For those who are pulling the trigger...

I just updated my sig with my latest addition. An SSD... geezus everything I've read is true. It will by itself make your already fast SAGER notebook feel like it's got a turbo strapped. Now my desktop with its 10k rpm raptor drive seems sluggish.

500 MB/sec reads.... seriously.

 

Nice! SSD's are a great addition. IMHO it's a night and day difference with boot times and application load times.

 

Yep. This is why when people agonize over the 2630 or 2720, most tend to recommend 2630 + SSD for the same money. I went from 10k raptors in a desktop to an SSD and it's like you finally get to see the performance you paid for in a machine

 

Hmm... if I do decide to later buy a SSD, what interface does the P150HM use?

 

You'd be looking for a 2.5" 9.5mm SATA drive (SATA III 6Gbps on the primary bay, SATA II 3Gbps on the optical slot)

 

Sweet, thanks

 

Do Malibal guys game?

 

Only problem is that they die so fast.

 

yeah im concerned with whether it will die quickly or not. is there at least one ssd that has the best reliability. maybe i should do another poll.

 

My friend has had to RMA his SSD 2 times this year because of failure.

Also, after about a year, they lose a lot of their speed.

 

thats why i get slc ssd
now mlc ssd refresh so quick........

 

I can completely understand. Given the choice between 2630+SSD vs 2720, I would take the SSD any day. I finally took the plunge and put a 256GB Intel 510 Series SSD in my desktop, and I love it. It was expensive, and I still have to install a lot of my programs to a standard HDD (I want large SSDs to come down in price, obviously) but it's a huge difference. I don't leave my desktop running as often anymore because it boots up so quickly.

 

i've never had an ssd, but from trolling the forums i noticed that a lot of people have the intel ssd. i've also noticed that people swear that the intel ssd have the best real world performance, is this true?

 

Is there any influence of the SSD on the game performance ? I guess no but just in case.....

 

Load times pretty much.

 

To be honest, most people will tell you that the OCZ Vertex 3 is considered the fastest drive on the market. With that info though they have also been known to not be greatly reliable. That was the reason I didn't go for that one and instead went with the Patriot Wildfire which is newer to the market, equally as fast, and is supposed to be very reliable. I got mine for $309 for a 120gb version and it makes load times on EVERYTHING so much faster. Adobe Photoshop used to take ages to load but now it's loaded in under 2 seconds.

 

^^^ thx for the info im getting my laptop today and im already thinking about getting and ssd for it. hopefully ill be able to find a deal on newegg, they are expensive as hell.

 

Think of it like broadband... as soon as you get a taste you won't ever go back.

 

SSD. I have a G2 X25-m in my NP8662. Although it's about 21 mths old, it's like taking a rocket and strapping it to the laptop. I don't even want to accept the fact that I'm going to have to buy a drive for my upcoming Sager, because the SSD has spoiled me to the point that HDDs now test my patience. With the X25-m, it does help to run the SSD toolbox every so often and to NOT use the onboard win7 defrag tool, which will destroy the drive with LOTS of writes. As far as gaming goes, I haven't noticed that the SSD causes much in terms of an increase in fps, but it does allow for games to load up and shut down much quicker, again because no rotating drive, just chips on a thoroughfare, so to speak.

Personally, what I'm waiting for is the new Intel 710 SSD to come out, and i wish they would make an X25-e G2 with SLC that wasn't the size of a fairly beefy GPU (though I will admit that 2.2GBps is awesome). As far as OCZ goes, yes they are faster, but much of their speed is based on compression algorithms courtesy of the sandforce controllers, it has a hard time with compressed files and upgrading firmware has a healthy risk of bricking drives. Firmware though, makes the drives better if done right... one firmware upgrade was memorable in increasing the Write speed of the G2 X25-m from 70MB/sec to 100MB/sec.

So SSDs are great for increasing speed, but please remember they are not scratch-disks for photoshop; if you need one of those, get a rotating drive and stop abusing the write cycles on those poor chips!

Jason

 

I'd love to have a pair of SSDs in my system - one for booting and one for games. Can't really justify spending the extra money on a 256 GB secondary drive when I just dropped for a 128 GB boot one.

 

What do you mean by scratch-disks?

 

Is there a good guide to show us how to keep the OS (Win7) from writing on the disk too much?
The good example is the defrag - but is there any other behind-the-scene programs in Windows that just writes constantly that we can turn off?

Also, generally how long does one last? I would hate to throw out a few hundred dollars every year or so...

 

The warranty on the majority of SSDs is 3 years so in the event of failure, you would simply get a replacement from the manufacturer.

A whitepaper released in 2008 shows that even if you wrote 320 GB of data to an SSD every day, the drive should still last more than 23 years. In the intervening time, technology has improved so that figure could be greater. Basically, you'd probably be buying a new one because you want something faster long before you'd have to buy one because the cells wore out.

 

"Simply"? I prefer reliability. I have gone years between Win OS reloads and to know that if I got an SSD for it's speed, that means I could almost assure myself that I'd be reinstalling the OS a few times (or more) in a few year period, just goes against my grain. Then there's the issue of being without the SSD while you wait for a replacement. No thanks!

 

By virtue of the fact that SSDs have no moving parts, they are designed to be more reliable. This link has a link to a study done by Intel showing the massive improvement of reliability of employee computers that have switched to SSDs.

As long as you stick to a proven commodity, such as the Intel X-25M G2, you should be fine.

You can say the exact same thing about platter drives.

 

Heard of Raid 1 ever?

 

SSD's die so fast? What, where? Controllers seem to fail periodically, and that's just a growing pain right now. But the SSD's themselves can last 5+ years.

 

It's a common term for people in software engineering/computer science/design work to refer to their data/cache disks. If you're saving temp files/other large files for processing, they go on the "scratch" disk.

Scratch space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There aren't too many tweaks you can do, but disabling drive indexing, prefetch/superfetch, system restore (If you don't need it), and turning off the page file are the big ones. (other than the defrag tool being disabled)

 

Don't completely kill off the page file. I keep mine set at 128MB min and 6GB max. Some older programs take it for granted that there is a page file and will cause problems otherwise. I've never seen it go above the 128mb though.

Unlike hard-drives, SSDs actually take a hit when writing data over data as opposed to just zeros. You can find utilities to zero out the disk to restore the "new" performance. I do it about once every 6 months. It's some added wear, but at the rate I replace drives it is only 4-6 extra writes on each sector before I've moved on.

 

I keep ssd for like 5 yr by that time new one already out with speed and i get in to Have to have feelings and end up buying new one lol! But like ppl said turn off stuff u don't use restore file index and serch and back groupd program running u don't use, startup control and such.

Sorry for bad english.

 

You are missing my point--I've owned MORE than 24 HDD's, beginning in 1985 and have had just three failures in all those years, so for me, HDD's reliability is excellent. Currently, SSD's seem to be having teething pains--so I'm not going to dive in until they mature a bit.

 

I would like to get one but the price is at a premium compared to standard drives, and you get a lot less HD space.

 

My thoughts are to have your OS and apps load off the SSD. And then storage of games, movies, etc on your multi-TB HDDs. (or 1 TB if you are Notebook strapped)

 

I was thinking about doing the exact same thing as you suggest but I don't want to be lugging around an external hard drive just to save 15 seconds on boot times and 2 seconds on apps.

 

It depends on the machine whether you'd even have to do that. For example, the P150HM/P151HM1 have 1 HDD bay and 1 optical bay. Quite a large number of people (myself included on my personal P150HM) have replaced the optical drive with a caddy + HDD so that the primary drive can be an SSD. Optical drives are seldom used anymore due to USB media and direct-to-drive type gaming. I only carry around an external blu-ray optical drive for the few times I want to watch movies anymore

The speed benefit of an SSD is hard to go back from once you've got it.

Plus, new laptops are incorporating mSATA SSD's which are the size of wireless cards and are easy to find room for. With those you really don't even have to compromise.

 

Agreed. That option wasn't for me because as a college student, I needed the optical drive to use the CDs that came with my text books. I could have bought a external optical drive, but than again, didn't feel like lugging another attachment around.