QOTD: Have You Bought An SSD Yet?

[dark_lord69]

[citation][nom]UnlicensedHitman[/nom]They are overpriced! For $300 for a 64 gig SSD...[/citation]
Where do you shop dude!? seriously, that's about $100 more than you can get them for! I've seen 64GB for $200

I saw a 32GB for $110 but I am looking to get a 64GB or bigger for the same price before I purchase.

 

[Guest]

I bought a Vertex 30 GB OCZ for my Laptop. 7.1 Rating in Windows 7.

196MB/SEC Average Read in HD TACH. Almost as fast as Intel for Fraction of the Price.

Got it for $80. Will totally buy another one for my main PC when they are that cheap again.

 

[hillarymakesmecry]

Too much money!

 

[PrangeWay]

Nope. It's not going to speed up fps, so it's not worth the premium...

 

[blackened144]

Just worked it out so that I got 2 30gb OCZ Vertex drives for $130. Well, I think I'll pay closer to $150 after everything is said and done, but that brings my price per gb from $4.33 to $2.16. Not as nice as the vrapters $1.43/gb but its close enough for me. Assuming the Egg can get them out today, I should have them tomorrow.

 

[wcarthurii]

Like all technology, just gotta wait until performance + life cycle= Price

 

[A Stoner]

All the first posters fit into my area. My wife has an SSD in her dell mini 9, but I doubt that is the same thing. I am waiting until prices hit around $1 per gigabyte to buy my first SSD, I am thinking i will end up buying two 64GB, one for operating system, and the other for game installations. This will allow even faster access to the games I play. I might even get a third smaller one for the Windows pagefile. It is likely that the pagefile will quickly destroy an SSD, and I would rather it destroy a cheaper smaller drive, than my main opearting system or game installation drive.

 

[marsax73]

I would like to get one but the price and capacity is not there yet. Plus I want to see faster write times. I do alot of video and audio production and the write times don't hold a candle to a RAID stripe with two 7200 RPM drives (and not to mention the capacity--2 TB for $200). 24bit/96K audio eats up hd space real fast.

 

[samoya22]

I purchased 2 x OCZ 128 Vertex, updated to 1.1 FW, and put them in a Raid0 configuration. I'm pleased as pie with the performance so far, though I'm looking forward to having Windows 7 with integrated TRIM support. All of my critical data is backed up twice because I like to fuss around with configurations. I'd say SSDs aren't everyone's cup of tea right now, especially if you're working with a smaller company like OCZ and Indilinx.

I can't be the only one who gets a kick out of OS installs, can I?

 

[talys]

I have seen many posts about WD Velociraptors. Upon upgrading my i7 920 from a VR 300GB to an X25-M. Obviously, the performance difference was very noticable.

Out of curiosity I doubled up two velociraptors 300GB into a Core 9650 (RAID 0) to compare performance.

Sequential reads -- copying multi-gigabyte files in a synthetic test (I don't copy may 10GB files during normal use) -- was pretty comparable. However, the RAID 0 velociraptors were not noticably faster than the single VR's on random reads, which just affects so many things (like starting up big programs).

The noise and heat difference was totally disproportionate too. On the i920, I'm able to use a Small form factor case (using a Rampage II Gene). I'm able to cool with just the CPU cooler and two low RPM 120mm fans in the front (meaning, very quiet).

On the 9650, I can use a SFF motherboard, but 3 hard drives (two velociraptors and 1 storage drive) just generate too much heat to use a SFF chassis without getting silly with fans.

The major deficiency of the SSDs, IMHO, is that 160GB is a pain in the neck. It's just too small for a single-drive desktop system.

 

[AdamB5000]

I don't plan on building a new home rig for another year. I hope to have Windows 7 and a SSD. If I can get a 256Gb drive for $150 or less without any hanging or sluggish problems and get a drive that is extremely reliable, that'll be cool. I don't plan on paying anywhere close to $1/Gb. It's just not worth it to me.

But we'll see. One can get 750Gb drives for $70 so... it'd be tough to pay so much more.

 

[Festergod]

I run 2 ocz core v2 60 gb on 128k raid 0 stripe.It is FAST! And i just do the gaming side. People wo do lots of compression/decompression, or compiling, would see vast improvements with 290m/s read and 180 m/s write.

 

[tleavit]

I forgot to mention earlier that I have a 63 gig Samsung SSD in my server as its boot drive running Server 2008 enterprise. I have 4 750 gig Sata drives in raid 5 for 2 TB storage thats used for media streaming in hd. Has worked flawlessly for the past 6 months.

 

[Shadow703793]

Yes, I use this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191056
as a ReadyBoost drive with a spare PCIe adapter that I had.

I also use the OCZ Vertex on one of my systems.

 

[mwinfie]

Nope, like previous posters have said, my load times are not currently an issue and the SSD's are too expensive for a luxury. I don't usually use up a lot of space so the lack of capacity isn't a huge deal for me.

 

[garydale]

I'd buy one for my old notebook (IBM Thinkpad a22e) but it uses IDE and the SSDs are all SATA.

I'd buy one for my desktop, but it already uses RAID so boot and load times are pretty good. Moreover, I'd be trading off redundancy against the last bit of speed in going SSD. Moreover, I've already got 4 drives in the case and heat is a concern. Putting in another device just seems like asking for trouble - at least until I boost the airflow over the drives.

In short, I'd buy one right now, at today's prices, except for my particular situation. If my notebook took SATA drives, it would already have an SSD (the current HD is 13G, so even a small SSD would be a step up). And I just can't justify it on my desktop given my current 4-drive RAID setup.

 

[garydale]

I'd buy one for my old notebook (IBM Thinkpad a22e) but it uses IDE and the SSDs are all SATA.

I'd buy one for my desktop, but it already uses RAID so boot and load times are pretty good. Moreover, I'd be trading off redundancy against the last bit of speed in going SSD. Moreover, I've already got 4 drives in the case and heat is a concern. Putting in another device just seems like asking for trouble - at least until I boost the airflow over the drives.

In short, I'd buy one right now, at today's prices, except for my particular situation. If my notebook took SATA drives, it would already have an SSD (the current HD is 13G, so even a small SSD would be a step up). And I just can't justify it on my desktop given my current 4-drive RAID setup.

 

[Caffeinecarl]

They look very cool, especially in RAID 0, but I'll wait for prices to drop and performance to rise (even more) before I consider actually buying one. Once they're just a little more expensive than a hard drive, I'll probably get a pair as an OS drive.

 

[Annisman]

Yea, I bought a Super Talent LE 32GB Drive to run Vista 64 bit on, it is blazing fast!

 

[ktcrow]

LOL - I read through the comments and always get more confused.

What additional performance do you want before you buy? If you want performance buy the Intel drives. I bought two X25-Ms and performance has been great and flawless. I moved from Raptors. Right now there is a lot of deception with companies trying to compare to themselves to the X-25Ms but for random performance, which covers most loads, the M's rule (There have been a lot of reviews on this). I've been putting all of my application files on them and using my HDDs for storage. My theory is that is the best of both worlds.

Price is quickly coming down. It cracks me up that everyone is complaining about the price for the performance you get considering how much people on this board spend on their machines.

OCZ's quality, from what I've read (see these reviews and Anandtech's write ups) is lousy. Furthermore their performance is inconsistent. From the reviews I've read Samsung's performance is overstated. I guess the old adage 'you get what you pay for' applies to SSDs as well? My source for that is just some of the reviews at Newegg and Amazon.

The one thing I'm waiting for now is for PCIe to come down from FusionIOs ridiculous price. That seems like the next big performance booster given that all the SSDs will be capped by the interface within the next two years. Not that ~ 270MB/S read/write is a bad thing! I wonder when Intel will realize it needs to make a PCIe SSD? Will Nvidia get into this game? Couldn't they just add an SSD to a graphics card? Will AMD/ATI do that?

The writes they're talking about do seem faster than HDDs. The X25-E (I don't have one) is over 170mb/s I believe. Samsung's are claiming sequential performance there for MLC as well. I think Intel's MLC drives still do pretty well though, depending on what you're using them for. Working on my home movies is the next thing I'm looking forward to with these things.

Also, if you have a DT why not use multiple drives? It was pretty easy to throw the SSDs down, and use my HDDs for files.

 

[mdillenbeck]

Yes - it was a SuperTalent and I bought it about 1.5 years ago. Within the first week I got several OS Not Detected errors and promptly returned it. I loved it when it worked, and am currently hoping to buy a replacement for my laptop in the next few months.

 

[Dax corrin]

I am currently running 3 74 GB Raptors in RAID 0 and when loading maps in Battlefield 2, I generally beat most players into the map due to the speed of the loading. I'm tempted by the OCZ Vertex drives, 2 of those in RAID 0 would equal or beat the capacity of my Raptors but the price is the deal breaker at this time. I'll be ready in about another year to take another look once the technology has matured a bit more and prices drop a bit more as well.

 

[Guest]

I was so happy with the SLC Samsung in my x300 I just bought another one for my T60. All my capacity needs are filled by my NAS so the SSDs are perfect in my laptops

 

[silvercyrex]

Yes i bought a couple of OCZ 30GB SSD (OCZSSD2-1SLD30G) last year when i found out that my local computer store is selling them for $100 CAD each.
i wasn't too sure what kind of performance i was gonna get out of them but even one was gonna be faster than my old 36gb raptor.
setup in raid 0 i get 285 MBps on AVG sequential read and 175 MBps on AVG sequential write with .2 ms random access time. you can pick those up for $95 USD from newegg these days with free shipping. also i set 4 of these in raid 0 in my insane friends pc and we got 560 MBps AVG sequential read. after that i stopped caring how fast the write was i knew it was fast enough.

 

[antemon]

price price price
would be very cool to load your whole OS in a few seconds but right now the price is just way too much to outweigh the 'boost in speed'