Which SSD for my system?

B

BS911

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 22, 2000
Messages
270
I'm shopping around for a SSD drive and I just can't figure out which to go with. Looking for a little input from the experts! :)

System Specs:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 @ 3.2GHz
8GB DDR2 Memory
Vista Ultimate 64bit

I'm currently using a 300GB Velociraptor for my OS/Apps. It's pretty fast, but i can't resist the urge to try SSD!!! :D

I need at least 120GB of space, so a single drive or 2x RAID0 would work.

Budget: ~$300-600


So far, from what I've seen on the forums here the OCZ Vertex and IntelX25-M's seems pretty popular. Suggestions?


Thanks!
 
Read this link below from the OCZ forum and their SSD's. Loads of information you should be aware of. One of the better ones in your price range

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186

And this review as well..

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=776

"Who Would We Recommend It ToThe OCZ Vertex series and the Intel X25-M drives are probably the fastest and better SSDs available in the retail market at this point of time. The Vertex drives are the first able to compete with Intel's high end offerings, and at the same time they are notably cheaper. The Vertex series drives should make excellent OS drives for desktops and/or replacements for notebooks because of their 2.5" format, since they are manifold faster than any mechanical drive. Replacing your primary drive with a Vertex SSD will certainly make a great difference about your system's overall performance. If ultimate speeds are the most important factor to you, the OCZ Vertex SSD drives can also be set to assemble a very fast RAID array for even higher performance. Unfortunately their capacities are adequate but not comparable to those of large mechanical drives, so secondary internal and/or external mechanical drives will be necessary if large data storage is needed".
 
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Thanks for that. It looks like the Vertex series is the best bang for the buck. That's about what i had gathered reading through the forums, but i wanted to double check before pulling the trigger.
 
Check out my list in this thread: http://www.hardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1415307

Any of the Indilinx Barefoot based drives (Vertex, Falcon, Ultradrive ME) are awesome bang for the buck, and essentially identical drives. Go for the cheapest one in the size you want.

Also check out the corsair P256 Samsung based one.

Any of the Intel ones are winners also, kind of spendy though.
 
I went ahead and ordered the OCZ Vertex 120GB. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227395

Reading through the OCZ forums on tweaks, setups, etc. is enough to make your head spin. It sounds like Windows 7 does a lot of the necessary tweaks for you while Vista requires that you do them yourself. I may just go with Win7 RC just so i don't have to screw with all of that!!! LOL
 
Yeah, I am running Win7 7100 x64 on a Falcon drive and it is just wicked fast! Just make sure you have defrag disabled, indexing would also be good to disable.
 
So on these SSD's you don't ever want to defrag? I currently have PerfectDisk running every night on my Velociraptor.
 
defragmenting the drive is generally irrelevant to ssd's, since there are no spinning platters it's irrelevant "where" the data is located. The ssd is going to fetch it at the same speed no matter what. I'm not even sure if defragging an ssd actually does what it's supposed to with ssd's wear leveling algorithms in the way.
 
With a SSD, all memory cells are just as "close" to each other as any other memory cell. (no moving head like in a standard HD) and they have a limited (but still large) rewrite life. So all a DeFrag program does is wear out your SSD sooner.
 
Ahh, good to know!

So if i do end up installing Win7 64bit, can i skip all the setup steps listed for the other OS's like alignment, etc.?
 
Access time is near instantaneous so fragmentation has negligible impact on performance.

The only OS that really has any alignment issues is XP which is either 63KB or 63.5KB, neither of which plays well with SSDs.

Windows 7 is supposed to disable defrag by default when an SSD is detected but its better to make sure yourself. Also, turn off power saving features. The Vertex is known to have problems with this and can crash your computer.

Asside from that, nothing else is necessary and would inhibit performance. The tweaks that OCZ have listed on their website were, as Anand put it, futile attempts to reduce saturation of the JMicron JMF601/JMF602 controllers. Gskill techs also finds them laughably useless. The main reason for their limited effect (if there was any effect), the JMicron controllers had very poor write latency and most of these things reduce reads rather than writes.
 
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Yeah, I never understood why turning off superfetch was a recommended tweak. I wouldn't think it would cause writes to your system, or at least, no enough of them to have any noticable degradation... it's just reading off the hard drive at startup and loading programs into RAM. Granted, a SSD is often fast enough that you won't notice the speed difference opening up a program as much... but it certainly wouldn't hurt, either. You'll just get everything loaded into RAM faster after booting up the computer.
 
I'm running a newly installed vertex 30gb (newegg deal) in my laptop w/ win7 RC and it's worth EVERY penny. SO fast. For a laptop running work-related stuff (office, illustrator, photoshop) it's blazing fast. I was mostly concerned with durability, though. I just don't trust laptop HD's (with good reason, had lots crap out on me).

I don't feel the bang/buck is worth it for the larger drives, though ~275 for the 120 gb vertex might be good.
 
I have the 120gb in my laptop running win7RC.
The only thing that you need to do is disable defrag, indexing, and hibernation.

It is definitely worth it IMO, Visual Studio loads up almost instantly. I just let it go to sleep, and not only does it come back in just a second or two, my battery life feels like it last much longer.
 
I ordered the SSD from Newegg yesterday with overnight shipping and of course they didn't get it out in time! Not going to get it until tomorrow. :(

At least I'll have it to play with for the holiday weekend! I can't wait!
 
extide said:
Check out my list in this thread: http://www.hardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1415307

Any of the Indilinx Barefoot based drives (Vertex, Falcon, Ultradrive ME) are awesome bang for the buck, and essentially identical drives. Go for the cheapest one in the size you want.

Also check out the corsair P256 Samsung based one.

Any of the Intel ones are winners also, kind of spendy though.
Click to expand...
As you just posted, those are the only SSDs worth buying. Right now proper SSD's are NOT BUDGET ITEMS, so don't go into a purchase thinking because you got some jmicron trash for $100 that you got a steal.

Intel > Samsung > Indilinx, pricing falls in the same line. Nothing tops the intel offerings, they are easily worth the pricing if you really need the performance.
 
i can second a recommendation for the new samsung drives (we just bought 2xP256 for our macbook pros). good drives so far.. been about a month. noticed a little slowdown as expected but still better than hdd by a lot.
 
DarkStryke said:
As you just posted, those are the only SSDs worth buying. Right now proper SSD's are NOT BUDGET ITEMS, so don't go into a purchase thinking because you got some jmicron trash for $100 that you got a steal.

Intel > Samsung > Indilinx, pricing falls in the same line. Nothing tops the intel offerings, they are easily worth the pricing if you really need the performance.
Click to expand...

Don't the Intel have pretty slow writes though?

On paper lets say for example:

Intel X25-M
Sequential Access - Read Up to 250MB/s
Sequential Access - Write Up to 70MB/s

G.Skill Falcon:
Sequential Access - Read 230MB/s(max)
Sequential Access - Write 190MB/s(max)
 
It has much faster small writes, it only looks slower on paper. Unless you break out a stopwatch and time a large (gigabytes) transfer from another SSD to that drive you'll never notice. Due to the more aggressive controller and small write performance it will probably seem faster in real world use.
 
Sequential numbers are so insignificant compared to the random access times that you can essentially ignore them.
 
You also have to keep in mind that these numbers come from very simple benchmarks which don't always show you the true performance of the drive. I know it's a synthetic benchmark suite, but PC Mark Vantage is fantastic in that it runs several dozen different benchmarks that simulate Windows functions.
 
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