Are solid state drives a good enhancement?

[Budeez]

Right now on newegg you can get a 32 gig SSD for 80 bucks. And it even has a $20 mail in rebate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820411003

In a new computer build, If I used this for windows, do you think it would make the system faster? I want to stick with xp for awhile as my work software isn't 64bit compatible. I know I'm limited to an effective 3 gigs of ram, but a page file (is that the right term for virtual ram?) on a SSD would be good or bad? I know these things have a rep for fast read times and slow write times. This particular model has sequential read write times of 130MB/Sec and 90MB/Sec. But also has random read and write times of 80MB/sec and 25MB/Sec. Do you need to have random read write for the page file?

If anyone has one of these things, can you let me know how it affects your experience.

 

[Rick James]

I'm running a Patriot 32GB SSD and it cut windows load times in half and programs run a lot faster.

OCZ has a 64 gig model on newegg for 119 with a promo code.

 

[taltamir]

the ONLY SSD worth buying right now is the intel X25-M, some argue that the OCZ titan is also good, despite its stuttering. The vertex and the summit are supposed to arrive soon and also be good, but are not out yet.
Every other SSD falls short of a velociraptor. Most will give a horrible experience to the average user, as they cannot handle small writes causing the OS to "stutter"

 

[MikhailT]

Not true, Corsair S128 is also very good, it is based on the previous Samsung MLC controller with 32mb of cache. 110/80MB read/write speed with 128GB of storage. Intel x25-m is very fast in read with 250/80MB with 80GB of storage or 160GB for twice the price.

 

[taltamir]

the reported speeds are not really the issue, the problem is what happens when it tries to handle small writes. the end result is stuttering.
also, all of those figures go WAY down once steady state has been achieved. the velociraptor on the other hand, does not have its speed drop in such a manner. (and the intel is still faster than the veloci even with the speed drop)

 

[MikhailT]

Originally posted by: taltamir
the reported speeds are not really the issue, the problem is what happens when it tries to handle small writes. the end result is stuttering.
also, all of those figures go WAY down once steady state has been achieved. the velociraptor on the other hand, does not have its speed drop in such a manner. (and the intel is still faster than the veloci even with the speed drop)

Nearly all jMircon based drives has that stuttering issue, even the Titan/Apex based series with RAIDed jMicron controllers.

Intel and Samsung doesn't have the stuttering issue.

As for Intel being faster than velco, that is only true when considering the latency and the typical usage. The write speed according to some of the published information at pcper, drops down to below 50MBps over time. Which is not faster than velco at all, especially if people are writing a lot of data. (typical bittorrent/usenet users)

 

[taltamir]

yes, good point, its way faster on reads, but a little slower on writes. and has better access time.

 

[Budeez]

So this SSD would be slower than another HD is what you guys are saying?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: Budeez
So this SSD would be slower than another HD is what you guys are saying?

Not just that. On the one hand, I've seen reviews of the 32GB Patriots suggesting that "they were made for RAID0." On the other hand, if you check threads posted here, there is an issue about expected longevity under extensive writes -- when you'd think that the case would be the opposite. You'd even think that the risk of failure with RAID0 would be much lower, but I'm not so sure now.

I was thinking about getting a couple of these for a file-server re-build in-progress. Now, I have second thoughts about it.

 

[taltamir]

actually they don't FAIL (dataloss), they become "read only" media when they run out of writes.

but yes that patriot would be inferior to regular drive.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: taltamir
actually they don't FAIL (dataloss), they become "read only" media when they run out of writes.

but yes that patriot would be inferior to regular drive.

Thanks for the correction or refinement. I only started looking at the SSDs seriously over the last week or so, and not with sustained or well-focused scrutiny.

It is hard to keep up with all this stuff and maintain a well-rounded life . . . . or just a good Victory garden . . .

 

[coolVariable]

With SSDs, you get what you pay for.
As others stated, the only SSDs actually faster than HDDs in normal usage (i.e. outside of synthetic sequential benchmarks) are the intel, samsung (corsair) and SLC SSDs.
All of those usually start at $300+.

All SSDs with JMicron controllers (even those with two such controllers as the g.skill titan) are not worth it.