Which Solid State Hard Disk do I want?

[Jake]

Chaps,

 

I fancy getting a solid state hard disk to upgrade my PC a bit.

 

If it makes any odds, the PC is a couple of years old:

Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 4600+

4GB Ram (not sure what speed off the top of my head)

NVidia GeForce 8600GT

3 SATA HDDs (1tb, 500gb, 320gb)

Win 7 Ultimate

What would be the current 'best' SDD to upgrade performance a bit? I'm not really up to speed on PC hardware these days, and I believe the SDD market is still in rather an evolutionary phase currently.

 

I would perfer to buy something from www.novatech.co.uk if poss, as they are local to me.

 

 

Finally, anything else I should be aware of? Anything to specifically look for or to avoid?

 

 

 

Thanks guys!

[BK1]

I read a review in custom pc last year and the Crucial M225 128GB came out best. Prices are coming down, but they are still not cheap per Gigabyte when compared to fast hard disc drlves. If you were to use it for your OS you should see windows load in 30 secs instead of 60. Similar gains should be seen with games and read/write tasks according to the review. Your cpu is pretty old by technology standards, but a new sdd should still be a good upgrade choice and cheaper than a new motherboard, i3 or i7 cpu and ram.

[DamanC]

Jake,

 

What is your most important need of the disk; performance or VFM?

 

What size do you require? Would 40GB just for an OS install and the odd application or do you want as much as possible on it?

[caseys]

As d said above what's your budget? Is it for core os and apps to save time? Is it for large work files? If the latter also be prepared to up your ram if poss and have 64 but addressing natch.

 

Intel & ocz then crucial seem to be the best reasonably priced commercial based ones. And firmware has a lot to do with these drives as you have lru and pre-fetch algorithms even in some ssd.

 

Sorry not too much use beyond that, all my ssd experience is at enterprise level and generally raided ssd... Which is a tad costly.

[ozz]

I looked at SSD a while back and Intel seemed to be most popular, spend some time on the overclockers forum would be my suggestion, its a very busy forum and some good buying advice.

 

I would question what benefit you'll get, you may not get the best results from it as your other components won't be up to speed, it depends what you want it for and how your data/applications are arranged (stored on different drives for example). Also, they are low capacity high price at the moment, so only really suited for an OS drive and maybe one or two core apps.

 

Also, I've not looked into it for a few months but I believe the standard cluster size is changing which will see a price reduction in a lot of storage mediums and a new breed of optimised storage available I think end of this year.

[Jake]

Jake,

 

What is your most important need of the disk; performance or VFM?

 

What size do you require? Would 40GB just for an OS install and the odd application or do you want as much as possible on it?

Sorry for the late reply, I haven't been near a PC today.

 

 

I suppose VFM really. I think I'll be buying a new PC shortly anyway, when F1 2010 comes out. An SSD big enough for the OS, Photoshop and a couple of games would be fine I suppose, but obviously bigger would be better.

I was thinking of, say, £200 or so for an SSD would be OK. Which I could then hopefully put into the new PC when I get it in the next couple of months.

 

I presume these SSDs are only going to get cheaper and faster and generally better, so spending big money probably isn't the best idea, right?

 

I was looking at This 64gb Crucial one or this 128gb

but £120 for the 64 or £273 for double the size doesn't seem like it's worth the extra.

[Dash Rendar]

I bought an 80GB Intel X25 SSD from Novatech just a few months ago for a new build. I think it was on offer; I remember it being great value.

 

I have the 80GB SSD partitioned as 50GB purely for the OS (Windows 7 Ultimate), and a 30GB partition purely for apps. Then I've got two 1TB WDC for data (including work, multimedia, application installers and ISOs, VMs, etc) and backups.

 

Set up like this, my machine boots from POST to the Windows logon screen in 8 seconds.

 

So I would definitely recommend this disk. It's rapid and it's silent. If I had had more money at the time, I would have bought a bigger one. But that said, I've currently only used about 40GB of the SSD, and there's plenty of stuff installed on my machine.

 

I really like Novatech too.

 

If you do buy the SSD, there are quite a few things you can do to squeeze more performance out of the machine. SSDs are very quick for reading, but not so good for multiple small writes. Consequently, little things like moving your IE temp storage to your spinning disc can really help.

[ozz]

Did you find any good deals Jake? You've got me thinking now and I'm tempted to replace my OS drive. My OS install is about 3 years old now (vista) so time for a refresh, I'll stick with vista as its the 'ultimate' edition but SSD looks like a good option.

 

Interesting trick with the internet files!

[Ian C]

I just installed an OCZ RevoDrive. You need a free PCIe slot that does 4x, 8x, or 16x (so an unused SLI slot is ideal). It won't work with an Award BIOS if you already use two onboard RAID controllers (the BIOS runs out of NVRAM and fails to load a controller ), but it doesn't sound like that'd inconvenience that setup.

 

The performance of this knocks other SSD's for six as they currently stand, because it has a built in RAID controller that sees the SSD storage as a striped pair. This way it uses two 300mb/s SATA channels instead of one and sends the result over PCIe. It's £290 for a 120gb card from scan.co.uk. Overcockers are the only other sellers I know of, only it's priced higher and their customer support is terrible, so avoid

 

Using Perfmon I would see 80mb/s max transfer rate when shifting huge video files around my SATA drives. I have seen 133mb/s with this thing just loading Supreme Commander off it It's faaaaaaast

 

-Ian

[Wez]

[Dash Rendar]

Did you find any good deals Jake? You've got me thinking now and I'm tempted to replace my OS drive. My OS install is about 3 years old now (vista) so time for a refresh, I'll stick with vista as its the 'ultimate' edition but SSD looks like a good option.

 

Interesting trick with the internet files!

 

My opinion would be that if you want a cost effective way to make your machine run a lot quicker, then spend it on upgrading to Windows 7 rather than getting a new SSD. Windows 7 is so much faster than Vista it's hard to believe until you see the difference on your own hardware. And it's much more stable too. Vista is an awful OS, whereas 7 is very good.

 

I just installed Windows 7 on a 5 year old laptop that was previously running XP, and I'm stunned at how much faster it's running that XP was. In my nostalgia, and having been through the pain of going from XP to Vista, I always remembered XP as being lightning fast compared to Vista. And that's why I was so surprised to find Windows 7 running faster still.

[Jake]

I just installed an OCZ RevoDrive.

TRIM isn't supported on those though, is it?

I believe that's A Bad Thing, innit?

[TonytotheB]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-flash-trim,2593.html

 

Almost a line with gradient of 1 between price and performance. I have had a Corsair X32 Extreme and the Intel 160GB X-25M. Both were good. They are now producing a 6GB/s drive, the C300! Epic. Give yourself a budget and then decide on the best performance you can get mate

[Alex]

Jake, anything using a "SandForce" controller or an Intel SSD drive is best.

 

But like Ian, when I upgrade my PC I'm going for a RevoDrive PCIe SSD inside and a NAS outside.

[Jake]

Doesn't the lack of TRIM support concern you though, Alex? Or have I misunderstood its importance?

[ozz]

I might go for this: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/225415

 

I was going to buy it last night at £125 from them, but the missus said think about it some more then order today if I still want it (I'm a tad impulsive) and its gone up £10!

 

OCZ seems to be popular and its a great spec, I may take a look at Windows 7 as well. It also has TRIM support which I think I need windows 7 for.

[Wez]

I take it you are all aware that SSD drives slowly lose there performance and at the moment the only fix is to zero the drive and reload it, its a PITA and I really cant be asked to do mine even though its noticeably slower than when I first installed.

 

This is with a Corsair X64 and Win7

[Ian C]

TRIM is important for write performance, yes. Eventually an SSD will build up a sort of fragmentation at the memory allocation level. You can fix it by running a utility which flattens the entire disk but that's not much use if your OS is on it. You can also fix it on the fly by your OS talking to the drive and sending garbage collection commands called TRIM. For this both your drive and your OS needs to support it.

 

This is the best explanation I've seen of it yet:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/10

 

Not many drives support this yet and I think only Windows 7 supports it from the OS side, and it's still fairly immature as a technology unfortunately. It is a good thing to have though. I don't think the RevoDrive currently suports TRIM sadly, not sure if it's Flashable in the future, I know some OCZ products are.

 

I have to run WinXP for a lot of my filming utilities and stuff so TRIM is out the window for me anyway, so it wasn't a consideration. I consider the performance to outweight the occasional flattening with the RevoDrive anyway. My OS runs off an OCZ Vertex II and it's lovely and fast, but I couldn't record x-hundred-mb video files to it any more as the TRIM issue caused heaving chugs every couple of seconds

[ozz]

I take it you are all aware that SSD drives slowly lose there performance and at the moment the only fix is to zero the drive and reload it, its a PITA and I really cant be asked to do mine even though its noticeably slower than when I first installed.

 

This is with a Corsair X64 and Win7

 

Hmm, news to me, what kind of period are we talking about? I'm looking for 2-3 years trouble free processing as I've had with my current vista system. I am leaning towards getting windows 7 at the same time tho, seen ultimate for £145.

 

Edit- thanks Ian, interesting article though I'm more concerned now! Perhaps a raptor drive would be better.

[Wez]

Win7 would be a big step in the right direction as Vista has to be one of the worse versions of Windows ever released.

 

As for SSDs and the slow down it really depends how you have it setup, there are various recommendations like having your swap file, temp internet files, documents etc all on another disk, therefore minimising the writes to the SSD, this to me is pointless and they are not a fix they just prolong the inevitable which is that the SSD will slow down and require a fresh install.

 

Dont get me wrong, I like my SSD but it only performed how its supposed to for the first few months and I cant be bothered with the hassle of zeroing it.

[ozz]

found a good review of the unit I want, link

 

sounds very positive, i might indeed buy it and windows 7 today...

[Wez]

Seems like a nice drive, the important part is this :-

 

It's incredibly fast at both reading and writing data, silent, reliable and capable of maintaining that high level of performance thanks to TRIM support.

[Jake]

Wez, are your problems due to your drive not having TRIM support? I was under the impression that the issues you're describing go away if your setup uses TRIM, no?

[Ian C]

As far as I know TRIM fixes it, but I heard muttering from an unreliable source that Win7 and TRIM still doesn't fix everything. They were a billy bulls hitter sales idiot though so probably nonsense. Whatever, it's too early to tell IMO, it's new tech and bugs will iron out over the years.

 

Don't let all this talk of TRIM put you off. A clagged up SSD still pisses on a hard drive for running your OS off My 120gb Vertex SSD has been in my computer since 2008, and I used it as a scratch drive for making a film. I've recorded around 300gb of video footage to it, deleted a lot of takes, copied the rest around, then copied the final takes on and off several times each so I could work on editing the video (my HDs at the time wept blood when asked to handle the load ). I also ran games off it, and now my OS and some games and some video stuff is on it, and the ONLY problem is that recording uncompressed AVIs at 1920*1200 stutters.

 

I imagine if you move the page file, temp folder, and internet cache onto mechanical disks you'll prolong things and enhance the performance even further. I'm gonna do that for mine now I've heard about it

[Thorin]

My OS is running off a SSD... but I've been unimpressed with performance, can't say I've really noticed any difference from a decent Serial ATA drive.

 

Windows 7 benchmark thingy gives it a 6. But I've not run any other benchmark comparison.