SSD choices

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
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Howdo, I have a Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H. I want around 250gb of SSD space.

Should I get two 128gb SSDs for RAID0, or one 250gb gb SSD? I know nothing about what trim is apart from it's good, but I can't have it in RAID0. But RAID0 would be faster?

There seems to be a lot of noise about the Intel/Marvell controllers as well, but I can't find out which I have.

Are there any things I should avoid at the moment? Everyone at work was banging on about how rubbish OCZ drives were when the Vertex 2 was the flagship because the controllers kept dying. (One lad had 2 die, another had 1 die). Is that still an issue?

Cheers. :)
 
I was already looking at the M4 but want to keep my mind open at this stage, even though I reckon that's what I'll go for.

But 2x128gb in RAID0 or 1x256gb? Will I notice the speed difference enough to outweigh the reliability drop? I'm just an ordinary user really, play the odd game but not that many, use the internets, etc. I use photoshop/dreamweaver a lot and the time it takes to open them isn't exactly slow, but I want them to be faster. Windows boot is the same deal, takes 2 mins which I can live with, but it winds me up.
 
Do you have a SATA 3 (6Gb/s) interface or SATA 2 (3Gb/s)? SSDs in RAID-0 will be bottlenecked by SATA 2. Also you'll not get any noticeable gains in access speed with RAID-0.
 
I would buy 1 x 256Gb as it's cheaper than 2 x 128Gb and the performance will be similar, the difference with RAID will be hardly noticable in the real world
 
OCZ Vertex 4 with their new controller is the best SATAIII SSD on the market atm.

With the new 1.4 firmware the 128gb V4 is faster than an M4 256gb.
 
Raid-0 will only benefit you in sequential read/writes... SSDs are all about small file random I/O

I would go with a single 256GB drive - then you get the benefits of easy trim too.
 
If you do want to RAID I recommend ONLY doing it with the corsair performance pro, because it supports garbage collection while in RAID.

If these drives are too expensive for you then from what you said about what you want it to do I'd say that application performance is the most important factor for you, in which case please consult this graph:

http://img.hexus.net/v2/SSD/SanDisk/Extreme120/graph-09.jpg

Hope that helps :)
 
Right been reading up and stuff, as you do and it's between the Vertex 4 and the M4 I think. Going to go for a 128gb version though I reckon. The 256gb ones are just too expensive for me to justify. At the moment I'm using about 120gb on my OS partition but I have an awful lot of rubbish on there. If I can get that down to around 80gb then I'll be set on a 128gb. Shouldn't be too tricky. I have a lot of non-steam games installed on there at the moment. (Steam is on another partition), so a lot of stuff could be moved.

So, for the 128gb ones, M4 or Vertex 4?
 
The vertex 4 is faster overall, but more expensive and unknown reliability.

So if price and reliability are important factors then definitely the m4.

Also the vertex 4 is only marginally faster most of the time, what is your main focus with the SSD, you going for game loading speed and fast program starts and things, or more professional applications like video editing and the like?

If just general program performance and gaming load times then I'd say the m4 due to the tiny difference in performance but big difference in price.
 
AllBodies said:
The vertex 4 is faster overall, but more expensive and unknown reliability.

So if price and reliability are important factors then definitely the m4.

Also the vertex 4 is only marginally faster most of the time, what is your main focus with the SSD, you going for game loading speed and fast program starts and things, or more professional applications like video editing and the like?

If just general program performance and gaming load times then I'd say the m4 due to the tiny difference in performance but big difference in price.
Click to expand...

Just generally I'd like it to be faster. I don't edit videos much (and definitely not professionally) and rarely play games apart from Minecraft, my main wants are a faster boot and snappier response in general use.
 
Just ordered an M4 on "this week only" for £89, doubt very much I will be upset by this. Cheers guys. :)
 
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