A few questions about SSDs

So I'm considering upgrading to a Samsung 840 500GB SSD and since it's my first SSD, I have a few questions.

1. Are there any problems that the m14x r1 has with SSDs?

2. I've heard about how SSDs will eventually wear out, and that read/write speeds can decrease over time as well. I've also heard that new drives don't experience wear out enough to matter as long as you don't do things like dump raw FRAPS video onto it. Should I be worried about any of this? (Samsung has a 3 year limited warranty on the 840, so can I just replace it after 3 years?)

3. In general, do SSDs have any problems nowadays that could cause me to want to wait for the technology to progress?

4. Is this all good advise? (Someone said to move the pagefile to the SSD rather than turning it off, for example.): http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html

Thanks for the help.

 

If your OS is going on this disk, get an SSD with MLC NAND (Samsung 840 Pro, Plextor M5 Pro, etc) instead of the TLC NAND 840 non Pro. I'd only use a non Pro as a secondary SSD for games or something that will not be doing tons of writes, because TLC is much less durable than MLC, hence the 3 year vs. 5 year warranty.

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The upgrade to the Pro is $100. There's also the Crucial M4 for $50 more. Is it really necessary though? According to reviews like this: HARDOCP - Introduction - Samsung 840 Series 500GB TLC SSD Review the lifespan of even a TLC drive would be "7-14 years".

Edit: Actually, take a look at this: http://us.hardware.info/reviews/417...-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013

They conclude "A Samsung 840 SSD with TLC memory is just as reliable as SSDs with MLC memory, and the type of memory should not be a reason to choose one SSD over another."

 

There are too many unknowns about TLC NAND in my opinion. It's definitely not necessary to go with MLC, but rather what I'd do personally.

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So no problems with the r1 in general then?

 

No, except your SSD will only run at SATAII speeds (locked by BIOS) because there were issues with SATAIII, but you will still notice a
good jump in performance.

 

Yeah I saw that. I assume the jump in performance between an HDD and a SATA II SSD is much greater than the jump from a SATA II to a SATA III SSD. Is this correct?

 

Yes, totally correct

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Okay now I'm seeing that there's a modded A08 BIOS that provides SATA III speeds as shown in this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m14x/672655-sata-iii-fix-m14x-r1.html

But even signing up for that site isn't enough to download it, so can someone provide it on here? Thanks.

 

That's absolutely correct, the jump will be big

 

has anyone run 3dmark or any other benchmark before and after the ssd, I want to know how much better it really is

 

I don't see why 3dmark would benefit from an SSD. It doesn't make games run better, it just improves load times. I can tell you after installing the SSD, my computer is MUCH faster at booting and loading applications. I'd still like the modded BIOS to get things even faster though.

 

If the overall performance of the computer is upgraded i was just curious how the gaming performance is affected

 

You might notice a difference when playing data streaming games such as Wow.