Solid State Drives

What is your take on them?
I’m thinking about picking one up to load windows and all other programs on to, then using my hdd just for storage. My mobo will do sataII. From reading the reviews of a lot of them, it looks like the best bang for the buck size right now is the 128gb range. That being said, i’ve been looking on newegg and comparing read/write speeds and reviews…

Anyone here use them?

Here’s a few i’ve been looking at:

I have a 128GB Flash drive in my macbook air and its awesome. Such a huge difference between normal hard drives. Boot my whole laptop in 10 seconds and everything runs just a lot faster.

I’m going hybrid for my next drive…

Making the assumption you are running Windows 7, none of those are ones I would recommend. You really want either the Crucial C400 RealSSD line (SATAIII yes but just fine at SATAII speeds) or ones with a Sandforce 1400 controller.

I have the Corsair Force which is Sandforce based.

I’d highly recommend and suggest one these types of drives with windows 7 that use trim support the best.

I’d go with either Intel, Corsair or maybe even a Kingston. Look at benchmarks, read reviews, choose wisely.

I’d stear clear of Kingston, the techreport reviews of them was not very good. Intel drives are good but not spectacular, they will not really wow you in anything.

I’d need to make a correction for Windows 7 users you want Sandforce based (Corsair Force) or Crucial C300 not C400, the C400 will be out soon and they are going to push crucial ahead of the Sandforce ones. Right now the C300 and Corsair Force are about on par with each other.

Additionally OCZ Vertex drives are pretty good, but no where near as good as the above two I mentioned.

I should forewarn if any mac users are reading this DO NOT get C300 or Corsair Force, very poor performance in mac’s. Mac users should stick to OCZ Vertex or Other World Computing Mercury line.

I run one in my home desktop and one in my laptop love them…

Home desktop boots in 6-7sec with win 7

Laptop runs Ubuntu and flys

Don’t try running them with XP

OCZ is what I meant…DOH! Not kingston. I have a Corsair on my wishlist ATM…no funds to buy it though.

I put one in the HTPC I built because I knew I was going to need every performance edge I could get running that little dual core atom. It’s really quick loading all the movie artwork in XBMC.

The A-Data you have in that one is on the lower end scale of performance too but putting a expensive higher tier SSD in a HTPC Atom based box doesn’t make sense. That bundle was perfect the way you got it.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I’ve been thinking about getting my htpc back up and running.

Interesting, I’m new to ssd drives and compatibility/performance matching. My mobo is sata II not III. MSI 975x to be specific. What would be the best drive for me to go with? I would assume with only having sata II it may not even matter?

LZ…why no XP? I’m in need of being schooled here I can tell. :slight_smile:

i would like one but i cant bring myself to pay $200+ for only 128gb when that would get me a 3tb HDD

XP doesn’t optimize for SSD

Even manually tuning a bunch of shit its still a lot slower then windows 7

I tried it was not impressed and quickly moved to windows 7

A lot of computer will not recognize 3TB drives…I’d stick with 2 for now.

Not to mention XP is starting to grow out of support with M$. Might as well run 7, it’s new, fast, and great GUI

I’m running 7 right now, and almost all my windows experience scores are near maxed…except for my HDD which is at 5.9. Thanks for this info…good stuff

thinking of building a new box soon… would you nerds go with 2x128gb raid0 or 1x256gb?

i’ve read some places that it would be overkill… what your guys take?

If you want to drop the loot then do a RAID config. I think I’m just going to stick with a 128 GB for now.

Depends on what you’re doing…

My single drive is plenty fast running Win7 and a linux Vm at the same time.

Firefox/office open instantly

Wait until the Crucial RealSSD C400 SSDs are released this quarter.