Just bought the "80GB Intel SSD M25-M Gen 2". Need a few tips about looking after it.

Hi all, I just bought that disk and I'm planning on installing Win7 on it. I have a few questions about it.

1) Can I just put the disk in, and set it to be the first disk in BIOS, and then stick in my Win7 DVD and install straight on to it, and that's that? Or do I need to get some special drivers or anything beforehand?

2) How is that disk these days with re-writes? Should I try to minimise how much I copy and delete stuff on it? Or could I just forget about it and treat it like any other hard disk?


I ask because I am mainly just going to have Windows on it and a few important apps. But I also was hoping I could put games on, and I tend to play through them for a couple of weeks and then I will uninstall it, and install another one in it's place. I just wondered if installing and then uninstalling several gigs of data every couple of weeks could shorten it's life faster than usual?

Thanks.

1) stick it straight in. You can update the firmware I think, but if it's newish you probably won't have to.
2) Just treat it like a hard disk - windows 7 knows what to do with SSDs to prolong their life.

Yeah, it will shorten its life faster than usual - it'll probably drop from 50 years to 49 years lifespan.

Seriously, do nothing :)

Lol great news, thanks guys :)

Do let us know the performance you get from it. I have been thinking of buying a small capacity SSD but, do not want to spend much. I saw the Corsair Reactor 60GB for under £100 but, I am not sure how well they perform.

Sure I can do that. I am hoping it will arrive tomorrow, so if it does, I should be able to describe it then or the day after.

I had been thinking about them for a year or more. I nearly got a smaller capacity one too, but the speed of them didn't look all that amazing and I was concerned about the space. I read that if you fill it up too much, it loses a fair bit of speed. There's a new one that's popular for about £140 or so, but I just figured I'd rather spend a bit more and get an 80gig. I have a couple of applications I need on it, and I would like to have 1 or 2 games on it. They are getting so big these days (some are about 11gig, and some even more), I just decided I wanted to give myself the best shot of having some space left after I install the essentials on it.

I wished I could have waited until later in the year but my current disk is a bit flakey so I had to just do it.

I hear alot of people seem to be using SSDs as boot drives now I am interested to see how fast they are actually, I imagine they are worth so much to use in that way but the higher capacity ones are just so expensive at the moment theyre not exactly viable for storage

I've got the Intel X25-V Gen 2 40GB and I've got 13.5GB out of 37.1GB left. It's been probably 3 months since I had it and the speed hasn't decreased at all from what I can tell. PC boots really fast and programs and games load fast too.

I have been using three different SSD in my systems.

Here is my experience with them.

A quick note is that as I understand it when you write to an SSD unless it has a free flash memory "Block" it has to first erase the block and all its contents to be able to add the new data and the anything else that was there back to the block.

This is why SSD are slower at writes than reads but still plenty fast for a normal PC.

I use a RAM drive for my temp files and internet cache files to stop a lot of small writes to my drives, wheather it will matter in the long run I do not have a clue but its easy to setup and seems to work well on my systems. I use http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...ftware/ramdisk

The drives I have are G.skill Falcon I which is a 64 GB indelinx controller based drive.

A Crucial 225 64 Gb and is another Indelinx based drive.

My main PC uses a Intel X25-M G2 80 GB, I had a failure of my WD raptor so went for the Intel.

All have worked very well I use the AHCI setting to get the best out of them in the BIOS I do not know why this is recommended but it works ok so far :)

The boot up speed is very fast, on my older 965P board the AHCI bios takes a while to detect all my drives then the SSD boots win 7 very fast.

I have a newer AMD build and the bios runs faster and the machine boots in next to no time compared to a mechanical drive.

Loading big applications, I use Photoshop Elements is a lot faster as well.

Boot times and application load times are the thing that make SSD shine.

I would say they all feel as fast as each other in use.

The G.Skill did give my netbook a better battery life and runs much cooler with the Falcon, Its not in there at the moment as I moved it to my AMD build.

When you set up the partition(s) you need to use software like win 7 that is aware of SSD to align on the proper 4096 Kb boundary for the drives.

Ok so I've used it for a couple of days now.

First off, the boot time is epic. The bios stage still happens the same, because I'm guessing all that is dealt with by some ROM on your motherboard. But once Windows actually starts to load, it goes from the little windows logo, to my login screen in about 3 or 4 seconds. Then I type in my password, and it's on the desktop with all my half dozen of background applications loaded, within another 3 or 4 seconds. So you're talking about the entire boot process being only about 8 seconds or so, which is really a lot faster than I was even expecting. I think some credit has to go to Windows 7 because it loads quite quickly these days compared to XP and stuff, but still... that is surprisingly fast.

As for gaming, it's hard to know exact figures because games used to take so long to load, that I used to just not pay attention. I would grab my phone and play a little game on it for a moment, or I'd cut my finger nails or something. Now though, it seems to be roughly something like half the time. So in Stalker Pripyat which used to take a good 40 or 50 seconds or so to load, it's now more like 20 seconds. More importantly, loading new areas used to be about 20 or 30 seconds, and it's now about 10. It's really nice.

As for space, it's an 80 gig disk, and it seems that Win7 uses about 20 or so. So that left me with 60. Then I have installed my two favourite games at the moment, STALKER Pripyat, and ARMA 2 with the Operation Arrowhead expansion. I reckon that is probably about 12 gig just for that one game alone. But even with both of those installed, I still have 37gig free. The only apps I have installed on this drive is Firefox, Winamp, VLC, and Foxit PDF viewer. Everything else I have just installed on a second normal hard disk because I don't really need everything to be very fast.

So I'll probably keep it at around 30 gig free forever. I'll play these couple of games to death and then when I'm tired of them, I'll uninstall them and install different ones in their place. So I'll never fill this disk and I'll never go beyond about 30gig free. I have a second normal hard disk which is quite fast, and that is 320gig, so I can just install most stuff on that. So long as Windows, and my most used apps and games are on my SSD, I'm happy.

For me I would say it's definitely worth it, but it was a big consideration because £170 for just an 80gig disk is quite a big deal. I'm glad I did it though now. Once they drop to under £100 it's going to be so great. Everyone will have one, and I would even buy a second one at that point. At the current price though it's kind of a guilty pleasure for me.

Hope that helps.

I have just ordered a Corsair Reactor 60GB as it was on special offer at Ebuyer for £95 and seems to get reasonable reviews.

It is still alot for a 60GB drive in my opinion but, I wanted to do a fresh install and figured this was a good time to try an SSD.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sputnik

I have just ordered a Corsair Reactor 60GB as it was on special offer at Ebuyer for £95 and seems to get reasonable reviews.

It is still alot for a 60GB drive in my opinion but, I wanted to do a fresh install and figured this was a good time to try an SSD.

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i dont want to scare u but i read on newegg that many ppl who bought the corsair reactor 60gb are having doa, like it is not seen by the bios half the time

Quote:

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Originally Posted by howareu

i dont want to scare u but i read on newegg that many ppl who bought the corsair reactor 60gb are having doa, like it is not seen by the bios half the time

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Thanks for that! Order is now cancelled :D I had enough of them problems some years ago when I managed to buy the only hard drives that did not work with the motherboard I had at that time.

All the reviews on Ebuyer seemed good but, I did read on the Corsair site that some people had a few issues with them.

Windows 7 Automatically turned off Defrag for me when I did fresh install on to my SSD, But just check yours did after you install, I have read quite a few times its best to turn off Defrag on a SSD

instal this

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Deta...&DwnldID=18455

and run the tool box every few weeks... make sure you use the Intel Management Tools and run the Optimiser :)

I've been using the toolbox since the version that worked was released.

Easiest way is to set it to schedule the activity once a week to clean up the drive.
The first time I tried it made quite a difference to a drive that had been used extensively for about 3 months.