128gig Solid State disk on your Sager

Damn, it doesnt seem THAT unaffordable, but it depends SO much from vendor to vendor for some reason ?

Both xoticpc and Eurocom.com (Ontario based) seem reputable by the user feedback on this forum however eurocom charges $625!! for SSD upgrade (160GB 5400 RPM -> OCZ 128GB SSD) while xoticpc does the same for only 425 and the HD youre upgrading FROM is 7200 RPM, not 5400. Damn - is it because of the novelty of SSD's the prices are so "unstable" ?

BTW, NP8660 with 128gig SSD and 9800M GT from xoticpc is damn cheap - $2101.99 !

You guys think waiting a few months for the novelty of Montevina platform and Solid state disks should pay off ? Could save even more by september-october ?

 

Wait a few months, prices for SSDs will drop.

 

I still don't know what people see in the SSD. There will be 2 or 3 years before those things are worthy IMO.
Energy save? Better battery life? Some models are actually more energy consuming than traditional HDD's!

 

That's quite a bold statement, can we see some examples about energy consumption?

Thanks

 

Read http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html

 

That Tom's Hardware Guide article is bunk. They even had to issue an apology and general retraction soon after releasing it. The quality of their reviews has been deteriorating the last few years... so you really need to think about their methodology before you like a THG arcticle as evidence anymore.

Yes, it is true that "some" SSD's consume more power than HDD's, but there is a super wide variety of SSD's out there. A good consumer SSD such as the OCZ Core or the Samsung SATAII SSD's are far more efficient and faster than an HDD.

Plus, lets not forget that all HDD's are not created equal as well. There are plenty of HDD's out there that consume more power than even the worst of the SSD's.

So if you're asking:

Here is your answer: An OCZ Core can rival a Veloci Raptor. That sort of performance is completely unrivaled in 2.5" notebook HDD's. Nothing even comes close. THAT is why SSD's are starting to take over.

So overall:
1) Less power consumption
2) FAR superior performance
3) Likely better reliability (tough to know this one for sure yet, sample is too small.)

Yes, prices are still very high compared to HDD's, but that's not what you said. If your problem is price, say so, but it's clear that if they had equal $/GB, SSDs already beat the snot out of HDD's.

Still, there is a moral to the story here. Just like HDD's, not all SSD's are created equal.

 

The only reason you would want one (at this price) is shock resistance, although most HDD are reasonably good with that anyway (unless you want to be able to drop it off your table, in which case your screen will probably go). Noise - irrelevant due to fans, power consumption seems about even, given the poorer SSD results on idle, but better when in use.

The other reason is speed, but it is a couple of seconds here and there ... but think about the hours on hours you will spend uninstalling and reinstalling things when you have 120GB to juggle around compared to 500GB (or a fast 300GB). I would hate to have a notebook (ie the ability to have everything with me wherever I go), only to have to keep my music, big apps (and let's face it, they ain't exactly getting leaner with each new version!) etc on an external drive, all for the sake of getting FEAR to load levels 2.3 seconds faster.

I would agree that until we see them at 256GB+, and some unequivocal long-term reliability tests on the multi/single cell thing, as well as a $ premium of say +30% over plates, this is a seriously unwise move for a gaming machine at this time. I would advise give it a year or two then re-evaluating.

 

256 is happening this year

 

I disagree.

1) Number one is only valid for the most expensive SSDs. There's plenty of reviews out there (not just Toms) that show (for example) the OCZ Core is not a power saver.

2) Although OCZ Core has some strong points, it also has weaknesses. The sustained write performance is below par and so is the random write. I've seen several users reporting freeze ups in mutlitask situations.

3) MLC is less reliable (sometimes as few as 10,000 write cycles)

At the moment the 320GB 7200rpm Black Scorpio is still a very competitive alternative to the OCZ Core, especially if you do a lot of multitasking, need fast write performance or a lot of storage.

 

Xotic PC is Ontario, Canada based?

 

no, xotic is US, eurocom is ontario

 

Yes, but that article was on June 27th. Check out Tom's new article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html

I believe that what the article is trying to point out is that one cannot make a general statement that the current generation of SSDs are more power efficient than hard drives. It depends on the tasks/workload involved. Also SSDs are improving with time especially over the older 1st gen SSDs.

To quote:

"There is no Simple Conclusion"

 

I'll be waiting a few months and possibly getting the OCZ SATA2 drives (not that we get SATA2 performance, but those are the new drives which have lower power consumption and good performance).

I will definitely get 2x 64gb SSDs and raid-0 them.

http://dvnation.com/ seems to be the place to go for SSD performance information.... tho their site is a little sloppy. They are a SSD (and Sager) reseller.

 

I got the highest end SSD for a customer. He did extensive research on it being the fastest, bought it and sent it to me to use. It was $1,200. This guy was a hard core sql programmer if I remember right. IMHO the performance just wasn't there. I'm telling you guys, stay away from SSD drives right now.

They are incredibly expensive and it is simply paying way more for something that doesn't give you way more performance. From using it, I would question if even any real world performance improvement was there.

​

 

Just out of curiosity, do you by any chance have any benchmarks (e.g., screenshots) from when you ran the SSD for comparison against available mechanical drives?

 

That doesn't make any sense. Every benchmark out there is putting the $220ish (after rebate) OCZ Core SSD's right up there trading blows with a Veloci Raptor. Given that the Veloci Raptor is the fastest consumer desktop hard drive out there, and can blow any notebook HDD out of the water, there is no possible way that you wouldn't see major real world performance increase putting an OCZ Core in a notebook. Read speeds alone are almost twice as fast, and that doesn't even account for seek time.

I noticed a huge difference between my old 7200.7 Seagate and my Raptor 150 on my desktop, and that isn't even as big of a jump as from 2.5" Notebook HDD to the Veloci Raptor (any by extension, an OCZ Core.)

I'm not saying to go out and buy an SSD. Obviously even at $4/gb they're very expensive... but people keep stating these "facts" about them that aren't really true in most consumer cases, such as power useage and speed.

 

I looked up another benchmark:

http://www.hothardware.com/News/OCZ_Core_Series_SSD_Vs_VelociRaptor_Sneak_Peek/

"Here we see the OCZ Core drive mop the floor with the VelociRaptor, largely due to lighting fast random access times we suspect, as well as its strong read performance."

 

OCZ Core has very slow random writes that can cause serious freezes when multitasking. Accestimes can be as high as 246ms.

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

http://blog.laptopmag.com/in-depth-with-the-ocz-core-series-low-cost-ssd

 

Sure... most SSD's suffer from horrendous performance with super small writes. Perhaps there are certain applications that make use of constant small writes, but I can't really think of any...

If you're dealing with small writes, it should be written to the system memory anyway, and not stored on the hard drive until a large chunk exists.

Perhaps this is why these drives are consumer level drives and not enterprise. I know that servers deal with super small random writes all the time, which is why they prefer drives with Native Command Queing (NCQ). On a desktop, NCQ tends to decrease performance since no such small random writes exist. At least to my understanding...

The "real life" benchmarks (i.e., bootup time, game loading time, etc etc etc) on the OCZ Core have it blasting past even a Veloci Raptor, so obviously that limitation doesn't appear to be hurting it to much in most everyday PC uses. It is, however, another really good reason to have 4gb of RAM and the pagefile turned completely off.

 

Hey, I hope this OCZ drive sets a new benchmark in performance and redefines the whole industry. Sure sounds good from everything in this thread!

Here is the lowest cost I found. Lower than directly from OCZ!
http://www.eworldsale.com/ocz-oczssd2-1c128g-128gb-25-inch-sata2-solid-state-disk_8529_25849.html

 

I'd like to get an SSD in my notebook or desktop, but I can't justify the price/gigabyte. 128GB is simply not enough . . . I only use about 90GB, but taking into account future needs, I'll likely run out in a year's time (four years ago, I didn't even 20GB). When I bought my Sager, I upgraded to the 80GB drive from the 40GB, lol.

I agree with KN in this post:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3679157#post3679157
and I will take that statement further and say the hard disk is going to be the bottleneck in any computer relative to other components. The hard drive is something like 1000x slower than the next slowest component, which is memory. Therefore, any increase in hard drive speed will be noticeable. Go for the 7200RPM hard drives if you can . . . but I think SSDs need some time to mature. The ones we have received for review here at NBR have failed at a rather high rate in the office.

 

Chaz, I have also seen things that are showing the repetitive write cycles of small Windows files are causing failures in SSD drives so if anyone is reading this... make sure you have an iron clad warranty and read it to make sure there aren't OS exclusion clauses in it.

 

Good SSDs don't like the Samsung SATAII.

Vista, Photoshop, Browsers, Torrent downloaders.

In my opinion you are underestimating the problem. Users on dutch forums have reported system freeze ups of 10 seconds in situations with 2 browser tabs open watching youtube. They had their page file switched off.

SSD is a promising technology, but OCZ Core is not ready for primetime.

 

Thats what i thaught, cause why would i be sending my money to the US, lol