cheap 2.5" SSD in a gaming tower?

[tjoepie]

Hello all,

I need some advice for my new rig, first I tought about getting a raptor for the os and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB, SATA-300, 32MB, 7200RPM for the rest. This will mostly be games and things like photo's, films etc

But now I found a MTRON SSD MOBI 3000 Series 2,5" 16GB, SATA, 0,1ms for 295euro (=about 400$).

I was wondering if 16 GB would be enough for Vista 64, swapfiles and maybe some other stuff like a firewall and anti-virus to speed up the system? Or would I need a 32GB version for this?

And are there any drawbacks in installing a 2,5" in stead of a 3,5" in my case.

The reason I was debating this small 16GB 2,5" was because its the cheapest SSD I found.

And last but not least, is an SSD worth it? Or better get 8GB RAM on Vista64 and use that extra RAM for swap?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated...

 

[edgley]

I was debating the same thing, but with the 32GB version.
The problem is that whilst your OS would be quicker your games would still take as long to load.

It might be better at looking at a RAID0 setup as all of the stuff would benefit from the performance.

 

[tjoepie]

I think I'll just get a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and wait for SSD's to drop in price.

But I had another idea :

I read that the 32mb cache on a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 was a nice avantage that reduced access to the HD because more is kept in memory.
Would happens if you raid 0 two of these, will you get advantage of having 64mb cache?

 

[jay2tall]

I think I'll just get a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and wait for SSD's to drop in price.

But I had another idea :

I read that the 32mb cache on a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 was a nice avantage that reduced access to the HD because more is kept in memory.
Would happens if you raid 0 two of these, will you get advantage of having 64mb cache?

stick with one 7200.11, I've heard people who have configured these in RAID 0 and the benefits are nominal if any. I keep RAIDs out of my desktop and in a Server environment only. They are more advantagous for multiple user environments and not a single user PC. Get a single fast drive you will be happiest.

 

[tjoepie]

ok, ... tnx jay2tall

 

[c0llin]

Another option if you're looking for obscene speed (and have an Intel Southbridge) would be to raid matrix two drives. This allows you to make a first partition on the fastest part of the Discs in Raid 0 for your OS, and then a 2nd partition for data security in Raid 1 on the same physical drives. I'm strongly considering this for my upcoming build. Here's a mondo-thread explaining what I'm talking about:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=467848

 

[grieve]

Funny I was just looking into this the other day myself… I found that the 36GB’s are like 600 bucks and that they really only offer about a 4 second faster boot then raptors.

Ultimately even more then money what steers me away is the small amount of space, 16GB simply is not enough room for Vista… XP perhaps but Vista’s a pig.

I for one am going to wait for these to come down, if I can snag a 74gig one for $400 I will. This way at least you can slap all OS related software on there and your favorite game.

 

[grieve]

Interestingly enough....EBAY 32 GIG $206 Also i saw some laptops with these in them for $400... scrap the notebook and keep the drive.

http://cgi.ebay.com/TRANSCEND-2-5-IDE-32GB-SSD-SOLID-STATE-DRIVE-HARD-DISK_W0QQitemZ380000392484QQihZ025QQcategoryZ99247QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

***edit***
just noticed Its IDE, thats the catch...

 

[Shadow703793]

^Not too bad of a problem. You could always get a converter(?)

 

[grieve]

I believe the SATA ones are like up to 8 times faster then the IDE...A converter wont help, IDE is a bottleneck on these.

 

[tjoepie]

I'm getting a 7200.11 for my new rig for now.
I'll wait for the new raptors in a few months as an upgrade.
Tom mentioned them in a Cbit report.
It will probably be quite some work to put the os on onother HD.
Anyanyone have this experience, will I have to reformat the 7200.11?
Anything else?

 

[zyberwoof]

If you are adventurous you can buy 4 of each of these:
8GB 133x CF Card $37 each

And then get 4 CF to IDE (PATA) Adapter ($11 each) or one of these CF PCI RAID Card ($50)

Each of those cards runs at ~20MB/s. So striping them would give you about 32GB of total storage with ~80MB/s transfer rate. Total this would cost ~$200. Since you will be using multipe IDE ports I assume that the interface won't be a bottleneck at all.

If you have a higher budget you can get 4 of these instead: 16GB 266x CF Card $73 each. This will give you 64GB with ~160MB/s transfer rates for less than $350.


If you are feel VERY adventurous you could pick up the CF to IDE adapter from dealextreme.com for $2.38 including shipping. They are based somewhere across the Pacific so shipping usually takes a little while, but my orders have always come through.

 

[tjoepie]

Not a bad idea , but I don't think I'm enough of an Indiana Jones for that adventure.

It would be a good experiment for someone that can burn the cash, but I would not risk it myself because I don't think that would speed up my system. It just sounds to complicated with too many possible problems.