SSD questions!

[UFN]

So as everyone knows the Thailand floods have made buying Hard Drives something of a financial nightmare, with prices sky rocketing and supplies dwindling like crazy. I managed to purchase one (wanted two but they're limiting how much a single person can buy) Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 6GB/s 64MB Drive from Amazon but I did plan on RAID 0ing two drives.

BUT I can't do that anymore without essentially paying for 3 drives and getting 2 or waiting until next summer. So, I'm going to skip that option entirely.

instead I've decided to look into buying a small SSD for boot and some programs.

But I know nothing about SSD's, at all, didn't plan on getting one at all for my build, but suddenly their prices aren't so bad.

Can I use an SSD as a boot drive + a program or two without a z68 chipset mobo?

Are there any brands or versions I should steer clear of? I read in another thread that sandforce isn't so good...

would 60gb be okay for what I want to do?

Thanks in Advance

 

[yassarikhan786]

60GB would be enough for smaller applications, yes. And yes you can have it as a boot drive.

 

[Dolph123]

SSDs work on pretty much any mobo to my knowledge. I bought a Crucial M4 60gb for my dad's AMD llano a8 build. It has enough space for W7 and most of the programs you will use. But not games.

Sandforce generally has some problems, but i haven't read into it for some time now so i dunno if they have fixed the problems. With the latest update the M4 has reads of up to 500mb/s, but only a litle over 100 write. But with that said it's very reliable and doesn't have all those problems.

I will be away for some time in case you've got any questions

 

[UFN]

Thanks for the quick replies!

I've started looking at the cheaper 120gb SSD's as I would like to fit a game or two on there and the best i've found so far is the OCZ 120GB Agility 3 which falls just slightly above the £1/1gb ratio

http://www.ebuyer.com/268244-ocz-120gb-agility-3-ssd-agt3-25sat3-120g-agt3-25sat3-120g

Any good?

It seems there isn't a 120gb SSD drive on the market right now that isn't experiencing some tidal wave of BIOS issues...I'm hoping that gets sorted soon

 

[fcb]

You can get a Kingston V100 128GB even though it's a SATA 2 based SSD and it's still very good. It's also well price. I'd also recommend the Mushkin Chronos 60 or 120GB SSDs they offer now. Mushkin has always had great support for their products.

 

[UFN]

You can get a Kingston V100 128GB even though it's a SATA 2 based SSD and it's still very good. It's also well price. I'd also recommend the Mushkin Chronos 60 or 120GB SSDs they offer now. Mushkin has always had great support for their products.

Mushkin 120gb SSD's on Aria are £180-£200(!), so though they may be nice, that is WAY too expensive IMO.

Kingston are a touch cheaper, £10 maybe, but still out of my range, £120~ Is about as high as I can go. Is there a particular reason I shouldn't go with OCZ?

 

[fcb]

I've had better experiences with Kingston and Mushkin support in the past and still do. OCZ SSDs, they're very good, but the customer support/RMA that I've personally experienced has not been great.

Customers only ever came in with a faulty Kingston drive once in a blue moon, so most of the time I'd suggest Kingston to a variety of people. They're also more affordable. Do you feel the max speeds? Not really, but even the SATA 2 based SSDs are more than enough for what I would require. For games, I honestly think a WD 1TB Black drive is more than enough for performance and constant use of storage. I'd suggest a 64 or 128GB Kingston V100. They've been very very reliable so far.

Mushkin drives are quite user friendly. Their customer support has always been excellent and firmware updates are a breeze.

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

Patriot Wildfire is a beast

 

[UFN]

For games, I honestly think a WD 1TB Black drive is more than enough for performance and constant use of storage.

Oh I agree, My original plan was to get two 500gb Caviar blacks, but now they're either more than double what their cost was two weeks ago, not available for the next indefinite amount of time (Scan, for example, have been waiting almost a month for more WD drives to come in) or both. I only grabbed the 750gb HDD because it was £55 and is at least expected to get to me pre-2012.

But since my RAID 0 plans have gone out the window, might as well look at SSD's

I will look into the Kingston's, hopefully I can find something in my budget. And if anyone from Mushkin is reading, feel free to drop your prices on SSD's £40 and I'll gladly give you my money

I shall also look at those wildfires

EDIT : Wildfires are also £200+

I appreciate suggestions but they're not use to me if they're way out of my wallets league!

 

[fcb]

Oh I agree, My original plan was to get two 500gb Caviar blacks, but now they're either more than double what their cost was two weeks ago, not available for the next indefinite amount of time (Scan, for example, have been waiting almost a month for more WD drives to come in) or both. I only grabbed the 750gb HDD because it was £55 and is at least expected to get to me pre-2012.

But since my RAID 0 plans have gone out the window, might as well look at SSD's

I will look into the Kingston's, hopefully I can find something in my budget. And if anyone from Mushkin is reading, feel free to drop your prices on SSD's £40 and I'll gladly give you my money

I shall also look at those wildfires

EDIT : Wildfires are also £200+

I appreciate suggestions but they're not use to me if they're way out of my wallets league!

Yup, I understand completely. If you're not in a hurry to buy anything right now, I'd suggest to sit tight for awhile. At least until early to mid December, when things are more settled down and people are in their X'mas shopping mentality. Prices are fluctuating a lot, and believe me, it's rather tiring to look at pricing almost every day when customers are calling in with their inquiries.

Aria has a couple SSDs that may meet your budget requirements:

OCZ Solid 3 120GB

Corsair Force Series 3 V2 120GB

Kingston 128GB SSDNow V100

Sorry, my links aren't working so head over and take a look.

 

[UFN]

Aria has a couple SSDs that may meet your budget requirements:

OCZ Solid 3 120GB

Corsair Force Series 3 V2 120GB

Kingston 128GB SSDNow V100

Sorry, my links aren't working so head over and take a look.

No worries, Thank you very much for looking at all

its more than I could politely ask!

Which brand/controller/series would you say is the most reliable? I was over at TomsHardware and they had an article, an incredibly informative one, that showed that the slowest SSD was ~85% faster than the fastest non-hybrid Mechanical HDD but that the fastest SSD's were ~90% faster - the spectrum for performance being incredibly tight despite the HUGE differences in prices.

So, with that in mind, performance is almost not of consequence as I'm pretty much guaranteed to end up with something that will blow my mind relative to Mechanical HDD's. What really matters, to me anyway, is reliability.

Also, is there any particular difference between getting a 128gb SSD or 2 64gb SSD's? I'm wondering because it might be easier for me (less maintenance, more data security) to get a dedicated boot drive, a dedicated "games" drive (i usually only have 2-3 games installed at any one time) and then having my 750gb storage drive.

 

[fcb]

No worries, Thank you very much for looking at all

its more than I could politely ask!

Which brand/controller/series would you say is the most reliable? I was over at TomsHardware and they had an article, an incredibly informative one, that showed that the slowest SSD was ~85% faster than the fastest non-hybrid Mechanical HDD but that the fastest SSD's were ~90% faster - the spectrum for performance being incredibly tight despite the HUGE differences in prices.

So, with that in mind, performance is almost not of consequence as I'm pretty much guaranteed to end up with something that will blow my mind relative to Mechanical HDD's. What really matters, to me anyway, is reliability.

Also, is there any particular difference between getting a 128gb SSD or 2 64gb SSD's? I'm wondering because it might be easier for me (less maintenance, more data security) to get a dedicated boot drive, a dedicated "games" drive (i usually only have 2-3 games installed at any one time) and then having my 750gb storage drive.

In reality, I think if you were to get 2 separate SSDs, it shouldn't make a difference. The new Sandforce controller and respective firmware have been doing well to fix problems. It also has pretty good house cleaning functions in my experience, so you don't have anything to worry about in the future if you wanted to RAID them.

 

[Lollipop]

Don't bother getting 2 SSD's IMO unless you want to make life harder for yourself

 

[UFN]

Don't bother getting 2 SSD's IMO unless you want to make life harder for yourself

Why would it make life harder?

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

Why would it make life harder?

A ) SSDs are deliberately priced so it works out better to buy one next model up double capacity drive than two model down drives to equate to the same capacity

B ) Chatter

C ) Double risk of failure

D ) Garbage management may not be that great even on the better drives. Two drives will only double the build up rate.

 

[S_I_N]

A ) SSDs are deliberately priced so it works out better to buy one next model up double capacity drive than two model down drives to equate to the same capacity

B ) Chatter

C ) Double risk of failure

D ) Garbage management may not be that great even on the better drives. Two drives will only double the build up rate.

Chatter??? whats that SSD's have no moving parts

GC works very well AFAIK I havent had any issues with mine in raid since I set it up.

benifits are almost double speed of single ssd but in reality can one really see it ??? I know it can be benched but see it. I'm referring to the drives that are already pushing the 550 read write arena. The ones I have were first gen sata 6gb so I jumped a tad to soon but I got them at a great price so it wasnt so bad.

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

Chatter??? whats that SSD's have no moving parts

GC works very well AFAIK I havent had any issues with mine in raid since I set it up.

benifits are almost double speed of single ssd but in reality can one really see it ??? I know it can be benched but see it. I'm referring to the drives that are already pushing the 550 read write arena. The ones I have were first gen sata 6gb so I jumped a tad to soon but I got them at a great price so it wasnt so bad.

Chatter has nothing to do with moving parts. The more parts you add to your PC the more communication has to take place. The southbridge or equivilant chipset has to do twice the communicating to achieve the same the same throughput as one channel of communication with a single drive, therefore performance will take a slight hit. It's why it's better to buy a 580 SOC than stick four 550Ti/ 540s in SLI - chatter.

Of course you don't see the performance of the drives. SSDs companies are all about giving you the best available while your Intel and AMD CPUs and GPUs (& Nvidia) are just plod-along releases that were created at least a decade ago and bottleneck it by preventing the existance of any application that would be 'intense' enough by today's standards to actually use such nippy drives