SSD ? Hybrid ? RAID? or 10000 RPM ?

[Machinegun]

Hi guys

I need your help to decide what to go for
I was looking around for an option to improve the speed of my PC. There are many options for that , some cheap and some v expensive.
The options for my small budget (£100) would be :
- 60GB SSD ( not big enough and so many complains about reliability )
- Hybrid 320/500 GB ( enough space and decent speed )
- 10000 RPM traditional platter drive ( ?? )
- RAID with my two SpinPoint F3

Advice would be much appreciated

[Chris P]

Machinegun

The LN 33702 - HOT SELLER 60GB OCZ Technology Vertex 2E, 2.5" Sandforce SSD, MLC-Flash, Read 285MB/s, Write 275MB/s - Is extremely reliable and well within your budget and would give you the best performance increase.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/s60gb...-write-275mb-s

Best Regards

[kalniel]

Hi guys

I need your help to decide what to go for
I was looking around for an option to improve the speed of my PC. There are many options for that , some cheap and some v expensive.
The options for my small budget (£100) would be :
- 60GB SSD ( not big enough and so many complains about reliability )

What complaints have you heard about reliability? SSDs are in general more reliable than mechanical drives.

- Hybrid 320/500 GB ( enough space and decent speed )

Look at the reviews to carefully match the pluses and minus of a a hybrid drive to your requirements. They work well in *certain* uses, but not others.

- 10000 RPM traditional platter drive ( ?? )

Noisy and not usually very good value for money these days - go for a high platter density drive instead for equivalent performance without the drawbacks.

- RAID with my two SpinPoint F3

Won't improve the speed, if that's what you're after.

[Jasp]

A SSD is going to give you the biggest feel of speed increase due to the much smaller access time, something like 8ms v 0.1ms on a SSD. Your always going to trade of space for speed though, the drive Chris has posted looks fine tbh, tho not Sata 6 it will still feel a million times faster then a mechanical drive and has a good proven track record.

[Biscuit]

Hi guys

I need your help to decide what to go for
I was looking around for an option to improve the speed of my PC. There are many options for that , some cheap and some v expensive.
The options for my small budget (£100) would be :
- 60GB SSD ( not big enough and so many complains about reliability )
- Hybrid 320/500 GB ( enough space and decent speed )
- 10000 RPM traditional platter drive ( ?? )
- RAID with my two SpinPoint F3

Advice would be much appreciated

As above, these issues of SSD reliability you have spoke of are probably a miscommunication of the actual issues with them. Originally a lot of the controllers has issues with constant small writes however this is no longer and issue. Some SSDs have throttling if their are excessively used on a day to day basis. SSDs might have a slightly shorter overall lifespan as sectors are more likely fail with repeated use however in normal circumstances this is still probably much longer than you would need to worry about.

I am running a few hybrid drives (Seagate Momentus XT is the only decent one around AFAIK and thats the one i got). I have 2 in my main PC on RAID0 and 1 on my HTPC as the system drive. They do speed up things like booting and your most regular games, however you wont get the same 'wow' factor like you do when you change from disk to SSD. Some people have also had a lot of problems with them as aggressive power management, now this is something i have never noticed really, seems to be more people on apple laptops but have a look on the seagate forums.

1000PRM drives - as above, expensive with little to no gain

RAID0 - Again, pretty much as above. I wouldnt say no speed increase but it would be very minimal, especially in comparison to the change to SSD.

Suck it up about the loss of space and just get the SSD, takes a bit more active management with your applications and data but its worth it in the long run.

[Machinegun]

Thanks guys
I've done some more research and ,
- 10000RPM's - scraped the idea
- RAIDO / 1 - I may use the two F3’s on external server
- HYBRID - still not sure

And now the most important one
SSD - I know that nothing out here will match the speed of an SSD
( and this is my main target ), BUT even after reading about them so much ……. I’m not confident

Thanks Chris P for recommendation , this OCZ appears as is the best SSD available for that price range . Two concerns I still have with this one
- Will 60GB be enough for my current system W7 – 64 bit + games and loads of software I’m testing ( and this is the main reason I’m worried about reliability )
- I had issues with OCZ in the past (my power supply) and I had to pay a small fortune to send it back ( Netherland ) so no customer support in UK

[jim]

That's why you have two disks - if there's no room for your games on the HDD (and I agree there probably won't be), install some of them on the Samsung F3 or whatever.

Only put things on the SSD when you need the speed - everything else can be put elsewhere.

[Machinegun]

How important is the number of IOPS ?

[kalniel]

How important is the number of IOPS ?

Forgive the question as answer, but what tasks are you trying to improve the speed for, specifically?

IOPS won't help load games, but will help multitasking scenarios.

[Machinegun]

Forgive the question as answer, but what tasks are you trying to improve the speed for, specifically?

IOPS won't help load games, but will help multitasking scenarios.

I'm looking to improve the general use of my machine. Multitasking is great if will be faster
I'm more interested to speed up Windows than Games ( i'm ok with the speed of my games in general )