwod - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    Interesting question. Majority ( I remember somewhere up to 95% ) of the trace inside Anand benchamarks are Queue 1 - 2.

    P.S - Which site was that? The only thing i found was one thread. Which is different to Q1.
  • Conficio - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Anand,
    thanks for the correction.

    I admire your courage to stand up for your errors in public and with full responsibility. It is just human to make errors, the difference we can make is hwo we deal with them. You just showed us the best way to deal with any of them.

    Thanks

    Kaj
  • B - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    +1
  • Aigoo - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    <3 you anand.

    Nice to see you acknowledging and quickly fixing any errors that arise. Stuff happens, so as long as it gets fixed then all is well!
  • slickr - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    First with Nvidia than with Intel and now with OCZ!

    This website just burrows itself deeper and deeper into the ground. People can not trust this website anymore, nor should they!

    This kind of "oversights" or "accidents" are becoming too frequent for them to be just that. I'm sure its actually something more like being on the payroll of these companies and making their results look better than realistically.
  • marraco - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Some people are slave of an ego, and suffer a lot meanwhile trying to hide his faults.

    Other people are free, owner of his life, and are the people that you can look straight in the eye, and trust.

    Thanks for your liberty, Anand.
  • extide - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Makes my C300 not look so shabby, heh.
  • Belard - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link

    Just plain unprofessional to mess up on such a simple thing!

    Thought you guys were professional!

    That it, this is the last straw! I'm going to CNET for my tech information!

    Just kidding. Errors happen, spotting them and fixing or having others point out the errors and resolving it in a professional manner is WHY we continue to come to this website.

    Thanks for the work you do on all your articles and reviews.
  • pcfxer - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link

    I love Anandtech for being scientific, objective and accurate. Tom's is riddled with "rumors" posing as "news", then there are their "build" articles which are just shopping lists without any performance numbers to backup up their claims and for the most part when there are performance numbers the tests don't prove anything.

    Anandtech does it right and that's coming from an Engineer ;).
  • jed22281 - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link

    No worries Anand, everyone makes mistakes!

    It's also probably best to mention in the articles that amendments have been made.
    I checked both and this doesn't seem to be the case so far.

    People reading user comments may be confused by some of the remarks otherwise.
    Plus it's just the professional thing to do...

    Thanks for this official mea culpa.
  • jed22281 - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link

    test
  • HangFire - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link

    As an owner of the C300 64GB (shell shocker for $99 delivered), I have to say... I LOVE this graph.

    Thank you.
  • njeral - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    Mistakes are one thing. Actively ignoring ongoing major issues is another and more damaging disservice to readers. AT has said nothing about OCZ's Vertex 2 capacity and performance reductions. I cannot believe I had to go to Tom's Hardware to get that scoop. AT has said nothing about the C300's stuttering problems. I have to go through Crucial forums to get info on that one (no meaningful response from Crucial, BTW.) My faith in AT might return if AT actually gets out of bed with the manufacturers and reports on both the good and the bad.
  • datalaforge - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    I don't know when it happened but through some order of events I end up on your site every day. I love reading your insights analysis of solid state technology. Thank you for this valuable resource.

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