SSD Drive

[AlbinoKalle69]

Does anyone of you use a ssd drive? I'm thinking about buying a cheap product like this one http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews/1 ... -32gb.html, to install Win 7 and some other programs on it. Any thoughts?

[Shrapnel]

Haven't purchased one yet, I keep waiting for the prices to come down. Specifically been looking at the OCZ Revodrive units.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820227596

3 times the price yes, but also 4.5x as fast as the one you posted (540MB/s versus 125MB/s). Of course it uses a PCI-E 4x slot instead of SATA so you have a have a compatible motherboard and slot space.

Around $450 you can get the best performing SSDs on the market, the OCZ Revodrives, doing 740MB/s. It starts to get crazy after that, quickly jumping to $1500+. Same speeds just larger capacity.

Oh, btw I'm an old timer so I remember paying $400 for a 64MB 5400rpm HDD (yes that's MB not GB). So the prices don't seem that far off the mark to me.

[AlbinoKalle69]

Ha, so I allready learned something. Didn't know that some ssd drives use a pci-e slot. Overall they seem to be faster than the sata counterparts...but also more expensive. Waiting for the prices to go down could be one option because I actually didn't want to spend more than 100€ for a good product.

Btw I also remember the times where 4mb ram were decent and 16mb sheer lunacy

[.Sup]

Not long ago I have bought my second SSD. Both from Intel, very good support, easy firmware update. Remember that an SSD has to have at least 12% free space to work optimally so beware if you intend to buy smaller sized SSD.

Shrap, Revo drives don't support TRIM and TRIM is crucial if you want your SSD to last as long as possible and be as reliable as possible. I would look elsewhere.

[Shrapnel]

Hm, wasn't aware of that. Thanks.

[.Sup]

You're welcome. I'm not expert on SSDs, far from it but I went through the process of buying two SSDs and read a lot regarding this topic so I know a thing or two.

[AlbinoKalle69]

Thanks for the info Sup. I thought about a Intel SSD Drive, too. I think I'll wait another month or two before I make my decision.

[ShadowrogueXl]

I bought one as well a year and a half ago.. after 6 month it crashed and fraked my system up in a way that made me buy a new mainboard... (afterwards i turned out it wouldnt have been necessary)
but in the meantime it shouldve improved.

but u should keep in mind, that the "cheap" drives dont bring u a performance boost and the relly stunnin drives still are very expensive (afaik at 400 and more for quite small space)

at the moment (afaik) the ocz drives are the best u can buy for quite a good price and a little performance boost (dont await too much) a friend has one and hes quite happy with it. but I for my part didnt recognize that damn stunning speed boost out of hell which we all want

imo , without spendin too much money the ssd´s dont give a better performance boost than a performance raid system.
i think in about one or two years the technology will be a better choice. Since the reading is great at most ssd the writing is pretty slow...
And u can evade long booting times like i do - with the great energy save mode of win 7- we measured the energy needs and it turned out that the pc does not need a lot more energy than a tv in powersaving mode.
And bootin time is then at about 1 second... which is pretty much unbeatable..

hope this helps.. if u need more info i can get the specific information on the topics i just touched..

[BRUMMIE]

I installed 2x Kingston 64 gb SSD's in Raid 0 (purely for gaming but equals 120 gb with some performance gains) about 18 months ago. They have been at about 86% full for a long time as I dump or move lesser used programs when I install new ones due to size limitations. I store data on 2x 1tb mechanical hd's in Raid 1. My system is Core i7 930 with 6gb of memory. I ran CrystalDiskMark 4k QD32 as they did in the article you quoted Albino and got reads of 40.03 and writes of 24.20 - slower than the new ones for sure but still way faster than mechanicals. This was a dirty run as I left all background programs in place. I also ran the CDM sequential test and got 393/234. When it was a new install I got 450/400 so there has obviously been some degradation over time. This maybe because these drives came out before TRIM was mainstream and I run them almost at capacity.

I'm telling you this as a real life example of SSD's. I would never go back to mechanical hardrives for storing programs any time soon. Windows load up is still lickity split. Photoshop and Lightroom still run way faster, even with the degradation. I'm at the point where I can't wait for one of them to fail just so I can justify upgrading.

If you go with the smaller ssd drive or drives you will, based on my experience anyway, enjoy and recognize the difference in speed of loading times in all programs. You will just have to manage what you do with your data and where you install less important large programs.

[.Sup]

Shadow which brand/model SSD messed your system up? Just curious.
Brummie those Kingstons are one of the slower SSDs around and the smaller size the slower they are. The fastest are always the ones with bigger capacity. But since you're running them in RAID you must be getting good performance. I recently put an 80GB SSD in my ThinkPad laptop and when I start it up (it starts fast almost as in ipad) people don't know that its really on with closed eyes as its dead silent. I put the drive that was originally in the laptop in a NAS enclosure to hear how loud a 5400RPM mechanical is and was surprised a brand new HDD can be so loud. Both my drives are from Intel and one is going strong for the second year now while the newer 120GB is working flawlessly for about half a year now. I, same as Brummie, am not going back to mechanical drives. I've had 5 die on me.

[AlbinoKalle69]

Again thanks for the intel guys. Now i definitely want a ssd drive as soon as possible...in about a month or two. And I think I'll start with either this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product
or this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 20II%20MLC

[.Sup]

Again thanks for the intel guys. Now i definitely want a ssd drive as soon as possible...in about a month or two. And I think I'll start with either this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product
or this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 20II%20MLC

F60 is the better drive with its SandForce SF-1200 controller. There is a newer, better controller but raises the price significantly along with performance ofc.

[BRUMMIE]

Brummie those Kingstons are one of the slower SSDs around and the smaller size the slower they are. The fastest are always the ones with bigger capacity. But since you're running them in RAID you must be getting good performance.

Mine are the V+ series (not the V+100 though). These allow for RAID set-ups and have the 'self-healing' feature that comes with the Samsung controller so the lack of TRIM isn't important. From what I understand certain controllers don't allow RAID setups so if that is a possibility in your future Albino you might want to confirm that in anything you buy. Also Kingston has a 3 year warranty which might be important on SSD's as they do have a limited life. I haven't really looked into them in the last while as my set-up is 12-18 months old - but I'm sure .Sup will set me right if I'm leading you astray.

[.Sup]

.Sup is speechless, Brummie knows stuff

[Shrapnel]

ok, so a little more info on the SSD scene. OCZ just released RevoDrive 3 SSDs which promise 1 GB/s read 900 MB/s write, awesome stuff. It also says it supports TRIM, but that's not really true. What they mean is, the drives support TRIM is Windows 7 adds support for TRIM over PCIe. Microsoft has made no statement on TRIM over PSIe support. If you were planning on purchasing one of those drives I'd hold off till MS (or another OS) at least makes a statement regarding PCIe TRIM support.