What to upgrade?

[scaryjim]

Cheer up! <snip>

Anyone who wires their computer that messily is just asking for a cat to stick their paws into it...

[sammorris]

My PC is if anything, messier. Get away, cats!

[Terbinator]

Crucial C300 64GB is only £89.99 on ebuyer today

:O Nearly as good as the £75 i got mine for off Aria last week

Well Corsair give you the option of which controller to use. I may just be biased because I think Crucial's memory is poor, but from the benchmarks I read, the OCZ looked like the superior drive. That said, it's probably irrelevant, as even the relatively weak X25-V is an amazing performer in my system.
I just like to make sure people don't end up with SSDs that work like the old ones did, where they only had about 50KB/s random write speed. I made the mistake of buying one of the original OCZ Solid Series. Absolutely unusable.

I got a C300 last week and for all intents and purposes, it feels no different to the X-25V even though its faster in every department, the obvious benefit being it has more capacity and the blistering good price i got it for.

[sammorris]

Yeah Aria always did have some decent deals. Still using citylink though, I can't really order from them, nor can I order from ebuyer any more due to the same reason :S

[Pob255]

The C300 is very fast, faster than the sandforce SSD's but only in sequential read, not write which is it's weak area (random read it's about the same/slightly faster)
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/sto...b-ssd-review/1

[sammorris]

That's exactly it, and sequential read is almost useless. Arguably random read is probably of greatest importance, but only when random write is up to par. Random write performance of a lot of SSDs is so poor it renders the other stats irrelevant.

[Pob255]

No it not totally pointless http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/sto...b-ssd-review/7 granted I'd not lose sleep over 4seconds quicker load times but it does go to show that it can have an effect.

It's the sequential write speeds on the C300 60gb that are bad, the random write is not that bad, not quite as fast as the corsair F100 and ocz vortex2, but better compared to it's sequential write.
The random read are also fast, not as blistering as the sequential but still very fast and beating the sandforce based SSDs

[sammorris]

Games differ, wildly. I'd like to see more than just that one game tested.

[Terbinator]

[sammorris]

This is more like the benchmarks I have seen posted of SSDs before, hence why I asked for an additional test. Typically you see a clear benefit over even the fastest mechanical drives with any of the SSDs on test, but the difference between any of the SSDs is minimal at best.

[Terbinator]

This is more like the benchmarks I have seen posted of SSDs before, hence why I asked for an additional test. Typically you see a clear benefit over even the fastest mechanical drives with any of the SSDs on test, but the difference between any of the SSDs is minimal at best.

I agree. As I've put up above i can't tell any real difference the C300 and my X25-V using Windows.
Load up is a tad faster, that i can tell without a stop watch but not like going from the F3 to a Intel SSD.

Personally, i now wonder if the faster and faster drives become will we notice any real difference? I'm guessing that future OS will have to be built around how a SSD performs/functions for it to really speed up the OS. - Huge guess here, it seems plausible enough though IMO.

[kalniel]

That's exactly it, and sequential read is almost useless. Arguably random read is probably of greatest importance, but only when random write is up to par. Random write performance of a lot of SSDs is so poor it renders the other stats irrelevant.

I wouldn't say that. I tested my CF120 with crystaldisk I think (which sandforce drives are meant to be poor with). The lowest score I got was the low queue depth 4k random read, followed by random write. (Something like 50mb/s and 150mb/s respectively.) I was worried, until I tested my HDD, and got ~0.150 for both.

So yes, random read/write is not as fast as sequential, but it was several orders of magnitude faster than a mechanical drive.

[sammorris]

Sandforces are decent controllers though. The first generation JMicron SSDs, in particular the OCZ I had, the random write speed and latency is so poor, you often couldn't actually click the start button if a youtube video was streaming, you had to wait until it ended. Truth, it was absolutely horrendous.

SSDs for the most part now though have speed covered, it's storage and price that need to be improved.

[nibbler]

But I would be using this SSD for steam, msoffice, itunes, spotify and windows only. So Write performance wouldn't really be that important IMO.

[Terbinator]

But I would be using this SSD for steam, msoffice, itunes, spotify and windows only. So Write performance wouldn't really be that important IMO.

Once you've got everything installed no, whether you would notice a huge difference between decent SSD's when installing, i very much doubt it.

[nibbler]

I don't care if I have to wait an extra hour to install anything
Thinking of sticking with my current GPU and upgrading the SSD and holding onto some money till I can get GTX460 for £100.