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The mkiv Supra Owners Club

Which Solid State Hard Disk do I want?


Jake

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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.

 

Which SSD? Some are less than impressive but they were mostly low power laptop ones.

 

I found that it didn't really improve boot time, but once Windows is up and running, responses are instant.

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In case you're interested, the Intel X25 I mentioned earlier supports TRIM on Windows 7 without needing any additional tools. You just need your BIOS configured to AHCI.

 

Note that if AHCI isn't enabled in your BIOS when you install Windows 7, then enabling AHCI post-install will prevent Windows 7 from starting. (Which is easy to fix... just switch back to IDE.) But you can configure AHCI in Windows 7 at any time by editing the following registry key:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci

 

and changing the value of "Start" to 0. Then restart Windows.

 

Then you can change your BIOS settings and restart. All done.

 

Alternatively, you can use the Intel tools and configure them to optimize your drive on a schedule. But I prefer letting Windows do it all for me.

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I'd still prefer the option of ram disks / pinning objects in memory in Windows akin to like what you can do with other OS.

 

You'd be amazed at how fast some jobs run when their entire structure is constantly held in memory :) Feck I/O...

 

Good luck booting your OS off a RAM drive :D

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Good luck booting your OS off a RAM drive :D

 

Erm.... NVRAM? :)

 

It's what we use in big arrays for when data hasn't destaged to disk if there's power issues, it only clears when a commit comes back. Considering we've got caches of 256Gb now I think the tech's there.

 

Not that I could possibly afford it. But OSX has been doing RAM disks for years, it's handy when you can carve off 50% of your ram and use it instead of swap.

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Well if you're gonna be silly, why not run a terabyte RAMSAN :p

 

RAM disks have been around since Stonehenge, they fade in and out of fashion depending on the current state of play with drive size/cost/speed, OS and software RAM requirements, RAM cost and speed, and maximum capacities.

 

Regarding the last one, I'm still stuck at 3.6gb with 32bit XP so no RAM disk for me. Especially as sometimes the video files I'm using in a scene go up to 15+gb :cry:

 

I :love: my RevoDrive, I still think it's the best price/performance SSD out there.

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Not that I could possibly afford it. But OSX has been doing RAM disks for years, it's handy when you can carve off 50% of your ram and use it instead of swap.

 

I remember using RAM disks in the AmigaOS Workbench back in the 80s, and in MSDOS too. They've been supported in every Windows version that's been released since, and you can still install a RAM disk into Windows 7 as a legacy device. (Takes about a minute to set up.) But RAM disks were traditionally used prior to the existence of hard disks out of necessity, and faded into obscurity since hard disks made them obsolete.

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Well I ordered the SSD I linked and windows 7 so now £300 worse off, no-one is allowed to post anything detrimental about them now!

 

I've got a few days now to to arrange my data, not looking forward to reinstalling everthing, especially Steam...

 

I want to read up on tips for configuring my data in relation to SSD, make sure I get the optimum performance.

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