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It has come to my attention that Super Talent had posted a new firmware version on its website (090508S), and I had missed out that update. Upon updating the drive’s firmware though, I found that the random write speeds have improved dramatically. Without further ado, here’s my findings.  Info tab in HD Tune Pro on the 090508S firmware Looks like Super Talent got it right this time, and the firmware version string is updated. Interestingly, one of the SSD drives that was missing about 500MB had its full capacity restored, and the 48-bit addressing feature is back. Security mode is still not in, however. I’m not sure if Security Mode in HD Tune refers to the password-protected hard drive feature, or the secure erase feature, but I am hoping that secure erase will be back, if it improves the speeds of the drive. Let’s take a look at the sequential read and write performance from this firmware version, compared to the previous ones.
 Exceptional sequential reads, as usual  An improvement in average sequential writes Looks like a big improvement in that area for CPU usage, average reads, maximum reads and average writes, with decreases in performance in a few other areas. Now for the killer test – random read and writes.  Stellar read performance, as usual Random reads are no sweat for SSDs. But what about random writes?  An improvement in random writes?! It seems that random writes have an improvement of roughly 10 IOPS for 512 bytes, 4KB and 64KB transfers, as compared to the old firmware. A complete breakdown of the write speed comparisons are shown below:  HD Tune - FW090508S Write Operations / second (IOPS)  HD Tune - FW090508S Write Average Access Time (ms)  HD Tune - FW090508S Write Average Speed (MB/s) A complete breakdown of the read speed comparisons are shown below:  HD Tune - FW090508S Read Operations / second (IOPS)  HD Tune - FW090508S Read Average Access Time (ms)  HD Tune - FW090508S Read Average Speed (MB/s) And finally, the IOmeter tests.  IOmeter - FW090508S % CPU Utilization  IOmeter - FW090508S Write IOps  IOmeter - FW090508S Write MBps Surprising results, as it seems that the performance has been lowered for the ext2 filesystem (in Windows, at least, using the IFS driver). Although CPU utilization is lowered for all filesystems, the write MBps and IOps have decreased. However, performance on ext2 still outpaces the NTFS and raw disk access, while NTFS and raw disk access speeds have increased. In conclusion, although it is certainly better in benchmarks, it isn’t really better as an “overall experience”, mainly because during write operations on the SSD, Windows XP will often lock up and wait for the outstanding IOs to be finished before I could do anything. What this means is that my Windows XP system will often pause while doing file transfers to and/or from the SSDs, especially when I multitask (e.g. playing music on iTunes while installing a game to one of the SSD drive) – note that my Windows XP installation is on a hard drive and not on the SSD itself. However, it seems limited to only ext2-formatted drives using the IFS driver for Windows – NTFS and raw disk access are snappy. EDIT: It seems that the firmware is not limited to only Super Talent drives – in fact, if one does a proper search online, the firmware update is supposedly a generic update for all JMicron JMF 602 based SSDs (at risk of voiding your warranty and/or bricking your SSD). If that is the case, I hope that the firmware update works for JMF 601 devices, such as my old Transcend SSD that I bought last year, assuming that I can get the updater to detect the Transcend drive. EDIT: Since there are no resources on the web, I’ve decided to compile a list of drives that can and cannot be flashed using either the Windows-based update (for USB only) or the DOS update (for SATA only): Flashable:
Not Flashable:
 OMGWTFBBQ HAX!!!11 Been wanting to post this, but I kept forgetting about it. Recently there has been activity on my wiki site, and I haven’t been paying attention much to the pages on my wiki, until I decided to check all the pages on a whim, and I found out that an automated web crawler had used my wiki site to store parts of an Ubuntu torrent data. Thankfully, it was done as a part of research conducted by a university, and there wasn’t much damage too. I’ve taken steps to secure the wiki (by disabling user registrations), but I’ve forgotten to disable write permissions for guests, so now any bot can vandalise my page. In hindsight, wikis are a great way for users to collaborate or use the features that a wiki can provide, but security is the biggest issue, especially on a publicly-accessible site. Wanted to post this earlier but didn’t have the time. So here it is.  The admission ticket - $2 discount from PAssion card! Well the prices are a tad bit expensive IMHO, but I guess its alright for an exhibition this size.  The ticket prices on the day itself Surprisingly the turnout was quite large, and its not even the last day of the exhibition. Went for the exhibition first, which was pretty much boring because I can bet with 99% confidence that they are all replicas. There were works of marvels, though, and I can’t help wondering if the guys at Ubisoft Singapore went to the exhibition to get inspiration for Assassin’s Creed 2. One particular exhibit caught my eye, as it showcased how they did imaging on the Mona Lisa to restore the Mona Lisa’s original colours was interesting, as it involved computer science and digital image processing concepts which I studied in university.  The Cylons from Battlestar Galactica at the Science Centre!  Interesting game whereby you are in a high-level boardroom meeting  "The world is peaceful when you stop talking."  The job that you are applying for in the game At the end of the exhibition, we headed for the science centre exhibitions – mostly primary school level stuff, but the exhibition on information communications technology caught my eye. There was a game whereby you get to answer questions and determine your job application. Overall a pretty good concept. Oh, and I bumped into one of my secondary school friends at the science centre too. I guess that’s all for this post.
Caught GI Joe on the eve of National Day with a few friends from army days, and the turnout was quite big – 12 of us occupied one entire row in the movie theatre at Marina Square. The plot was OK, though some of the scientific stuff seems a bit stretched too far, but hey, it’s a movie. Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols were hot. Action was good, but not to the point of saturation. Overall a 7 or 8 out of 10.
We had bowling before the show started. First game was for three people, and the second one I joined in with the name of “D” because we were using only one lane, and we wanted to play quickly.
We finished off with dinner at Sakura Restaurant at Orchard Central, and our dear Mr Wu did an impression of Storm Shadow with the butter knives. Too bad I didn’t take a photo though. After reading the various good and bad blog posts regarding tweet.sg, I shall provide some factual evidence with a dash of history lesson and my personal opinion at the end. Tweet.sg was first set up in November 2008 as a “project” of sorts by Jymster to allow local users to send their SMS updates to a local number for security and cost reasons, after testing and ensuring that the system works perfectly. Back then, it was using a different domain, but it was moved to a new one to avoid issues with cybersquatting. Initial sign ups were slow, and it only had 36 users in the time between November 2008 and January 2009. The “competitors” for local services to update twitter.com twits via SMS emerged after a blog post on the website about running your own gateway in February 2009 – heck, Jymster even took time to make a new page on the blog so that it was more visible to readers in March 2009. Additionally, a quick domain whois showed that the other two “competitors” that I could Google up registered their domains after that blog post by Jymster – interestingly, one of the “competitors” registered their domain 5 days after the March 2009 blog posting, so what’s the objective in that? I’ll leave it for you to decide. Jymster made changes to his system to ensure that the security of the SMS update system is intact and users would not have to send their passwords over everytime they sent a message using tweet.sg’s gateway some time in April 2009, despite the fact that there were “competitors” in the field. Then came the AWARE saga, which saw a flurry of activity which made it to the top 10 twitter trends (because it was dead in the middle of the night in the States at the time the AWARE EGM at Suntec began), and tweet.sg’s gateway was still working, although it was tested to the limit – quite an amazing feat, with one person administering the server, as compared to the other “competitors”, since I have no data on how the other “competitors” managed their gateway during that time. Finally, after about 8 months of running the project, Jymster has now closed the SMS update system to the public to ensure that his gateway will not be overloaded and lag in updating twitter, and also (hopefully) to have less help requests from users. I find this story strangely familiar, as I recall that there was a time where people used to share their files online (before the authorities came down hard, and the copyright law was made a criminal offence) and users would download them for free without so much as a “thank you”. There were a few people that were being nasty to the individual sharers, but they got banned from the system for pissing the individual sharers off (Note: the story that I mentioned should be taken in the context of an example of online services, and not as an incentive to commit a criminal offence). Those were the days where users knew the risks when downloading a file from the sharer’s server. Yes, some of you may say that its not good for business reputation. But this isn’t a business. Online reputation is lost, some might say. I would say yes, but does it really matter, since its not a business? Personal reputation might be lost, but I don’t think he has lost any – in fact I would think that he has gained more reputation in my opinion, especially so after I’ve done a little research on tweet.sg’s history. A true pioneer of local developments in the online world, and one who is not afraid to stand up for his own personality, just like DK99 of ping.sg, but sadly lost to the mindless sheep that do not stop to think, and blindly agree with other people’s opinions. Some of you might have boycotted tweet.sg because the server admin is a nasty guy and announced your decision to the whole world. I respect you for your decision, but Jymster doesn’t care for lost users – in fact, he would like to see as little users as possible in order to reduce his “operating costs”. Come to think of it, can you name one “competitor” that existed to provide local SMS twit updates to twitter.com before tweet.sg, because I can’t find any with my resources. If there isn’t any, then I can say that without Jymster and tweet.sg, such services (updating twits to twitter.com via SMS) wouldn’t even exist locally. I know that there are quadrillions of websites offering local services to update blogs via SMS (well, so much for that hype) which pre-dates the creation of tweet.sg, but here I’m referring to websites offering local services to update twitter.com twits via SMS. It’s not about the technology behind it or who is copying who (in fact, I stated that it is for you to decide earlier on), but its about how tweet.sg has attracted “competitors” to the new market of offering services to update twitter.com twits via SMS. I bear no grudge towards any of the other “competitors”, and instead I applaud them for their willingness to step into this new market to provide similar and better services for the locals here. However, the possibility still remains that if not for tweet.sg, there wouldn’t be any “competitors” that you can sign up for updating your twitter.com twits via SMS locally. You get nasty “service” for free service, some of you might ascertain upon reading other users’ opinions. True, but that is out of context – Jymster has already stated in the blog at tweet.sg and also on the FAQ page that the service is 100% free, and there is absolutely no guarantee there will be 100% uptime, or a “Yes Man” every time you contact Jymster. One strange thing is that despite these risks, people still signed up for the service. What puzzles me even more is the fact that there’s an FAQ page on the website, and some of them ask silly questions about the system, so wherein does the fault lie? With this, Your Honour, I rest my case. EDIT: Added a little bit more detail to clarify the context in which the “competitors” to tweet.sg are, instead of “alluding to copying“. Thanks, serenelee86! Another piece of hardware to play with today – two Super Talent MasterDrive OX 64GB SSDs off eBay.
Strangely, the box is packaged bigger than the OCZ Apex, even though its an SSD.
Before I show the pictures of the benchmarks, there’s something that I want to highlight. What’s interesting about this SSD is the firmware that is available for update (in March 2009) from the Super Talent website, and the effects it has. Here’s a HDTune screenshot of one of the SSDs before flashing the new firmware:
After flashing the firmware, a few features are disabled – 48-bit addressing, write caching, secure erase command and NCQ commands. Logically, removing write caching makes sense since this SSD is based on the JMicron controller, but removing secure erase and 48-bit addressing is a little bit strange. NCQ would most likely not matter since it doesn’t use any moving parts internally, so it is not the point of attention here.
Also, even though the firmware is updated, the firmware version string isn’t updated at all, which I’m not sure if the engineers at Super Talent forgotten about it, or it is not possible to change the firmware version string on the SSDs.
The other SSD, even though its the same model, appears to be different from the other one. Does Super Talent tweak the device ID string and firmware features on shipped SSDs of different batches? Also, why is the capacity different, albeit its only about 500MBs of difference? In all possibility, we would never know. Anyway, let’s take a look at the linear read & write performance of one SSD before and after flashing firmware.
While conducting the test with the drive “out of the box” (i.e. the drive was not updated to the latest firmware), there was a temporary pause of the system whereby I have to wait for a few agonizing seconds before I can see anything updated on screen, or use the keyboard/mouse. This “stuttering” occurred only “out of the box”, and it went away once the latest firmware was update. For the results, not much of a change for read performance, but the updated firmware seems to be better at writing by a smidgen. Now for the killer test – random read & write performance.  Before firmware update - random read  After firmware update - random read Doesn’t look like there’s much improvement in the random read benchmarks, but what about random write?  Before firmware update - random write  After firmware update - random write Well, the numbers may seem to be almost unchanged, there is a difference – the samples obtained have changed from wildly swinging between a slow 900ms and almost unnoticeable (perhaps 0.02ms?) and a more “acceptable” 450ms to about 200ms, with quite a few samples near 0ms. After the HDTune benchmarks, its now time for the IOMeter benchmark, and here are the results – almost similar to the OCZ Apex results, but only faster in certain results.
Seems quite consistant as the OCZ Apex for the CPU utilization.
Amazingly, ext2 runs faster on this drive than the OCZ Apex?!
Again, ext2 outperforms all other filesystems on the MasterDrive OX, as compared to the OCZ Apex.
NOTE: In my haste to complete this article, I have forgotten to conduct the CrystalDiskMark test for this drive. I apologize for the lapse. In conclusion, it seems that the good things about the MasterDrive OX is that the probability of faster access times are higher than the OCZ Apex, and if the ext2 file system is used, the speed will definitely be faster than the OCZ Apex. Additionally, it is firmware upgradable as well, so any “old” MasterDrive OX SSD can be updated to the latest firmware.
Another big video game music orchestra concert arrives in Singapore, just slightly under a month after Distant Worlds was here. This is a very different concert for a different crowd – or it could be just the Friday Night Effect. People from all walks of life were at the show, compared to the mostly teenage and young adult crowd at the Distant Worlds concert. At the stadium, there was a pre-show festival with companies giving away free stuff – Razer, Infocomm Asia Holdings and New Era were there, along with other companies which seem somewhat related to games – Cristofori was there to promote themselves, and AXN and Animax promoting their channels. A Guitar Hero competition and a cosplay competition were being held as well. There were a few video arcade with classic games loaded there too, like Pac-Man and Street Fighter II. Due to space constraints, the festival had to be split between the North and South entrances, which made a few people quite confused.
Before entering the Indoor Stadium, I was in queue at the priority queue as I had my SIS Star Pass on me, but the ushers directed me to the premier entrance on the ground floor below since I also had premier tickets, and thus, I wasted quite some time in queuing twice to enter the stadium. Additionally, why are premier ticket holders not being admitted ahead of people with SIS Star Pass? Who has more priority? I sincerely hope that SISTIC improves on their service regarding the issue of premier tickets and SIS Star Passes.
There were quite a few cosplayers hanging about in the festival area after the competition – to name a few of them – King of Fighters, Team Fortress 2, Final Fantasy series, Link, Patapon, Macross Frontier and Advance Wars. There’s even an “official” cosplayer dressed up as
Before the show started though, the Starhub, AXN and Animax commercials were being played and repeated quite a few times, which was kind of irritating – couldn’t they have gotten more sponsors? Thankfully, they were being shown for a short time, and there were two video clips shown on the screen before the emcee came on stage – one was a Flash animation titled “Yuri and me”, and the other was a video clip of Ms PacMan running around in New York, with a funny poem opening the video. The emcee then introduced the finalists of the cosplay competition and announced that the guy cosplaying as the Patapon won the competition. Finally, the concert started proper with Jack Wall as the conductor. The programme:
INTERMISSION (20 minutes – with “LOADING ACT II” video clip which was really 20 minutes long. Also, the usual Starhub/AXN/Animax spam)
There was a part whereby a member of the audience went on stage to play Space Invaders, and it was fun to watch and cheer him on, even though he didn’t win the prize. Two finalists for the Guitar Hero came on stage as well to play Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion with the orchestra providing backups. The NUS Symphony Orchestra was somewhat okay, with the exception of One Winged Angel. Its also hard to tell if the orchestra was good or if they were winging it, because the sound system in the stadium was terrible. In choosing the NUSSO, quality of the performance might be affected, but I believe that they can improve their standards in playing video game music, since most of them are young people who most likely have played games before (hopefully NUSSO organizes a local video game concert so that its cheaper to attend…). The NUS choir was passable, but somehow the volume of the choir seems to be drowned by the orchestra occasionally – perhaps another sound system problem? Additionally, Norihiko Hibino only came on-stage once to play one piece, and the audience didn’t have a chance to interact with him, compared to the PLAY! Symphony two years back. Pluses:
Minuses:
Final Grade: B+ |
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