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Anyone install Windows on a solid state drive?

C

coolpurplefan

Gawd
Joined
Feb 19, 2006
Messages
547
I don't know how I came accross it, but I saw something on the OCZ SSD and am almost hot and horny to build a machine using it just to surf the Internet at insane speeds. Has anyone tried that?
 
SSD's are still pretty up there in price (though they are dropping fast), but an SSD is not going to let you surf the net any faster than your standard HDD. They really have nothing to do with each other and would be a waste for a internet machine if you ask me.
 
You want a hard drive to increase your internet speed? That's like buying new headlights to make your car go faster.
 
DO NOT get the OCZ Core series SSD (MLC). They are junk drives, that work with a very limited hardware configuration. You might get lucky and have a configuration that works, or you most likely won't and end up with a useless drive. Go with another SSD brand if you're going SSD.
 
Griff805 said:
DO NOT get the OCZ Core series SSD (MLC). They are junk drives, that work with a very limited hardware configuration. You might get lucky and have a configuration that works, or you most likely won't and end up with a useless drive. Go with another SSD brand if you're going SSD.
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Do you have sources for that? Doesn't the OS see it as just another SATA device? I'm curious how it only works with a limited HW configuration - can you provide more info?
 
I've heard of some corruption problems they've had with their v.1 drives, and generally spotty performance for SSDs, partly because they are MLC drives. Search around a bit on these forums and you should be able to find out some of the issues people have been having with these particular drives.
 
drgnfang said:
Check the OCZ forums. It is very bad. 50% or greater failure rate.

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I'm curious where you got such a statistic? The amount of posts complaining about failure over the entire number of posts on their forums? Hardly a representative sample, don't you think? It wouldn't hurt to think that maybe many of the people are on the forums because of problems in the first place, and happy customers just don't complain about their products?
 
OCZ reps are running polls on "what setup is working" and "what setup is not working". They are seeing exact same setups both working and not working. On the flip side, when tested I believe only 1 out of 10 drives returned are showing as bad.

While I'll agree that those who are working tend to announce it less than those who are broken bitch, I go by what data is available. This is a brand new consumer technology, and first generation hardware has more issues than any other generation (generalizing obviously).

 
drgnfang said:
OCZ reps are running polls on "what setup is working" and "what setup is not working". They are seeing exact same setups both working and not working. On the flip side, when tested I believe only 1 out of 10 drives returned are showing as bad.

While I'll agree that those who are working tend to announce it less than those who are broken bitch, I go by what data is available. This is a brand new consumer technology, and first generation hardware has more issues than any other generation (generalizing obviously).

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Yes, but to generalize that the drives have a "50% failure rate" isn't misleading at all? I agree that the OCZ Core do have issues, but someone might read your claim the wrong way, and that's just not fair for the product, despite its issues.
 
I setup a HP Compaq 1210p for one of the VPs at work, very nice laptop, but anyway it had a 1.8" SSD 64GB, very fast, all around nice to work with fast boot times, quick to open apps, and short installs. It also encrypted much more quickly than other laptops and most desktops I've setup. And acronis on a SSD over gig connection was pretty sweet, it's just too bad it had Vista and drive encryption on it to slow it all down, it would be kick ass to have something like that for home, and with XP or nix.
 
Actually I see your question in three parts. First, yes I’ve installed Windows XP on a high performance military grade SSD and benchmarked it. Boot times were improved by 12% - 15%, far from “instant on” that a lot of people expect. Second, I’ve never used the OCZ SSD, so no specific comment there. Third, Internet performance is gated primarily from your broadband connection speed. However, the fastest surfing I’ve seen was on a Linux system I built which ran out of RAM disk.
 
I've read that SSD's are not the best for OS installs since a SSD has a limited life when it comes to re-write cycles. It's a high number for sure, but an OS often writes to certain files a LOT and can easily reach the re-write life of a SSD. Any other thoughts on this? This is one reason I've decided to just use a VelocirRaptor for my OS drive rather than a SSD at this time.
 
jsl10 said:
I've read that SSD's are not the best for OS installs since a SSD has a limited life when it comes to re-write cycles. It's a high number for sure, but an OS often writes to certain files a LOT and can easily reach the re-write life of a SSD. Any other thoughts on this? This is one reason I've decided to just use a VelocirRaptor for my OS drive rather than a SSD at this time.
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Not really an issue, most SSD's not only have a huge rewrite life, but also do "write leveling" that is write the changes to a different cell (eg: move the file around the disk) so that the whole disk wears out at about the same rate. (no one cell will sit and flop states constantly) These things together mean that theoretically the MTBF of a SSD with write leveling is higher than that of a normal disk.

And because of the nature of SSD's file fragmentation is a null issue.. doesn't affect speeds etc. (so no need to ever defrag a SSD)
 
I own several machines with MTRON SSDs in RAID 0.The desk top machines use server class drives and an Areca RAID card. The reason is to speed up enterprise development tool performance. I have another post that you can read if you care to.

Yes they are fast but there are limited reasons to justify them and you don't seem to have one. IMHO almost everyone else with performance requirements should stick to Velociraptors for the time being.

Z
 
Anyone know if the ocz core ssd would be good with the popcorn network media tank, sort of like the xbox media center box that runs on linux that can play all kinds of video files, music and photos.
 
bass4040 said:
Anyone know if the ocz core ssd would be good with the popcorn network media tank, sort of like the xbox media center box that runs on linux that can play all kinds of video files, music and photos.
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Bad choice honestly. You want size when it comes to media storage.

I have a 64gb SSD in my Lenovo laptop. I like it a lot, but I don't really think it is worth the $800 they want for it. Performance is great though, and it uses only 1w of power. Sad that my laptop can do sustained reads twice as fast as my desktop...
 
bass4040 said:
The popcorn nmt has usb ports, so you can use a large external hd for the media by itself
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Why even bother putting a SSD in it though? The whole point of one is low power consumption and high speed, neither of which are necessary in such an application. You're pretty much throwing away money at that point.
 
Dont have one yet and not sure how the OS works but they say it is sluggish compared to the more expensive tvix box.
 
The OS resides on embedded flash RAM. The type of drive you hook up to it won't help with performance.
 
bass4040 said:
Anyone know if the ocz core ssd would be good with the popcorn network media tank, sort of like the xbox media center box that runs on linux that can play all kinds of video files, music and photos.
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That would actually probably do great with the OCZ Core drive. They are getting much cheaper for some reason... ;)

As long as you don't use the core drive as an OS drive, you'll be fine. Or as a database drive that will have lots of small writes to it.
 
Griff805 said:
DO NOT get the OCZ Core series SSD (MLC). They are junk drives, that work with a very limited hardware configuration. You might get lucky and have a configuration that works, or you most likely won't and end up with a useless drive. Go with another SSD brand if you're going SSD.
Click to expand...

I'm probably one of the lucky ones with no stutter/freeze problems with 4x 32GB OCZ Core SSD with WinXP Pro SP2/SP3, Vista Ultimate SP1 32bit or 64bit in single/IDE or raid 0 on Gigabyte EP45 Extreme ICH10R controller http://i4memory.com/showthread.php?t=8944
 
LeftSide said:
Very Very Very Very Very Very Very good read. Seriously this article explained every question / Misunderstanding I had about ssd. :D
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++

Best comprehensive overview of the issues with the Core/other brand SSDs I've seen. Really makes you wonder how these companies could drop the ball (hard to think it was anything other than willfully ignoring it). Now if we could just get the pricing down on those Intel drives, everything would be great. I am very happy to see that we'll have solid performing SSDs at reasonable prices by the time I'm ready for my next laptop. As much fun as the raw numbers of SSDs are, the best part is that they'll finally close the remaining performance gap between laptops and desktops (for general use at least, notwithstanding quadcore number crunching and heavy duty gaming of course).
 
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