|
You are wrong. They get a bad rap because they tweak the firmware to make the drives 10 MB/s faster but five times as likely to die, and also because of the Vertex 2. They packed it with cheaper NAND so it was cheaper to produce, ran half as fast, and had less usable space (5GB less on a 60GB drive), but sold it under the same SKU for the same price, all without telling anybody about the switch until people benchmarked them and realized something was amiss.
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2011 22:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:49 |
|
|
Are all the VM's hard drives definitely stored on the SSD? You haven't accidentally passed it to one as RAW, have you?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2011 21:28
|
|
|
I wouldn't worry about it. My Crucial C300 dropped from 7.8 to 5.9, yet there's been no performance difference. Maybe a patch got WEI confused about system drives and secondary drives, I dunno.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2011 21:12
|
|
|
Yeah, and Arkham City went from "no waits" to "a second here or there when entering/exiting buildings or travelling quickly across the city" when I moved it from my SSD to my HDD after beating the main game. It's not a big difference, but it is a difference.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2011 05:34
|
|
|
If anyone is looking for an SSD in the next 18 hours or so, Newegg's got a SanDisk last-gen SandForce SSD, 120 GB for $129. Incompressible writes aren't all that, but it's a very nice performer based on solid tech for a good price.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2011 11:15
|
|
|
You treat it like a regular SATA hard drive, because that's how Windows sees it and that's what it is (by the most literal definition of "hard drive"). So install Windows to it, or partition it and put files or install programs to it, like you would to a normal hard drive. It's just faster. All of the SSD tweaks to Windows settings, as few as we/the OP recommend, are optional. You can treat an SSD as a drop-in replacement to a platter hard drive. Changing settings beyond that is strictly for optimizing, not for basic function.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2011 19:42
|
|
|
Alereon posted:I don't want to read anything just tell me what SSD to buy! This might help, too.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2011 23:54
|
|
|
What do you want, eggs in your beer? SSDs are expensive, and we don't have our own personal hardware testing labs. If you want more information than our summaries of AnandTech reviews, go read the reviews yourself.YouTuber posted:Despite the insistence in the original post it appears that SSD have severe reliability issues? Every page in this thread has someone talking about RMAing two or three drives until they get a functional one. Is this par for the course when it comes to SSD? I've never had a hard drive fail or need to be RMA in 20 years of hard use, hell my current hard drive is about 7 years old. Are these things more stable than the thread indicates or is it totally hit or miss? People are much more likely to talk about bad experiences than ones which went swimmingly. My personal experiences: A Crucial C300 drive which stuttered a bit until a firmware update was released, but which otherwise I am deliriously happy with. An Intel X25-M G2 I got my mother for her birthday, which she is deliriously happy with. An Intel 320 in my laptop which I am deliriously happy with. A Kingston V+100 in my now-sold netbook which I was deliriously happy with. A Kingston V100 refurbished drive I used to use as a server boot drive. Showed an error prediction in SMART and Kingston gave me a very fast RMA. And you are INCREDIBLY lucky with hard drives. The annualized failure rate on those is double to an order of magnitude greater than SSDs, and, thanks to statistics, there are people who've had incredibly bad experiences with them just as you've had an incredibly good one. I went through a two year period where I had 13 drives fail on me from an initial purchase of 5. I recently had a RAID drive start failing but couldn't tell which one, so I had to send back the whole batch to be safe. Compared to those failure rates, even 1 RMA out of 5 drives on my SSDs has been just brilliant. Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Dec 19, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2011 00:15
|
|
|
Presumably two Corsair Force 120GB drives in RAID 0.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2011 10:21
|
|
|
tzirean posted:I just got my Crucial M4 256GB up and running and it's absurd how fast things are. But boot time isn't quite as good as I was expecting; it still sits at the motherboard splash screen for ~30 seconds before moving on. I ran CrystalDiskMark and compared my benchmarks to some online for the drive, and mine do seem to be lacking. The ones I found: Something is wrong, but I don't think it's with the SSD. First of all, at the BIOS splash screen, the disks aren't being read, SSD included. That 30 second pause is something not-SSD. It's likely beyond the scope of this thread to figure out what it is, though. Second, do you have AHCI enabled? It looks like you don't, as the high-queue random I/O is nearly identical to the no-queue numbers. Google enabling AHCI in Windows, do that, then enable it in your BIOS and check CDM again. With luck, that should reduce the BIOS wait time, as well, as enumerating IDE drives (including SATA disks running in IDE compatibility mode) takes longer than enumerating AHCI SATA disks.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2011 19:52
|
|
|
tzirean posted:Could the 0:59-1:43 delay have anything to do with xInsIDE.exe crashing immediately upon login? Oh Jesus, JMicron RAID? Yeah, that would introduce impressive delays on boot. Unless you have drives plugged into that controller, turn it off completely in the BIOS. At least see if you can change it to AHCI instead of RAID.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2011 07:00
|
|
|
Oddhair posted:Would there likely be any benefit to caching on a Z68 board if the boot drive is also an SSD? My gut tells me it would be slight if so. I have an 80GB Intel drive (SSDSA2M080G2GC) as a second drive in my old machine, and I'm about to build a new box with that drive as its boot drive, or maybe one of those Corsair drives above. You can look at some real-world performance benchmarks for SSD caching at AnandTech. Bottom line: SSD caching works well, but a stand-alone SSD is faster. If you have a small SSD and run many programs off your storage drive, adding a cache to the storage drive can certainly increase performance significantly. But if you can swing purchasing an SSD big enough for all of your most-often-used programs, that will perform better and without worries of overfilling your cache. There are a lot of SSDs at around $1 per GB right now in the 120 GB range; check the OP and last page or so of the SSD megathread. Then you can re-use your Intel drive in a laptop or netbook, and it won't cost much more than getting a single <=64GB SSD to cache.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2011 15:26
|
|
|
jeeves posted:I am thinking of adding a small SSD system drive to my NAS (tired of the 4 minute boot times with FreeNAS-- I want 15sec Win2008 boot times), however the only free port for it is a eSATA port. I did that for a while. If the eSATA port is run from the main chipset, it works exactly like any of the inside SATA ports. If the eSATA port is attached to an add-on controller (like a JMicron chip), it will still work, and at full SATA speeds, but it will take a little more configuration to boot from - same idea as booting from a SATA PCI card.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2011 17:58
|
|
|
Just looking at the spec sheet, I'd say it's from the chipset AMD controller, same as the internal ports. The SB820M the N36L uses supports six ports, but there are only four internal. I also don't believe AMD does add-on SATA controllers. I'd flash the hacked BIOS to enable full SATA II speeds, as I think that's done by having the machine treat the port as identical to the internal ones. Which would be, electrically, if it's on the same controller.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2011 18:39
|
|
|
Check the drive with CrystalDiskInfo. If those sectors are Uncorrectable, then there's data corruption, and that will be mirrored on the cloned drive. If they're Reallocated or Pending, you can continue to use the cloned drive without issue. Either way, the old drive has failed and will need to be RMA'd or replaced or tossed out or such.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2011 02:17
|
|
|
Node posted:Current Pending Sector Count does come up as yellow. 1 uncorrectable sector or 2+ otherwise-bad sectors on a drive is a failure. Even if you can still use it, it is no longer a reliable means of storing data, and it's even money that the drive will be entirely dead within a year.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2011 02:31
|
|
|
Re: reliability, Intel is the Best of the Best, and Crucial is the Best of the Rest. They're both really, really good. In comparison, Corsair is actually a bit more error-prone, though that's likely as much a Sandforce thing as a Corsair thing. It's still not bad though - still a lot less likely to die than a hard drive, but not an order of magnitude less so.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2011 07:21
|
|
|
Straker posted:Most of the people in this thread know an order of magnitude more than most Fry's/BB etc. caliber employees - I've helped plenty of random people in stores before We call him Travis.  But I've been a store Travis now and then, as well. I always feel a little bad letting people know about Newegg and taking money out of Best Buy's pocket, because that on a large scale tends to make Best Buy squeeze the rest of the folks even harder for "bargain" $25 HDMI cables, janky TVs with overdriven crappy panels costing the same as the nice IPS on the bottom shelf, and a teensy collection of overpriced computer parts.Oh well, gently caress 'em. They wouldn't hire me as a high schooler because I wanted $0.50 an hour over minimum wage.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2012 11:58
|
|
Of course, on the whole, advice from random customers is about as useful as advice from that guy you work with who builds "awesome gaming PCs" and then you post a parts list in the stickied thread here and are thoroughly embarrassed because it's all garbage.
|
DNova posted:The usual symptoms? Being OCZ? Check.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2012 07:05
|
|
|
spasticColon posted:According to UPS I'll be getting my Force GT 120 tomorrow and I'm really excited. Just install SP1 after.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2012 03:49
|
|
|
Orange_Lazarus posted:Is it OK to encrypt an SSD? Example: If I used Truecrypt to create an encrypted operating system? Yes, but it will mess up garbage collection. Software-based full disk encryption will write over the entire disk with encrypted data and encrypted random crap so that the data can't be so easily picked out. None of that random crap has been TRIMmed by the OS, so the SSD doesn't know to clear it, and your drive is essentially 100% full except for when the OS sends a write command to clear a block. This makes for much slower performance and very high write amplification, which are both bad. You have two choices: 1) Buy an Intel 320 or other SSD with hardware-based FDE, or 2) After you encrypt the volume, either write a file to the SSD that fills all of the free space and then delete it, or use CCleaner or somesuch to zero-fill the free space. The former is more secure if you want FDE to hide the data, as the data will merely be TRIMmed, not actually erased. The latter is easier, but it will also immediately add a full program/erase cycle to the drive. Probably not a big deal, but if it's a smaller drive, it could well be.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2012 15:59
|
|
|
You seriously have to go out of your way to find an SSD that's not 2.5". Read the OP.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2012 16:35
|
|
|
Does this affect the C300? 'Cause I'm sitting at 4226 hours, and I've been noticing that the old n x 60 second stutter has been coming back if Intel RST is installed.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2012 20:14
|
|
|
Yar, and I just checked out the announcement forum post, no C300 mention. Guess I've got SSD problems!  Meh, probably just the same horrible motherboard problem lurking under the surface that I've been ignoring. RST RAID arrays also hork up in ways that don't happen with AHCI and softRAID on this thing.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2012 20:34
|
|
|
spasticColon posted:I'm all but certain it was my bios settings that was causing my issues because when I set them to what MSI's website and forums suggested my problems went away. I ran the CrystalDiskMark at the 4000MB/9 Runs settings a dozen times and my system didn't even flinch. I have been using my computer normally and no issues have popped up except that 120GB doesn't go very far for games. For Steam games, is there a way I can install some of them on the SSD then install the rest on my HDD? SteamMover (bottom of the OP). If you have Steam on the SSD now, then games download to the SSD, and you use SteamMover to shuffle them off to the hard drive.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2012 14:10
|
|
|
Perfectly fine.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2012 00:17
|
|
|
Because most access to the page file is 4KB random reads and writes, which SSDs are about 20-40x faster at than hard drives. That is, the entire reason you buy an SSD is for exactly the types of I/O the page file sees. Shrink it if you have enough RAM that you use it rarely, but leave it on the SSD.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2012 03:19
|
|
|
If it doesn't work, you shouldn't have to pay the restocking fee because it's a defective part.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2012 18:01
|
|
|
alnilam posted:Possibly stupid question here that I couldn't find in the first few pages: Sony laptops are generally poorly documented. You'll have to track down an owner who doesn't mind doing a near-complete teardown for info on how to do the install. You might have to significantly disassemble the laptop to change the hard drive, or it might just be a couple screws to open an access door. 1. Generally 2.5" SATA, but there are different drive heights. With a slimmer laptop, you may need a 7.5mm drive, where the standard size is 9.5mm. Some 9.5mm SSDs have spacer rings on them which let you fit them in 7.5mm bays, but removing them technically voids the warranty (just put 'em back on). But I don't know whether that thing takes 7.5mm or 9.5mm drives - probably 9.5mm considering the 500 GB drive. I don't think anybody makes 7.5mm drives that big. 2. SATA is backwards and forwards compatible. You won't see anything special out of a SATA 3 drive, as that VAIO is software-limited to SATA 2, so don't pay a premium for a SATA 3 drive. If a SATA 3 drive happens to be the best deal, go ahead and buy it, it'll negotiate SATA 2 speeds with the laptop's controller. 3. An SSD works just like any other SATA drive in terms of putting files on it, installing Windows to it, etc. There are some tweaks necessary for optimal performance, but if you install Windows fresh on the drive, those are taken care of for you. If you watch your partition alignment, a cloned install will also do everything just fine if you just re-run the Windows Experience Index. 3a. No. Just make sure the SATA controller is set to AHCI mode rather than IDE Compatibility, as that makes a much bigger performance difference for SSDs than HDDs. 4. Generally. Big gaming laptops and business notebooks will have two bays or one bay with a hot-swap bay that can take an HDD instead of the optical drive.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2012 23:40
|
|
|
You see those 4K random I/O numbers? Your hard drives did 1/40th that, about half a MB per second. Put some programs on them and start the programs. Then you'll see the difference.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2012 15:52
|
|
|
You can get a nice 120 GB SSD from the very first paragraph in the very first post in this thread.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2012 22:24
|
|
|
It's not currently necessary unless 1) you want to use RAID-mode features, including Rapid Response, or 2) you want proper hot-plug functionality without forcing a manual re-detection of hardware.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2012 21:13
|
|
|
mAlfunkti0n posted:Compared to the Intel 320 series, how does the Samsung 830 compare in reliability? "Not enough data to give a real answer" is the real answer. On the not so concrete front, the 830 has had a firmware patch to fix a BSOD issue link), though it's difficult to put this in context. Samsung historically is quite reliable, as are Marvell-controller and Toshiba-controller drives. And Samsung's 470 and 470-alikes were picked by Apple for their OEM SSD builds, so that's... a thing.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2012 22:48
|
|
|
AMD's Llano is particularly egregious: if you want to overclock via FSB significantly, you have to turn off AHCI in favor of IDE mode. This raises your maximum FSB from ~108 MHz to somewhere around 136 MHz.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2012 01:36
|
|
|
SpaceRangerJoe posted:The board I have right now doesn't actually support AHCI as far as I can tell, and only has SATA 3.0gb Either that's the 100% shittiest motherboard/BIOS in the world, or you're overlooking something. AHCI is a de facto standard. What's the specific motherboard?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2012 23:00
|
|
|
SpaceRangerJoe posted:It's an ASUS P5N-E SLI. It's getting a bit old, but the lack of AHCI is still pretty bad. At least I have a (probably) crappy SSD to go with my sub-par motherboard. Welp. I didn't know about that.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2012 03:18
|
|
|
Oh my. Having your cake and eating it, too.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2012 22:24
|
|
|
Re-run the Windows Experience Index.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2012 23:04
|
|
|
neckbeard posted:I got a 7.9 with my Crucial M4 on a fresh install It's not so much about the rating as that detecting an SSD with sufficient performance triggers Windows' "Hey, we got an SSD here!" settings.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2012 23:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:49 |
|
|
japtor posted:Anyone have trouble with the Intel 320 after the firmware update? Just curious cause I came across this thread today: The one in my laptop has been rock solid, but then, I never got the problem in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2012 02:20
|
|