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."



LINK

I jumped on the SSD train early on without 6G controler on my motherboards, so haven't had the pleasure to run on SATAIII / 6GB yet, but future proofing is a good excuse to go 6G.

I bought a Kingston SSDNow 64GB for my laptop in December 2009 and transferred it to my HTPC shortly after. My game system is running a Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB as boot for Win7 64 Pro, since September 2010. Married to that are two 1.5TB WD Black in a RAID0 volume of 2.7TB, split into one 2TB partition and one 750GB one. So far I have some 40GB allocated on C:



Samsung "KIES" is in my user folder, which takes up 6GB, pagefile has grown to 8GB as you can see and hybernate wants 6GB as well. Once I get around to it, KIES will be moved.

On my D drive, I have most of my programmes installed, divided up into:
-Games (Steam etc.)
-Hardware (Drivers)
-Programmes (Internet, Media, Tools)

I seriously doubt the sequential write numbers you posted are from same size SSDs. The comparable 120GB Vertex3 scores 415MB/s and the m4 scores 375MB/s in that benchmark.

As to why I think Crucial's M4 is better than the Agility is from looking at many reviews of the M4 that were done after the updating to Crucial's firmware 0009 and focussing on real world applications. Comparing SSDs has to be done with equal size SSDs, since comparing a 120GB with a 60GB one will always favour the larger one in 99% of the benchmarks.

If I were to focus on write performance, I would let "Incompressible Sequential" write benchmarks decide and go for Corsair P3. Makes sense for people who mainly use iTunes and compressed video files.

Skinflint.co.uk has the 64GB M4 as the lowest price per GB SSD, under 100 quid. The 120GB variants are close together. Finally, one 120GB comparison (Pre-0009) @ HardOCP

Samsung 470 series.

Read/Write speeds are there just to boost sale numbers. In real life use and performance dealing with small 4k files makes all the difference.

Besides, Samsung is on their 5th gen controller while Starforce is on 2nd.

I've got a 300 gb Intel 320. I don't have SATA 3 on my system, so it won in terms of dollar per gigabyte.

We have about 140 or so odd SSDs in machines throughout our lab. Several are SATA II and some are SATA III. For the current crop factoring speed versus reliability and firmware dependability, I would say go with the Crucial M4 with the very latest firmware. OCZ Vertex 2, while not 6G is not bad at all either. The latest OCZ Vertex 3 drives have had several BSOD issues with many motherboards (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, etc..) and we have seen this as well in our lab. The latest firmware has helped but not ended all the issues. Plus Crucial is cheaper and has a better warranty.

Good to know. Is there a visible pattern yet, or is it still evenly divided over the various motherboards?

Here's a recent 120/240GB comparison @ TechReport. It shows the m4 SSDs certainly holding it's own where it counts, but the Corsair Force 3 SSDs (GT and non-GT) display their performance in the benchmarks and have competitive prices (GT) or a good bit cheaper (non-GT). Might have something to do with restoring goodwill after the call--back this summer.

JAMF , could you say what software this is displaying your HD ? Thanks.

DiskSpaceFan, also a handy tool, that I shall add to the "List Of Good Free Programmes" thread.

I quite like the Crucical M4 128GB, but it sometimes hangs a little before delivering next pack of data. Seems more stable than my Patriot Torqx though, no more volume bitmap errors in Checkdisk.

I think the market right now is such that you can't really go wrong with major brand SSDs, Corsair, Crucical, Samsung all have very good offers. When I started two years ago with my first SSD, you still had some rather bad controllers on the market, no longer the case today.

You've chose the worst time to look at this ICE.....HDD prices have just about doubled in the last week due to the problems overseas. It's projected that it will be like this for appoximately the next 6 months.

From my limited 3 weeks of experience so far with a crucial M4 128G:

If your mobo supports Sata2 ,or better still, sata3 you should be OK to go unless there are documented difficulties
with that mboard and Bios and SSD

Loading win7 64 and arma2 basic has taken up about 60G of the 128 G available !!

My prediction then is you may not be able to load as many programmes as you would like
once win 7 is on the 64G ssd because of a lack of space.

The speed difference is noticeable and tho' SSD is not cheap , I'm glad I invested.