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Thread: Pondering SSD

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    Studmuffin Flibb's Avatar
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    Pondering SSD

    I have decided to do some mid life PC upgrades, and am waiting for some more DDR2 to arrive. Going to stick with the same MOBO, CPU, GPU for now, so that leaves the HD as the next culprit for an upgrade.

    My Asus Motherboard lists 6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports , so a DDR2 SSD would appear to be the way to go. I can then sort through my existing mechanical HDs for the best candidate as my bulk drive. My main usage for the PC is games, with a bit of photo editing on the side. My max budget would be about £150, so I can afford a 120GB drive, although I am tempted to get a smaller drive to save some cash and go for a 64Gb model. So any recomendations for suitable drives?

    Cheers

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    Re: Pondering SSD

    Hi Flib,

    First off, good call, SSD makes a monster difference to your PC's responsiveness (not sure that is correct spelling).

    The choice you have at the moment is to go for the slightly older generation drives which are mostly givin read speeds between 220 and 275mb/s or to go for one of the new generation ones jsut out which are coming in over 400 mb/s read speeds. I don't mention write speeds as this can be affected by the drive size (i.e a lot of 128gb SSD drives write a lot quicker than th 60/64gb ones)

    I personally have a kingston v100 64gb. It is pretty cheap, about £80 and reads at about 220mb/s. In a word, it is awesome!! The difference in day to day response and program response over mechanical is fabulous. For a few more quid, you could get an OCZ Vertex2e (£90 ish) which is a 285/275 read/write, so pretty tasty - the 128mb version is about £155. Ok, these are all SATA II and tbh will make you huge difference.

    The brand new drives out have full SATA III support and can read around 450 mb/s plus. Again the write times are variable with size and manufacturer. They are also a lot more expensive. For example the OCZ Vertex 3 128gb costs approx £210. There are also some comprimise next gen drives about such as the OCZ Agility 3. This uses some differnet (cheaper hardware) - as a result its claim max performance is the same as the Vertex3, but its real world performance is a lot less.

    One of the big "issues" that the review sites are trying to express is that there is a big range in performance on these drives comparing claimed speeds to real world. The next fen drives claim approx double speed, but depending on the app, this figure is rarely achieved. You could read half a dozen reviews on this to get a better picture.

    Personally, I would look at the OCZ range as they seem to get very good reviews pretty well across the board, and with your budget would pick the OCZ Vertex2e, or maybe splash a few extra quid on the OCZ Agility 3 which is quicker in certain apps. The new Crucal models look intersting too, but again more expensive.


    Here s very recent review on Crucials latest M4 range, worth a read as you can see how variable different combinations of controllers can be. You can also see taht some of the ultra fast drives, when it comes to things like application loading, are only 20% or so quicker than my cheap little kingston drive - so are they worth the expense?

    http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=30751
    Last edited by Ed Omega; 12-06-2011 at 04:33 PM.

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    Studmuffin Flibb's Avatar
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    Re: Pondering SSD

    Thanks for the advice. Going to search out some more reviews and have a think. The V100 looks interesting, and I have been consdering the 96GB version.

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