SSD Advice

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DarthV

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 26, 2004
Messages
165
This is what I get for not being in the storage loop for a few years :p Right now my PC has 4x 500gb 7200rpm drives. One has an OS partition (60gb) and another for local downloads. The second has my games. The 3rd and 4th are in RAID-1 for documents, photos and my user profile for windows.

I haven't spent much on my PC in a while, my last upgrade for my OC'd q6600 was a 800GTS 512 a couple of years ago. So I'm looking to spruce things up a little. And I'm thinking about replacing the first 500gb with a SSD. But I don't really want to break the bank to do it. My needs would be something to fit a Win7 install, a few apps (office, lightroom, photoshop) and maybe have my WoW install there.

Any advice?
 
Go for it, you won't regret it at all. SSD are absolutely the best kind of upgrade you could do right now. At $200-250 you've got two choices... Either a 60GB OCZ Vertex (or other Indillix-based drive) or an 80GB Intel X25-M G2. The Vertex or Agility you can probably find for $200 flat, the Intel drive has a MSRP of $220 but it's still tough to find so a lot of places (Newegg in particular) will price gouge you heavily on it, shouldn't be hard to score one for $250 tops tho.

I'd favor the Intel because even at higher-than-MSRP it comes at a better cost per GB, and it's a better performer under random read/write operations, which is what the bulk of your OS and apps do.The Indillix drives have better sequential write speeds tho, so if you intend to write large files to the drive constantly it's worth considering. Read some of Anand's articles on SSD, they'll catch you up quickly on what's been going on as he takes a big-picture approach thru most of them.

If that's too high for you then a 40GB X25-V is available for $130 as well... Sequential write speeds are even lower (along the lines of a laptop drive) but random write speeds still outclass any mechanical HD by a mile, so it's still a pretty good OS/boot drive, I'm about to purchase one for my netbook.
 
Thanks, I'll take a look at those 2 drives. 80gb might be overkill for what I need, but faster random r/w might be what I'd be looking for.
 
DarthV said:
faster random r/w might be what I'd be looking for.
Click to expand...

Well, Intel drives have OVERALL faster read times and that's what you do the most on an OS drive - read data, not write it. The only achilles spot is the sequential write but 64-80gb drive is not the one you'll be writing large files to anyways ;)
 
Impulse's recommend x 2 ....Intel 80Gb or OCZ Vertex 60Gb, both are top notch SSD's.

I got the Intel, b/c of its better overall real world performance. OCZ wins one category sequential, but is still in (close) 2nd place for real world. And most other SSD's are in distance lower places.
 
Not really worth the extra money IMO. They just overclock the processor (controller) built in to the device.
 
NCIX didn't have the 80gb intel in stock, so I ordered the vertex. Should have a nice upgrade ready next weekend when the SSD + 1tb black + radeon 5850 are all installed :)
 
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