SSD's-Are they really worth it?

[pparks1]

Speed!
Full review: Crucial RealSSD-C300 SATA-III 6Gbps SSD | Benchmark,Review,Crucial RealSSD-C300,CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1,Marvell 88SS9174,SATA-III,6Gbps,SSD Test,Crucial RealSSD-C300 CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1 SATA-III 6Gbps MLC SSD Benchmark Performance Solid State Drive Review

Ok, well this is the first SSD drive that I have seen which actually exceeded the SATA 3.0Gbps interface. So, I guess with the right drive, SATA 6.0Gbps might be a valid concern now..but with almost every other hard drive (including nearly all SSD's)...SATA 3.0Gbps is still not the bottleneck.

 

[24c]

You'll love it when you have it up and running and you'll never look back, might shed a tear when you look in your wallet though


Steve

The joy will last, the expense will be forgotten.

True

 

[dulvan]

yeah.. thanks for the info

 

[noyb]

Can anyone suggest which of these SSDs might the best .. Western Digital ... Kingston

Seems to me, The lower cost WD (after price reduction) has the best performance and the negative reviews for the WD has nothing to do with performance.

 

[whs]

P/P wise the WD looks the best. It is amazingly cheap. There is little to loose.

 

[noyb]

Many Thanks .. But I kinda wish you hadn't said that ..
(Looks like you're going to cost me

I've been thinking about moving my C drive to a SSD .. And sticking it on top of my JBOD stack .. (attached)

I've been wondering if using a SSD for a working C drive ..
Is Not the way to go with the deterioration in performance with the write cycles.
Don't see any sense in spending big bucks for an experiment.

 

[profdlp]

...I've been wondering if using a SSD for a working C drive ..
Is Not the way to go with the deterioration in performance with the write cycles...

My 80GB Intel X-25M came with a three-year warranty, which is about what most HD manufacturers are offering these days. With Windows 7's TRIM function I think longevity concerns are overstated these days, provided you follow a few simple guidelines. Including, but not limited to, don't try and defrag it, store your data elsewhere (pretty much a given since the drives themselves are still so relatively small), and move things like your temp folder to another drive.

...Don't see any sense in spending big bucks for an experiment.

Yeah, the cost per GB is enough to give anyone who is not rich a reason to hesitate when it comes to making a move. Throw in the fact that early adopters always pay a hefty premium for any new tech and and you'll probably need a few deep breaths before coughing up the dough.

For me, once the price got down to the $200 level and I was convinced that SSD is going to become the norm, taking the plunge was doable. For what it's worth, a month later I'm glad I did.

 

[noyb]

With Windows 7's TRIM function ....

This'll be on XP .. W7 is too crippled for me to use for serious work.
I've read that Trim is also available in XP ???

Not sure yet what Trim does ..
The only thing in my C drive is my System and work in progress on the desktop.

I usually do a fresh install of my working C drive about every two or three months.
I'm wondering what impact this'll have on the SSD ??

I'm wondering about 6 months (or more) down the road

 

[profdlp]

I haven't checked ALL of them, but most SSD manufacturers have a TRIM-like utility available.

TRIM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As for the reload every two or three months, if another half-dozen writes a year are going to kill the drive then a LOT of us are in trouble.

 

[noyb]

if another half-dozen writes a year are going to kill the drive then a LOT of us are in trouble.

What has me wondering .. a system drive is Writing all the time ??
or is most of this activity in RAM ??

 

[profdlp]

What has me wondering .. a system drive is Writing all the time ??
or is most of this activity in RAM ??

Most of the writes are in RAM. Most HD activity is just READ stuff, which won't degrade the drive. An exception would be your TEMP Folder, which in my case is redirected to another drive. I also have Firefox save all my downloads to a separate drive. The only thing which I haven't figured out yet is what impact all the email I get each day is having, since most of that is read-and-delete stuff. If I find out that this is significant I may try to move my email profile to another drive as well. Since most of these are very small (3kb, plus slack for cluster size) I doubt they are a problem.

The Wikipedia article I linked to listed a figure of "10,000 cycles" as being the normal life expectancy of Flash RAM. With Wear leveling taken into account I expect the SSD to last roughly as long as most of my mechanical drives, almost all of which go clickety-clack at some point anyway. Even if I get my three-years under warranty and that's it, by then I would bet that 80GB SSDs will be in the same bargain bin that 250GB mechanical drives were sent to once 1TB and 2TB mechanical drives became widely available at a reasonable price. By then, I could probably afford a 500GB SSD for what I paid for my 80GB SSD last month.

PS: Anyone else feel weird describing an 80GB drive as "puny"? It wasn't so long ago that I thought I was set for life with that kind of capacity...

 

[ccatlett1984]

With Windows 7's TRIM function ....

This'll be on XP .. W7 is too crippled for me to use for serious work.
I've read that Trim is also available in XP ???

Not sure yet what Trim does ..
The only thing in my C drive is my System and work in progress on the desktop.

I usually do a fresh install of my working C drive about every two or three months.
I'm wondering what impact this'll have on the SSD ??

I'm wondering about 6 months (or more) down the road

"garbage collection" is not TRIM, to get it you need win7

What "cripples" win7 for your purposes?

I went to a SSD (OCZ Vertex Limited Edition) and couldn't be happier. Its OMG fast.

 

[danpass]

Worth it: considering what?

I suggest a little window shopping at Amazon. Based on my brief observations, the per GB cost of an SATA HDD is $0.24. For the same size SSD, that cost is $2.61. Is 10 times the cost per GB worth it to you under any circumstance? It's not to me but then again, I am poor old man whose money goes for motorcycle gas (and superfluous pieces of chrome, and the blue-eyed . . . oh never mind).

Monk

there's also the noise aspect (or lack thereof)




on a sidenote: I have this vision of 530 million tons of chrome on a HOG with additional pages dogeared in the Harley catalog

 

[danpass]

Can anyone suggest which of these SSDs might the best .. Western Digital ... Kingston

Seems to me, The lower cost WD (after price reduction) has the best performance and the negative reviews for the WD has nothing to do with performance.

Thanks. Price alert set on the WD

 

[noyb]

What "cripples" win7 for your purposes?

Can’t choose to see ICONS on the desktop .. ONLY
Can’t manually sort the contents of a folder ..
Can’t work with my twin screens and my KVM setup ..
Can’t create a new taskbar and park it on any edge of my Screens ..
Can’t customize the file type context menus
Doesn’t like Office 2003 files on the desktop.
… etc …

Haven’t found anything new that W7 gives me that I’d use ..
Except for maybe Trim now.

I keep reading something about the WD SSD has wear leveling firmware.

One of the unique features Western Digital talked about with this new SSD is its internal TRIM support. Unlike normal garbage collection which requires support from the operating system or an outside utility, the SiliconEdge Blue can process this in the background on its own. For users still running Windows XP or Vista this means you get many of the benefits of TRIM which is native to Windows 7.

 

[danpass]

PS: Anyone else feel weird describing an 80GB drive as "puny"? It wasn't so long ago that I thought I was set for life with that kind of capacity...

Yep. I remember ordering the Dell P75 with the upgrade to the 540mb drive and there was a plenty of room outside the WfW311 install

 

[whs]

If you really want to stay on XP (which is kind of odd in my book), you will have a lot of work to make the SSD work halfway reasonably. First you have to make all the tweaks that the Win7 installer does for you automatically (alignment, disabling certain services, etc.). Then you have to run a wiper type program all the time (including the constant backup/restore) to keep the write performance up since Trim is not supported by XP. I wonder though whether WD even provides such a program.

On one of my systems with Vista I installed a SSD G1 (which has no Trim). My main motivation was to fight a heat problem on that laptop. But in terms of performance it is a mixed result. E.g. program installations are slower than on a HDD because of the slower writes. Calling programs is faster though. If I had to pay good money for the SSD, I would not do it again. But I had the SSD sitting around so I thought I might as well use it.

PS: It is an Intel X25 80GB which is ample for what my wife uses it. On the original HDD she had only used about 45GBs - after 3 years of operation.

 

[pparks1]

PS: Anyone else feel weird describing an 80GB drive as "puny"? It wasn't so long ago that I thought I was set for life with that kind of capacity...

Not really. With anything times change....and so do the sizes of things. It does seem that the size of data files have really exploded...but then again....the size of drives has increased dramatically and prices are crazy low....so it's hardly an issue.

 

[noyb]

Just ordered the WD .. Guess I have some learning to do .. I May be back for help
Don't think I have to worry about installing programs ...
I'll be Cloning the SSD with Acronis from one of my Fresh Install (Backup System Partitions) ..
Or from an ATI Image ... Wiper & Backups should not be a problem.

If I can get it working good on XP .. The next test will be to see how fast I can wear it out ..
And If the 3 year warranty will be good if it wears out sooner.
64gig sounds huge to me for an XP system only drive.

 

[pparks1]

As far as lifespan goes, I believe that Intel has stated numerous times that users could write 100GB of data per day to their SSD drives for the next five years and all of their data would remain intact.

So, expect that it's going to take you quite a long time to wear out the drive.