Advice for a future ssd owner.

[scubba85]

I am planning on buying an ssd in the nearish future, probably around the beginning of june. I will have about 300$ to spend on one, and I plan to purchase from newegg. I plan to put windows 7 64bit on it, as well as programs that I use daily such as firefox, itunes, open office, etc, as well as a couple of games. I am looking in the 128gb genre.

I have never owned an ssd, so i have a few questions.

Would it be better to get one larger ssd, or 2 smaller ones and run them in raid 0?

Any special partition I should set up?

Is their a huge difference in say, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139137 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233087 besides just the price?

Is their a certain brand or spec that I should be looking for?

My system specs are, if it matters:

Q9550 @ 3.9
gigabyte mobo
4gb ddr2
hd 5850
samsung f3 1tb
ocz 600W psu

Thanks in advance.

 

[sminlal]

My druthers would be for one large drive over two smaller ones in RAID. Right now SSDs in RAID arrays don't receive the benefit of Windows 7 TRIM operations.

Most people configure one partition covering the entire drive for the OS and applications, and then use HDDs for bulk data storage. If you install Windows 7 on the SSD with no other disks attached (at least during the install), you'll also get a 100MB "System Reserved" partition that contains boot and repair code. I like to do it this way so that this partition doesn't end up on some other drive instead such that the other drive is also required in order to boot the system.

The Intel SSDs are generally considered to be the best overall, with some of the new Sandforce-based SSDs also looking to be very good if not better. Google "anandtech ssd sandforce" for some good reviews from Anandtech's site.

 

[scubba85]

Thanks for the advice. I see that anand has a huge article on ssd's, so I start by reading that.

 

[RetiredChief]

June is like "Eternity" as things can change considerably by then like SSDs prices cut in half - like we should be so luky.

Anyway sminlal gave very good advice - concur with one large and forgo Raid0. In addition to non trim support under raid0, I could be wrong but Raid0 does not improve Random 4K reads/writes that much.

As sminlal said, currently Intel is King of the hill, or was - waiting on more about sandforce. That aside in the 120/124 Gig space 2nd best is not so bad which is the Pateriot torqx and the OCZ vortex. (I have the 80 gig Intel G2 in my desktop and the 128 gig Patriot Torqx in my laptop.