"Cheap" SSD's...
ngon master
http://www.scan.co.uk/shops/kingston/hyperx3k
ordered this yesterday, got it today, very nice little upgrade for my machine would highly recommend it!
only did it as i thought the price was (finally) reasonable enough for what is essentially a glorified boot drive.
just formatted/installed windows and all that jazz... yeah, very very snappy!
ordered this yesterday, got it today, very nice little upgrade for my machine would highly recommend it!
only did it as i thought the price was (finally) reasonable enough for what is essentially a glorified boot drive.
just formatted/installed windows and all that jazz... yeah, very very snappy!
Replies
My fault, since I usually changed my documents folder to my data drive. (SSD was the OS drive)
Nice to see SSDs are finally beginning to become more affordable.
My other regular hdds that have failed, I've managed to pull of files before they went kaput.
BTW I just read cool article about ReRam technology which boosts SSDs performance 10 times and its life spawn 7 times. Its not here yet of course and its not cheap but just throwing some knowledge ;p
Wow, write cycles have gone DOWN since I had a SSD that failed in three years? Lol, good luck. You honestly think those review sites have the SSD for a year or two before they release a review to know if they last that long under heavy use? Nope.
Software like Photoshop with their frankly bloody odd scratch disks (reinventing the page file wheel) are SSD murder with constant small writes that accumulate very quickly in heavy use.
I'm sorry to do this, but please, "educate yourself".
SSD is in no way a scam, and for a lot of users absolutely great. I wouldn't recommend one to anyone doing heavy work though as a lot of software was never written with SSD wear in mind. Levelling and OS-level caching can only do so much.
They are not. It's about firmware. And most companies fail at it. Marvel controllers in SSD's are safer choice.
I can recomned Intel 5xx or Crucial M4.
OS drive:
OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-240G 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227727
^mine came in a box pack though unlike the above plastic pack.
Photoshop scratch disk and windows page file dedicated drive:
OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-90G 2.5" 90GB SATA III MLC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227759
i have a separate 750gb & 2TB drives from storage and game installs.
if you get BSODs then you may not have AHCI mode enabled either in bios or windows registry depending on your system config.
google AHCI mode: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&ei=lBneT5j8CcH76gHXw6z_Cg&ved=0CAUQBSgA&q=AHCI+mode&spell=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=1d62f2a36ee5bdd6&biw=2368&bih=1254
that way, in the event of an SSD failure i'm not losing anything at all. and i benefit from the speed increase of the SSD in all but one area; loading files i work with regularly.
although i'm thinking of just making sure that when i'm done working on a model/sculpt/whatever for the day i'll just make a backup on the hdd, and keep "working" files on the SSD as well, although even now the load times are minimal on opening files.... so yeah.
woot to ~11 second boot into windows
"Hard data" like the reviews you posted done by reviewers who probably owned the drive for a week or two?
They wouldn't have a bad reputation if they didn't have a tendency towards failure. The SSD laptop I had that failed. All the memory sticks.
Flash has its purpose but I would NEVER rely on it for a boot drive or for software in its current state.
'Wrong. People even now say that SSD drives give you ebola.' - ohhhh i see what you did there...impressive.
i'll look into it, i have an awful lot of stuff backed up on my FTP as well. thanks for the link man.
Right?
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/solidstate/128gbandabove/sdssdx-240g-g25.html
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/solidstate/128gbandabove/mz-7pc256neu.html
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch-Solid-State-CT256M4SSD2/dp/B004W2JL2A/ref=pd_cp_e_0"]Amazon.com: Crucial 256 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT256M4SSD2: Electronics[/ame]
The 256GB is at a great price right now. Unless you're really tight for cash, getting anything less than 256GB seems silly to me (I read somewhere their performance starts to fall off at around 75%+ capacity).
Now i just need to make some cash and buy this wonder thingy!
There's a big difference in the actual numbers. The old SSD's get about half the performance (because they're on Sata 3gb/s instead of 6). But, compared to a standard hdd, it's going to feel like a big boost no matter what.
well worth the improved speed thats for sure
Intel 520 series uses sandforce controllers. They took awhile to get to market likely because Intel has much better testing procedures and thus less issues with firmware.
Wheras OCZ et al wanted to get their stuff out the door first and used consumers as firmware beta testers. The Crucial M4s had issues with firmware months after they released, yet they don't get as much shit as OCZ sandforce based drives.
The reviews I've looked at are somewhat meaningless to me as the "Real world" tests test things like virus scanning and backing up steam games... Most reviews state that performance will varry between application and since I'm not familiar with how photoshop/zbrush/3ds max utilize the hard disk which makes it difficult for me to relate any of this information to my daily use.
Even more arbitrary is benchmark scores, Tom's Hardware has benchmarks for the Crucial M4 and Samsung 830, the Samsung 830's score is almost 30% better which looks significant in a graph but what's that mean to me? Fractions of a second launching photoshop?
They're $100 apart and it'd be nice to know that what I'm getting for the price isn't just a higher benchmark and the ability to run a virus scan in 6.5 minutes instead of 6.6. I'll take your advice though and keep reading...
Might well be it. And those that don't believe that it happened to me, the OCZ support forum speaks volumes.. (specific to my SSD, the Vertex2).
But yeah. In the end I followed their instructions and reflashed firmware and secure-erased and now it's been working fine for a week. However, despite having backups it's still a pain reinstalling windows and countless programs and I'm not sure whether this should accepted as "to be expected".
Though ignoring that if you're willing to suggest a solution specifically for me I'd greatly appreciate it: My budget is $300 and I'm on an old Q6600 quad core, ASUS P5K Premium mobo, 4gb DDR2 memory, a gtx260 and some archaic 7200RPM 200 gig hard drive. I'm mainly looking for something that will improve my performance in photoshop/zbrush/3dsm, specifically helping eliminate the intensive bottlenecks I get where my hard drive grinds for several minutes when working with large files in ZBrush (especially when clearing masks and adjusting upper subdivision levels) or swapping between the multiple applications I have open. Anything that would improve the brush performance when working with large resolution canvases in Photoshop would be useful too but the bottlenecks are my primary concern.
I figured an SSD seemed like the best solution but obviously I'm willing to buy whatever combination of parts is going to get me the best performance in the most cost effective way possible. If I could keep the drive size above 100 gigs that would be a plus.
It was overly expensive though.
What you must look at is IOPs (how many operations per second SSD can handle), for most modern SSD is about 60k, and it's only attribute that matter for user.
and don't sweat it Perna, stuff like this can just happen, at least there's a voice of reason in the madness, sorry it had to be you!