Solid State Drives

IceFire, I was not aware that we are talking about a netbook (or laptop) with an Atom processor. That obviously puts major constraints on the overall performance of your system. The SSD will probably still help to boost it, but do not expect wonders.
I am not familiar with the Intel SSD that you linked. The main question here would be whether it has a firmware that supports Trim (which I doubt) and whether you will be running Windows7. Since this would be your only disk, Trim is more importent because you would do a lot of write operations on the disk. The way that Wishmaster and myself are using the SSD, that is not the case because we move our own data to an HDD. And in my case I know that even the system hardly ever writes to the SSD because I have plenty of RAM and my hard faults (page faults) are practically always zero. Maybe you can find some more information about this SSD and then we can take a look at it.

whs said:

I have 2 SSDs (for 2 different systems) - one Intel 80GB and one OCZ 60GB. In my book there is nothing that can speed up your system as much as an SSD for the same amount of Dollars. The OCZ Vertex 30GB was on sale at Newegg for $99. That is a wonderful disk and completely sufficient for the Windows7 OS. Just put your data on the HDD.
Win7 supports Trim and also a few tweaks like alignment and service disabling (e.g. superfetch). So you really need not do much tweaking yourself. I would not want to go back to HDDs for the OS.

unlike in 98, 98se, 98me, xp, vista in 7 for some reason when you change the default path to another drive in stead of c for users, program files, and program data 7 still puts a exact copy on c. in vista i had my 64gig ssd as c and through the os set it up to to install my programs, user files and the page file to d. to test it i would install all the apps i wanted then check the programs file folders size on both c and d. c would be around 400mb to 1gig and d at least 30gigs telling me that the redirect worked. now in 7 when i check both program files folders they are the same size. this tells me that for some reason 7 is making copies of everything that should be going to the programs file folder on d to the programs file folder on c. this is why i recommend a 60gig drive or above.

krazdkiller said:

whs said:

I have 2 SSDs (for 2 different systems) - one Intel 80GB and one OCZ 60GB. In my book there is nothing that can speed up your system as much as an SSD for the same amount of Dollars. The OCZ Vertex 30GB was on sale at Newegg for $99. That is a wonderful disk and completely sufficient for the Windows7 OS. Just put your data on the HDD.
Win7 supports Trim and also a few tweaks like alignment and service disabling (e.g. superfetch). So you really need not do much tweaking yourself. I would not want to go back to HDDs for the OS.

unlike in 98, 98se, 98me, xp, vista in 7 for some reason when you change the default path to another drive in stead of c for users, program files, and program data 7 still puts a exact copy on c. in vista i had my 64gig ssd as c and through the os set it up to to install my programs, user files and the page file to d. to test it i would install all the apps i wanted then check the programs file folders size on both c and d. c would be around 400mb to 1gig and d at least 30gigs telling me that the redirect worked. now in 7 when i check both program files folders they are the same size. this tells me that for some reason 7 is making copies of everything that should be going to the programs file folder on d to the programs file folder on c. this is why i recommend a 60gig drive or above.

Hmm, that's interesting. I never moved the Program files folder to another drive - just my user folders. But even with the program files folders on the SSD, my Windows 7 is only 15.5GB (13GB respectively on another system) with a good selection of programs that I installed (over 11.000 files in the program files folder). The programs are usually not that big - about 2GB for the whole folder in my cases.

Here is what WinDirStat says for the SSD on this system:

this is what i currently get. the user file is actually 10.7gigs not 83.2gigs once i file away everything in one folder on the desktop.

That's a LOT of program files. I probably would not know what to do with all those programs - LOL. I uninstall all programs that I do not use, especially all the junk that comes with the system (.eg. all the HP or Dell help stuff, works, etc.).

whs said:

That's a LOT of program files. I probably would not know what to do with all those programs - LOL. I uninstall all programs that I do not use, especially all the junk that comes with the system (.eg. all the HP or Dell help stuff, works, etc.).

not really not when you consider the size of some programs. i build my own systems and i do disable or set a lot of services to manual. after building my first system under win 95 i would never own a prebuilt again, with the exception of a laptop. even then i would remove everything including the hidden partitions from the maker and do a clean install of 7. my concern is the user file compared to yours.

in "Users", you probably have all your own files whilst I moved mine to a seperate partition. Only AppData has the usual stuff in it. If you moved yours too, tell me how you did that. Maybe you used the wrong method.

nate42nd said:

To the OP:

I you haven't read this yet, things are changing in SSDs....right now you need to go with Intel or an Indilinx controlled SSD. Now there are "SandForce" controllers. These are fast becoming the best. Even to Intel's standards. I would read this and Anand's other articles. You will learn more than you could ever imagine.

AnandTech: OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro Preview: The Fastest MLC SSD We've Ever Tested

Thanks for the link. I read Anand's articles regularly but i guess with the holidays I missed that one. Things seem to be moving into the right direction.

whs said:

IceFire, I was not aware that we are talking about a netbook (or laptop) with an Atom processor. That obviously puts major constraints on the overall performance of your system. The SSD will probably still help to boost it, but do not expect wonders.
I am not familiar with the Intel SSD that you linked. The main question here would be whether it has a firmware that supports Trim (which I doubt) and whether you will be running Windows7. Since this would be your only disk, Trim is more importent because you would do a lot of write operations on the disk. The way that Wishmaster and myself are using the SSD, that is not the case because we move our own data to an HDD. And in my case I know that even the system hardly ever writes to the SSD because I have plenty of RAM and my hard faults (page faults) are practically always zero. Maybe you can find some more information about this SSD and then we can take a look at it.

Yeah as far as i can tell none of the drives support TRIM. but the Kingston, which is also the cheapest, is capable of supporting it in the hardware. unfortunately the firmware currently doesn't support TRIM and it seems like Kingston is dragging their heels in enabling it. Shame because it has a really good rating and I'm pretty sure the bad reviews are because of the lack of TRIM support or the user configured their OS wrong.
Although I'll still wait and see if anything better comes into that price range, because I don't think kingston will enable TRIM for that drive.
However, because i don't believe I will go over 40gb on that drive, I could probably just download an app that cleans the drive once a month or so.