Solid State Drives. Your suggestion please.

Kareem

I am trying to build a " superpc " if you wanna call it.

As you all know, the HDD is the major factor that slows down the computer. Even with the best PC specs, a 7200rpm raid0 drives will not perform as good as a SSD ones.

Did any of you tried it and willing to share his own experience ? There are lots of brands. I read somewhere rolf suggesting the Sandisk. Actually I have read that Intel has the best SSD to date.

But there are still lots of troubles experienced with SSDs because they were not tested enough under heavy usage/ read/write operations.

Another thing, most of the SSD do not support TRIM. A feature that only Windows7 will provide and that is mandatory for a good SSD performance as it tells which data block is no longer in use.

So far only Intel and OCZ provided such a feature.

comments are welcomed.

rolf

I am interested in SSD for memory intensive applications, they probably boost the performance of the disk swapping. I was working with photoshop, merging 12 high res photos into a 360 degrees panorama. Memory/swap usage for photoshop went up in the gigabytes and the computer became frustratingly slow. I wish I had an SSD. Of course, you could double your RAM and go 64bits, but that would mostly go unused most of the time. I think SSD is a more interesting solution.

Padre

if ur working on graphics ... get a graphic workstation :P
i haven't played with SSD drives yet, but aint planning to anytime soon. work is too precious to leave it to smth that might not work properly because it wasn't tested throughly.

Xsever

I have read many reviews about SSDs, and on today's market, Intel is offering the best performance. Their new 34 mm SSDs are top of the line.

It all depends on how much you are willing to spend.

I suggest Intel, then OCZ, then Kingston.

Kareem

Well thanks guys.

Padre, if this thing is working as it should, then it is going to save us a lot of time. Can you imagine searching for something in your HDD with 500+GB files? or copying 15GB in 1 min instead of 10 ?

This gotta be a huge step in the computer performance world.

Padre

all the SSD i've seen are

Sequential Access - Read: Up to 250MB/s
Sequential Access - Write: Up to 70MB/s

so it's a limit of 4.2 GB/min :P:P

i may order one tonight if my search online convinces me :D

Bassem

I've heard SSD deteriorates much faster than HDD, but it seems they have improved. Brief & source article

Is it a good idea to install my OS (win7) on an internal SSD?
Is the increase in speed significant?
I would install Win7 and all program files such as games or applications on it.
My data & documents would be on a separate drive, an HDD.

Where can I find an internal SSD drive for my desktop machine? What's the best type?
I wouldn't need bigger than 100GB.

kareem_nasser

Bassem wroteI've heard SSD deteriorates much faster than HDD, but it seems they have improved. Brief & source article

Is it a good idea to install my OS (win7) on an internal SSD?
Is the increase in speed significant?
I would install Win7 and all program files such as games or applications on it.
My data & documents would be on a separate drive, an HDD.

Where can I find an internal SSD drive for my desktop machine? What's the best type?
I wouldn't need bigger than 100GB.

I have seen tests on the PS3 and SSDs are worth the money because they decrease loading times on mandatory installed games by 40-60% depending on the game of course.
As for the PC games of course it will improve performance but it is unnoticeable because the whole PC is being used so that you can play a game. It is not only dependent on the SSD or HDD, you may gain an advantage on texture streaming but as i said most games on PC are optimized and you rarely see any pop-ins.

But if you want to use SSDs then my advice is use them for Windows or any them OS because it boots them much faster.

BashLogic

there are lots of models in the market and the cheapest are the worst due to the fact that they make use of poor components.

i have had an ssd now for 6 months (using it with linux) its a kingston v series 64gb. it has the average speed of 190/70mb/a sec.

even thou the write performance is as "low" as 70mb/sec its still ten folds faster than a platter disk!

i have already ordered two new disks for my new work laptop, a corsair force 120gb with the sandstorm chip giving a 270/250mb/sec performance. in addition i ordered a 750gb/7200rpm disk. yes i will be installing two disks in my laptop one for speed and one for capacity. this will make my life so much easier.

on my private laptop, i have installed opensuse 11.2 on the ssd disk and on top of it i have vmware workstaiton with windows xp. it takes me less than 40sec from cold boot up untill the xp desktop is loaded in the vmware with the ssd disk. on a platter disk, that would have taken at least several minutes, lessons learned? the 70mb/sec write speed is good enough! dont be too greedy, just make sure that you have the trim support in the model that you choose and that it has a good warranty since ssd are fairly new in the market and are unpredictable. make sure that you have backups ;) i at least intend to backup my 120gb ssd to my 750gb platter disk ;)

rolf

Can you Imagine putting these on RAID... :-) ... If only the bus can keep up with such speeds.

BashLogic

rolf wroteCan you Imagine putting these on RAID... :-) ... If only the bus can keep up with such speeds.

raid would not bring up much benefit, unless raid-1 for redundancy. proper raid setup requires good configuration attention.

wollyka

Well, my experience with Intel X25 G2 80 GB has been positive since i got one last year. It truly offers a speed boost. However, i use it only for my main OS (windows 7) and a few apps ( Office 2010, Photoshop etc..).

Kassem

OK I'm tempted to buy an Intel SSD. How much does it cost?

Bassem

Thank you guys for your feedback.

wollyka, that's exactly what I have in mind. Where can I find this SSD you mentioned? And how much did it cost you? Thanks.

wollyka

Well, i got it from Amazon, 225$ at the time (listed now at 180$). Of course, it was part of a larger order to justify the cost of shipping+ customs.