Time to jump on the SSD train........

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

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Been putting this off for a long time and my boot drive has now just gone kaput by the looks of things so figure its about time I got on board the SSD train.........

I only want one as my boot drive, so figure a 60gb'er would suffice nicely, but i'm lost with all the different ones out there, and also the correct way to configure and set them up. I've read a few things about TRIM?! and other bits and bobs.

I don't have a SATA3 motherboard so won't be able to take advantage of that, and my budget is around £80-£90 TOPS.

Can anyone recommend me one I won't be disappointed with?

Also I currently run Win XP, will I still get the same benefits running XP or will I get more out of the drive if I switch to Win 7?

Probably going to buy a new storage drive too to go with it too so if you could sling one of those into the mix, I currently only have 500GB, so a 1TB should be fine. Gonna try and get the order in early doors tomorrow so I get them for Weds.
 
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Im looking to buy a SSD too for SO drive on SATA 2

these are my only options, almost same price

Corsair Force F60 SSD 60 Gb --- 285/275 Mbps ---
Crucial RealSSD C300 64Gb --- 355/75 Mbps ---

Dunno what SSD is best on real life rather than on paper, any thoughts?
 
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Well vista or 7 would be a good move to get Trim sorted...

For the 60gig drive at that price/lack of sata 3 id point yo towards the vertex2 which is a round 90 quid (or something in that ball park). Just get something with the fastest read speeds at the price our willing to pay, you'll love it.

(sata2 is limited to 300mb/s I think so real world anything that does more than 285-290mb/s would be held back by the bus speed)
 
Not sure about the Corsiar, but understand that the Crucial has garagbe collection if you want to keep XP. But as an old XP fan I would say you are better off moving to W7 as it is so much better, let alone TRIM.
 
Vertex 2E 60GB or Crucial M4 64GB are both around £90, either would be fine. No point stretching another tenner to an Agility3 if you don't have SATA3.
 
pingwing said:
Well vista or 7 would be a good move to get Trim sorted...
Click to expand...

Only Windows 7 supports TRIM, Vista and XP (and obviously earlier OSes) do not...

You will see an improvement with XP on an SSD, Windows 7 sets itself up automaticly so will be easier to use with the SSD, but if you make the necessary tweaks, XP will be fine, minus TRIM.

Necessary tweaks Examples:

-Disable Indexing on the drive
-Disable automatic defragging

Hope this helps. :)
 
Paul11 said:
or buy a sata 3 card
Click to expand...

Which is another £25-£30 on top of already being £12 over budget already on the SSD.

Plus there's not a great deal of benefit with the extra sequential speeds most of the time. My RAID0 SSD's don't feel much different to a Single drive. My mums Macbook is limited to SATA-150 and it's still the computer where an SSD has had the biggest impact.

Unless you've got a specific application in mind that benefits from high sequential reads it's all just epeen.
 
Zarf said:
Which is another £25-£30 on top of already being £12 over budget already on the SSD.

Plus there's not a great deal of benefit with the extra sequential speeds most of the time. My RAID0 SSD's don't feel much different to a Single drive. My mums Macbook is limited to SATA-150 and it's still the computer where an SSD has had the biggest impact.

Unless you've got a specific application in mind that benefits from high sequential reads it's all just epeen.
Click to expand...

Meh

£40 = miss out one night at the pub :D
 
So what things should I be doing to prepare the drive for first use? Or is it simply plug in and go?

Going to be doing a full format win Win 7 Pro.
 
DON'T full format an SSD. Also, DON'T defragment an SSD.

Just plug it in and install Windows to the raw drive space with no other drives attached (it should automatically create both a boot partition and your C: partition on your SSD, both correctly 4k aligned).
 
As DragonQ has stated you really don't want to be doing a full format on a SSD. If you run the Windows experience index assessment after your up and running then this should disable disk defrag for you.
 
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