noob's SSD concerns

[rabt68]

I appologize if this has already been covered in a previous thread but I have not found anything listing any answers. I decided to build a new system (first build in over 10 years) and I have been reading up on all of the new technologies and setting in motherboard BIOS. I really wanted to do this right so I figured I would purchase pieces as the budget allowed. My first purchase was the 2600K intel proc (loved what I read concerning the over clocking ability as well as performance). I was looking at the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe board and I was just getting ready to purchase it when the recall of the SB motherborads happened. I decided that I would start purchasing the memory and drives so that whent he MB became available I would be all set. I have been researching the 6 GB C300 SSD drive and I saw all of the horror stories concerning the system freezing/stuttering. I continued to read articles and forums and noticed that this appears to be happening on other SSD drives as well as the C300. This also does not appear to be linked to just one motherboard manufacture. Again, I have been reading numerous forums and articles and I have seen numerous posts with suggestions and links that will help resolve these issues (often a lot of these suggestions contradict each other...lol) and the issue of the freezing/stuttering still seems to happen or returns after a few days. I have not seen anything to suggest that this issue has been truely diagnosed and resolved. While I would really like to use SSD drives with my new system, I do not want to spend a nice chunk of money to buy something that will not work properly. Any info that you can pass on would be greatly appreciated.

 

[sub.mesa]

SSDs stuttering? Apart from the disaster with JMicron/Toshiba controllers with high write latencies, i know of no such problems with Sandforce, Intel or Marvell (C300) controllers. Perhaps you mean TRIM commands block all I/O when running in IDE mode, but a new motherboard can run in AHCI mode instead which allows TRIM to happen on the background.

Know that newer SSDs will be introduced first, so perhaps you should not buy an SSD now. The existing SSDs might get even cheaper when the new ones will be available in one or two months.

Oh and don't overestimate 6Gbps SATA and 3GBps SATA. An SSD is primarily for small files access performance (4K performance); those numbers do not hit the limits of SATA/300 yet so consider Intel G2, Sandforce SF1200 and Marvell C300 to be the same class (second generation). The upcoming third generation (SF2000-family, Intel G3, Marvell C400) will have double the 4K speeds (still under 300MB/s) and most feature a supercapacitor to protect against corruption and sudden death "bricked" SSDs.

Regarding your sandy bridge motherboard; perhaps you can buy from a vendor that allows swapping the board for a B3 (bugfree) version sometime later, i heard some vendors do this but you would have to find more details on that; but it looks like a solution since you already bought parts and should just finish your system and allow you to use it; i think.