Tribal Instinct

Restored my OS onto my new OCZ Vertex 3. "power button to windows logon" time went from 1:13 to 0:47.

I been looking at SSD drives for a while. I have narrowed it down to either Intel or Crucial as far as dependability.
From all the research I see is that the SSD are great for faster boot times and longer battery life in notebooks they do almost nothing for games as most of the gaming information is stored in the RAM
when gaming.
When the prices come down I will look at a 250 or 300 gb drive.
They are very fast but there still some concern about wear as there is a finite number of time you can write/erase the cells before they lose the ability to store information.
They are a heck of a lot better than they were a couple of years ago and they will eventually replace
standard hard drives in the future but they still have a ways to go.

Porkinator wrote:I been looking at SSD drives for a while. I have narrowed it down to either Intel or Crucial as far as dependability.
From all the research I see is that the SSD are great for faster boot times and longer battery life in notebooks they do almost nothing for games as most of the gaming information is stored in the RAM
when gaming.
When the prices come down I will look at a 250 or 300 gb drive.
They are very fast but there still some concern about wear as there is a finite number of time you can write/erase the cells before they lose the ability to store information.
They are a heck of a lot better than they were a couple of years ago and they will eventually replace
standard hard drives in the future but they still have a ways to go.

Piggles, I was looking at Crucial as well. I chose OCZ for price. As far as dependability.. consider Hard drives have been around a long while. In days gone by manufacturers would dedicate 50% or more of the media surface for error correction. I still remember the "free drive space" utilities that would override the firmware and allow access some of that space..at a risk. As time went on, both quality and density increased....but even today drives still have a fair portion of media dedicated to error correction. Half the work of S.M.A.R.T is just keeping track of how much of the EC zone is left.

The same is true for the SSD's, but with no long term statistics manufacturers didn't know how much was required. As a result, first generation drives didn't contain enough error correction space and they got a reputation for being unreliable. Much of that has been accounted for in the newer drives. Every batch is more reliable than the last as more data becomes available.

Lastly, I look at it like this... OCZ (and Crucial) offers a 3 year warranty on the drive so for the next 3 years the only thing I have to do is make regular backups (which I do anyways) and keep a spare HDD around for emergencies.

So there's no reason not to enjoy the speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed now.

Games keep a lot in RAM, but I've already seen phenominal load times in Borderlands. I'm interested in seeing how fast UT maps load or if AntiTCC validation is faster.... because everything else is.


BTW, for comparason, the speed of the single SSD is about 3.2x faster than my 2 drive RAID-0 stripe.

Using Intel and OCZ Sata3 myself. I will never go back to a spinning disk. You don't know what you are missing.

Yes, the price is killer. But it is the single best improvement you can make to any modern system.

Save pennies, ask for christmas gifts, get a small one as a boot/game drive and keep your music/pics elsewhere if you have to.

BTW: I've never had an Intel fail yet, and lost two OCZ that they were very easy to replace. And yes, while I am a Mac nerd I have Windows machines - just use Windows 7, turn off Defrag, and you're gold.

After the holidays I plan on ordering a 2nd unit and setting it up as a RAID-0 stripe with the one I have now. With the drives this fast already 2 should saturate the SATA III interface.

600MB xfers will kick ass.

pewterdragn wrote:Using Intel and OCZ Sata3 myself. I will never go back to a spinning disk. You don't know what you are missing.

Yes, the price is killer. But it is the single best improvement you can make to any modern system.

Save pennies, ask for christmas gifts, get a small one as a boot/game drive and keep your music/pics elsewhere if you have to.

BTW: I've never had an Intel fail yet, and lost two OCZ that they were very easy to replace. And yes, while I am a Mac nerd I have Windows machines - just use Windows 7, turn off Defrag, and you're gold.

How long did the OCZ drives last?
I pretty much ruled them out do to other dealings I had with them over server RAM they swore would work and didn't and gave me a hard time about replacing it on a customers time critical server we built for them.
They did not have the best reviews when I looked at them.
I am leaning heavliy toward a 200 gb or higher SSD from Intel.

After a lot of research I found the drive I want.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820139600
Now I just have to convince myself to buy it.

Porkinator wrote:After a lot of research I found the drive I want.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820139600
Now I just have to convince myself to buy it.

It's only money.

I like the OCZ, but given the chance to do it again I would go with the Intel 510.

Pork,

If your MB does RAID, you can get 2 120's for about $80 cheaper than 1 240 and stripe them as I plan to.

Of course it's increased risk...but thats why we have backup software.

law.of.averages wrote:Pork,

If your MB does RAID, you can get 2 120's for about $80 cheaper than 1 240 and stripe them as I plan to.

Of course it's increased risk...but thats why we have backup software.

I think SAS drives in RAID is way overkill.
It is tempting though.
I want a large hard drive so I don't have to constantly move files over to the regular drive.

I don't keep so much on my system. My old system backup is about 111GB. That's after about 2 years running...

Currently running with about 60G in use, but I haven't gotten around to reinstalling Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 which is about 15-25G for full installs including help.

I also switched from Office / Outlook to Open Office / Thundirbird just to try something different... I tihnk that also shaved a few G off the total.

Broke down and ordered drive #2 today. $179 with the promo code.

Holy Shit Batman!

Got my 2nd drive and restored with both as RAID-0

law.of.averages wrote:Holy Shit Batman!

Got my 2nd drive and restored with both as RAID-0

Does that mean you going to kick Nytes ass on a regular basis?

I am thinking about putting one of these on my system.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820147135