What are your thoughts on a Solid State HD 2

[Johnthephoneguy]

Any opinions on these?

Do you think the price has come down enough to buy one to put the OS and maybe 1 or 2 frequently used programs?

Is the reliability there?



JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!

 

[Grenage]

Well you could raid 256, it would just cost you £450+ a piece

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

I know I could, but the expense of even the 32gb is alot for me right now, I couldn't guess what the price of a 256gb was! at least I know now haha

JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!

 

[coldan]

For a particular SSD V HDD comparison see

http://preview.tinyurl.com/npvnbc

 

[kmcferrin]

Oddly enough, I just bought an OCZ Summit 60GB SSD drive for my MSI Wind Netbook, and it's very impressive. Netbooks are fairly slow to begin with, but I was able to install Windows 7 from a flash drive to the SSD in 12 minutes flat. That impressed me. Boot times from hitting the power switch are about 17-18 seconds, and it shuts down in about 4 seconds. My netbook has never been faster, and I can only imagine how it would be to have a pair of these in RAID0 on my main desktop.

The big thing is that prices are dropping right now because Intel released their next gen drives based on 34nm manufacturing, which allows them to lower prices (and every else has to stay competitive). Just be sure that you get a drive that has support for TRIM or Garbage Collection so that you can keep performance up, and avoid anything with JMicron controllers. Intel, Indilinx, and Samsung are the best controllers.

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[Sympology]

One thing to be wary of on SSD.
If you do a firmware update, often it will completetly wipe the drive. Just one of those things to be cautious of.

Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[robmazco]

this video should explain it all...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

 

[ll60630]

That is one powerful hard drive array! Very funny, thanks.

Anyway, does anyone know if it is ok to install an OS on a SSD? I heard a while ago the page file will wear out the drive. Is this true anymore?

Jeff
_______________________________________
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[Grenage]

No

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[manhunter2826]

Anyway, does anyone know if it is ok to install an OS on a SSD? I heard a while ago the page file will wear out the drive. Is this true anymore?"

Not as far as I know: hence why some netbook manufacturers do indeed install the OS on a separate SSD.

 

[Grenage]

I think the current Intel drives can have continuous writes for three years before failures come into the picture. installing the OS on the drive won't cause a problem.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[ll60630]

Thanks for the clarification.

Jeff
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[kmcferrin]

It's not really an issue of killing the number of write cycles on the drive, but there are some performance issues with current generation SSDs where you would want to keep writes/re-writes to a minimum.

The deal is this, when you delete data from a hard disk the data isn't actually deleted. The entry is just deleted from the file allocation table (or your filesystem's equivalent) and the space is made available. The data still resides on those sectors, which is why undelete utilities work. That's not really an issue on mechanical hard disks because when the disk needs to write to a free sector that has old data on it it can just overwrite the data. However, on an SSD it has to erase the old data first, then write the new data. The erasure of the old data takes longer than writing new data to blank cells would, so if you have a disk that has been heavily used you will see write performance going down considerably.

That being said, the newer generations of SSDs will include support for a command called TRIM that eliminates this issue. Windows 7 supposedly supports TRIM now, if you have an SSD that supports it. If you don't have a disk that supports TRIM (and very few SSDs do at the moment) then there's a chance that your SSD manufacturer may release a new version of the drive firmware that does support TRIM. They also may release cleanup utilities (OCZ has one for their Vertex drives called Wiper) that you can occasionally run to erase old data from cells to free up performance. There's also another feature that they are incorporating into some of their drives' firmware called Idle Garbage Collection, which basically runs a process similar to Wiper within the drive's firmware when your system is idle for extended periods.

So in summary, while your SSD may be rocket fast when it's new, the longer that you use it the slower it will because unless you are using TRIM or some tool that provides TRIM-like functionality on the drive. It pays to do your research. Right now I think that the OCZ Vertex is by far the leader in this area due to their support via Wiper, Idle Garbage Collection, and coming soon with TRIM support.

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[Grenage]

As an addition, I'd like to say that nobody should buy a drive now without TRIM, in the assumption that it will be added later with new firmware. From what I have read, this seems unlikely to happen.

I'd actually go as far as saying that it's not worth buying an SSD without TRIM.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[kmcferrin]

Grenage, it depends on the drive. OCZ has been very good about releasing firmware updates for their Vertex drives (based on the Indilinx controller) to add new functionality. I have no doubt that TRIM will be available on those drives soon, if it isn't already. However, I have an OCZ Summit drive, which was supposed to be the next step up from Vertex on the performance scale (based on a Samsung controller) and there have been no firmware updates released for that model yet even though there are newer firmware revisions shipping on the newer drives. It really is going to depend on who the drive vendor is and who makes the controller used in the drive. Indilinx seems to be very concerned about getting the latest and greatest features out there, and OCZ has followed suit with their Indilinx-based drives. But it seems that Samsung could care less (though they say a firmware updater is coming "in the future") about supporting the drive after the sale.


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[Grenage]

My main worry is that the Intel SSD drives that predate the new line don't support TRIM, and Intel have said themselves that they can't add TRIM support to those drives with a firmware update. For that reason I don't think people should purchase drives now with the assumption that they will later receive TRIM functionality.

Those new Intel SSDs though, very nice indeed!

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[kmcferrin]

Yeah, it's definitely more of a case of "buyer beware." You'll get what you pay for, but whether you get any value-add on the back-end could be a crapshoot.

________________________________________
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[cdogg]

I think the current Intel drives can have continuous writes for three years before failures come into the picture.

Are you sure about this assessment? I thought I heard Intel SSD's were offering 5-year warranties on some of their models. If I'm right, then it sounds to me like traditional hard drive warranties of 2 or 3 years reflect a higher chance of failure within a shorter timespan as opposed to SSD's.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
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[Grenage]

Hi cddog,

I may have been a little off, because I cannot find the article I was read. Here is some interesting infarmation though:

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer