No SSD enthusiasm at AT?

[coolVariable]

Why aren't there more SSD postings?
I am kind of disappointed that I have to watch for SSD info on notebookforums instead of AT.

Lots of enthusiasm for SSDs there ...

 

[AmberClad]

Maybe laptop users are more accustomed to low capacity drives and paying hefty premiums for components. I'll be enthused in a few years, when these are less ridiculously priced.

 

[AshPhoenix]

Yeah, I think they will start getting more popular when faster and cheaper models become available.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: coolVariable
Why aren't there more SSD postings?
I am kind of disappointed that I have to watch for SSD info on notebookforums instead of AT.

Generally, that's how enthusiasm works. Users that would most benefit tend to have the most interest.

 

[Modelworks]

They really don't interest me right now.
They are too small and cost too much and are no more reliable than current hard disk.

 

[Toadster]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
They really don't interest me right now.
They are too small and cost too much and are no more reliable than current hard disk.

once you try one, you'll never want to go back to a spindle again... trust me, these things ROCK!

 

[Denithor]

Poorly designed MLC controller

That's one of the main reasons there's little enthusiasm right now for SSD.

The other big one has been mentioned: price. A standard HDD is ~$0.12/GB and these things cost $3-4/GB for the cheapest ones (and that's after the price cuts that resulted from the articles about poorly designed controllers). 30 times higher price for somewhat better performance in selected applications (and worse in others)? I think I'll just wait another year or so.

EDIT: Wow, I was asleep last night when posting this. Price/GB edited.

 

[faxon]

yea, right now you can get a 150gb VRaptor for about $170, which offers almost as good performance. if you want to spend more for that little bit of extra performance, a SAS controller and 74GB SAS drive can be had for $180 for controller, and the same for a drive, which after you RAID a few drives is still as fast if not FASTER than a SSD for sustained data transfer, and has about half the latency of a VRaptor to boot, for about the same price as an SLC/intel MLC SSD. so you see, it just doesnt make economic sense right now to buy a solid state drive for anything besides a laptop, unless you have unlimited monies to spend

 

[BoboKatt]

Well lets see: I bought the 64 GB OCZ Core2 a few weeks ago. I installed my Vista 64 on it. I have 2 other drives (regular WD 640) as well where I have all my documents, movies, pics, work files, music etc. BTW it took for ever to install Vista on that ? way way longer than my regular WD 640.

The SSD runs very well -- but the one I have is no Intel SSD. Do more than ONE thing such as lets say, install an updated driver... and maybe downloading something or have a song playing or anything really that involves writing to the drive... and it's God awful slow ? pretty much everything freezes for a bit.

I am sure the Intel SSD is way better. I got it since the price of the OCZ was so low AND there was a $70 rebate. At that point it became more of something new to play with and try and it?s all on me. Personally that OCZ is not ready for prime time. I had read various reviews... Jmicrion controller etc... and I knew it was not the best but again for the price why not.

The boot is zippy for sure and honestly for 75% of what I do, it does its job well -- just I am not overly excited about it. In fact I have totally forgot I have it running in there and it's such new tech. It works flawlessly - - don't get me wrong ? no errors? no crashes ? you can?t put a value on it being dead silent, very little power use? no HEAT, don?t need to defrag. For that it?s awesome.

I am not giving up on it. One thing I have not tried is running a game off it. All my games are installed on the actual other HD's... thus really only the OS is on the SSD and stuff like Office, Winrar, Firefox etc. Swap file is also on the WD 640 and all my 'work" dump folders are on the WD 640... so when I run my video encoding software, the app resides on the SSD but the video file I am working on is on one HD and the target result of the encoding goes to yet another hardrive. This works well.

 

[taltamir]

The ONLY SSD on the market right now to offer higher performance then a velociraptor is the intel SSD... for about 600-700$ (depending on the store, supply is limited).
As such the only ones to get excited over the mediocre SSDs are the laptop users (since a valociraptor does not fit into an SSD).

When you can have an intel SSD for 200-300$, desktop users will get excited about them.

 

[ochadd]

Originally posted by: coolVariable
Why aren't there more SSD postings?
I am kind of disappointed that I have to watch for SSD info on notebookforums instead of AT.

Lots of enthusiasm for SSDs there ...

I have been thinking exactly the same thing. Cost, write performance, and availability seem to be holding back the excitement. When $500-700 graphics cards come out the internet seems to be exploding with reviews and forums are hot with what people's rigs can do with them.

When the OCZ Core series came out I was set on buying a couple. They had so many issues with both write performance and reliability I decided to pass to see if Intel's unit was going to be game changing. That came out at $600 or so and figured all these people who bought $600 VGA cards would be all over it.

Two drives in RAID 0 for 400+ MBps? That's nuts. To get that in Vraptors you would be up in the 5-6 drive range and a badass controller, $2000+ depending on the controller. Hasn't seemed to happen yet though. I suppose waiting that 5-10 seconds per load isn't as tangible as seeing a smooth framerate on the latest and greatest FPS.

When the time comes that I can get 400/MBps for $500 I'm pretty sure I'd pull the trigger.

 

[taltamir]

to be honest, i'd spend the 600$ on an intel SSD before I would get a 600$ video card (or CPU)

 

[ed21x]

laptop users like the fact that it is cooler (thus saving on fan speed), takes up less batteries (longer battery life), and has no moving parts (more durable for carrying around). The speed increase isn't really that dramatic yet to sway people on that factor alone. So as you can see, the three factors listed above aren't applicable to desktop power users as all.

 

[taltamir]

some crappy models can take more power rather then less... and most models are actually slower. And despite not having moving parts, with MLC and crappy controllers some have very short lifespans.

 

[frostedflakes]

You just have to know the limitations of flash and how to deal with them. The Patriot 32GB MLC disk can be had for $90 ($80 AR) at Frys, and an MFT single-drive license is $125. The Intel MLC will probably still outperform it, but for $205 it should be a pretty potent combination. I'm thinking about trying it out.

If there was a free alternative to MFT, it'd be a no-brainer for me. I think there are some Linux filesystems that have a circular write buffer, but I don't know of anything available for Windows operating systems.

 

[capeconsultant]

MFT seems to have a free trial. Very interesting. I had forgotten entirely about MFT. Thanks, Dave

 

[BoboKatt]

Just to add to this: I recently found out that MFT wont work if your SSD drive is your OS drive. Only in secondary/data mode. They are working on this however.

Also I was reading the forums on the OCZ site -- some very interesting things there about configuring your SSD to be your OS drive using Vista or XP. Essentially they recommend disabling a crap load of features (especially in Vista) like... super fetch, indexing, auto defrag and the list goes on and on. Also the way you set your OS up having any feature which automatically writes to the main OS drive for whatever reason changed to write to another drive (browser cache/temp files/swap etc.).

Also AHCI has to be disabled in the BIOS...so you have to use IDE mode. The funny thing is that I have done NONE of these tweaks and my system runs just fine. Again the tech is so new and there are some substantial differences over a regular rotational drive that it will be some time before it becomes normal. Heck I would assume that even the Intel SSD must have some differences applied to the way your OS is installed and tuned and it involves more work and research.

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: BoboKatt
Just to add to this: I recently found out that MFT wont work if your SSD drive is your OS drive. Only in secondary/data mode. They are working on this however.

Also I was reading the forums on the OCZ site -- some very interesting things there about configuring your SSD to be your OS drive using Vista or XP. Essentially they recommend disabling a crap load of features (especially in Vista) like... super fetch, indexing, auto defrag and the list goes on and on. Also the way you set your OS up having any feature which automatically writes to the main OS drive for whatever reason changed to write to another drive (browser cache/temp files/swap etc.).

Also AHCI has to be disabled in the BIOS...so you have to use IDE mode. The funny thing is that I have done NONE of these tweaks and my system runs just fine. Again the tech is so new and there are some substantial differences over a regular rotational drive that it will be some time before it becomes normal. Heck I would assume that even the Intel SSD must have some differences applied to the way your OS is installed and tuned and it involves more work and research.

Hmm interesting, thanks for posting that. Not being able to work on the OS drive is probably a deal-killer for most people here, myself included.

You're using an OCZ drive? Core V1 or V2, or is it one of their older SLC drives? Are you on XP? In terms of small random writes, I think it's supposed to be a bit easier on flash disks than Vista. If you're using an SLC drive, their random write performance isn't nearly as abysmal as the JMicron MLC drives.

 

[BoboKatt]

I am using Vista 64. The SSD I have is the Core V1. Honestly -- it's not bad and in fact I am actually quite impressed. I have 8GB of DDR2 RAM and 3 actual HD as well all on SATA running an Intel q9550 on an older Asus P35 mobo.

I will try the tweaks tonight: Disabling Swap file. Disable Prefetch and Superfetch, move around all environment directories that are using my OS drive (SSD), disable all indexing, disable search as a service and disable Hibernation and make sure my Firefox temp directory is on a separate drive, make sure the scheduling is turned off for auto defrag. I am not sure if I can disable AHCI since it?s that in my Bios and that is how I installed the OS. Not sure if you can change that back to IDE mode like that.

I am most curious about my swap file. I had it to start on a separate drive (as I always do by default) which was my WD 640 HD. Not sure if any benefit comes from disabling this completely, SSD or no SSD.

Trust me -- if MFT was for an OS drive I would have been all over that.

One thing I might add -- I have my original Vista 64 OS also installed on my 500GB SATA drive. That was my original OS drive before I got the OCZ SSD as a joke really. I wanted to try it out and figured it was not ready for prime time, so I removed my 500 GB SATA drive and swapped it out with the OCZ and installed my Vista 64. That was like 3+ weeks ago and I never looked back. However I did swap out the OCZ for the 500 GB SATA last night just to test something and I was BLOWN away as to how sluggish the 500 GB SATA install was compared to the OCZ. HOWEVER, the OCZ, and I have said this before... is CRAP if you try to write to it (install something) and God forbid if you try and do something at the same time as writing to it.

 

[coolVariable]

How would these drives perform as OS drive for a Media Center PC?
Recorded TV would obviously go to a "standard" HDD.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

I really don't think price is the thing that is holding enthusiasts back, otherwise Raptors wouldn't exist. I think the problem is that companies aren't focusing on pushing the truly blazing fast drives they could be huge sellers.

I'd seriously consider shelling over ~$500 for something like a Fusion IO drive, even if it is only 80GB, as long as its as fast as they claim. Disc drives will still be around for the economical price/capacity, no big deal having one or two super fast drives that are small and then storing everything else on massive but slow drives, which can still be plenty fast for larger files they'd be devoted to anyways.

The problem, IMO, is that I feel the companies are focusing too much on competing for capacity as opposed to delivering on the aspects of solid state that is supposed to improve performance...the drives available now can be nice in certain aspects, but they're certainly not mind blowing.

 

[frostedflakes]

Sent a few emails to EasyCo about using MFT for OS drive, and the guy I talked to mentioned that a solution for this should be available before the end of the year.

My understanding is that it will involve creating two partitions on the SSD. One will contain the OS files and be the boot partition, and the other will use MFT for random writes and contain the Program Files and Documents and Settings folders, as well as symlinks to OS files in the boot partition.

It actually doesn't sound extremely complicated, I may read up on symbiotic linking and try setting something like this up on my own.

 

[faxon]

Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
I really don't think price is the thing that is holding enthusiasts back, otherwise Raptors wouldn't exist. I think the problem is that companies aren't focusing on pushing the truly blazing fast drives they could be huge sellers.

I'd seriously consider shelling over ~$500 for something like a Fusion IO drive, even if it is only 80GB, as long as its as fast as they claim. Disc drives will still be around for the economical price/capacity, no big deal having one or two super fast drives that are small and then storing everything else on massive but slow drives, which can still be plenty fast for larger files they'd be devoted to anyways.

The problem, IMO, is that I feel the companies are focusing too much on competing for capacity as opposed to delivering on the aspects of solid state that is supposed to improve performance...the drives available now can be nice in certain aspects, but they're certainly not mind blowing.

yea this is definitely true. with the vastly expanding demand for super high capacity drives it wont be long though before we run into a limit on how big a magnetic disk storage device can get before they are going to have to modify the tech somehow. i wouldnt be surprised though if the enthusiast sector starts mass migrating to SSDs though once the price/gb is on par with that of a raptor class drive, or hell a cheap SAS setup, which can run as low as $180 for a controller and drive these days, at twice the cost/gb of a velociraptor with a substantal performance increase to boot. once you get the SAS controller out of the way im sure there are plenty of enthusiasts who would set something like this up. im betting sometime mid 2010 is when you will start to see these things become "affordable"

 

[eva2000]

Originally posted by: coolVariable
Why aren't there more SSD postings?
I am kind of disappointed that I have to watch for SSD info on notebookforums instead of AT.

Lots of enthusiasm for SSDs there ...

Well I'm loving my 4x32GB OCZ Core V1 SSD raid 0 array tested on Gigabyte EP45 Extreme ICH10R controller as well Highpoint 3520LF PCI-E 256MB cache raid controller and works perfectly.. I'm lucky i'm one of the few who has never had any freezing/stuttering issues since day one.

But i use Vista Ultimate SP1 32bit/64bit and WinXP Pro SP2 and SP3 fully updated and integrated hotfix cds via vLite and nLite

my adventues so far

http://i4memory.com/showthread.php?t=10744
http://i4memory.com/showthread.php?t=8944

I did all the OS tests etc first but eventual use for this is as a scratch disk/video encoding non-OS stuff so happy with 500+ MB/s reads and 300+ MB/s writes

 

[postmortemIA]

WD's Black Scorpio $100 for 320GB, 7200rpm and solid performance - hard to beat.