SSD Help

I'm thinking about getting a bootdrive (32/40GB) SSD but am unsure on what to look for/get. I have a few questions that I'm a bit confused about.

Uses:
Bootdrive
Company of Heroes
Firefox
Any other small programs I can think of (Spotify and the like)

For these, would I need a drive that has both top end Write and Read speeds (like the F60) or something a bit cheaper do the job just as well (as in, not paying £30 for a 1second gain)?

With it being a boot drive, would having a RAID make it quicker? I saw in the Hexus review that it does help obviously, but would real world advantages on booting make it worthwhile?

Is it worth me waiting a month and seeing if they drop in price as predicted?

I need to look into them more but just want some guidance really as I've not looked and been confused when I've seen people talking about the different firmware (I think) issues with different models (OCZ Mainly?) but dunno if these affect it for what I'd use it for. There's no rush in getting one.

Check out the Corsair F40, they're about £90 atm and one of the best drives you can buy :).

Really would be considering a 60GB tbh, especially if you're putting a big game like COH on it, or you might find you're out of space pretty quickly, plus the SSD controller can use the extra space for 'overprovisioning' which will potentially increase the health and overall life of the drive. With the price differential between the 60s and 40s being ~£20 atm I think the larger drive is better value.

Main reason most are not using RAID with SSDs is that TRIM is unsupported, which means the performance will drop over a relatively short period of time. Plus the real world difference won't be that noticeable with SSDs, they're fast enough as it is.

I chose the Vertex 2E as it seemed the best supported, highest performance drive overall for my system (using SATA 2). The price of these has dropped more than £25 in the last month since I bought it (currently on SCAN TO @ £108.09) which seems like a very good deal to me.

On ebuyer a 64gb kingston SSD is £80. That's what I'm getting when the pocket money comes through ;D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by nibbler

On ebuyer a 64gb kingston SSD is £80. That's what I'm getting when the pocket money comes through ;D

---

Yeah, is what I thought...whether to go with one of them as it's cheaper than a F40...but wasn't sure how much performance impact there is on real world. That said, I don't need that much room really either so is it worth going for the F40...but also agree with marktime in that more space is always good :p

The kingston SSD is a good SSD. And in the real world you will notice no difference. Boot time and level load in games will be identical IMO.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by nibbler

The kingston SSD is a good SSD. And in the real world you will notice no difference. Boot time and level load in games will be identical IMO.

---

Yeah, tis what I thought. What about other SSDs? Like the OCZ series or are they all a bit meh?

OCZ are good but I really would just get the 60GB kingston will you can for £80. The price changes every day and by the time they're £100 again (could be by monday) it would probably be worth paying anotehr tenner for an OCZ or Corsair.

I agree, but nor do I have the money currently :p But nice try into talking me into spending money ;)

I'll keep an eye out for the Kingston then, as long as I know which one's good then I'll be happy. Does it have any issue with controllers/firmware?

Don't think so. I'll have enough for it at the end of the month, here's hoping they're still £75 D:

Intel X25-M. I have two, and an X25-V for an unimportant no-moving-parts server.

They're also supposed to be releasing G3 sometime "very soon."

As an indication of the performance of the Vertex 2E, a large COH map loads about 10 secs faster (29s v 19s), once in-game there really is no performance gain to be had if you have loads of system/video RAM.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by nibbler

The kingston SSD is a good SSD. And in the real world you will notice no difference. Boot time and level load in games will be identical IMO.

---

I've owned a cheap SSD and I've owned Intel SSDs, and I'm sorry, but there is a definite difference in everything you do on the PC.

You can either get more storage or more speed, up to you at the end of the day :).

Should I be looking into RAID at all?

What did you have matty? Also, what did you have installed on it that you saw the differences in? Kingston aren't exactly bad from what I know :p The Read is similar, just the write is slower (F40;280/270, King; 200/110).

Any idea on the G3 specs or is it going to be a very similar drive to the Corsair F-series?

Yeah, it's mainly the CoH load times that are what I want as some of the 4v4 maps can be a bit of a chug.

I'd recommend you stay away from RAID until they get TRIM working with it first..

I had a Samsung ages ago, and it was good, obviously, but once I got my first Intel drive I was absolutely blown away by the performance of the drive, it was faster and smoother in everything it did.

Don't get drawn in by the "sequential read and writes". They're just big numbers that they put on their descriptions cos people know those numbers from HDDs. What you really want is a higher IOPS number for your SSD, that's their real strength.

The Corsair boasts 50,000 IOPS compared to the Kingston's 3,900.

From what I can see both have 4k IOPs...am I missing something? Or do you say that both kingston and corsair are similarly good? :p

Yeah, was thinking of avoiding RAID, just wondered. I'd basically just convert my current HDD into storage.