SSDs?

Forum Storage : General Discussion SSDs?

RunCore

Is it just me or they are unaffordable?

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Well you have them under $100, the 40GB ones.

The idea of SSDs is, that you use them as the system disk, not to store large files like movies and personal documents. Those large files or mass-storage data is best stored on a HDD instead.

So the SSD only needs to contain:
- Operating System (Windows7=15GB excluding pagefile/hibernation)
- Installed Applications (Firefox, Picasa, OpenOffice, whatever)
- Installed Games

The first two are probably easy, most application's take much space and total would be about 20GB. But Games can be very large and may not fit your SSD.

The best 40GB drive you can buy is the Intel X25-V 40GB. I would suggest leaving some space unused, by making a partition slightly smaller than the full capacity of the drive. For example, your 40GB drive (37.2GiB) should have a partition that's two or three GB smaller. This will enable the SSD to perform well over its lifetime.

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Reply to sub mesa

I see, thats interesting, I look it up.

Reply to Padlius

sub mesa wrote :

Recently I have been heavily looking into upgrading my 4 year old RaptorX to an SSD alternative. So far all I've read has been incredibly positive feedback about the performance of these drives and that the cost is so high. My question is if I have a 1TB HDD already storing all my data and programs would a Velociraptor or a decent SSD be the better purchase?

Also you mention that the Intel 40gb SSD is the best one out there currently. Why is that? The read and write speeds are not very impressive for example what are the differences between these two SSD's? According to the specs it appears the OCZ drive is significantly better than the Intel alternative and cheaper. Am I missing something?

-OCZ Vertex 30GB
-Intel X25 40B

Reply to casach06

Read and Write can happen in two ways:
- sequential (one big file from start to finish)
- random (small files, lots of I/O activity)

Sequential I/O is easy and is always fast. Random I/O is a lot harder, especially for HDDs. The HDDs would have to seek and not even get 1MB/s; but like 0.05MB/s in the worst case (synthetic) benchmarks.

So sequentially, SSDs are only 1 to 2 times faster, but random I/O SSDs are 100 to even a 1000 times faster than HDDs. Translating this to actual performance, you will see things such as booting, application launch and basically anything you click happen instantly.

If you already have a big 1TB drive, you can add to that a 40GB or 80GB Intel SSD and you would have a very nice setup. Just do not use Windows XP with SSDs.

About this sequential versus random write thing, check these benchmarks:

With sequential write, the Intel drive is pretty slow. Sequential write is very uncommon on the system drive, though. So its score is basically meaningless. However, if we look at random write IOps:

Here the roles are reversed; and this benchmark IS relevant to the function of the system disk.

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