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Just took "the plunge:" bought the X-25M 160GB G2 from Buy.com

C

CurseTheSky

Diamond Member
I've been looking to replace my aging (and nearly full) 150GB Raptor X for a while, and now that the Intel G2 SSDs are out, it seems like a good time to go for it. I have a number of different applications and games I want to keep installed, so 160GB seemed to make the most sense.

Anyway, the Intel G2s are out of stock nearly everywhere, and almost $100 over MSRP at places where they're not. I've been following Newegg, Mwave, TankGuys, ZipZoomFly, Amazon, and Buy.com twice a day (or more) looking for one to come back in stock for a reasonable price.

About an hour ago, I saw this: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=211497429. It's about $30 over MSRP, but it does have free shipping (so I figure I'm overpaying by roughly $25). The model number is SSDSA2MH160G2R5, so it should be the X-25M, 160GB, generation 2, in retail packaging. After having such a hard time even locating one of the X-25M 160GBs in stock, and an even harder time finding one for less than $500-520 or so, I'm having a hard time believing it's actually the right product. Does anything seem fishy?

Anyway, if anyone else is sick of waiting, this might be a decent opportunity. Hopefully they'll be back down to $430 or so in the coming weeks anyway.
 
I gotta say that I am surprised at how much 80GB can hold. I have Win7, Photoshop, Vegas, Warcraft 3, After Effects, Flash, Premiere Pro, Dreamweaver, Indesign, Avira, and a bunch of other smaller apps on here and I'm only using 23GB.
 
As SSD technology improves (and the drives become cheaper), I'll look into upgrading to a larger / faster one in the future. Probably around the time when 300-500 GB drives drop into the sub $200 range. When that happens, I'll stick this 160 GB drive into my laptop; since it'll be a single drive, I'll need all the space I can get. 🙂

Right now I have Vista Ultimate x64, IE8, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Office 2007, Photoshop CS2, several small utilities (CD burning programs, FTP clients, SSH clients, etc.), Avira, Warcraft III + expansion, World of Warcraft, CoD4, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect, CS:S, Titan Quest + Expansion, Portal, TF2, and The Witcher all installed, and I'm using 116 GB of 139 GB total on my Raptor. I have most of my documents and media on a separate storage drive, but downloads and whatnot temporarily stay on the system drive as well.
 
Yeah, it sucks. I'm considering just using a spare WD 640GB for games / backup, but I'm not sure how it would affect performance. I need to do a LOT of research on the subject to determine my optimal configuration.

I'm also sure there are features enabled on my OS drive that are just taking up space. I moved Windows recovery / page file over to my storage drive already, but I should do some more research to figure out why my drive is so full. The games are definitely the biggest factor, though.
 
Has anyone considered using a SSD and a 2.5" laptop drive all in the space of a single 3.5" drive? I was thinking of this since a 500gb laptop drive would be fine for music, HD movies, etc. But I don't know how much performance will be affected if I install my entire Games library on the 2.5" (TF2, BF2, etc... all the big gigabyte and bigger games).
 
buy uses ingram. there's hundred ETA'd for today for arrival. how much do they charge for these?

$475-499 seems fair for a small reseller (free shipping) figure 8-10% markup (over cost) for a hot product
 
Originally posted by: ilkhan
Without games or HD media content you can store quite a bit on 80GB.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I could care less how long it takes Windows to boot since I only boot up Windows once a day. However, I do care how long it takes games to load since every few minutes a level loads.

Ideally I would run several of these 160GB Intel SSDs in RAID0. Ideally I would also win the lottery right before buying several of these things. :brokenheart:

If I were to end up with an SSD in the near future (not likely but not out of the question either) I would probably run it alongside my VelociRaptor and have the most used apps/games on the SSD with lesser used stuff on the VelociRaptor.

And no, 160GB is not enough. Just my WoW and Steam folders take up around 50GB, let alone all my other games.
 
Lo and behold, I got the "Sorry... we have an inventory problem!" email from Buy.com today. I'm not pleased, but I can't say that I didn't see it coming.

Now I have to decide if I want to cancel the order and try somewhere else, or tough it out. Hopefully they have some kind of ETA (and actually stick with it).

It took two business days for them to admit they didn't have one in stock for me, which is pretty poor in my opinion. This will probably be the last time I do business with them.
 
Technically modern games shouldn't benefit too hugely from SSDs. Reads are typically not concurrent (games don't typically use async IO) and textures are, well, large (e.g. 2048x2048 - a couple MB). Assuming no additional workload on the drive, I would expect a RAID 0 array of conventional hard drives (to get that read speed) to get similar performance. The bottleneck is typically seq read speeds, not random speeds. In contrast, apps that load plugins, modify reg settings, etc (most of Adobe, office productivity software) benefits hugely.

Compare, for instance:

WoW load times (sorry, WoW is not a modern game)
- high randomness (many areas)
- vast number of different objects
- low res textures and models
- http://images.anandtech.com/gr...031809001858/18649.png
Poly counts are ~1000 per model (blizzard says design for under <2000), texture sizes around 512
VRaptor is 135% slower than X-25M

Far Cry 2 load times (a modern game)
- low randomness (a largely linear game)
- comparatively small number of different objects
- very high res textures/models
- http://images.anandtech.com/gr...031809001858/18650.png
Poly count up to 100k per object, texture sizes >=4096
VRaptor is 11.9% slower than X-25M

It really depends on the game though. For example, I'd expect something like Fallout (nonlinear) to benefit way more than Far Cry 2, but not as much as WoW. Any time the game can pre-emptively load data and have a low miss rate, you won't see too much benefit from an SSD. Based on experience, generally MMORPGs top the list, followed by RPGs, FPSs, and finally RTSs at the very end (little to no benefit since EVERYTHING is preloaded into memory basically, and the content to load is essentially static).

An excellent way to measure this is with the Windows 7 Resource Monitor. If during the load, average queue lengths hover around 1, that typically means workloads are seq bound. If it becomes very high (>5), you should investigate if the workload is random concurrent IO bound.

However, having an operating system on the same drive does impact performance by a lot (due to highly random read/writes due to user activities).
 
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