Solid State Hard drives

[LHammonds]

http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/mmframe?prid=464787&attachid=901396

There's other newly available ones as well but this one might be the best overall performance and physical size.

 

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20090305132228_OCZ_Technology_Develops_1TB_Solid_State_Drive_with_Extreme_Performance.html

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/182865/1tb_ssd_drive_available_now_a_steal_at_just_over_3000.html

None of those in SATA 3.0 spec yet.

 

evilneko, take a look at RedVexHK's 1st link to marketwire. Click their Renegade Product link and look at the specs. Write Endurance: Guaranteed Unlimited 5 Years . Sounds eerily familiar like the Intel article about the 5-year longevity for writes to the SSD.

 

Speaking of the Intel article, it was actually a PDF spec sheet. I'll save you some time, it can be found in section 3.5.4 - "The drive will have a minimum of 5 years of useful life under typical client workloads with up to 20 GB of host writes per day."

 

20 GB per day for 5 years...that is MUCH more than what I remembered (or would use per day).

 

PS - PLEASE DO NOT DEFRAG SSD DRIVES. It is not needed, will do nothing to increase performance and may actually cause damage.

[evilneko]

Hmm, interesting. I'd love to have an SSD in my laptop for battery life if nothing else. With durability like that, it just might be practical.

[Thor.]

YAY after a while without defraging the ssd i noticed a huge jump in loading times, i mean wow. Smooth, smooth and then some in Oblivion, i never thought was possible. I actually notice a difference.

 

Note i use Oblivion as a loading benchmark.

[AWarGuy]

I reckon SSD are amazing, but will only be bought in large numbers when the prices are down either by releasing larger models allowing the less bigger versions to cost or in time just slowly slash the prices down.

[DarkWarrior45]

PS - PLEASE DO NOT DEFRAG SSD DRIVES. It is not needed, will do nothing to increase performance and may actually cause damage.

 

Agreed. It is not needed, as SSDs are to my knowledge random access; you can instantly get to any addressable memory space within a single memory access. The reason why we need to defrag mechanical drives is because they are not random access, they are linear; meaning that it has to spin a physical disk and move a physical head in order to access any memory space. When you defrag a mechanical disk, it means that a group of data is all together on one part of the disk, thus reducing seek times. This is the reason why SSDs have ridiculous read times over traditional, magnetic disk drives.

 

 

 

On another note, is there any word on the performance of a SSD versus SAS drives? Traditionally, SAS drives in RAID 0/5 have been the fastest thing around. I'm just curious as how the SSDs compare to a SAS drive?

Edited November 22, 2010 by DarkWarrior45

[LHammonds]

Well, it looks like it is finally time for me to get an SSD drive. There are some SATA III drives available but they are still quite pricey. I am hoping to buy the Intel X25-M, 160 GB SSD for $219 via their Intel Retail Edge Program....assuming I can come up with the cash before the Dec 1 deal starts.

 

I was holding out for SATA III and lower prices due to smaller manufacturing processes which save money and thus provide for a larger capacity at lower prices but dang, it has been almost an entire year and not much on the market. I'm tired of waiting and this seems like the best bang-for-the-buck deal I've seen so far.

 

EDIT: Dec 12, 2010

 

More details about the PC I built

 

Intel Core i7-960 3.2 GHz

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 (rev 1.0)

Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM (12 GB)

XFX Radeon HD 5870 Video card

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

 

This system currently has 3 SATA hard drives (which are currently the main bottleneck)

 

• Primary: Western Digital 250 GB
  
• Secondary: Western Digital 1 TB
  
• Tertiary: Western Digital 1 TB
  

Here is the current Windows Experience Index:

 

Processor: 7.6

Memory: 7.6

Graphics: 7.8

Gaming Graphics: 7.8

Primary Hard Disk: 5.3

 

I am about to replace the Western Digital drives with an Intel X25-M Solid State Drive (160 GB) and will post the results of the test after the upgrade.

 

EDIT: Dec 13, 2010

 

Here is the new Windows Experience Index using the new SSD:

 

Processor: 7.6

Memory: 7.6

Graphics: 7.8

Gaming Graphics: 7.8

Primary Hard Disk: 7.5

 

LHammonds

[mcole254]

Nice choice with the SSD looking at the WEI you see a big improvement. I've been using a Crucial C300 SATA III for my boot drive and I love it.

By the way do you have the drive in ACHI or IDE mode?

[LHammonds]

By the way do you have the drive in ACHI or IDE mode?

I made almost all the recommended changes to the OS for an SSD except this one. I am leaving it in IDE mode. There have been too many reports that it only synthetically increases speed but also causes contention problems. I'm quite happy with the performance as it is right now. The only way it could really get any better is with an SSD that can utilize the SATA 3.0 spec that my motherboard supports. But I've waited for that over a year now and decided to go with this one since I found such a great deal.

 

LHammonds

[prandiningrat]

In my opininon. at least, there are two things to note when using SSD drives. First, you will not get significant performance differences compared to hard drives. With one unit, SSD only has advantages in terms of vibration/shock, power consumption and noise. When two SSDs with RAID0 configuration have only small differences compared to one unit SSD (only 300MB/s)

If you want to get optimal performance with SSD, at least you have used two SSDs and run them in a RAID0 array with Volume Write Back Cache (an ICH10 controller feature) activated will get average R/W 550 MB/S..(had been tested). Using the two SSDs with RAID0 with that feature can be much help applications with large data, such as databases and multimedia. However, more applications are better appreciate the increase in clock processor.

Another things with SSD, Unlike hard drives, SSD and SSD with RAID0 array prefer "block size" smaller. In hardisk, large Block size (128 kb) RAID controller much help "flatten" the transfer to the hard drive because the CPU load is not too much influence in most systems. Otherwise at SSD, a smaller block (64 kb or 32kb) is better. Other than that, a small block size also allows the mechanism of "SSDs perfetch" offer optimal working.

[mcole254]

In my opininon. at least, there are two things to note when using SSD drives. First, you will not get significant performance differences compared to hard drives.

 

I disagree with this, HDD can not compare to SSD in terms of read speeds, SSD will vary greatly with writes so in that case, yes sometimes there will not be a significant increase over HDD's. But on average (especially access/read speeds) there is no comparison between the two drive types.