SSD Hard Drives

[needles 1,013]

Hi Guys,

I am in the market for a SSD Hard Drive.

Could someone let me know exactly what I should be looking for i.e

Size to accommodate Windows7 64bit OS,

Brand???

Read/write speeds

etc etc.

I hope someone can shed some light on this for me.

Thanks in advance

Brian

[allardjd 1,853]

Joe knows...

 

John

[Andrew Godden 945]

Needles,

I have a 120GB SSD in my computer and that is more than enough for the OS. A 60GB will do it for Win7 64bit, but then the more you can afford the better. I have an OCZ Vertex 2. Joe has / had the OCZ Agility and had some serious problems. Don't worry about read / write speeds, they are that fast you won't even notice it. The only other brand I would personally go for is Kingston. They have had a high reputation with DDR memory for as long as I can remember.

Cheers

P.S. Many happy returns for last week.

[needles 1,013]

Hey Andrew,

Thanks for your reply. Much appreciated.

I was also thinking of Kingston, as I have had their hardware in the past with no problems.

As I have searched the forums, there seem to be a lot going for OCZ so I had a feeling that they had overtaken other brands in performance but I will go for Kingston.

Thanks again and thanks for the birthday wishes.(although they seem to come around pretty fast now).

Cheers

Brian

[mutley 4,498]

Hi Andrew and Brian,

I am still running the OCZ Agility120Gb as my main OS drive. After changing the the drive from SATA port 3 to port 1 the CTD problems appears to have cleared. (Still not trusting it 100% though)

I like the kingston brand too so good luck with it Brian

[needles 1,013]

I will keep you updated Joe. Good luck with yours also, I hope it holds out for you. OCZ seem to have very good reviews so it should be fine. (Not that I'm any authority on SSDs yet)

Cheers

[M31 0]

Hi. I'm a bit of a PC and flight sim enthusiast and was an early adopter of SSD about two years ago with a Vertex 2 60 GB for Win 7 and RoF.

Couple of monts back i built a new Sandy Bridge i7 2600K rig just for flight sims and splashed a bit on a 3rd gen 60 GB SSD for OS but also a 240 GB third gen SSD just for FSX, this was quite expensive and hard to justify upgrades here ... but compared to my WD Velociraptor install of FSX ... the SSD FSX loading times that can be painfully slow are now a pleasure to use.

SSD's are for sure the way to go for an enthusiast flight sim platform.

[needles 1,013]

I agree I don't think it will be long (in the great scheme of things) before SSDs are the order of the day in every PC.

[rob16584 42]

I've got a 60gb Vertex SSD has my boot drive and it's fantastic how quickly the PC loads up now. I just needed to tinker with the download settings so that they went onto the 'normal' hard-drive so that the SSD doesn't get clogged up.

[needles 1,013]

Which download settings Rob?

Am I correct in thinking you mean for the OS??

[mutley 4,498]

I think Rob means the browser download location settings. By default they normally go (On my machine) to C:\Users\joe\Downloads but I have mine set to F:\Downloads

Cheers

Joe

[needles 1,013]

I think Rob means the browser download location settings. By default they normally go (On my machine) to C:\Users\joe\Downloads but I have mine set to F:\Downloads

Cheers

Joe

Ah! I see now, thanks for that Joe. I may be buying a SSD in the next couple of weeks so look out for some screaming and shouting if I get a duff one. Hopefully not and all will be well.

Catch you later Joe

[M31 0]

Yep ... I remember all sorts of unfounded worrys about SSD's before I took the plunge ... and my very first SSD is now over two years old.

I at first too was doing all sorts of silly things, clever things I'd heard on the current wisdom of the time forums of putting temp files and and suchlike the OS uses to a mechanical drive to save my precious SSD any more writes, a lot of this was done with registry tweaks that were from trusted enthusiasts ... and it worked, but in hindsight not worth worrying about.

The other big worry was putting your swap file on the SSD too ... I still put mine on a Velociraptor, but even here I think it was just fear of the unknown, next time I format I'll keep my swap files on the SSD ... with 8GB of ram and over though, many folk think you don't need a swap file, but some old programs expect them and might crash without them and its not always clear what those programs are ... so even if I had a trillion megs of ram I'd still keep a swap file/page or whatever its called :smile: For now at least.

I was reading all sorts of guff about how SSD's had very limited writes ... this is so not true! here is something I posted on another forum recently (That I found on a very well respected hardware site) that helps to allay these fears ...

when it reaches full write it simply becomes a read only drive, like a regular CDR disk. You cannot "revive" them, but your data is safe.

an MLC has only 10,000 writes per cell. and intel estimates GENEROUSLY that it will last at LEAST 5 years for the overwhelming majority... SLC will last 10 times longer (50 years +).

Write amplification does matter though (efficiency), intel CLAIMS their drive gets 1.1x amplification, while the worst controller on the market (on very old SSDs, first gen) was up to 40x write amplification.

To calculate it yourself... an 80GB drive with 100,000 erase cycles can thus have 80GB x 100,000 lifetime writes = 8 million GB lifetime writes. now you need to account for write amplification. AWD (actual written data) x WA (write amplification) = total write capacity lifetime.

I think 2-3 is a realistic write amplification worse case scenario for the vertex. so AWD x 2 = 8 million GB lifetime writes

AWD = 4 million GB lifetime writes.

If you want it to last 50 years you must limit yourself to 4 million / 50 = 80,000 GB per year, or divide by 365 = 219.18GB per day. almost 220GB a day.

Do you write 219GB per day? because those are the "worst case figures" under which the 5 years for MLC and 50 for SLC are based...

Note also, that the more space your drive has, the longer it will last, double the capacity from 60GB to 120GB and you will have to write twice the amount daily, making the SLC drive last 50 years with 440GB a day writes instead of 220... or you can double the years and just say that a 60GB SLC written at 22GB a day will last 500 YEARS.

you want to know how long the MLC drive lasts? divide it by 10... 220 divide by 10... you get 22GB a day... So for the current MLC vertex, at 60GB, you need to write 22GB a day every single day for the next 50 years for it to run out of writes... at which case it becomes a read only media without any dataloss.

However, lets say you are trying to put a database on it, and it is one that maxes out writes by writing constantly... those drives do what.. 100MB/s writes? so thats 0.1 GB/s write x 60 seconds per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, times 24 hours per day, times 365 days per year. = 3,153,600GB a year... remember we expect to be able to write 4 million GB in its lifetime.

So depending on write amplification, if you somehow manage to get it writing at FULL SPEED 24/7 it will last slightly more than a single year... This is of course completely unrealistic for a home user, who can easily expect it to last 500 years. And even most SERVERS can safely assume that is not gonna happen...

For OCz Vertex/Agility users, there was a real panic recently though that I discovered just after I bought my recent two SSD's with the Sandforce controller, to look on some of the specialist forums I was convinced mine would have the same problems too ... I had to get a grip of my paranoia and mistrust of manufacturers when they claimed it affected a small minority of users, they worked hard to fix it though ... and it affected all Sandorce controlled SSD's on just a tiny percentage of their drives to a small degree at the time, but both my new 3rd gen SSD OCz drives have performed faultlessly and have done so in the three months I've owned them, even though there are now new improved firmware revisions for my drives I wont be using them until my next format ... such is my trust in these drives.

Like I hinted at before ... in years to come we will all be using SSD's and looking fondly back at mechanical HD's in the same way we look back on 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drive media :smile:

[ddavid 149]

The devil's in the detail, eh? But thanks for the comprehensive info, 'M'.

Maybe I'll take the plunge, too - but possibly after an up-grade to an I7... Where's my draft letter to Santa?

Cheers - Dai.