SSD? Anyone?

yes.

OCZ Vertex.

Buy it if you can afford it. Best performance upgrade ever.
 
yes.

OCZ Agility.

Buy it if you can afford it. Best performance upgrade ever.


/me hifives MadCow

Disclaimer: Will not add fps to your fps. Will not make pron download faster.
 
HDTune_Benchmark_INTEL_SSDSA2M080G2GC.png


:)

Intel X25-M 80/160GB Gen2 > * in terms of value for money.

I got my 80 gigger just a few days ago and all I can say is:

SSD F-T-W :D
 
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I am seriously thinking of getting one of those.

Only trouble is that the 80GB drive is a bit small. My OS, programs and games would just fit on it. I would like to have a bit of breathing room, because the OS gradually takes up more space over time and I will install more programs and games.
The 128GB or 160GB drives are bit too expensive for me.
 
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HDTune_Benchmark_INTEL_SSDSA2M080G2GC.png


:)

Intel X25-M 80/160GB Gen2 > * in terms of value for money.

I got my 80 gigger just a few days ago and all I can say is:

SSD F-T-W :D

is that only the read test :p

and ic the your hd adds more cpu power :D (hint -1%) :D
 
yes.

Crucial M225-series 128GB.

Buy it if you can afford it. Best performance upgrade ever.
 
quick question : I only play older games, have mostly videos and music on my computer...
what would be the point for getting one of these for me? Faster boot up?
Because I can honestly not think of a situation where the extra speed actually helps (aside from being cool and bigger e-penis)
 
Intel X25-M 80/160GB Gen2 > * in terms of value for money.

Well, depends on your definition of value (and money? :lol:).

If you want the last few percent of performance, then yes, they do very well.
If you just want to get rid of the annoying positioning of the arm on the platter, then cheaper SSDs will do very well.

The crucial bit for most people is not the MB/s figure, doesn't really matter if you pull 175, 200 or 225.
What's more important is how long does it take to fulfill a small request, like there are thousands in program/OS startup. Most SSDs do similarly well there, and all magnetic/mechanic HDDs fail catastrophically.

Randomly accessing a 512b block on my magnetic disks takes 12ms (1.5TB drive) or 13ms (250GB drive) on average. Doing the same thing on the SSD gives me 0.09ms average, or a 144fold increase. Maybe your uber-Inteldrive can do a bit better, but the difference will be tiny.

Intel claims 70MB/s write speed for the X25-M, dunno if first or second gen... that's slooooooooooow :lol: OCZ claims 135MB/s for mine, did work when I got it and tested that as well.


My point is, each may have advantages and disadvantages, but when comparing to magnetic HDDs both Intel and non-Intel will do equally well.



quick question : I only play older games, have mostly videos and music on my computer...
what would be the point for getting one of these for me? Faster boot up?
Because I can honestly not think of a situation where the extra speed actually helps (aside from being cool and bigger e-penis)

If your entire PC is old-ish, then the performance gain will be smaller of course. In a modern PC everything becomes faster, except for magnetic storage - that's pretty much unchanged (in terms of random access time, 12-13ms have been possible a decade ago). Thus magnetic storage is a huge bottleneck in a modern PC, but a smaller (wider?) bottleneck in older ones.

You would experience:
- faster bootup of the OS
- faster program starts
- a lot less (I really mean a LOT less) impact of paging to disk when your RAM runs out
- faster file operations in general
- less impact of doing multiple things at once, magnetic storage will go to its knees because the arm is bouncing around wildly - easy to get down to 5% speed or less.
- less noise and power consumption (unless you just add an SSD and keep the old HDDs of course)
- playing games, be it old or new, benefits the least from an SSD. Like I said above, it doesn't add fps to your fps. (fps as in frames per second, or first person shooter :mrgreen:)

For example I use eclipse a lot, currently for developing plugins for itself. That involves starting new instances of eclipse quite often, which used to take a minute with magnetic storage due to their method of storing/loading stuff. With my SSD that's taken care of in <10s. On an active development day that might save me half an hour and a lot of nerves.
 
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Booting up. Launching Firefox. Launching Word. Closing Word. Launching everything in your start menu. Launching games. Loading games. Frapsing games. Restarting computer. Shutting off computer. Clicking things. Saving things. Opening things. Moving things about. Updating the computer. Installing things. Doing things. Stuff. Porn.
 
Well, depends on your definition of value (and money? :lol:).

If you want the last few percent of performance, then yes, they do very well.
If you just want to get rid of the annoying positioning of the arm on the platter, then cheaper SSDs will do very well.

The crucial bit for most people is not the MB/s figure, doesn't really matter if you pull 175, 200 or 225.
What's more important is how long does it take to fulfill a small request, like there are thousands in program/OS startup. Most SSDs do similarly well there, and all magnetic/mechanic HDDs fail catastrophically.

Randomly accessing a 512b block on my magnetic disks takes 12ms (1.5TB drive) or 13ms (250GB drive) on average. Doing the same thing on the SSD gives me 0.09ms average, or a 144fold increase. Maybe your uber-Inteldrive can do a bit better, but the difference will be tiny.

Intel claims 70MB/s write speed for the X25-M, dunno if first or second gen... that's slooooooooooow :lol: OCZ claims 135MB/s for mine, did work when I got it and tested that as well.


My point is, each may have advantages and disadvantages, but when comparing to magnetic HDDs both Intel and non-Intel will do equally well.

About every single hardware guidance site tells you to get the Intel so I'll rather trust their judgement than what some label says. Also, how often do you write large amounts of data to your system drive? Cos that's when you only start to notice the difference of those Samsung chipset based SSD's. With the new upcoming firmware the write will be boosted to 110mb/s apparently.

I'm considering getting a 160GB one aswell now and moving all the old HDD's to my server. Fucking bored with HDD 'rattle'.
 
Wow, it seems a lot of people are thinking on exactly the same lines, I too have been looking into these. To be honest it's just the expense that is still putting me off but I'm still very tempted. Performance and price wise is it best to have a small capacity SSD for just the OS or a larger one for both OS and apps?

I was thinking along the lines of one small SSD for my operating system then a few large magnetic drives for applications, game and storage but maybe it would be better to have multiple small SSDs or one larger one. I really have no idea :think:.

I've also heard that running a defragmenter can entirely ruin these drives, is there anything built in to Windows 7 to stop you committing drive murder? I know it's common sense but mistakes can and do happen.
 
I have magnetic drives in my new PC. On the Windows Experience score, all of the components score at least a 7.2 except for "Hard Drives" which is 5.9 so my entire build's score is ony 5.9. Just can't justify the costs yet.
 
^ Pretty much the exact same sentiments here. HDD is clearly the bottleneck but the price is just too much, and it's not like the computer is slow to begin with...
 
quick question : I only play older games, have mostly videos and music on my computer...
what would be the point for getting one of these for me? Faster boot up?
Because I can honestly not think of a situation where the extra speed actually helps (aside from being cool and bigger e-penis)

*bigger e-penis
*pulls more fanny than your average IDE hdd
*faster boot-up & shut-down speed
*noiseless
*applications takes 1/10 of the time to load/exit

yes.

OCZ Agility.

Buy it if you can afford it. Best performance upgrade ever.


/me hifives MadCow

Disclaimer: Will not add fps to your fps. Will not make pron download faster.

high-five-0808-lg-76258126.jpg


SSD FTW : )
 
Also, how often do you write large amounts of data to your system drive?

Sure, reading is more important than writing.

You do write more than you think though, albeit mostly small stuff.
Read a file? Write its most recent access time stamp.
Use a modern browser? Write cache entries all the time, update the (in my case huge) database that's used for the nifty search-while-typing feature in the address bar.
My DVB-T software uses the SSD for recording/delayed viewing, no impact on other activity thanks to quick writes.

I'm not saying you will feel the difference between say 70 and 135 (if you believe both labels) in the real world, but you would also not notice the difference from Intel's higher advertised read speed. Both will give you a nice performance bump compared to a spinning metal disc with a phonograph-style read/write arrangement.


WPerformance and price wise is it best to have a small capacity SSD for just the OS or a larger one for both OS and apps?

I was thinking along the lines of one small SSD for my operating system then a few large magnetic drives for applications, game and storage but maybe it would be better to have multiple small SSDs or one larger one. I really have no idea :think:.

I've also heard that running a defragmenter can entirely ruin these drives, is there anything built in to Windows 7 to stop you committing drive murder? I know it's common sense but mistakes can and do happen.

I went with a 60G SSD, it keeps everything that's executable. OS, applications, games. It's currently at about 40% full, and a lot of that is me being lazy. For example there's 6.5G of DVB-T material (or over 10% of the disk) on it that I could easily move. For everything else I've got two magnetic disks, one 1.5T for long-term storage, one 250G for temporary stuff.

Having the applications on a magnetic drive will negate some of the benefits of SSDs, I wouldn't recommend that. 60G is a lot if you don't have many modern games installed at once. Those you could also install on magnetic drives, because you don't start them up as often as you start up regular applications like email, browser, text processing, whatever - and they eat up the space like pacman.

About defragmenting, well ... one defragmenting operation won't kill the drive. It just hurts it when done often because forcing the drive to put stuff in a specific spot is not only useless (no time for moving the arm around), but also disables some of the wear leveling capabilities. If your system does defragmentation on the fly without your input then there may be trouble, idunno.

Just can't justify the costs yet.

Of course, in terms of $/GB they're quite expensive. On the other hand, if you want overall PC speed in everyday use you could go back a couple CPUs for example and instead invest that cash in an SSD. For everyday applications it'll be faster (gaming, encoding, rendering etc excepted).
A 60G SSD is about half the price of a good GFX card. The SSD makes everything go faster, the better GFX card only improves games. If you play games all day, go for a better GFX card. If you don't, go for an SSD.
 
I'm think that when it comes time to upgrade the PC next, it'll probably be a good time to put in an SSD. I just built this computer within the last few months with an i7 920, and the hard drive is the bottleneck (using a WD Black, and if I'm going to go with a faster drive, an SSD isn't THAT much more than a Raptor...) even though it does everything I want it to. I can play Arkham Asylum at the full res of my monitor with every option turned up and on with beautiful smoothness, and I went from taking 3.5 hours to render video for burning on to a DVD-Video to about 22 minutes...so even that is still setting in. :p
 
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