Surprised not to see any Solid State Drive Threads here

[rthefley]

I also have a feeling that Kyle and Company will be changing the name of this sub forum sooner or later to reflect SSD and Disk Based Storage.

How this all started was for me is that I was thinking about getting one of those new Asus EEE PC's with the 4g or 8g SSD drives. I thought to myself how cool that would be but quickly talked myself out of it as it would see limited use in my home where I already have a laptop I do not use.

Then just recently, I was digging around on Newegg and saw several SSD drivers. They even have a 128g SSD driver for $3,2000 or so dollars. However, I don't really need anything that big.

Seeing as I am performance desktop oriented, I thought, I could get one of these extremely fast SSD drives, an 8g or most likely a 16g drive and have Windows boot in mere seconds. Can you imagine WoW loading? Would be almost instant. Yes, wow takes up 8g lol. Still. For booting and the os. SSD driver would make the how home computing exp that much more awesome.

Here is the drive I will be getting within the coming weeks on my new build.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609242

The plan is this, getting an 16g SSD drive along with 2 x 750 32meg cache SATA drives. I will use nlite on my install of Windows XP pro SP2.

[Cyrilix]

Why don't you get the MTRON 16 GB? That seems to be the best performer right now.

I'm just looking at the advertised speeds, and it says 60/45, which is, in my opinion, quite slow. Your boot up time may not be as different as you thought it would be.

[ALL4AMD]

if they were cheaper, larger, and faster then i would get one over a raptor

[drizzt81]

there have been plenty of SSD related threads in the past couple of weeks and months. I -for one- am somewhat disappointed with their performance. A factor 100-1000 improvement in access time and the ``real-world'' improvement is nowhere near that.

Even a drive array (http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/) with ~8x the STR of a single raptor and a measured access time of 1/80th, gets a 50% (factor 2) improvement in windows boot....

[Waldorf]

As has already been stated, there have been a few threads if you look beyond the first few pages (or use search).

Before you buy that drive, you should probably visit www.dvnation.com and see what you are getting. You should also look and www.tomshardware.com and www.anandtech.com. They are the only sites that a really seeming to be covering SSD's right now.

This thread has a few of my performance numbers:

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1255653&highlight=ssd

[unhappy_mage]

SSD is mostly wasted on home users. It's nice for low power draw, but most applications don't hit the disk hard enough for the near-zero seek times matter.

[Ockie]

there have been plenty of SSD related threads in the past couple of weeks and months. I -for one- am somewhat disappointed with their performance. A factor 100-1000 improvement in access time and the ``real-world'' improvement is nowhere near that.

Even a drive array (http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/) with ~8x the STR of a single raptor and a measured access time of 1/80th, gets a 50% (factor 2) improvement in windows boot....

SSD is mostly wasted on home users. It's nice for low power draw, but most applications don't hit the disk hard enough for the near-zero seek times matter.

QFT.

[Waldorf]

SSD is mostly wasted on home users. It's nice for low power draw, but most applications don't hit the disk hard enough for the near-zero seek times matter.

I'm not sure I agree with that. One of the most disk intensive things users do is surf the web. The web browser is constantly caching pages and accessing that cache. If I get up the willpower, I might try and find a web surfing benchmark and test the Mtron drive against a normal hard drive to see how much quicker the SSD is.

[Simpson5774]

SSD hasn't become a reality to mainstream desktop users, and the performance isn't really there yet (on some drives), and theirs the cost.

I don't see why one of these companies haven't stuck together 256GB of flash together (twice the amount of the largest laptop SSD that I have seen), put it in a 3.5in package and float it out there in the market.

[unhappy_mage]

I'm not sure I agree with that. One of the most disk intensive things users do is surf the web. The web browser is constantly caching pages and accessing that cache. If I get up the willpower, I might try and find a web surfing benchmark and test the Mtron drive against a normal hard drive to see how much quicker the SSD is.

The internet is generally hundreds of times slower than hard drives, and recently accessed pages are generally cached in memory by the browser or the OS. Hard drives are not the bottleneck on your surfing.

I have a machine with a solid state drive and a rather slow processor (Pentium M 1.7) which is less responsive while surfing than my desktop with a Raptor and a faster chip. Same browser, same OS.