spectrum48k

I'm almost ready to commit and get an Intel , but I was wondering if anyone else has taken the plunge on an SSD as their new C:\ drive ?

BlkKnight

a couple of my m8's have.

They RAID0 3 of the buggers.

It's pretty quick I must admit, but in reality it's not an amazing jump from my velociraptor.

It's a bit of a mine field. AVOID SSD's build on MLC technology as their life span is shocking. You need ones based on SLC.

Saying all that, if I were to buy again given the £ / GB I'd still go for a raptor or two in RAID0.

I think you'd be better waiting for the technology to mature a bit.

HankScorpio

What's the heat like? I'm interested in replacing my laptop drive with a slower spinning or SSD to keep the temps down, it gets pretty hot on the lap.

HHxx

I use a Intel 80GB mlc ssd. Seem ok, not as fast as I was expecting, with my seat of the pants testing, my sas drives seem much quicker, but then I have only 1 ssd, response times 'feels' great but throughput is a bit pants with only 1.

I'm not expecting it to last last long, but I'll have to wait and see. I moved my page file and logs off to the sas to limit the writes to the ssd, not sure if that is a benefit...

I just make sure I have backups and images of the ssd, I have partitioned one of the other drives ready for the image restore when the ssd does go funny.

Heat wise, I'm not sure, haven't actually touched it to see and its a pain moving it to check for you, sorry Not sure if there are utils to monitor the temp by software, but then I don't trust those anyway. If I remember, I'll check the next time the case is out and open (need to move the i7 to water cooling soon) I might not be able to give you a realistic temp as there is a 230mm fan sat in front of it which I'm sure would be in-pratical on a lapdog

If you do take the plunge, make sure you get the latest firmware for it and make sure you align your partitions <- very important, especially for a ssd but you should do it on a hdd as well.

H

andys

Should be better when TRIM is relased with windows 7

kernel

This is a new concept to me, what's that all about then?

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Upgraded my Asus EEE 901 PC with a 128GB Runcore SSD drive, and it's quite quick for something that runs from the PCI-E slot.

alistair

That will be a tasty upgrade once the price comes downa bit - £300 is a bit steep.....

warrenm2

just got myself a ocz vectrex 120gb as the main drive - previously had 2 raptors in raid 0 - new setup is noticeably quicker

http://www.ocztechnology.com/product...ata_ii_2_5-ssd

warrenm2

better than spending it on cars eh?!

BlkKnight

It's MLC -I hope you got a long warranty

ScoTTyB

Lets face it, you probably only want a year out of it before buying a 500gig for the same money.

warrenm2

How many people do you know whos drives have hit 10000 read/writes and died? This whole business of lifetime has been overdone IMHO. By the time it gets near end of life, I would be replacing it anyway with a newer technology like SATA600 for example. Red herring AFAIAC

HankScorpio

2 year warranty, any early adopter will have, or be looking to, move on by then.
As long as your sensible with backups, no more cause for concern than a std drive with all them moving parts.

spectrum48k

The OCZ vertex is impressive. I see they've changed to a brand new controller using an ARM chip. It produces superior write performance to the intel X25-M

Think I'll have a look at that as my new c:\ drive for now. Like people have said, I'll probably change it again for an Intel X25-E or similar in a year or so when prices come down.

Incidentally my work files are kept separate from the OS hard drive, and stored in a RAID volume, which also gets backed up regularly.

Besides, I've got some spare cash and want to treat myself to a worthwhile upgrade! Next up is a little chip for my 330D, taking it up to 594Nm and 300bhp

David_Wallis

you should align you partitions regardless of HDD type ie SCSI / SAS / FLASH

dunno if vista does it by default now, but 2008 server does..

I've a script at work I wrote for checking partitions being alligned on sector boundarys..

if its you boot disk you need to boot using something like bart pe and create the partition using disk part..

diskpart>
select disk x
create partition primary align=64

Makes bigger differences when using things such as sql / vmware etc.

Basically when you request a 4 k block and it spans a sector boundary on the disk then you have two do two reads per 4k block for example.

Probably not explained it right well as its getting on, and Im not at work so not in work mood..

googling it will turn something up, but it will most likely reference exchange or sql and not your home pc!

kernel

Thanks David