SSD purchase conundrum!

Hello all,

I am torn. I have found a brand new C300 256GB SSD for sale at £255 (postage included) that is £1 per GB!

Do I pull the trigger and buy it or get a Samsung 470??

This is to work in a SATA II system (the one in my signature)

I am very tempted to buy the C300 but understand that the Samsung will offer better performance especially in the long run after firmware updates that the future will bring.

What to do ??

ps: forgot to mention the drive would also be running in IDE SATA mode as the laptop's bios oddly does not support AHCI mode (tried all bios versions) so if this has an effect on the best decision would be good to figure it in. I think it affects my boot times with my HDD which are pretty dismal. Boot up in 2-3 minutes with 400 GB free and well defragged and CCleaned

 

Forget about which SSD - get a new notebook first - (IDE in 2011??!!??).

 

At the same price, I would get the C300 as it is rated for 5000 write cycles, while I have read that the Sammy 470 is rated for 3000.

 

P35 chipset absolutely supports AHCI just the bios doesn't have the option

Absolutely not getting a new laptop hehe. I will still have IDE in 2015 thanks unless someone re-writes my bios lol

 

Get the Samsung 470 series.

Cheers
3Fees

 

You won't notice any performance difference.

Does the Crucial deal have warranty?

 

IDE doesn't have NCQ so one of the key advantage of SSD is lost(queuing multiple probably unrelated request which show case the low latency strength).

Like tiller, I would say think twice. That was the reason why I picked a black instead of SSD for one of my old notebook.

 

Should have. It is an ebay seller. He is selling several.

Did a bit of bartering as I always do and was successful

 

In that case then, I would be looking at a Kingston V+100 SSD with it's agressive GC.

With no AHCI - not only are you losing about half the performance of the SSD, but you also don't get TRIM either.

Good luck.

 

I want better performance. I have used a mid-range jmicron controlled SSD before until it broke that was considerably worse than the C300 and I could easily see the performance improvements over platter HDD's.

So my question isn't and won't be "should I ?" it will remain "which to buy ?" so please people don't try and persuade me to get rid of my machine and buy a new one. Thanks


edit: TRIM works in SATA IDE mode tiller

 

Yeah C300 doesn't do very well without TRIM.

Samsung 470, Kingston V+ and Sandforce are better options.

 

I'm hinting which SSD I would be getting in your position - not which new notebook.

 

I am pretty sure TRIM works in IDE mode. A quick google search seems to confirm this...?

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...k=view&id=505&Itemid=38&limit=1&limitstart=12

 

TRIM is supposed to work in IDE and AHCI modes.....

I haven't seen TRIM working in any system/SSD configuration yet to say it does - even in pure AHCI mode.

 

As far as I know, MSAHCI is the driver(and thus later Intel driver) that has TRIM support. So you need to double check if TRIM is really supported.

Manually using some thing to send the ATA command is one thing, having it take part in the OS process(i.e. a sector free would automatically translated into a TRIM command via the driver to the SSD) is another. IDE is just ide, it can pass on whatever ATA command(TRIM included).

 

I just read following in a Microsoft forum:

i entered the fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify as suggested above.
got a 0 response, only thing is i got the same response on my wifes laptop that has a hdd. is there any other way of proving trim is working?

I experienced similar. Issuing the query in IDE, AHCI or RAID configuration gives always the result 0.

So how is it possible to check that TRIM is working?

 

by measuring. the way anandtech does f.e.: benchmark the disk. fill the disk with random crap over 30minutes or so, and benchmark right afterwards. wait a while and benchmark again. delete all crap. benchmark again. wait a little and bench again.

in the end, you should have the same performance as at the start. if not, trim failed.

something like this (too much for my head right now)

 

I used IDE mode with my SSD until very recently and there's a huge difference in finally being able to use AHCI. Stupid msahci would make my system hang at the logo screen and it drove me insane, so I kept using IDE.

Then, at the end of April, AMD finally put out AHCI drivers that work (I have an AMD system, obviously). It's really hard to go back, as I can open a bunch of different programs at once without hanging.

It seems a bit strange to spend the equivalent of the price of another laptop but not get the advantage of what it all has to offer. It might be worth it to think of what SSD would go well in your next laptop in 6 months or so, even if your SSD doesn't do well in your laptop now. Getting good performance now will just be crippled anyway.

 

Thanks for the input everyone. I will be getting either a C300 or samsung 470 256gb sometime during the next month. I won't be getting a new laptop in 6 months or even a year probably so this upgrade is predominantly to boast performance in this system otherwise I would be looking at Sata 3 drives.

Even in IDE mode I think going from traditional platter to highend SSD will still net very noticeable improvements so it is a must for me. Besides I am not a huge multi-tasker and rarely open more than maybe 2-3 programs at once and that is on the rare occasion.

One more thing I would like to ask is. When I get the new drive is it possible to connect it via e-sata and clone the current filesystem onto it to save me re-installing everything? The filesystem is clean, stable and quite small.