SSD price heads up.

[M31 0]

While the price of mechanical hard drives are slowly falling after the flood in Thailand last year, so are the prices of SSD's, have not checked other sites for comparison yet but OCUK are selling 240 GB Sata 3 SSDs for just £ 134.99 inc VAT, I bought one of these last year and it cost me just under £400 I think it was?

I'm tempted to buy one more and RAID 0 them for almost 500 GB but as far as I know you still lose TRIM support in RAID for Win 7 and SSD's, you should not defrag an SSD and I dont want to lose TRIM that is its equivalent.

There were some cold boot problems with these drives in the early days with its Sandforce controller but after flashing mine to the latest firmware I've had no problems, presumably these drives ship with latest firmware, if not its really easy to flash them, but you will lose data, so beware.

I'm not a fan of OCUK to be honest, prefer Scan for my bitties but they do have bulk buying power and you get the odd good bargain, this is one of them I reckon.

240GB is a nice size for an FSX and add on install, but if you are a fan of photo scenery like me its still not enough, there are 1 TB SSD's now of course, but the last I looked these were about the best part of £2000.00 Ouch!

http://www.overclock...rodid=HD-077-OC

[mutley 4,487]

Hi Colin,

I think you are right about loosing TRIM in raid 0 .. but the performance gain would be fantastic.

[M31 0]

I reckon so, Joe.

But third gen SSD's and the newer 4th Gen ones can pretty much saturate all modern motherboards SATA controllers bandwidth. if you are going to RAID SSDs then you should buy an after market controller card and these are silly money for the good ones ... and you still lose TRIM.

I've RAID 0'd mechanical hard drives in the past, its measurable in benchmarks of course, but not worth bothering with any-more IMHO.

[britfrog 180]

my fsx comes to over 300gb and i refuse to pay the kind of money they want for an ssd of 500gbs when ssd's are going to be phased out in 18months, according to all the articles that i have read. for the moment i will stick with conventional engineering and await the new storage media. I have seen so many tears amongst friends with ssd's that went awol, under warrantee but the manufacturer wasnt interested to pay for the time and hassle of installing all the software again.

[M31 0]

my fsx comes to over 300gb and i refuse to pay the kind of money they want for an ssd of 500gbs when ssd's are going to be phased out in 18months, according to all the articles that i have read. for the moment i will stick with conventional engineering and await the new storage media. I have seen so many tears amongst friends with ssd's that went awol, under warrantee but the manufacturer wasnt interested to pay for the time and hassle of installing all the software again.

Hi Brit, What is this new HD technology you speak of arriving in 18 months?

PCIE SSD cards? they are out there now and apparently outperform even SATA 3 2.5 SSD's , but Oh Boy, its serous money for these cards, then you have to consider these cards can share levels with the CPU, or even on-board sound if you enable it ... its all a compromise and big balancing act..

Sata has its dedicated channels and with most modern boards Intel or another flavour to choose from, but they are dedicated channels built for the purpose.

Nah mate, the time has come, Modern SSD's are here to stay, It was a flaky start for SSD'ds for sure, but they are well established now, ... apart from maybe WD 10K WD Velociraptors, its all about SSD's now for pure FSX performance and its just fine with them here no worrys ... I'd certainly not recommend a product here if I knew nothing about it, I do have real experience in SSD's though and this drive in particular and just wanted to pass it on

In time we will look back on today's HD's and laugh, it will take a while but it will happen.

I started with 5.25" floppy drives and they were really floppy when the 3.5" floppy drives arrived I thought it was a revelation, they were so much quicker

Times change oh so quick

[britfrog 180]

hi mate,

to be honest I can only remember a big article on tom's hardware or a similar site bemoaning the limited size that ssd's can become and their limited transfer rates the technical side of it leaves me for the moment but I know i read something that intimated that the life of ssd's was very limited and would be replaced by something that regenerated the life of the existing style of storage. I am sorry i cant be more precise but some of it was over my head.

I have to say i envy your new setup but find that for me i prefer to always rest about a year behnd the sharp edge, being a modern day scrooge at heart

whilst i would love to have a gtx 680 or similar i find it hard to pay out my hard earned moolah when 9 months down the line it will be perhaps half of the current price, for that reason i heve my current setup which allows me to "fly" with all the sliders to the right and no stutters. Would it be possible to do a deal with you to buy your old crap that you are now using in say 9 months time ) for say a song?

[M31 0]

No worrys mate .. I do upgrade often and sometimes post my bitties for sale here.

Currently i have three I7 comps and that was bordering on the looney, even for me, it looks like you are good to go for hardware for a while? But I have an I7 920 4GHz bundle on Ebay just now if anyone's interested?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/180906563358?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649

In future I'll always offer my parts here first, I've sold stuff here before and nobody has let me down.

[mutley 4,487]

I'm waiting for you to sell your latest machine!

[M31 0]

I'm waiting for you to sell your latest machine!

I'll give you first shout Joe

[britfrog 180]

I'm waiting for you to sell your latest machine!

After me you are first in line!!!

[Tim_A 996]

Look here: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

The worked example, using older tech, shows that writing the SSD continuously at full pelt using a 'rogue realtime data logger', it would take 51 years before it's trashed. It will certainly outlive your PC.

My experience with conventional mechanical drives is that they typically fail after 3-4 years.

Also, current gen RAID controllers allow TRIM with RAID 0. (big RAID arrays of SSDs are now commonplace in the movie industry, for direct recording of camera output, for one example)

[M31 0]

Yep, Tim is right ... I once wrote something about expected read/writes on SSD's here and how the early concerns about this were unfounded, no worry's about putting your swapfile/pagefile on the SSD either IMHO, by the time you use up an SSD's read write cycles you'll either be too old to be bothered with PC's any-more or they will have moved on in performance many times over and dropped in price that you will want to replace them anyway

Nice thing about SSD's is that should they fail they apparently still remain read only so you can get your data back, not so easy on a failed mechanical HD.

I've had a few mechanical HD's fail over the near 20 years I've been using PC's, I'm a firm believer of SSD's now, curiously they wont load a bloated FSX scenery install much faster than a very fast mechanical HD but they do have lots of other benefits, a dedicated OS SSD with Win 7 on one of the newer third gen SATA 3 SSD's does load insanely fast though.

For mechanical HD's I prefer Western Digital and their 10'000 RPM Velociraptor's (they do a 1TB one now) WD have the best hassle free quick returns policy for a failed drive too if you are unlucky enough to have one fail in warranty, even if you buy a second hand Western Digital you can check its remaining warranty on their site by its serial number and they will still honour that warranty, did this once with a Raptor I'd bought off Ebay.

Whatever you do, you cant back up important data enough though, have all my important data backed up on several drives here on different PC's and if one drive fails I'll get that data copied to a new source straight away ... it took me a while and learning the hard way to think like this and it cost me a lot of personal pictures/documents and suchlike in my early PC times that I'll never get back again, to learn this hard lesson.