SSD Advice for nvidia 780i

[NACZ3]

I'm on the fence on getting the OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD deal for $129 or waiting until my next upgrade as I have a XFX 780i MB with OC'd Q6600 with 150 GB raptor that's working pretty well for me with Vista 64. I plan on loading Win 7 Pro 64 bit on a single SSD.

I"ve read mixed things as in Win 7 has the drivers for TRIM to work properly and that the latest firmware on the drive makes ACHI unnecessary but I won't see as good performance.

I don't care about benchmarks but real world performance. My main concern in reading the OCZ forums and here is data degradation, but alot of those thread dealt with XP or Vista on a 780i.

Anyone with Win 7 and a 780i have any advice? Will the SSD work out of the box okay on the 780i with Win 7 or am I going to have to tweak the hell out of it on the nvidia chipset.

Thanks. If it's only marginal real world performance over the Raptor, it's not worth it to me. I do gaming, Photoshop, Office apps, and some video editing on my machine.

 

[Damar]

Even at it's slowest, that SSD should be quicker than your current HD unless something gets really messed up.

I put an Intel X25-M 80GB in my (now dead) system a while back (680i MB), and it was like a whole new experience with how fast programs load (Photoshop usable within 5 seconds even with tons of filters).

I went with the Intel over the OCZ due to better posts on forums and more confidence in Intel as a brand. I realize the cost is an issue for others though.

Under normal conditions, you'll put the SSD in, install Win7 and be done. It will do everything needed during the install that needs to be done. After that just enjoy the speed and maybe disable things like hibernation if you want to conserve space.

 

[SR45]

Bought the Agility 60 GB a couple of weeks ago, first benchmark was very good with Seq Read around 215 MB/s using CrystalMarkDisk vs 3.0 beta and Write was about 108 MB/s on my Windows 7 780i system.

Used many of the tweaks from the OCZ forum (Confusing with members saying yes or no to a tweak) and my performance suffered a whole bunch with my Seq. Read around 104 MB/s and Write around 40 MB/s. See the performance drope ?

1. Told that Perfect disk was OK to use and if you read the forum as I did, from top to bottom, many suggested not to.

2. Told that you can use CCleaner as well and was safe, but later told not to.

3. Told to download and install Sanitary Erase, but one must have an Intel motherboard with IDE and ACHI but we know our systems do not have this. Suggested that I find a system some where with Intel mobo to burn the Sanitary Erase to a Pen drive, but I have no one with a system.

4. Told also you must have a 32 bit OS (Vista or Windows 7) in order to burn the Sanitary Erase as well though I have one, some individuals do not, so now what do they do, try and find someone with a 32 bit OS since the 64 bit OS will not do.

5. Was finally told not to tweak the darn SSD, but for me it was too late.

As you can clearly see, SSD's are not ready for many of us yet and have much in the way of fixing to get it to where normal customers can us it without all the hoops and jumps the enthusiast have to do to maintain the performance.

 

[grndslm]

I'm reading the OCZ forums right now to figure out how I can update my 1.4 Firmware to 1.5.

Basically, from what I understand, you can just burn a LiveCD, like Ubuntu.... and issue these commands in order to do a "sanitary erase", which will wipe all your data and get you back to 100% stock speed:

hdparm --security-set-pass NULL /dev/sdX
hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sdX

I think you might have to set the password in there somewhere, but maybe not.

If for some reason you're having problem with your mobo not able to boot into IDE mode.... just don't plug the SSD in until after the LiveCD loads. It should work at that point, and the commands above should work too