Solid State Drives

DenSweeP

DenSweeP

New member
Who is using a solid state and what is performance like?

What do you have installed on said drive? OS, AV, Office etc, games?

And has anybody used one of these drives yet? Very good pricing with a 3 year warranty and specs look impressive also.

G.Skill Phoenix PRO 120GB

2010-0609phoenixpro.jpg


[ PHOENIX PRO ] FM-25S2S-120GBP2
 
I just upgraded my laptop with an SSD drive and it makes a massive difference in boot times and loading times. Its basically a decision you need to make between the price and space limitations versus a desire to have fast boot up and load times.
 
Space isn't really my concern. I have over 7TB of drive space for storage.

I want to know if the performance increase in justified vs the price.
 
hey man. i have got 2x intel drives in raid and the difference in load time etc are mad. It is really worth it. I would say that it increases your pcs performance in general. everything. You are going to laugh but i think it increases CPU performance, GPU performance everything. Cuts out all the bottlenecks. You said that you are in Pretoria, if you wanna come pop by my place i can show you what the performance is like. MS outlook opens almost instantly. Really really nice hardware to have just quite expensive for the amount you can store or install on it. Have to keep Steam on my normal drives because i am limited to 76gig with the drives in raid. HAHA. Should have gone for 2x 80gigs.
 
Okay, so say for instance I run 2 of the in RAID0, I still have 240GB of drive space, it is just faster?

I've never quite understood RAID. And what is the risk to this kind of RAID setup?
 
well how i understand it. if you stripe (raid0) the drives if one fails you loose all the data. If you have it in raid0 you add the space of the 2 drives and that is how much space you have it will also be much faster. if you mirror the drives you are basically running a permanent backup. If one fails you have all the same data on the other. Not sure about the speeds though.
 
How I understand it as well. But if one fails you lose your data yeah, but then again, if you also only have one drive and IT fails, well same scenario really!
 
That is why i am running a raid setup. It does not matter if you loose data it should be backed up. hahaha
 
RAID 1 (mirroring) has a slight performance decrease, as it needs to write the same data twice, once to each drive.
RAID 0 splits the data among drives, so this already gives you a performance increase, then doing this to fast SSD drives improves performance even more!

Then, all you need to try and do is to get the SATA 3 versions of the SSD and a motherboard that supports it :)
 
I bought an SSD a while back. I think for now, the high price and low capacity of the drives makes them not worth it. They do cut load times, but we aren't talking by 50% or anything, you gain a few seconds here and there.

They are worth it if you have something specific in mind for them though. For instance, I use the drive for FRAPS. Other drives would just run out of write capacity recording at 1920x1200 @ 60FPS, the solid state keeps up quite nicely. On the other hand, my recording sessions have to be very brief because 120GB is NOT a lot of space, maybe 30+- mins of recording. I could also imagine them being quite useful for high traffic databases where the hard drives have run out of read/write capacity.
 
Apparently Intel are supposed to be upping the storage space and lowering the prices right about now, I guess this will only filter into the SA market sometime next year.

I will consider one then.
 
Running a Samsung 256gb SSD. Some of the best money I ever spent on my pc. Using it as an OS drive and for the odd game. It cuts out waiting for anything. Windows takes around 20 seconds to load, from start to finish, and thats with around 10 apps starting up with Windows.

BC2 maps load in around 3 seconds with the drive.

However, if you've got a midrange pc with the option to still upgrade cpu/mobo/ram/gfx, I'd go with those first. For an enthusiast user who has a really decent rig already, it's the logical choice though.
 
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