News - OCZ introduces the ARC 100 Series of SSDs

[HEXUS]

The storage firm trumpets "performance meets affordability" with these new drives.

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[DemonHighwayman]

hmm it sounds like it'd make a nice little upgrade to my dads pc which he always complains is too slow. Question: would adding an SSD to a dual core atom computer show much difference or would the CPU be the main bottleneck ?

[Bagnaj97]

I wonder how they'll fare against the MX100 and 840 Evo drives. I hope these have been thoroughly tested - no doubt Toshiba want to turn around the image of their OCZ purchase!

[DemonHighwayman]

I wonder how they'll fare against the MX100 and 840 Evo drives. I hope these have been thoroughly tested - no doubt Toshiba want to turn around the image of their OCZ purchase!

It shows it compared to the 840 evo in the graph, generally it does more iops than the samsung except under 100% load.

[cheesemp]

hmm it sounds like it'd make a nice little upgrade to my dads pc which he always complains is too slow. Question: would adding an SSD to a dual core atom computer show much difference or would the CPU be the main bottleneck ?

I stuck an old m300 in my wife's dual core atom netbook. Made a decent improvement in responsiveness but didn't make it super fast. Also helped with boot speed. I'd say worth it if its cheap enough! The M300 was £30 so was worth it at that price!

[crossy]

hmm it sounds like it'd make a nice little upgrade to my dads pc which he always complains is too slow. Question: would adding an SSD to a dual core atom computer show much difference or would the CPU be the main bottleneck ?

Depends what he's doing - obviously boot up time would be much improved with your SSD. And if - like mine - he's doing the usual email/web/office stuff then I would have thought that a dual-core Atom would be able to cope. Is more memory an option too - in which case do a double upgrade of storage and RAM?

As to the SSD itself, I did a quick calc on the 480GB and it works out at about £172 inc VAT and doing a USD->GBP conversion. Downside, from my point of view, is that the Samsung 840 EVO 500GB is also available at around that price and I'd think that this would be a better drive - being "mainstream" rather than a "budget" model. Plus prices on the 840EVO's might fall further when the 850's come out.

[DemonHighwayman]

Thanks for the replies Cheesemp & crossy. The max Ram is 4Gb Which I installed when the PC was built and he just uses it for web surfing and word processing, so nothing very demanding. At the moment its basically just got windows 7 and open office installed so the 120gb ssd would be more than enough if it makes things a bit snappier.

[crossy]

Thanks for the replies Cheesemp & crossy. The max Ram is 4Gb Which I installed when the PC was built and he just uses it for web surfing and word processing, so nothing very demanding. At the moment its basically just got windows 7 and open office installed so the 120gb ssd would be more than enough if it makes things a bit snappier.

You're very welcome. Not sure if it's relevant, but last year I upgraded two machines with SSD's (Samsung 830's). The Dell Inspiron 1500 (dual core Celeron, 4GB RAM, Windows 7) boots far faster and loading programs is very much faster. As this is a laptop there was also a noticeable increase in battery life. Like your dad's machine, this machine is used for the standard web stuff and a bit of Office. I'm now told that there's no need for a replacement since "this one is fast enough for me".

The Dell D620 (dual-core Core2Duo, 3.5GB RAM, Ubuntu 12.04LTS) now boots in about 5-6 seconds and many OS-side processes (like software updates) rip through at a great rate of knots. This machine is one of my VirtualBox hosts (with a DAS for the VM's) and actually what I'd call my "main" machine (Windows box is for gaming), so the boost was noticable. E.g. I've got the usual Chrome, Thunderbird, etc launched and I just clicked Firefox, which was up by the time I'd counted to four - despite Firefox being a bit on the "lardy" side.