What SSD?

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xBanzai89

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Well school got out and I finally got around to making more money again. I have spare cash on me, so I figured now is a good time to jump on the SSD bandwagon. At the moment I do not know if I should go for 64GB or 128GB of storage. I plan on really just using this for a OS drive and for a few games. That is why I do not know if I would benefit from having the more GB. I have no problem swapping games out once I am done with them too.

I came across this Crucial M4 64GB SSD for $115. Would that be a good drive to start out with? If I ended up needing more space I could always put this one in my secondary computer down the road.
 
Check the size of your current C drive. Depending on what is installed and what you need will let you know if the 64 is enough or not. If you have office and PS plus a few games, you will probably want the 128. It sucks when you get to the point that you have to determine what is essential and what is not when you get to the gb limit.
 
With windows and office it leaves me with around 44GB left of storage if I was to get a 64GB drive. Is there a certain amount of space I should leave for the well being of the drive (read that somewhere)? I'll probably only put single player games on the drive when I am playing them like Shogun 2, and The Witcher. Is there really any reason to put multiplayer games on the drive considering you still have to wait for the match to start? Only ones I play on BC2 plus some TF2 and those load pretty quick already.
 
I believe that leaving some free space is short-stroking of some sort, where you leave some of the drive unpartitioned. I've no idea how much it improves performance, but I'd rather the extra storage (unless you don't need it).

You can free up some space by disabling the paging file, hibernation, and system restore. See the "Free up extra drive space" here on how to do those. Also note that companies use the 1 billion bytes = 1GB conversion, while Windows uses 1.073ish billion. A 64GB drive will only give you ~59.6GB.

As for MP games, what you said never really occurred to me. Maybe have them on your SSD initially, then if you need more room you can move them to an HDD using symbolic links. Assuming you use Steam, there's a program that will do it for you.
 
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I did not know about that way to save space on Win 7. I will have to take advantage of that!

Yup I use Steam for 95% of my games I would say. My friend won a Intel 510 120GB SSD at the PAX East Lan in a competition. When he finished doing his install of Win 7 I showed him that Steam mover and he loved it.

I think I may just go with the 64GB after reading all that. I really don't want to dump over $200 on a SSD at the moment. When next gen comes I maybe more up for doing that. Considering this generation wasn't that much faster then the previous.
 
A friend just bought the Crucial M4 64gb and he is been pretty happy with it, here are some benches he just did after a clean install and doing TheSSDReview The SSD Optimization Guide

capturaxo.png
 
Those are some pretty nice read speeds. I feel the performance with a lesser drive. You must look like this:

 
Well I ended up ordering the Crucial M4 64GB SSD. Can't wait to get it!

KENNYB said:
Those are some pretty nice read speeds. I feel the performance with a lesser drive. You must look like this:

Click to expand...

I hope I feel like that :cool:.
 
xBanzai89 said:
Well I ended up ordering the Crucial M4 64GB SSD. Can't wait to get it!



I hope I feel like that :cool:.
Click to expand...

Dagnabbit - this thread (and a quick peek at the MC web stock page for Fairfax, VA) have me thinking; MC has some *factory refurb* Corsair Extreme Series 64 GB SSDs for $90USD after tax - http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0356684. This will be my *toe dip* into SSDs (which is why a refurb); also, I have no idea how the combo of SSD+ICH7 will perform.

My current Windows 7 boot drive is no slouch (5.9 WEI) despite it being the 500 GB EcoGreen; however, I do a lot of small-applet multitasking (IMs, small Web apps, etc.) and Outlook/Word, so increased performance would help.

Does anyone here run such an SSD on the ICH7 or equivalent SATA controller? If so, how well does it perform as a boot drive?
 
PGHammer said:
Dagnabbit - this thread (and a quick peek at the MC web stock page for Fairfax, VA) have me thinking; MC has some *factory refurb* Corsair Extreme Series 64 GB SSDs for $90USD after tax - http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0356684. This will be my *toe dip* into SSDs (which is why a refurb); also, I have no idea how the combo of SSD+ICH7 will perform.

My current Windows 7 boot drive is no slouch (5.9 WEI) despite it being the 500 GB EcoGreen; however, I do a lot of small-applet multitasking (IMs, small Web apps, etc.) and Outlook/Word, so increased performance would help.

Does anyone here run such an SSD on the ICH7 or equivalent SATA controller? If so, how well does it perform as a boot drive?
Click to expand...

Thats a first gen SATA? These current drives start to be bottlenecked by SATA II actually and take benefit from SATA III. I don't know how much of a bottleneck you will see though I am sure it will still be far faster then your mechanical drive regardless. I am still one SATA II, but I may move to a 990 FX chipset or slighty lower one depending on the prices for DDR3, SATA III, USB 3.0, and maybe better overclocking support for my 955 BE (My current mobo can't do anything really unless its the chip).
 
xBanzai89 said:
Thats a first gen SATA? These current drives start to be bottlenecked by SATA II actually and take benefit from SATA III. I don't know how much of a bottleneck you will see though I am sure it will still be far faster then your mechanical drive regardless. I am still one SATA II, but I may move to a 990 FX chipset or slighty lower one depending on the prices for DDR3, SATA III, USB 3.0, and maybe better overclocking support for my 955 BE (My current mobo can't do anything really unless its the chip).
Click to expand...

Actually, ICH7 (along with ICH8/9) is SATA-3.0 Gb/second - the only SATA-6.0Gb/sec from Intel for the mainstream (as opposed to Xeon workstation/server) are the various Cougar Point iterations. Every WD SATA HDD from the past two years (not just the RE3/4, but Caviar and Scorpio as well) is *at least* SATA-3.0 (which is why the Caviar EcoGreen still has decent performance, despite the small cache and slower spindle speed). ICH5R (Intel's second-generation SATA-supporting desktop controller southbridge) is SATA-II.
 
Well I got the SSD today. Did the install of Windows 7 and the optimizations mentioned in the guide above. Though it looks like my performance is being hampered in some areas.

Untitled-1.jpg


The drive feels much faster then any other drive I had prior to this. I was expecting to be limited by Sata II. Just want to make sure this is accurate and nothing else is wrong. Looks like I will be picking up a AM3+ board sometime this summer to get more speed out of this.
 
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It looks like your disk controller is in IDE mode rather than AHCI (based on "pciide"). You should be able to change that in the BIOS (I know there are complications with some AMD systems, but I have no firsthand experience). Also note that you'll have to do some hacking or reinstall Windows for it to work after the controller change.
 
Ah fantastic -.- lol.

Reinstalled with the AHCI. Scored 449 in AS SSD. The results are a good deal faster still need to get Sata III MB though soon.
 
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