Solid State Hard drives

[Roguespear]

I am a retired tech, have been repairing and building systems for 29 years. I own 5 SSD's that I run on 3 computers.

One computer is an EVGA SR-2 rig running 2 6core Xeon cpu's, and number 2 is an ROG rig running an i7 960 and number 3 is my wife's computer running an Ivy Bridge i7 3770K and all three are running NVidia GTX 660 ti cards, I have 2 Asus cards and the wife is running an MSI card. Her computer is running a 128 gig ssd for the boot drive and a 240 gig for her games, Skyrim in particular. The SR-2 rig is running a 1 terabyte sata 6 hard drive and a 240 gig ssd for drive d:\ which is the drive Skyrim is on, and the ROG rig is running 2 ssd's a 128 gig boot drive and a 240 gig ssd for games. I have also been testing the feasibility of running ssd and laptop hard drives together in a desktop PC. I installed 4 500gig laptop drives and 2 ssd's to lower the noise and heat while gaming. This setup has 1 year on it with no adverse effects other than fast smooth game play and blazing fast boot times. I won’t be buying 3.5 inch drives any time soon.

Skyrim seems to love running on an ssd with excellent results. Today’s new ssd drives, with the new generation of controllers, are very solid in performance and reliability, and the price keeps coming down.

There are some caveats, you need to set your controller in bios from enhanced ide to AHCI. I can’t stress this too much, AHCI MUST BE ENABLED for fast trouble free operation, this is all you have to do unless you cloned your old installation of windows 7 which take a few more steps, this requires editing the registry and caution must be used (they don’t call this file your pet rattlesnake for nothing) one false move here could hose the whole system so make a back up, I will say it again, ( MAKE A BACKUP OF THE REGISTRY!!!!). As for cloning your old install, I recommend against it. Also make sure you install ALL drivers and programs to your D:\ drive to save space on the boot ssd.

Before you do any of this, edit the following registry keys….If doing a fresh install ignore the following)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci

Set “start” to 0 (zero)

Then go to…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Pciide

Set “start” to 0 (zero) also.

If this does not work, just change bios back to ide mode and wait till you can do a clean install. Also if you are rocking Windows XP don’t bother it will be a waste of money for too many reasons to go into now.

[Thor.]

I recently bought a Crucial m500 480gb ssd and the size does matter for some reason, the smaller the ssd the slower they are. its been proven to.

Edited August 25, 2013 by Thor.

[Illiad86]

I just got a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240GB SSD as a gift from my bf :D It's...amazing lol. Windows boots in 30 seconds, shutdowns are less than 10 seconds. We had to switch mobos so I could have SATA III (I had II on my mobo) and I get the full 550MB/s read/write.

 

I've been waiting ages to try these out and I'm quite happy.

[AceGoober]

I've been rocking a Crucial M4 512 GB SSD for about a year. I got lucky and was able to have a friend pick-up the SSD from Micro Center during one of there sales. $330 with tax. :laugh:

[Beriallord]

My SSD lasted me roughly 2 1/2 years. Its an Adata 64GB. I used it exclusively as a caching device on a Z68 board. I believe using an SSD as a main drive would be much harder on it.

 

Had a BSOD come up one day, and I researched the error, and it was attributed to caching. Disabled acceleration and it never happened again.

 

They're known for not lasting as long as HDDs. So before you buy an SSD, know that they're going to fail on you quicker. Although they are going to get better as time goes on. The SSD I had was when the technology was still sorta new to consumers.

[FMod]

The error you got has nothing to do with the SSD. It has to do with Intel's SSD caching (what it's called now, Rapid or Quick or Whatever Something) being a sinkhole of bugs.

 

Also, using SSD as a main drive is easier on it than caching, not harder.

SSD last ~as long as HDD, typically even longer, if you didn't get a buggy model.

[Jiggalopuff]

I currently have two 500GB HDD in my Asus laptop that came from the Factory. How would I replace at least one of them if I wanted to swap one out for an SSD? I mainly have games I've downloaded off of Steam.

[FMod]

What model? You sure these are two separate physical HDD?

 

Generally you would delete everything from one of them, move what you need to the other, swap in the SSD (can take a bit of small connector work), install a new OS on it if it's retail or boot from a specially formatted USB drive and clone your OS partition (after cleaning it up heavily first) otherwise.

[Jiggalopuff]

I have an Asus G74SX-BBK9. I have reseeded both hard drives before, so I know that I have two 2.5" SATA slots. I was just curious if the games I purchased off of Steam would transfer, or if they'd have some sort of copyright protection preventing me from doing so.

[niphilim222]

I bought a 1tb evo pro samsung ssd not to long ago.