What SSD to get

rodders

rodders

rodders

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Hi all,

My mate wants SSD's in his new pc.

Does he go for a few 60 gigs in raid 0 or one big one?

I assume raid 0 will increase the speed a lot, but then im reading about this TRIM??

:D
 
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I also want to make the move to SSD but dont want to compromise on space. Can anyone point me in the right direction for reading material on the subject of Rodders question (smaller ssds in raid 0 vs 1 large ssd or just 1 ssd if it makes no difference how big). I didn't want to start a new thread when I figured any reply might help us both.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
 
The G.Skill Falcon 128GB drive, or the Samsung pb22-J 128GB drive both offer good performance for the money and are the safest bets with regards to TRIM support (Samsung have said their drives will support it when Win7 comes out). Vertex is also good, but there's no real point in paying the premium over a Falcon.

My choice was three of the cheap £90 64GB samsungs in RAID0, I figured it was the best value for money (similar cost to a single 128GB drive) and 192GB is enough to not have to worry about uninstalling stuff for years.
I'm not particularly concerned about TRIM myself, I figure as long as you have plenty of free space on the drive and arn't running IOmeter and other intensive benches on it all the time it'll be ages before they degrade and even when they do you'll be hard pressed to notice it in normal use.
For me it's a nice-to-have, rather than a must-have feature.
 
What is this TRIM support thing? Don't remembering reading about it until this thread. I think that the 128GB Samsung pb22-J is a good example for the right sort of drive to go for. Not too big and therefore expensive and it has good reported transfer rates as well.
 
From the reviews I've seen, you should probably look at the Samsung PB22-J or the intel SSDs, although the OCZ vertex isn't too bad.
 
Zarf said:
The G.Skill Falcon 128GB drive, or the Samsung pb22-J 128GB drive both offer good performance for the money and are the safest bets with regards to TRIM support (Samsung have said their drives will support it when Win7 comes out). Vertex is also good, but there's no real point in paying the premium over a Falcon.
Click to expand...

Another vote for the Falcon, great drive from the short time ive had with it so far.. plus its cheaper than the Vertex. Even beats the intel SSD in a lot of tests.
 
2 smaller drives. Just run them separately. If you run low on space on one, install your other games/apps to the second. Later when the trim support for raid comes out, then you can raid and you will be glad you went two smaller drives. My 2 pents worth anyway.

As long as you don't raid them at first, you can still trim the 2 separate drives.
 
or could get a large one and when the trim function on raid is available, year or so? he can afford another large one, lol. Its not my money, hehe!!!!
 
There is no getting around the lack of trim command with windows XP, however, the Samsung and intel SSDs still perform reasonably well (And to a certain exetnt one of the OCZs, vertex IIRK) .TRIM would improve them though. Also leaving space on the disk does not help very much, as all SSDs perform wear leveling, to avoid over stressing one block of flash. This means that your swap file alone will quickly mean that all of the blocks have been written to at least once.

Do not use a defragmenter on an SSD under any cirumstances. Firstly it's not needed as all parts of the 'disk' perform equally, but the main reason is that it will significantly reduce the SSDs lifespan.

With the wear leveling, I believe you need an OS that is aware of this, and I'm not sure if XP is, windows 2000 certainly isn't. Vista and win7 do understand wear leveling IIRK.
 
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