SSD Advice

martian_aphid · 25 Jan 2009 at 15:46

I need a bit of advice from you knowledgable forum dwellers.

Currently I have a 500gb os drive and a samsung f1 1tb storage drive. Well the 500gb is the now notorious 7200.11 st3500320as. I had been following the whole affair for a while but fortunately missed out on applying the dodgy firmware fix. I have however, updated the firmware with the revised copy now available, but obviously I have lost a bit of faith in this drive - plus SMART is showing some not so good Raw Read Error Rates as well as Hardware ECC Recovered values.

For a while I have been considering a SSD for an OS drive but was put off a bit by price and certain areas of the performance. Recently there have been some more promising releases, I saw a decent review of the new g.skill ssd and the new ocz vertex series have impressive numbers and have also done away with the jmicron controller. I was looking at the 30GB version which is fairly well priced for the SSD arena:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-013-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

Do people think this is suitable for an OS drive running vista 64? Do I need to step up to the 60GB?

As far as I can see the biggest weakness with this tech. is the limited number of writes, is there a way to reduce the number of writes that occur to prolong the life of the drive, maybe running temp stuff on RAM, or something else? I want to use the drive for the speed and efficiency of running an OS and primary programs so I don't want to bog it up with anything unncessary and make it perform at its best.

Any advice is appreciated

StephenLawUK · 25 Jan 2009 at 16:18

Vertex Series SSDs have an excellent 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) ensuring peace of mind over the long term.

They do last for quite a long time. The only weakness was the stuttering problems caused from excessive read/writes at once but thats supposed to be solved with the change stepping away from the jmicron controller. Depends how many programs you decide to install as to what size. If you have few programs and then move all ur large files over to your samsung you should be fine.

MidnightLamp · 25 Jan 2009 at 17:30

seen numbers suggesting under heavy heavy use they'll last 10+ years. i havent seen any evidence suggesting anyone should worry even the slightest about lifespan

dms · 25 Jan 2009 at 17:49

One of the main advantages of SSD is that when they fail they are meant to do so gracefully, i.e you can't right to a new part of the SSD but you're existing data is not destroyed (it can still be read).

So if you get a "dead" SSD you should still be able to clone it and start again. I can't imagine there are really that many people using disks which are 10 years old, in fact most of mine don't last 5 years (before I replace them deliberately for more space/speed).

Also its a real minefield out there with SSD atm, OCZ are supposedly fixing the stuttering problem by use of a new controller and onboard cache, but I haven't seen any review confirming this.

martian_aphid · 25 Jan 2009 at 18:01

Ah right ok, I guess there's no real need to worry about the writes then, I just read stuff about disabling pagefile... things like that to limit writes.

Not seen any reviews on these yet as you say so I will be waiting for some definitive results before making any investment. They made the announcement of the vertex not having the jmicron controller over the apex and priced it slightly higher. So although they didn't confirm that it was a problem it appears they have moved away from it with their high end product. I read that it caused stuttering with simultaneous read/writes. Plus in reviews for the new g.skill, which does use jmicron's controller, they have used 2 in raid stripe - I assume that is to solve this very problem.