Got a virus on my OS yesterday, getting really irritated. I'm thinking of just wiping everything down after backing up docs to DVDs. However, I'm considering might as well get an SSD and reformat straight to the SSD --- all that work, might as well get some more speed to show for it.

However, current budget only allows me to spare £100 or less for this "upgrade." Most SSDs I find on this range is about 60GB --- is that enough for your basic Win7 64bit + necessities (MS Word, Excel, PPT, Adobe, Gimp, etc.) and DCS A10? Looking at my DCS folder, it's only about 6GB in size. Any recommended SSD brands? Or any brands to stay away from? Hope to get my order in by tomorrow so that it arrives mid-week next week.

Thanks!

BTW, Mobo is a Gigabyte P55-US3L... does mobo type matter for SSDs?

Lol, that's the exact article I'm reading now.

Hmmm... I see the usual names... Corsair, Kingston, OCZ... I was hoping to hear from fellow SimHQ users with SSDs. What do you have, what do you use it for? Any comments?

At the moment I am looking at OCZ Agility 3 120GB SATA 3. How do I know if this is 1st-gen or 2nd-gen SandForce SSDs technology? It says Controller: SandForce SF-2281 on the website...

Lastly, anyone know if it is possible to put the \Program Files directory in another non-OS drive? Well, with 120GB, that might not be needed...


EDIT: The OCZ Agility 3 is SATA-III / 6Gbps (Backwards compatible with SATA-II / 3Gbps) and my mobo only supports 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors. Will I miss that extra 3GB/s? If not, then I can just file this under "Future-proof for when I get a new mobo/CPU"... a 60GB SSD costs around £70 (£1.17/GB) whereas a 120GB SSD costs around £125 (£1.04/GB) so better £££ per GB + larger capacity = win!

Yes you can put your programs on a real mechanical hard drive and your OS on the SSD.

If you are reading at Tom's Hardware, they have a best SSD for the money article every month.

Crucial RealSSD M4 has great price/performance ratio. Write performance isn't brilliant though, but most usage happens to be read actions.

That "Agility" isn't the top performer. Don't stare yourself blind on it having the SandForce SSD, as manufacturers take shortcuts when making cheaper models.

Thanks for confirming that, speedbump.



According to the Tom's HW review, the Crucial RealSSD M4 has Sequential Read - 415 MB/s and Sequential Write - 95 MB/s vs. the OCZ Agility 3 has Sequential Read - 525 MB/s and Sequential Write - 500 MB/s. Can you tell me why you seem to imply that the Crucial SSD is better than the OCZ SSD? Serious question here --- this is the first time I'm looking at buying an SSD so no real background info to go by except what I read at Tom's, so I'm open to suggestions.


Does anyone here have a 60MB SSD? Or anyone with an SSD, I'd love to hear what you've put into it and how much space it occupies. Just curious whether Win 7 64-bit and DCS A10 will fit into a 60GB SSD.

There are some guys here with SSDs. One member has two of them in RAID 0. They will just have to show up and see your post.

Roger that, just getting impatient here. All that "suspicious activity" is annoying me.

I guess I'm better off reformatting my OS drive for now -- that'll give me a few days of "peace" as I wait for the SSD to arrive, then set THAT one up.

I think that the SSD will run in Advanced Host Controller Interface mode so to avoid some heartache later, I bet your current drive is not running in that mode. You won't have much luck cloning to the SSD if the two completely different types of drives are running in different modes. What I'm saying is, you will probably have to do the whole dance again when the SSD gets there. Seen some posts here where people have run into that problem. Lots of real mechanical hard drives are running in parallel ATA emulation which will drive you over the edge trying to get the cloned image to an AHCI SSD.

"Some operating systems, notably Windows Vista and Windows 7, do not configure themselves to load the AHCI driver upon boot if the drive controller was not in AHCI mode at the time of installation. This can cause failure to boot with an error message if the SATA controller is later switched to AHCI mode. For this reason, Intel recommends changing the drive controller to AHCI or RAID before installing an operating system.[1] On Windows Vista and Windows 7, this can be fixed by setting non-AHCI mode in the BIOS then booting and changing the registry, then changing the BIOS setting to AHCI.[3] A similar problem can occur on Linux systems if the AHCI driver is built as a module, rather than included in the kernel, as it may not be loaded into the initrd (initial RAM disk) created when in legacy mode; the workaround is to build a new initrd containing the AHCI module."



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