Hi all,
Considering making the leap to SSD but not sure whether to go with a current sata II sandforce drive (ocz), a sata III realSSD drive (crucial) or something which bypasses the whole sata bottleneck in the form of a pci-e solution.
My motherboard (gigabyte UD5 rev1) supports only SATA II at present, so I don't really see any point in going with the Crucial solution unless i'm going to shell out for a Sata III card as well. Sata II real-world maximum bandwidth is 270MB/s according to what i've read, which obviously renders the Crucial 300MB/s advantage over the OCZ vertex 2E 285MB/s pointless.
So, of the two, the OCZ seems like the better compromise given my system. However, I've also read that the sandforce controller takes a serious performance hit when dealing with uncompressible or heavily compressed data. I guess my question here is: what does that mean in terms of real world performance? Obviously if i'm moving a lot of movies and jpegs around, which are already heavily compressed, i'm going to suffer this compromise. However, what does it mean for program loading? Does it effect writes as well as reads? What about pulling programs off disk and into memory? Is much of that data already compressed? What really attracts me about an SSD is just the general improvement in usability of my system. I'm not looking to massively accelerate file transfers, but dramatically improve boot time and program loading time. Will sandforce's compression issues make a noticable impact on anecdotal desktop performance?
Finally, the other option is something like the OCZ revodrive X2. Significantly more expensive, but with dramatically higher read/write speeds. Will those read write speeds make any significant impact on every-day performance, The aforementioned program loading and the like? Or is it purely an issue of bragging rights? I'm a professional photogapher, so can be working with large photoshop docs and raw images (hundreds of megabytes if not more) - does revo make more sense in this case?
One other issue with revo is the fact that windows 7 can't execute the TRIM function over RAID0. However, sandforce garbage collection is known to be rather aggressive, and in some circles it's believed that it renders TRIM surplus to requirements. Is that true? Or will the revo performance degrade over time?
One final question relates to porting my current windows installation to the new SSD. I'd rather not install from scratch again, so my plan is to image my current drive using backup software, then restore the image to the new SSD. Are there any disadvantages in doing this? Does windows 7 need to be installed from scratch on an SSD to cause it to use things like TRIM?
I think that's more or less it. Sorry for the epic post! Just it's a lot of money and i want to try and make the right choice for my needs
Cheers!
Considering making the leap to SSD but not sure whether to go with a current sata II sandforce drive (ocz), a sata III realSSD drive (crucial) or something which bypasses the whole sata bottleneck in the form of a pci-e solution.
My motherboard (gigabyte UD5 rev1) supports only SATA II at present, so I don't really see any point in going with the Crucial solution unless i'm going to shell out for a Sata III card as well. Sata II real-world maximum bandwidth is 270MB/s according to what i've read, which obviously renders the Crucial 300MB/s advantage over the OCZ vertex 2E 285MB/s pointless.
So, of the two, the OCZ seems like the better compromise given my system. However, I've also read that the sandforce controller takes a serious performance hit when dealing with uncompressible or heavily compressed data. I guess my question here is: what does that mean in terms of real world performance? Obviously if i'm moving a lot of movies and jpegs around, which are already heavily compressed, i'm going to suffer this compromise. However, what does it mean for program loading? Does it effect writes as well as reads? What about pulling programs off disk and into memory? Is much of that data already compressed? What really attracts me about an SSD is just the general improvement in usability of my system. I'm not looking to massively accelerate file transfers, but dramatically improve boot time and program loading time. Will sandforce's compression issues make a noticable impact on anecdotal desktop performance?
Finally, the other option is something like the OCZ revodrive X2. Significantly more expensive, but with dramatically higher read/write speeds. Will those read write speeds make any significant impact on every-day performance, The aforementioned program loading and the like? Or is it purely an issue of bragging rights? I'm a professional photogapher, so can be working with large photoshop docs and raw images (hundreds of megabytes if not more) - does revo make more sense in this case?
One other issue with revo is the fact that windows 7 can't execute the TRIM function over RAID0. However, sandforce garbage collection is known to be rather aggressive, and in some circles it's believed that it renders TRIM surplus to requirements. Is that true? Or will the revo performance degrade over time?
One final question relates to porting my current windows installation to the new SSD. I'd rather not install from scratch again, so my plan is to image my current drive using backup software, then restore the image to the new SSD. Are there any disadvantages in doing this? Does windows 7 need to be installed from scratch on an SSD to cause it to use things like TRIM?
I think that's more or less it. Sorry for the epic post! Just it's a lot of money and i want to try and make the right choice for my needs
Cheers!