Another SSD thread :)

craptakular

craptakular

craptakular

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I had two Samsung Gen1 I think in RAID last year and they were quick but I needed more space.

I now have a Samsung F3 1TB drive which is pretty nippy.

Now I'm thinking of one 64 GB Kingston drive for OS + Arma2 (20GB) + Office (700MB) + Bad Company2 (6.5GB).

Writing it all down it does seem to be cutting it close. There's also Arma: Arrowhead coming out which would add another 20GB, I dunno if that would make my Arma2 install obsolete.

I guess I need to be looking at the Kingston Gen2 128GB model?

How does this SSD fair in games and general OS tasks like Firefox, office, photoshop, Vegas?

The OCZ Vertex 2 50GB looks best on paper but I could'nt install many games on it, so I guess it's to small for me.
 
The Crucial is better than the Vertex 2 in pretty much all situations, its still VERY fast in Sata 2 mode, as its real speed is random read/writes which isn't hugely effected by sata 2/3, in Sata 3, its simply unmatched. Its on par price wise with OCZ per GB, well its significantly ahead right now due to being 128gb(120gb formated in windows), OCZ should have 60/120gb models available soon, so at that point the price will be the same.

The kingston and Intel drives are very good, the kingston ahead in some situations due to sequential writes, but it tends to fall down compared to most others on the market in random read speeds, in some situations worse than Indilinx drives, in some situations better. I'm not sure how much the V+ ones go for though, if 128GB is £50-100 cheaper than a 128GB C300, its well worth it, it its £15 cheaper, I would go with the better drive as it will retain its value better when you resell and you get the benefit of better speed while you use it.

A windows 7 install, normal, will be about 17gb, kill hibernation, system restore and some other things(just use the backup tool to make an entire system image on the 1tb drive somewhere, you can use that from the windows install disk to basically copy a fresh install windows 7 back on the drive if any problems occur.

So a 64gb should fit what you want, honestly, very easily.

I did mess with creating my own Windows 7 disk, which worked in all but one situation, but it was like a 7gb install :( It was great saving so much space but ultimately had a couple things missing that stopped a couple games working. Thing is thats working off someone elses image basically, its insanely complex removing stuff from windows 7 so is very hard to remove large amounts without killing everything. MS are a joke, it should let you customise what you install and stop you having to have the stupidly sized driver folders with drivers for some printer made 20 years ago you've never even heard of :(
 
The good news is that I have Sata3 on my mainboard. The bad news is that I don't have £300 for one.

The kingston 128GB is £208 with all the cables and adapters. The 64GB version is £99.

Going to pop in the bank tommorrow and see how much is in there, if I can stretch for the 128GB one I will get that.

So the short of it is that the Kingston drive is very good value with pretty good performance, comparable to the Intel G2, but cheaper.

It isn't as good as the C300 or Vertex 2 but is vastly more affordable.

So in games this Kingston is going to fly? Arma2 is a texture whore and it reads a lot of HDD data. The 64GB is quite appealing if money is tight...

What would you do?

I have the 1TB for programs that I ain't bothered about speed and my steam account. The 64GB reserved for firefox, office, win7, arma2 and BC2. Thats around 50GB, cutting it close :s

Just turned of hybernation and system restore and saved 18GB :p

I'll research more tips to see if I could trim 5GB off the win7 install.
 
Make sure the kingston model you are looking at is an SNVP325 Theres a minefield of similarly named products and the 325 is the decent one based on Toshiba controller.

The Intel 80GB is always worth looking at; fantastic all round performance, decent capacity, Proven design, reasonable price.

Games absolutely fly on SSD's: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8HJEZjxiws - That's a vid of my ARMA2 load with a single x25-m, It's almost 50 seconds faster than my Samsung F1 was.
Most of my game loads were halved or better. Now i've gone RAID0 I'm always first on the server in mp games and my boot times are cpu bottlenecked on a [email protected]

I need to put ARMA2 back on at some point, if they've made any progress on the issues.
 
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What OS is it running ?

im using windows 7 on a 40gb, and the os plus usual installed programs eats most of that space, so 64gb might be pushing it abit
 
I'm running Win7 64 bit, I think one 64GB will be too small, I had two samsung's in raid 0 last year and 120GB was difficult to manage.

The new kingston model is the 425?, so it's better than the 325?
 
Crucial C300 Firmware update now fully working well

Btw, the Crucial C300 firmware update now seems to have addressed some of the previous concerns that were raised.. This is what they communicated when the firmware update was released: (link below)

The SSD firmware is now fully functional and ready to be utilized.


On Thursday, May 20th the RealSSD C300 firmware v0002 with a new update tool was posted live to the support site. It is now available for download at:

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

The Crucial Performance Lab, in conjunction with the Micron Capability Lab, has performed extensive testing of the new update tool functionality, and has confirmed it works properly across multiple platforms.
 
Oxy said:
I'm running Win7 64 bit, I think one 64GB will be too small, I had two samsung's in raid 0 last year and 120GB was difficult to manage.

The new kingston model is the 425?, so it's better than the 325?
Click to expand...

No, The 425 is based on a JMicron 618, which isn't as good as the 325. See what I mean about a minefield :)

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=736&type=expert

Hmm - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/141?vs=154
the 425 isn't technically that bad, at least sequentially and in 4k performance, so it's not a terrible drive, but the real world style tests (PCMark, AnAnd storage bench) show the 325 to have a significant advantage somewhere.
 
Zarf said:
Hmm - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/141?vs=154
the 425 isn't technically that bad, at least sequentially and in 4k performance, so it's not a terrible drive, but the real world style tests (PCMark, AnAnd storage bench) show the 325 to have a significant advantage somewhere.
Click to expand...

I looked at this drive aswell for a starter SSD.

In laymans terms, then, for general usage ;

Std HDD = Pushbike

This Kingston = Supercar

The best SSD = Formula 1

Are these the sort of ' jumps' in speed ?

Cheers
 
mrdbristol said:
I looked at this drive aswell for a starter SSD.

In laymans terms, then, for general usage ;

Std HDD = Pushbike

This Kingston = Supercar

The best SSD = Formula 1

Are these the sort of ' jumps' in speed ?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's a pretty good analogy. If you can get a 128GB 425 for £200 that's a good buy. It's "punching above its weight" so to speak.
 
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