Intel X25-M G3 coming March 28th?

[tiaza]

120gb 175£! am I missing something they are more expensive than c300 128gb which has better speeds, reliabilty, connectivity and size.
Why would anyone buy this?

[El Juan Pablo]

Been waiting a few weeks to see what the next gen of ssd were going to offer over the last lot.

[badass]

120GB OEM Drive for less than £160 http://www.lambda-tek.com/components...s=y#productTop
The retail drive is a few pounds more http://www.lambda-tek.com/components...s=y#productTop
SCAN want £187 and £196 for the same product!

I think I'm going to take the plunge later TBH

[ed^chigliak]

Strange how out of stock items are priced low when they are unavailable to order.

My house is not on the market for £1 at the moment but when I do decide to sell it I'll be sure to adjust the price.

That stupid shop that lists thousands of items they don't have = reason I never buy from them.

[badass]

One of my monitors went pop so I've bought a Dell Uptrasharp U2311h detailed in the bargains section.
TBH I was looking for an excuse to delay purchasing one of these to see what the fallout is like once they hit retail. Now I'll get my chance. Also, Scan have made their prices more reasonable (only £10 more than Lambdatek have them advertised) so I'll probably get them from there instead.

[watercooled]

I've just been trying out AHCI mode on my system (enabled msahci driver in registry) and, well, it could be better. I measured boot time as about 5s faster, but HDDs keep randomly spinning up/down, performance seems worse in HD Tune and it seems SMART isn't supported. After a bit of reading it seems this is a common problem on Gigabyte and/or AMD boards.
I've seen mixed opinions on whether you should use AHCI mode for SSDs, some saying TRIM won't work without it. So any advice here?

Since AHCI is the native mode for SATA drives you'd expect it to be better implemented than this!

Edit: A PCI-E SATA card might do the trick, I'm limited to 1x slots so I can't use that Asus USB/SATA card but Scan sell some Lycom ones. It's something I'll have to do some research into though i.e. performance/drivers/etc. Don't suppose anyone has one/has experience with one?

Edit 2: There's also that RocketRaid one. IIRC WD were supplying that with one of their HDDs and it was recommended by Bittech apparently (not a huge comfort but I assume it does what it's meant to if they recommend it). Sorry, I'm just posting my thought process now. I'll come back if I find anything useful.

[badass]

I've just been trying out AHCI mode on my system (enabled msahci driver in registry) and, well, it could be better. I measured boot time as about 5s faster, but HDDs keep randomly spinning up/down, performance seems worse in HD Tune and it seems SMART isn't supported. After a bit of reading it seems this is a common problem on Gigabyte and/or AMD boards.
I've seen mixed opinions on whether you should use AHCI mode for SSDs, some saying TRIM won't work without it. So any advice here?

Since AHCI is the native mode for SATA drives you'd expect it to be better implemented than this!

Edit: A PCI-E SATA card might do the trick, I'm limited to 1x slots so I can't use that Asus USB/SATA card but Scan sell some Lycom ones. It's something I'll have to do some research into though i.e. performance/drivers/etc. Don't suppose anyone has one/has experience with one?

Edit 2: There's also that RocketRaid one. IIRC WD were supplying that with one of their HDDs and it was recommended by Bittech apparently (not a huge comfort but I assume it does what it's meant to if they recommend it). Sorry, I'm just posting my thought process now. I'll come back if I find anything useful.

AHCI is needed for TRIM
AHCI is generally slightly slower for single access on spinning disks as it allows NCQ which is more balanced towards multiple access to disks.
Check and double check your drivers. I'm using AHCI on my machine and it's fine now (Asus P5k-E WIFi/AP - Intel P35 chipset with a Q6600)
At first it was a bit dodgy.

[watercooled]

I think it's just a problem with the SB7xx southbridge or drivers. Apparently RAID works with smartctl in Linux, just not in Windows but I'm having the above problem with the stock Windows drivers, and from what I've heard the AMD drivers are even worse. It's something I'll have to try out for myself but the latest drivers I can find on the Gigabyte website are from 2009 so I don't expect them to sort anything. Apparently AMD have sorted these problems in the SB8xx drivers but haven't bothered with previous models.

[badass]

I think it's just a problem with the SB7xx southbridge or drivers. Apparently RAID works with smartctl in Linux, just not in Windows but I'm having the above problem with the stock Windows drivers, and from what I've heard the AMD drivers are even worse. It's something I'll have to try out for myself but the latest drivers I can find on the Gigabyte website are from 2009 so I don't expect them to sort anything. Apparently AMD have sorted these problems in the SB8xx drivers but haven't bothered with previous models.

One of the things that always irritates me when I buy AMD based systems. IME they have always been more fiddly and less relaible than Intel based kit. I can't always put it down to the fact you can't expect a £65 motherboard to be as well made as a £120 one.

[watercooled]

Yeah I agree, in a time when AMD is trying to regain some market share they really should put more effort into their drivers.

[kalniel]

One of the things that always irritates me when I buy AMD based systems. IME they have always been more fiddly and less relaible than Intel based kit. I can't always put it down to the fact you can't expect a £65 motherboard to be as well made as a £120 one.

I find the opposite usually, though I went with Intel for my recent purchase. In the past the AMD stuff has generally been more solid (though I don't remember how many chipsets were AMD themselves - I think they were usually ULI/nvidia). Same with the graphics cards, I find the AMD ones much more durable for some reason - my fiancee's mATX system isn't the greatest environment for cards, and she's already killed a 6800GT and 8800GT, but the ancient X1950XT I bunged in as a stop gap has lasted!

[watercooled]

I gritted my teeth, upgraded my BIOS to the latest version and installed AMD's AHCI drivers which if I'm honest could be easier to find - you have to go on the IGP page to find them.

Anyway, having done all of the above the drive spinning up/down problem stopped and HD-Tune benchmark seems roughly the same as IDE mode now. However, still no SMART data showing, but I noticed the temperature was showing in the window - strange. I tried Seagate's SeaTools which passed my drives with the SMART check and I could see some of the SMART data. To be sure I also tried Everest which showed the lot. Seems it's just a limitation of HD Tune.

Thanks for the advice badass, now I know my system is SSD-ready.

I take back what I said about AMD, seems I was just reading rants by people with PEBKAC errors as usual.