Purchasing Solid State Drive

Hi all,

After hearing Certis and Rabbit talk about using a SSD as the boot drive and for apps on the conference call, I'm looking to get into one too. Any ones that are quick recomendations? I'm looking to drop about $200 or $250 on it.

At that price range, OCZ is pretty much the only show in town on price, reliability and performance. Unless something has changed in the past month

Certis wrote:

At that price range, OCZ is pretty much the only show in town on price, reliability and performance. Unless something has changed in the past month :)

You enabler. How hard was it to set up? did you have to get in and change a lot of settings within Windows?

Certis wrote:

At that price range, OCZ is pretty much the only show in town on price, reliability and performance. Unless something has changed in the past month :)

I bought my Intel X-25M for $250 on newegg. Sale's over though. It's back up to $289ish now.

I picked up an OCZ it had pretty good reviews and I have heard that they have good customer service. I also ordered GG case along with my OEM Windows 7 ultimate 64 bit CD.

There was a two page thread here about two months ago on SSDs.

If you're on a budget, a 60GB OCZ Agility will do you nicely at about $180 dollars. If you have more change to spend, buy an Intel X-25M, but make sure you get the G2 model (good luck, btw - Intel has failed spectacularly to meet demand).

Faceless Clock wrote:

If you're on a budget, a 60GB OCZ Agility will do you nicely at about $180 dollars. If you have more change to spend, buy an Intel X-25M, but make sure you get the G2 model (good luck, btw - Intel has failed spectacularly to meet demand).

I got an 80gb G2 just last week. It is out of stock on newegg again though.

I installed a large-flavor (160GB) X25-M Gen 2 recently. Sometimes it makes an enormous difference. Often it doesn't. It really depends on what you're doing. For loading programs and switching around and doing real work, the impact is very large. For running games, especially online ones, it's much less noticeable, because you're often waiting on the computer on the other end of the connection, which probably has a regular hard drive. And even local games may be optimized around slow hard drive transfers, reasoning that it's faster to load compressed textures and then uncompress them in RAM; when the drive suddenly becomes instant, it still has to uncompress the textures, and load times barely change.

If you're using Win7, you can get a lot of the same effect by throwing enough RAM into the machine. I have 12 gigs on my home computer, because it really wasn't that expensive and was nice for virtualization, and I found that my routine daily use of the computer often fit within the RAM cache, meaning that loads were almost instant anyway. Throwing RAM at the problem is probably cheaper, and it doesn't require a wipe and reinstall, or worries about your drive space, but this will only work if you're on at least Vista. (this was why the 'memory usage' numbers were so bloated for Vista.... transitory disk cache that would be discarded the instant you needed the RAM for something else. Now they just lie and call the drive cache RAM 'free memory', because customers are apparently stupid and would prefer to be lied to. )

Now, I'm glad I bought one, but for my particular home workload, it wasn't as transformative as I expected. Yes, almost all drive use is nearly instant, but because I had so much RAM, it had less of an effect than I expected. Had I been on a more normal machine, or still on XP, I think the impact would have been far greater.

Oh, also: if you're using a Mac, the payoff is likely to be very large. Macs benefit tremendously from improvements to seek time, as their disk I/O algorithm seems to be fairly inefficient. SSDs have a seek time that's just shy of zero, and OS X really, really likes that.

I'm sure this has been asked, but when running your OS off of an SSD, is it recommended to place the pagefile on the SSD or a separate (traditional magnetic platter) physical drive (if one is available)?

It seems apparent to me that performance- wise, you'd absolutely want it on the SSD, but I was considering wear on the SSD.

I'm guessing the wear issues have mostly been dealt with on SSDs at this point and leaving the pagefile on the SSD is the way to go?

According to Mark Russinovich: yes. It seems if you're running win7 that it knows all about SSDs and treats them appropriately.

I'm running Vista 64 Home Premium, I wonder if I need to manually fix some things that 7 does automatically.

I ran my first backup with the Windows utility over the last hour or so, and I have to say... that's one area where SSDs seriously rock. Running a backup to a network drive is completely invisible, as far as load goes. You just can't even tell it's happening.

Heavy I/O on my prior terabyte Hitachi would slow the rest of the machine down a very great deal, to the point of being highly annoying, often enough to make me go do something else. On the SSD, the only indication that anything is even happening is the little progress indicator. Everything else just keeps running exactly like normal.

If you're a heavy multitasker, I think these things will pay off BIG, once they get a little larger.

I really want to get one but man are they expensive. $449 for a 120 GB and the 128 GB drives are starting at nearly $300 for the cheap ones.

I posted a bit about this in one of the SSD threads, but I'm not sure which, and this one seems relevant.

As a followup, I've found one of the best uses for an SSD: if you've got a NAS, you can do backups without noticeable slowdown. I'm set now to back up every day, and I can't even tell when it's happening. With four cores, 12 gigs, and SSD, backup has zero visible impact. So I just set it to every day, and that means I'll never lose more than a day of data, and there is absolutely NO usage penalty. I have no idea when the backup is even happening. It's completely invisible.

Good, good stuff.

Are they really the best thing since sliced bread to run your OS on?

I'm thinking of building a new rig with Win7 and I'd never heard of SSDs until you guys started talking about it. Do you see a big difference in performance really?

Well, as I've said elsewhere, I don't see that much difference for gaming use, but I think that's because Win7 caches so aggressively. I have 12 gigs in this machine, so with that much cache, several games can be sitting out there at the same time, and the real power of the SSD isn't as obvious.

But I'll tell ya, Dragon Age is quick quick between levels, at least for awhile, and it's about 15 gigs, so it definitely wouldn't all fit in cache. After a couple of hours, it starts to get really slow, and I have to quit and restart to get speedy level loads again.

If you mostly game with your PC, I wouldn't sweat about the SSD just yet. But if you do real work, it's transformative, particularly if you multitask heavily, PARTICULARLY if what you're doing is disk-intensive. You can be running several programs that are hitting the drive simultaneously, and they'll all be close to normal speed. And being able to run invisible backups to a network drive seriously rocks.

I think it'll make more of a difference if you have a more usual amount of RAM. 12 gigs is pretty extreme, even though it's not very expensive.

ARISE THREAD!

I plan on buying a SSD soon and I would like some advice from my fellow Goodjers. I've been hearing a lot of good things about SSDs but I personally don't know anyone that uses one.

Which manufacturer has the most reliable SSDs?

Is it worth getting anything with more than 128GB capacity? From what I've seen on quick glances on Newegg it is the best price vs capacity ratio there is.

I am pretty much just going to move Steam, Origin, and maybe Maya to my SSD. I've had directory issues in the past where games and programs would refuse to work if they were installed anywhere but the C: drive. Does anyone run their games off of a separate drive or should I just make my SSD my primary drive?

Gimpy_Butzke wrote:

I am pretty much just going to move Steam, Origin, and maybe Maya to my SSD. I've had directory issues in the past where games and programs would refuse to work if they were installed anywhere but the C: drive. Does anyone run their games off of a separate drive or should I just make my SSD my primary drive?

If you are having problems running games off a different drive, then something is wrong.

Steam now has built-in support for installing games to separate drives - it asks you when you go to install a game.

Yeah all my games are on my G: drive. I have an H: drive partially empty for when that runs out.

*Legion* wrote:
Gimpy_Butzke wrote:

I am pretty much just going to move Steam, Origin, and maybe Maya to my SSD. I've had directory issues in the past where games and programs would refuse to work if they were installed anywhere but the C: drive. Does anyone run their games off of a separate drive or should I just make my SSD my primary drive?

If you are having problems running games off a different drive, then something is wrong.

Steam now has built-in support for installing games to separate drives - it asks you when you go to install a game.

Yeah, I should have clarified that when I tried to run programs and other things off of a different drive it was probably 2005. I've built two other computers since then. I've been using one primary drive since I had issues years ago.

*Legion* wrote:
Gimpy_Butzke wrote:

I am pretty much just going to move Steam, Origin, and maybe Maya to my SSD. I've had directory issues in the past where games and programs would refuse to work if they were installed anywhere but the C: drive. Does anyone run their games off of a separate drive or should I just make my SSD my primary drive?

If you are having problems running games off a different drive, then something is wrong.

Steam now has built-in support for installing games to separate drives - it asks you when you go to install a game.

Hmm, it doesn't ask me. Am I missing something?

I don't think it asks each time, but I know there's a place in the settings menu where you can change the default games drive. I've got my OS on an SSD and all my games, documents, and media stored on a 2nd drive. Works great. SSDs are nice.

Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Hmm, it doesn't ask me. Am I missing something?

Maybe it only prompts if Steam isn't installed on the C drive? I'll have to try an install and make sure it always triggers for me. I have steam in D:\Games\Steam and haven't had any problems so far.

Dr.Ghastly wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

Steam now has built-in support for installing games to separate drives - it asks you when you go to install a game.

Hmm, it doesn't ask me. Am I missing something?

Pretty sure this is only in the current steam beta. Go into preferences and opt-in. You'll get big picture mode too!

psoplayer wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Hmm, it doesn't ask me. Am I missing something?

Pretty sure this is only in the current steam beta. Go into preferences and opt-in. You'll get big picture mode too!

Yep, probably this.

There will be a drop-down in the install popup window, right before the very last step, where you can change the install destination.

A word of advice on adding SSDs to a middle-aged computer based on my recent experience: if your motherboard is old enough (2009-ish) to have only a couple of SATA3 (6gb/s) plugs driven by a third-party chipset, you might be better off just using the core SATA2 plugs instead. After about a month of occasional 10 second long hard IO blocking freezes and failed Ubuntu installs I finally tried using the other SATA plugs and it fixed my issue. After further investigation it turns out there's a history of problems with my particular Marvell chipset.

psoplayer wrote:

A word of advice on adding SSDs to a middle-aged computer based on my recent experience: if your motherboard is old enough (2009-ish) to have only a couple of SATA3 (6gb/s) plugs driven by a third-party chipset, you might be better off just using the core SATA2 plugs instead. After about a month of occasional 10 second long hard IO blocking freezes and failed Ubuntu installs I finally tried using the other SATA plugs and it fixed my issue. After further investigation it turns out there's a history of problems with my particular Marvell chipset.

That's something I'm bearing in mind for when I get an SSD, my chipset is from before SSDs were anticipated, so if I want to use one well it'll be part of a mobo upgrade.

*Legion* wrote:
psoplayer wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Hmm, it doesn't ask me. Am I missing something?

Pretty sure this is only in the current steam beta. Go into preferences and opt-in. You'll get big picture mode too!

Yep, probably this.

There will be a drop-down in the install popup window, right before the very last step, where you can change the install destination.

Argh, don't want to hijack the thread, but there is definitely an option now to put libraries in a different drive. Because my SSD didn't have room i installed steam client and all games on my non-SSD a few months back. Is there an easy way to re-install the steam client on the SSD while keeping my library where it is now?

Carlbear95 wrote:

Because my SSD didn't have room i installed steam client and all games on my non-SSD a few months back. Is there an easy way to re-install the steam client on the SSD while keeping my library where it is now?

Moving the steam client to the SSD while leaving the games behind doesn't really do much for you, but it's not difficult to do. Obviously, make sure Steam isn't running first, then:

  1. Create a new folder somewhere for your new steam. Maybe, C:\Steam assuming C is the SSD and D is your big one.
  2. Open your existing steam folder, select the contents except the steamapps subfolder and copy them over to C:\Steam
  3. The real secret sauce: open a command window as administrator and run the following: mklink /D "C:\Steam\steamapps" "D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps" (adjust paths as necessary)
  4. Update your shortcuts to point to the new steam location

Marvell chipset sucks, always plug your SSD into the built in chipset ports even if they are slower.