Best SSD for an OS drive?

[The Great Stash]

Right now I have a Samsung spinpoint F3 (1TB) or something like that picked out for a storage drive and I want to have a SSD just for my OS and possibly my most used applications...

Which one do you guys and girls suggest?

Did I post in the right section?

 

[rcpratt]

Intel X25-M G2. Availability is still an issue, hunt around for awhile and you can find an 80GB for less than $250.

 

[The Great Stash]

Intel X25-M G2. Availability is still an issue, hunt around for awhile and you can find an 80GB for less than $250.

Cool thanks! 😀 but isn't 80GB a little big for just the OS?

 

[blackhawk1928]

80GB is big for the OS but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD if you just use it for an OS, you want applications to fit in as well, if your apps will be on a another hard drive then the only benefit an SSD will bring you is faster boot times and nothing more. Applications will open as fast as the sluggish hard drive will allow it to. So an OS+Applications is what you need on it. Data and other stuff can go on the hard drive.

 

[whirlednews]

I have a Intel X25-M G2 80GB with pretty much only Windows 7 HP installed on it right now. I still have 60GB free and it is fast, boots up in no time, I don't really plan on installing all that much on it, at least untill they get the firmware back out.

 

[The Great Stash]

80GB is big for the OS but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD if you just use it for an OS, you want applications to fit in as well, if your apps will be on a another hard drive then the only benefit an SSD will bring you is faster boot times and nothing more. Applications will open as fast as the sluggish hard drive will allow it to. So an OS+Applications is what you need on it. Data and other stuff can go on the hard drive.

Oh I see... How much does Win 7 take up alone? So I will know how much data I will have for applications....

 

[blackhawk1928]

Hmm...it depends, i can't say for sure because people can have a different page file which takes up a considerable amount of space and can vary widley from computer to computer, I can't really say for sure because I already have a bunch of applications installed on mine and never really payed attention in the beginning. My guess is that its under 15GB not including page file. Plus cluster size can be a big factor, since windows has many tiny files that are only a couple kb in size, if you have large clusters then it can take up a much larger amount of space.

 

[The Great Stash]

Hmm...it depends, i can't say for sure because people can have a different page file which takes up a considerable amount of space and can vary widley from computer to computer, I can't really say for sure because I already have a bunch of applications installed on mine and never really payed attention in the beginning. My guess is that its under 15GB not including page file. Plus cluster size can be a big factor, since windows has many tiny files that are only a couple kb in size, if you have large clusters then it can take up a much larger amount of space.

Is there any advantage of having games on a SSD other than faster load screens?

 

[blackhawk1928]

Nope, performane of the actuall game and its fps won't be effected but initializing and loading of the game and every aspect of loading anything will be far faster.

 

[kleinberg]

I just got the 160GB Intel, and I have to say I like the extra space. I've installed a bunch of games on it and it's already up in the 40GB full. You can do some things to reduce the Win7 footprint (disable volume shadow copy, hibernate, pagefile (controversial, but the expert consensus seems to be to leave it in)). But so far, I love it, everything in the OS is a lot snappier. Even stuff like the Windows options menus open faster. Search is faaaaast, especially since I keep the index on the SSD, although that is another space killer. Overall fps won't make any difference, but min fps will show some slight improvement (before anyone jumps on me, that improvement only shows up in some games on really high settings, when it looks like the game is cranking the HDD trying to load textures and stuff on the fly).

Overall the review consensus seems to be that the Intel rocks on the random reads/writes, which is where the snappiness comes from, but the OCZ, etc are close in performance but cheaper. All the current gen SSDs are so far ahead of HDDs, the performance differences you see are probably pretty academic. The Intel Drives do seem to have better feature support, for things like TRIM, etc. and the 160GB has some features the 80GB doesn't, but again, that's all probably academic. In retrospect, I would probably go with the OCZ type, not the Intel, since they are close enough in perfmance, and all this stuff will plummet in price in a year anyway.

 

[The Great Stash]

I just got the 160GB Intel, and I have to say I like the extra space. I've installed a bunch of games on it and it's already up in the 40GB full. You can do some things to reduce the Win7 footprint (disable volume shadow copy, hibernate, pagefile (controversial, but the expert consensus seems to be to leave it in)). But so far, I love it, everything in the OS is a lot snappier. Even stuff like the Windows options menus open faster. Search is faaaaast, especially since I keep the index on the SSD, although that is another space killer. Overall fps won't make any difference, but min fps will show some slight improvement (before anyone jumps on me, that improvement only shows up in some games on really high settings, when it looks like the game is cranking the HDD trying to load textures and stuff on the fly).

Overall the review consensus seems to be that the Intel rocks on the random reads/writes, which is where the snappiness comes from, but the OCZ, etc are close in performance but cheaper. All the current gen SSDs are so far ahead of HDDs, the performance differences you see are probably pretty academic. The Intel Drives do seem to have better feature support, for things like TRIM, etc. and the 160GB has some features the 80GB doesn't, but again, that's all probably academic. In retrospect, I would probably go with the OCZ type, not the Intel, since they are close enough in perfmance, and all this stuff will plummet in price in a year anyway.

Thanks for the really long answer

I will probably go with the intel G2 80GB and just through in another in RAID 0 later. Because like everything tech they will be half the price this time next year 😉

 

[blackhawk1928]

^I have the G2 80...using it as i am writing this and i doubt anything can get better then this...Windows 7 is so ridiculously snappy. My HDD days are over, no more random freezes for a couple seconds, no more delay, no more sluggishness, no more fragmentation problems, no more slow boot ups with a bunch of services.....everything is 100x faster with this thing. I highly recommend the Intel G2 80GB.

 

[Pointertovoid]

My X25-E is an overkill, as any Cpu frequency change directly changes boot speed. Maybe a 30GB Vertex would be just as quick due to Cpu limit; it's "cheap" on eBay now.