Solid State Drives

[witman]

I’ve been looking for a while at the possibility of getting a Solid State Drive for my computer. I’m looking at getting around 120 GB drive, and I was wondering if anyone knew much about them.

Here are some on my maybe list: [url][/url]

OCZ – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227726
I’ve heard good and bad about OCZ drives. I’ve heard they are really fast, but die relatively quickly compared to other drives.

SanDisk – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171646
I also know Sandisk has been in the Solid State business forever with cameras cards and whatnot.

Gskill – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231613
I have Gskill ram in my computer and had no issues with that, but I don’t know how they stand up to everything else.

ADATA – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211569
One thing that I haven’t heard much about, but seem to get good reviews are the ADATA.

I’m not committed to any of these, so any input on any of these brands, or even other brands would be awesome.

[NeutralX2]

Nemesis and I both have that Agility 3 drive you linked to. Its pretty awesome. That being said, I would go with the OCZ Vertex 3 for the same price.

[Shellz0rz]

I am also interested in getting a SSD.

Do you see any real practical performance boost whilst gaming? Or is it pretty much just making file transfers and OS processes faster?

[NeutralX2]

For general computing use it makes a pretty huge difference. Windows startup times are incredible, and applications like Photoshop that used to take a while to start are now instant. I keep all of my programs on my SSD, and the OS just feels a lot more responsive.

The impact on gaming is a lot less. For games that have long loading times, such as Battlefield 3 or Natural Selection 2 it makes a noticeable difference as you can join matches faster. However in most games, once you have loaded the level you are not accessing the hard drive much. So it doesn’t really help you with in-game performance other then load times.

Check out this video from Toms Hardware where they compare a high end hard drive to a mid range SSD:

Quote:

We created a script that simultaneously launches multiple applications in a repeatable fashion, and documented the differences in a short video. The script starts as soon as Windows loads up, but then waits for 30 seconds for all processes to load and the processor to idle. The script launches Internet Explorer 9 (an offline version of tomshardware.de), Microsoft Outlook with the same PST mailbox folder that SYSmark 2012 uses, PowerPoint with a large presentation, and Adobe Photoshop with a large picture file.

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izwZWOY4_60[/embed]

From: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-hdd-performance,3023.html

HDD Storage is one of the biggest bottlenecks in PCs right now. Going from any HDD to any SSD should give you a pretty noticeable performance upgrade, as even the low end SSDs outperform HDDs by a pretty big margin.

[witman]

How about the Agility 4 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227807) verses the agility 3 or the vertex 3 (in my previous post)? I noticed the aglity 4 is running Indilinx instead of Sanforce and that in general, this drive is “slower”, but I don’t know anyting about either chipset.

[NeutralX2]

Quote:

Quote from witman on August 24, 2012, 16:16
How about the Agility 4 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227807) verses the agility 3 or the vertex 3 (in my previous post)? I noticed the aglity 4 is running Indilinx instead of Sanforce and that in general, this drive is “slower”, but I don’t know anyting about either chipset.

I would actually just suggest getting the vertex 4: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227791

Had no idea they came down so far in price.

[witman]

How much better is that over the Vertex 3? I’m not really techy enough to know enough to know what I’m really looking at and the internet machine isn’t helimg me very much when it comes to which chipset is better. I guess the best quesation is it it worth the 15 extra dollars?

[NeutralX2]

There are comparison graphs on this page:

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-vertex-4-sata-iii-2-5-ssd.html#overview

But to be clear, either will blow away your current hard drive. Do I think its worth the $15 and would I buy it? Yeah, but I also have a $500 graphics card and just upgraded a perfectly good CPU to a new ivy bridge just get higher FPS in Battlefield 3 even though I already run on ultra. So I am a bit crazy, just factor that in.

[witman]

Well, I got the Vertex 4 128GB version and I have to say I like what I see so far. I also was surprised by the price I got it at. Newegg had an shell-shocker deal and I was able to scoop it up for $79.99.

The drive is supposed to be 128GB, but my windows reads it as 119.2 GB, but whatever, it still works.

I’m only running my OS on it right now. Do you think I should switch steam over to it, or leave steam on my HDD?

[NeutralX2]

I would leave your steam install off of it since games dont really benefit a whole lot from it. You can then use something like SteamTool to move specific games to your SSD if you need to. I use that to put my NS2 Beta install on my SSD to increase loading times.

[Shellz0rz]

That sounds like a badass deal. $80 for 128GB SSD. I’m interested to know how quickly you run out of space. (It’s the partition information that makes it 119.2GB instead of 128GB, I believe) That’s the killer for me right now, I don’t to get a smaller drive and the large ones are a bit on the pricey side still.

These SSDs almost make me feel like we’ll go back to cartridges for gaming when it gets cheap enough. Wouldn’t that be an interesting throwback?

[witman]

Quote:

Quote from Shellz0rz on September 2, 2012, 11:02
That sounds like a badass deal. $80 for 128GB SSD. I’m interested to know how quickly you run out of space. (It’s the partition information that makes it 119.2GB instead of 128GB, I believe) That’s the killer for me right now, I don’t to get a smaller drive and the large ones are a bit on the pricey side still.

These SSDs almost make me feel like we’ll go back to cartridges for gaming when it gets cheap enough. Wouldn’t that be an interesting throwback?

I have only windows 7, and a couple other small programs loaded up on it and I still have 90GB free. I think it really will come down to how much you want to put on it. I’m running steam and all my games off my second drive (1TB standard hard disk). My games load just fine and aren’t very slow at loading at all, but like Neutral did, if you have a game with long loading times, I can see why you might want to load it onto it.

In any event, the boot time if phenomenal. Cut my boot time way down.

In any event, I liked the days of cartridges. You could save your game right there and not have to remember which memory card you had it on (I know the current gen of consoles don’t have that problem though). Plus, if the game didn’t work, you blew on it like it was paying $20 until it did.

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