"Mindblowing" is the perfect description for it
Sure will be nice when they drop in price, but using one as a boot/primary app drive alone, even a small 60-80 gig one is a /major/ speed boost. Makes my 3.5 year old 6700 seem like a brand new machine. (A new nvidia 285 didn't hurt either).
Put off a new machine build for another couple years at this point.
The prices are the thing that is holding back widespread adoption of the technology. And prices have been dropping and will continue to do so. When I first started looking at the technology, the 80GB Intel drives were pushing nearly $600. Today, you can find the generation 2 of that drive for $250.
Well, 4TB of space is great if you need lots of storage. But I don't need that much space...it will simply sit there unused. However, with my SSD drive, I reap the benefits every single day of that drive. I boot faster, I scan for viruses and malware faster, I don't have to defrag, I don't run Prefetch, I don't have to have Windows search enabled, my games load almost instantly, and my machine shuts down in about 5 seconds.
I'm running mine in a desktop. I built the machine in July of 2009, and I went with a 1TB mechanical hard drive. While I had no qualms about my performance, being a Systems Engineer for a living and living and breathing technology, I had to find out for myself just how good/bad were these SSD drives. Once the price dropped to under $300 for the Intel X25-M G2 drive, it wasn't much more costly than a Raptor or Velociraptor drive..so I decided to splurge and ponied up $289 for my 80GB hard drive.
My overall opinion is that the drive is fantastic...but nowhere near necessary for most average computer users. The cost is simply prohibitive. But for a gamer, techie, or computer enthusiast..it's one of the most beneficial upgrades that you can make to most PC's. Lots of people invest money in new video cards to get a few more Frames Per Second, they upgrade from Dual core CPU's to Quad core CPU's to get more crunching power, they increase RAM hoping to see a nice return on investment. In some respects, they get some performance gains, but usually in the area of 2%-10%. With the SSD drive though, the performance gains are substantial and they come into play every second that you run your operating system. I think it speaks for itself that most people who have invested in the technology, generally don't try to persuade others against a purchase. There is often very little buyers regret with SSD drives.
Yea, people don't realize how much they are waiting for their hard drive until they get an SSD. Even with the problems they have had, an Intel or Indilinx controlled SSD (Patriot Torqx, OCZ vertex, and many more) is just outstanding. Start putting $20 a week in jar and before you know it you will have enough to get a 80-128GB SSD. You'll never regret it.
Absolutely! There is no other upgrade that I've seen that even comes close. I have four OCZ Vertexs (Vertices??); two in RAID0 on my main desktop, one in one of my XPS laptops and one in my netbook. After you use one, its hard to labor through 55 second dino-drive reboot times when these reboot in 30-35 seconds.
And then there is the considerable increase in battery life for laptops.... I can get almost an hour more out of a 56 watt-hour battery on my M1330 compared with a good (high performance/power conserving) hard drive.
Here is how mine Intel X-25M has decreased perf. during the last 2 month. Windows 7, some games and tools.
From new:
https://www.sevenforums.com/attachmen...1&d=1256926499
And now:
https://www.sevenforums.com/attachmen...1&d=1256926626
So it is some lesser perf., but still nuch quicker than a harddrive, especially when it comes to Windows, and the games that has thousends of small files.
Just thought I'd post my SSD performance to add to the board. I have two Kingston 80GB Intel X-25M SSD's. I got these two SSD's back in June. Installed them in RAID 0. I got a firmware update back in July. As you can see they are nice and fast! I just upgraded from Vista 64 to Win 7. So far I haven't noticed any decrease in performance since installing them or doing the upgrade to Win 7. In fact Win 7 seems to be a bit quicker.
If your looking to do an upgrade that really makes a difference SSD's are the way to go!!
Luca
I also included my Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black HD performance for comparison. Actually, there is no comparison.
lucaa09, that RAID volume with your 2 80GB Intel drives is beautiful!
Those numbers are something to behold. Thanks for posting them.
Something I didn't know. Only MS storage drivers support TRIM. For all of you SSD guys out there. This is good to know. I just updated my Patriot Torqx to the 1819 F/W. TRIM is supposedly working right now in Windows 7. I didn't know Intel storage drivers didn't support it.
Source : Our friend AnandThere’s a major problem with TRIM today. The only Windows storage drivers to support it are written by Microsoft. The Intel Matrix Storage Manager (IMSM) driver will not pass the TRIM instruction to your SSD. This means you can't use anything but the drivers that ship with Windows 7. To make matters worse, if you enable non-member RAID on an Intel motherboard the default Windows 7 driver is an older version of IMSM so TRIM won't work there either - even if you don't have a RAID array created. Your best bet is to install Windows 7 with your I/O controller in AHCI mode (for Intel chipsets) and don't install any storage drivers. Intel is working on an updated IMSM that will pass the TRIM instruction to SSDs but it won't be ready for at least a couple of months.
Hmm, could someone maybe explain these crazy numbers? I decided to run HDtune on my regular HD, a laptop drive, 200GB 7200rpm. I'm running windows 7 in a virtual machine with 2gb of ram and 2 cpu cores, and my HD speeds were about 100MB/s higher than the SSD scores
Does anyone have any idea how this is possible? Thanks!
