Just a few SSD questions.

I actually have a question as well. Just installed my first SSD - a 30gb vertex. A lot of people on the ocz forums go on about ramdisks. Why do i need one of them ??
 
@explicit4u
you can't get it on overclockers, make an new thread if you wish, and 2 its nice some one els has come out with an Indilinx, so should push prices down hopefully

samsung and OCZ vertex are fast in real world use you not see any improvement between the 3 of them (even the corsair first gen is fast just not fast in data rate that i have) you did allso see the results at the end about game load time and boot all was the same http://www.guru3d.com/article/gskill-falcon-128gb-ssd-review/11 at bottem 1-2 secs thats all

the gskill falcon is just an OCZ Vertex drive with most likely updated firmware (and most likey OCZ results from guru3d are reused results useing older firmware going to ask now)

thay did state that was useing old firmware on that page 11
 
I actually have a question as well. Just installed my first SSD - a 30gb vertex. A lot of people on the ocz forums go on about ramdisks. Why do i need one of them ??

id not bother realy to much with it just do the norm bits for SSD turn off prefetchers superfetch defrag , the 30gb drive you got there you running Xp on it or vista as its bit small (could have got an 128gb of space for £50 more)

the smaller the SSD the Shorter it will last as it has smaller amount of pages to work with on the ssd
 
Been looking through the Guru3d article, so the Gskill drive is an MLC and the OCZ is SLC, possibly why the Gskill drive is cheaper? SLC is supposed to last a lot longer from my understanding of it.
 
Simpler answer than any of the above, yes, you want one.
I'd choose two 30gb in raid 0 over one 60gb given prices.

I have a single vertex, and it is amazing. I used to have a raptor. I will get a second vertex in the future :)

edit: to demonstrate I did read this thread, trim will obviously not be applicable to hard drives, ramdisks are faster than ssd but volatile, so put /tmp and firefox cache in one. Don't install games to one.
The vertex is considered second to Intel's efforts and ahead of the rest. I think this is fair.
 
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I have a 60gb vertex for os and 2 1000gb(meant to buy 320's) in fast raid(1 or 0 its late) for my games.

And its instant, brilliant, absolutly brilliant.
 
Been looking through the Guru3d article, so the Gskill drive is an MLC and the OCZ is SLC, possibly why the Gskill drive is cheaper? SLC is supposed to last a lot longer from my understanding of it.

need to check on that an little for what Both of these are (both are MLC) in that review using Different firmware, OCZ vertex was useing Old firmware in that review not faster same speed as Falcon and vertex use the same firmware if both was updated

@JonJ678
no point useing raid with the vertex/samsung drives operates at around 200MB/s just buy one SSD that fits your Size unless your going to be playing around with very large files (allso for £16 more you could have got http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-078-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1427 samsung 128gb or the vertex 128 for £50 more)

GOTO 3:50 (i have an corsair S128 and every thing runs super fast,the only time i Would seen an improvement going to Samsung 128 200MB/s drives is my game mite load 1-3 secs faster, or playing with big files)
 
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@JonJ678
no point useing raid with the vertex/samsung drives operates at around 200MB/s just buy one SSD that fits your Size unless your going to be playing around with very large files (allso for £16 more you could have got http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-078-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1427 samsung 128gb or the vertex 128 for £50 more)

Off for a couple of reasons, but a sensible response. Cheers.
I bought the vertex quite a while ago, when the samsung was not available here. I've had good experience with ocz in the past, and the core v2 ocz drive it replaced was lovely. So the ocz vertex seemed a sensible choice, and even were I buying now I would choose the ocz. This is based on their forums, their policy of updating ssd firmware after sales and that rma with them is generally painless.

It's currently 125 for 30gb, or 212 pre order for 60. I run ubuntu on mine, so it would fit comfortably in 4gb. That it is so much larger means I have dual boot with xp, and still have 10gb free. So I suppose I did buy the capacity I needed.

However, in the future, prices will fall and I will get a second. This upgrade may make no difference, but it might do. My system (when not broken :( ) is well balanced enough that it's hard to guess where the bottleneck is. The extra 30gb is fairly meaningless, as it just means longer time between moving data to/from hard disk.

However, if the price difference for double the speed is less than 10%, I think you'd be mad to choose the 60gb over two 30gb drives. You can even mount both in one 3.5" bay. It takes three or four to saturate the intel southbridge, so as long as I never want more than 90gb they'll be fine.
 
with SSD the data rate is not that important due to <1ms accesss times

you find it hard pressed to see any difference between single fast SSD and 2 in RAID (unless messing with 10gb+ files), but for your setup the size seems perfect for what you need, 1 vertex or samsung 2gen ssd is faster then 2 raptors in RAID0 and with an access time of around 10-20ms norm based HDDS cant touch SDDs (sub 1ms) in that department and thats where the response of the pc comes from when needing files off an SSD

if you got an intel SSD now over the vertex one you got now apart form data rate benchmarks your unlikely to know know the difference as all good ssds are norm less then <1ms access times, the only thing the intel ssd has got going for it is Big file random writing is quite fast
 
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it says on the guru3d article that the fuller the drive gets you can expect to lose 25% of the speed, that is a fair chunk.. does that apply to all hard drives or is it just the SSD? because i know hard disks get slower with the more info you put on them.

I wonder if the 25% loss is noticable? i know they are fast but its a shame that much speed is taken away when you get a lot of stuff on it.
 
id not bother realy to much with it just do the norm bits for SSD turn off prefetchers superfetch defrag , the 30gb drive you got there you running Xp on it or vista as its bit small (could have got an 128gb of space for £50 more)

the smaller the SSD the Shorter it will last as it has smaller amount of pages to work with on the ssd

I've got windows 7 on it. I install all my apps/games (apart from office) on a seperate drive, got over 12GB free on the SSD. I might get another 30GB drive at somepoint and raid them. I realise it's not going to last forever but ssd's are progressing so quickly, i'll probably end up replacing it in a couple of years anyway - im sure it'll last that long :)

To be honest i was put off from the 128GB corsair because of the fact that it's just a 1st gen samsung with the price boosted up.
 
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I wonder if the 25% loss is noticable? i know they are fast but its a shame that much speed is taken away when you get a lot of stuff on it.

you will not notice the speed loss as the SSD is still far far faster then an HDD in access times and IOPS and it only affects Write performance Not read performance as thay are talking about once the SSD has been filled once (filled means you have Writen say 64gb of data onto an 64gb ssd means all cells now need to be erased before next writes can happen so write speed is lower after fill, Corsair report the Filled Spec speed on there SSDs not Unfilled speed, when benchmarks are ran on unfilled drives Write data rate speed is higher then what thay was sold for)

most of the above problems if you call it that will be Fixed once SSD makers add the TIRM command to the ATA spec in there firmware (so windows 7/linux can use it) the Current TRIM that is on all SSDs is only usable with the Wipe tool, once thats been added windows 7 will be able to Report to the SSD that Block is now can be erased (Trim is done after Writes so does not affect Write performance), so next time an write comes along it does not have to erase it first before saveing data to it

this is the Super Talent UltraDrive ME (same as vertex and Falcon drive when useing 1275 firmware)
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/974/4/

@dayloon
data rate is not that important, and the price is not boosted up far cheaper then an vertex or second gen samsung (all the samsung SSDs on this site are second gen only the Corsair S128 is using first gen but there is nothing bad about that price you pay for 2 30GB or 1 60gb vertex you can get an 128 corsair only thats lower is read an write but as the access speed is so low data rate is not that important), you should get 5-10 years out of it but the smaller the SSD sooner it start to fail, as there are less cells to erase (each page is 512KB that can be erased at an time but 4KB can be written into each page untill its full)
 
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So maybe SSD's are more of a temporary drive? not as long term as HDD's?

if anyone has a good estimate of when prices are gonna drop a lot i would like to know :p
 
Think someone pointed out September-time a while back - something to do with a reduction in fab size coupled with storing an extra third of data on each cell (something like that?), so capacities should about double/prices halve, in theory
 
halve that fast? hmm i am not sure about that, would be nice if true though.

on another note, are there any other faster drives due out any time soon? on guru3d it says the falcon drive is just about maxing out the controller? which is a good thing because maybe it means before faster drives we will have to wait for a better controller which might take a while, or not?
 
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the only thing they can improve on SSD is random access data rate, Intel SSD is the best at that at the moment (it has like 10 channels to access at the same time where as most SSDs are like around 4)
 
nothing bad about it but it is the same drive as an vertex, Once the vertex has been updated to 1.1 so both falcon and vertex are the same speed once both have the same frimware, thay did state that on mostly each page

and its not on overclockers web site yet to buy yet so its samsung or vertex on this web site, both are fast

but do not take constant data rate speed as the best thing about the drive you need random read and Write access results as well, as proven with my so called slow SSD i have here thats 2-3x faster then any HDD i have had before and thats due to the access times of less then 1ms no HDD can touch that and why SSD will be always fast, the only thing thay can improve on now is the amount of data speed in random access, but realy 8000 for 4KB file sizes is more then any user should need for an long time and it realy does hide all the slow bits in windows

things that take 5-10 seconds to do on an HDD take norm less then 1 second on an SSD to do evey thing done

once all the JMicrons run out of stock and are removed any SSD you get from OCUK will be good to buy
 
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