Solid State Drives (SSD's) explained

Advice please :).

I've just ordered a new Sony Vaio E-Series laptop and the first thing I intend to do is stick an SSD in it. I'm going to go for an OCZ 120GB Vertex 2E SSD 2.5" SATA-II which I believe is highly regarded around here.

Installing the drive shouldn't be a problem; I've messed about with computers all my life. My concern is about switching the drive to AHCI or, at least, making sure it is AHCI to start with. I assume I can put the drive in, turn the laptop on and go straight into the BIOS to check/change it? Does anyone know what values I am going to need to change if it defaults to IDE?

Also, I'm fairly certain this should really be done before installing Windows 7, yes?

Ta.
 
Chapple said:
Advice please :).

I've just ordered a new Sony Vaio E-Series laptop and the first thing I intend to do is stick an SSD in it. I'm going to go for an OCZ 120GB Vertex 2E SSD 2.5" SATA-II which I believe is highly regarded around here.

Installing the drive shouldn't be a problem; I've messed about with computers all my life. My concern is about switching the drive to AHCI or, at least, making sure it is AHCI to start with. I assume I can put the drive in, turn the laptop on and go straight into the BIOS to check/change it? Does anyone know what values I am going to need to change if it defaults to IDE?

Also, I'm fairly certain this should really be done before installing Windows 7, yes?

Ta.
Click to expand...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox6DHlPQI-w
go to 4:32 tell you about ahci
you need to do it before installing windows 7
 
I have also bought an SSD OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive now around £90.00 inc VAT and will post details of how good it is once it is installed
 
Don't want to start another thread so this seems to be an appropriate place to ask this question.

I'm really out of touch with SDD technology but would want to jump in and get one of these awesome toys in the near future. Not going to upgrade my motherboard any time soon so looking for SATA II drive preferably.

Got OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB, Crucial C300 64GB and Corsair Force 60GB on mind, something that will take Win 7 64-bit install and a handful of applications.

Now my question is, is there any point waiting for new SSDs right now? Are there any major improvements coming our way? I've heard that Intel was going to release their SSDs with another die shrink that would supposedly allow to double the capacity of the drives maintaining old prices.

£100 is roughly my budget. I'm not to bothered waiting a few months if there's going to be a major improvement in the technology.
 
yes the crucial c400 is coming out and the ocz vertex 3 pro, no prices out yet though and no dates but likely within 3 months. the specs for each of these drives are in posts in the hard drive section of the forum. Please read recent posts before posting in here.
 
clocka said:
yes the crucial c400 is coming out and the ocz vertex 3 pro, no prices out yet though and no dates but likely within 3 months. the specs for each of these drives are in posts in the hard drive section of the forum. Please read recent posts before posting in here.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. It seemed reasonable to post in this thread rather than starting a new one as there's plenty of general advice posts floating around but none could help my cause.

Both Crucial C400 and OCZ Vertex 3 Pro are aimed at Sata 6Gb/s which is incompatible with my board and would be a waste with Sata II. Is there anything that is coming out for Sata II specifically and brings more capacity rather than higher speeds for the price?
 
you would still get faster IOPS with the vertex 3 pro compared to the vertex 2. You can buy sata 3 pci-e cards btw.
 
I've only occasionally been checking in on SSDs (as they're currently too expensive for me), but how have prices faired over the last year or so? Are SSDs still dropping in price considerably year-on-year? Has global production of NAND gates increased substantially with the growing popularity of SSDs causing a price drop?
 
cork-spotters said:
I've only occasionally been checking in on SSDs (as they're currently too expensive for me), but how have prices faired over the last year or so? Are SSDs still dropping in price considerably year-on-year? Has global production of NAND gates increased substantially with the growing popularity of SSDs causing a price drop?
Click to expand...

As of October 2010, NAND flash SSDs cost about (US)$1.40–2.00 per GB

As of October 2010, HDDs cost about (US)$0.10/GB for 3.5 in and $0.20/GB for 2.5 in drives

Cost and capacity

The technological trend is a 2 year 50% decline in costs, while capacities continue to double at the same rate. As a result, flash-based solid-state drives are becoming increasingly popular in markets such as notebook PCs and sub-notebooks for enterprises, Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPC), and Tablet PCs for the healthcare and consumer electronics sectors.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
 
What is your source for the lifespan of the Intel X25-M drives?

From what I remember calculating, I worked out it was 20GB a day you could write to the Gen2 SSDs (80GB models). But that was based on a 35TB writes and I can't seem to find an authoritative source on that anymore...

The Mean time between failures of 1.2 Million hours (from the spec) seems a litte far fetched... 136 years?

http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/index.htm
 
Posting here but not sure if its the right place, but it is for an update on SSD's
Guys, Advice please.
System specs below.

Started looking for SSD to replace the HDD in my system, ready to buy now, but still not sure what to go for.
Not to worried about the money i spend, but i do want as fast as i can push my system with stability.
I know quite a bit about SSD, so dont worry about trim and image and all that stuff, can do all that. Just been reading about the new OCZ but there seems to be only one link interfaces available at the minute, and besides, they are not available where i live at the minute, so would have to buy them from OCUK.
My Question is this, been reading through this section, and there are a few differing opinions, would raid on ssd be an advantage over a higher capacity drive ?
And would also like some opinions on the best drives out there at the minute, bearing in mind the hybrids aswell, all storage would have course be done outside of the ssd.
I do a bit of photo and video processing, also play a few games (crysis,mass effect2 etc)
so just looking to get the best possible from the components i have, the hdd's are the biggest bottleneck b4 i can start overclocking.
Opinions please ?

sorry forgot to mention windows 7 X64
 
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I have had intel's X25M for over a year now and it's absolutely great. There are now much faster drives especially when it comes to write speed, but as a system drive and for multiple simultaneous operations (multi tasking, Virtual machines etc) it's still up there with the best.
 
Leave it on your SSD. Unless you've filled up the drive a lot (75%+) and really need to save space, leave it as system managed. Remember, the main reason for having a fixed size page file on an HDD is to avoid fragmentation - on an SSD this isn't a problem. :)
 
Maybe a stupid question but I have never had any experience with SSD's..

If I ordered one of the ocz drives can I just plug it in like a normal hard drive, carry out a fresh install of windows and done.. I keep seeing things about trim and other utils but have no idea what this means...

Cheers
 
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