Making the change to Solid State

gps

gps

gps

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Never having used a solid state drive before, I'm wondering just how much better they are in terms of speed.
I have a Veliciraptor 300Gb 10k rpm OS drive and a 700Gb 7.2k rpm Samsung storage drive partitioned for system back up (Acronis) and and 2 more patitions for storage/gaming apps.
My original idea was to use one partition of the SAMSUMG drive for gaming apps but after installing one game onto the Velociraptor by mistake, I have enjoyed what seems to be quicker load times.
I have a couple of questions:
1) Is it really best to keep the OS drive free from other apps to improve system performance? (I still have well over half this drive empty)
2) How much difference am I going to see in terms of speed of loading gaming apps if using a solid state drive?
 
From what i've read, the affordable SSD's (OCZ, Samsung etc MLC based drives) have a crippling issue with random writes, having things like messenger in the background that write to a log file every second or so whn you get messaged can make your system stuttery (theres a couple of hundred ms pause every time it happens).
Either get one of the new intel based SSD's or the upcoming fusionIO drive.

The good SSD's are leagues ahead of even a velociraptor, but until you can afford one of those i wouldn't advise a change.
If i were you, If you have plenty of RAM (4GB + ) and thus swapfile isn't going to be used too much, put your games on the Raptor.
 
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SSD's are atm to expensive and suffer from poor write speeds, if i were you i'd stick with conventional disks for a couple of years and when the tech has been improved then make the move over to SSD
 
Thanks guys - good to get your advice.

Zarf, I'm running 2x2Gb Corsair DDR3 so should be OK - will use the Velociraptor for now.

Thanks again
 
MLC drives should be removed from the marketplace, they're an inherent failure by design and it seems OCZ are happy to keep taking money for a broken product....not that they're alone.

years ago they were tarnished as a company for selling rebadged memory as their own as well as some other dubious practices, seems they're missing the old days :)
 
There is nothing wrong with MLC chips. The problem with the OCZ drives and others which are the same product under different brand names is the drive controller chipset.

Intel's killer 80Gb drive for example is MLC technoligy, but they developed their own controller and the result is far beyond any older MLC based drive and without any known flaws.
 
Stonedofmoo said:
There is nothing wrong with MLC chips. The problem with the OCZ drives and others which are the same product under different brand names is the drive controller chipset.

Intel's killer 80Gb drive for example is MLC technoligy, but they developed their own controller and the result is far beyond any older MLC based drive and without any known flaws.
Click to expand...

+1

Specifically there seems to be a problem with the JMicron controller in use in many MLC SSD's today (but not in Intel's, they made their own.)
 
Stonedofmoo said:
There is nothing wrong with MLC chips. The problem with the OCZ drives and others which are the same product under different brand names is the drive controller chipset.

Intel's killer 80Gb drive for example is MLC technoligy, but they developed their own controller and the result is far beyond any older MLC based drive and without any known flaws.
Click to expand...

i missed an important word at the start of my post - current :p
 
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