what to get, 60gb or 120gb ssd?

[watercooled]

Provided you don't install every application you can think of to the SSD I think 60GB should be more than enough for most people. Anything you struggle to fit on that probably consists of a small number of huge files which, as I said before, should run fine from a HDD. I'd be fine with a 40GB SDD, which I am considering buying.

[mjwebb]

It really depends on what you'll use it for there was a post on rock paper shotgun about speeding up game loading times through an ssd, the other option is multimedia work but your best bet there would be spending more on ram first. The 60gb is fine for the os loading speed and pretty and your favorite game of the moment.

[Hicks12]

indeed, ive been playing starcraft 2 for almost a year now and its clearly set to be a permanent game so that will go on if its possible, if not it will be CSS as im still playing that lol

[Hicks12]

just found out my motherboard doesnt support ahci... wth >.<, even my 2 year old latitudelappy supports it!.

guess it will just have to be normal mode then

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I wish SSDs would start dropping in price quicker now!! ATM it seems that newer solid state modules have less read/write cycles than the older ones too which seems to negate some of the cost advantage, but it is about time that new 80GB to 100GB SSDs start dropping to around £100 or more.

The way the hard disk market is going we only have Seagate and Western Digital to choose from now and with other components shortages too this will mean we will be probably paying more in the near future.

[Hicks12]

well there is something i read about the 25nm, sure the nand itself has less read/writes but the process in which is does it has been greatly improved so wearleveling etc are even better so it pretty much makes the difference negligible if not better.

Main reason i jumped for this drive is because ive seen the price going down and now its started to go back up, i thought to myself i may aswell get it before it continues to go back up as the scan deal made it pretty close to lowest price its been.

It would be great to see the 80gb drives near £100 but i bet they wont, either its to expensive or they are to geedy!.

Apparently my motherboard supports ahci, http://support.asus.com/faq/Detail.a...0-51810D8AD552 asus FAQ says about it, however everything else says it doesnt have it and its not present in the bios... although the manual says it supports NCQ and power management and hot swaping, i presume this is essentially ahci but defaulted.

[watercooled]

I wish SSDs would start dropping in price quicker now!! ATM it seems that newer solid state modules have less read/write cycles than the older ones too which seems to negate some of the cost advantage, but it is about time that new 80GB to 100GB SSDs start dropping to around £100 or more.

The way the hard disk market is going we only have Seagate and Western Digital to choose from now and with other components shortages too this will mean we will be probably paying more in the near future.

What's wrong with Samsung/Hitachi? The days of the Deathstar are long gone and Samsung drives usually offer the best value in the UK.

@Hicks12: Make sure you have the latest BIOS.

Edit: Just read the article on the Seagate/Samsung deal.

[Hicks12]

i have the latest, clearly asus dont support boards all to well .

Oh well, so far so good... time for benchmarking in a bit

[watercooled]

You could always do what I was considering (before I sorted my problem by using AMD's drivers instead of the Windows ones) and buy a SATA PCI-E card. The Highpoint cards seem to be well-regarded.

[Hicks12]

would using one of them allow me to use ahci?

[watercooled]

Provided said card supports it, yes.

[Hicks12]

Ok well ill look at some cards, dont want to spend much though and those HP card seem to be fairly expensive .

On another note, not impressed with this drive at all!
Look at these benchmarks:



Isnt that great is it? Especially the atto benchmark, it takes ages to get 200+ and never manages its rated speed, writes off by 70 and read off by a more acceptable 30ish.

Compared to my lappys intel :



Now you may say, well it beats the intel but thats just a g2 and is ADVERTISED with a speed of something like 180mb/s read and 40mb/s write, it does perform perfectly to spec, however the f60 is actually slower for most of the atto benchmark and in the crystal is loses on the last test alot.

And ive also found this drive is "laggy", stuttering and slowing down a fair bit just from trying to multi task a bit, i.e opening a download while opening a word document will take about same if not longer than my HDD, havent seen this on my intel drive... its as if im using one of the old crappy drives!

Im going to search for firmware updates now...

edit: Ive checked and im using the latest firmware, ive also used crystaldisk info which says TRIM/NCQ are working but APM isnt enabled, so it seems as if i got half of ahci ... however APM shouldnt affect my drives performance surely? Only power savings etc or am i being stupid?

[pedro6994]

I went for 120GB Crucial C300 and it is fantastic. There was no point in me geting a 60gb as I would have always been deleting files and worrying about filling it up. Also I only have sata 300 so was no point in getting C400.

[Zak33]

What's wrong with ..../Hitachi? The days of the Deathstar are long gone

hey.. I found someone else who likes the latest deathstars in public

I love them.. best 1 TB drives I've ever used. Fast, quiet, and awesome value.. and no death's from those stars so far

[watercooled]

Am I right in thinking Hitachi released the first 7200rpm 2TB drives?

[dangel]

Leave defrag enabled, Windows will disable it for the SSD, but your storage drive will still need defragging.

Only other things I do are;
- do a powercfg -h off to turn off hibernation
- set a 2GB fixed pagefile on the SSD (I have 8GB of RAM, but still keep a pagefile)
- disable drive indexing on the SSD (drive properties)
.

Personally, I don't do any of that - hibernation is useful, paging is largely misunderstood and a non issue from a performance perspective (especially so with SSD) and drive indexing hangups appear to date back to the days when drives had issues with it. My drive supports TRIM, doesn't appear to degrade and i've yet to see significant wear on it that makes me think it'll die before i'm ready to replace it. Seen on all three SSD systems I have. Windows 7 was designed for SSDs - let it do it's thang.