Noob New SSD question

J

Jhalf

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 16, 2007
Messages
313
Like a lot of other people here my W7 RC is running on borrowed time, and I need to install a proper release this week. I am thinking about maybe getting an SSD for an overall system improvement.

My budget would be around $200. I have no clue about SSD's as I have put of reading all of the 20 page articles on toms about them. Would any SSD in this price range give a noticeable improvement in speed over a regular 7200 rpm drive?
Thanks
 
If you can up your budget a bit newegg has the X25-M g2 for $219 shipped (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167016). Also look into the X25-V (40g, runs around 125-130, great for a boot/os only drive). Picked one of the 80g M drives up this morning due to RC1.

Outside of the Intel drives, just about any of the Indilinx based drives with a good/recent (read supports TRIM) firmware will be a great improvement over a spindle drive.

I'm sure plenty of others will chime in.
 
thanks! exactly what I was looking for

How would you install that in a 3.5 in bay? some sort of adapter?
 
Any 2.5" to 3.5" adapter will work. Check the "Hard Drive Accessories" section on the egg for an idea (not necessarily the best prices, but an idea of what's out there). Ignore the reviews about the drive come with one, that's only the retail package.
 
And i am reading that after I put windows 7 on it I need to install drivers/ update the firmware for it?
 
Firmware is dependent on what is shipped (should be a X25-M post near the top of this form that explains it). I'm confused on the drivers as well. Apparently for the auto-trim you need the MS ACHI drivers, rather than the Intel ones? Not sure on that part.
 
LOL what is auto trim? some way of discouraging SSD degradation?
 
OS initiates trim on it's own, rather than using the manuafacture supplied app (Intel Toolbox in this case).
 
Do yourself a favor and read Anandtech's articles instead of Tom's imo... They paint a much more accurate picture of the SSD landscape as it stands today (alto I haven't looked at Tom's in detail, but the one article I saw recently had a lot of holes as far as testing method).

That being said, you can definitely get a pretty darn good SSD for +/- $200... Whether it'll be a worthwhile upgrade for you depends largely on what you do with your system. It'll be noticeable in lots of different ways within the OS (a lot of things will just open quicker, refresh instantly, etc.) but it'll be most noticeable when you're loading heavy apps (Photoshop, etc.) and/or multi-tasking heavily. It tends to help w/game load times as well tho the difference isn't huge and tends to vary a lot from game to game.

Within your budget I'd say your options are a 60GB OCZ Agility or Vertex for $160-ish AR, or an 80GB Intel X25-M G2 for $220. The Intel drive is faster at random read/writes which is where SSD really shine (since they're many orders of magnitude faster than a regular HDD in that regard), the OCZ drives are still pretty fast in that regard but not quite as fast as the Intel... They do boast faster sequential write speeds tho, which is nice to have if you think you'd often be transferring large drives the SSD. Either drive would be a big jump up from a HDD.

These are all 2.5" drives, you can get a $10 bracket or just velcro it to the side/bottom of your case... They weigh like nothing and generate no significant heat. The retail packaged Intel drive comes w/one such bracket but I think the one going for $220 at Newegg is OEM. Newegg has plenty of cheap brackets if you want one tho.

You should check to make sure the drive has the latest firmware before installing Win7 tho it really doesn't matter since the firmware won't wipe the drive at all. You can download it from Intel's site as a bootable ISO that you need to burn to CD in order to run the update. For TRIM support you shouldn't install your mobo RAID drivers since no one has updated RAID/SATA drivers w/TRIM support yet, just let Win7 use the MS drivers. What TRIM does is sustain the performance of your drive over time, otherwise it'll get progressively slower as you use it because deleted data isn't wiped properly.

If you're running a RAID confiig w/other drives and you have to install the drivers you can run a manual TRIM command (which would otherwise happen dynamically as you delete stuff) to force the drive to optimize itself, using Intel's Toolbox. Man, we really need a SSD sticky thread...
 
I'm not sure if you have to break up the RAID array to do so or what, I thought you had to do at 'least that but someone on the boards was saying otherwise yesterday... Dunno tbh, I only run a single X25-M or X25-V.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top