Solid State HD for WinXP Pro / Vista boot installation….

ST Dragon · Post by **ST Dragon** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 1:26 pm

Hi,
I’m thinking about getting a Solid state HD as my 1st primary Sata II HD for installing WinXP Pro (And possibly Win Vista Ultra in the future)

This specific one caught my attention:
OCZ SSD 60GB (Sata II Core Series V2)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820227360

Its specs are superior to even the fastest 7200 – 10000RPM magnetic HD!
Sequential Access - Read Up to 170 MB/s
Sequential Access - Write Up to 98 MB/s

So, is it worth the money and will it work flawlessly / faster for installing and booting WinXP Pro / Vsta Ultra compared to traditional magnetic 7200-10000rpm HDs?

Thanks in advance

trivial · Post by **trivial** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 2:27 pm

Some HDDs have a "write protection" setting among their jumper blocks. Seems like a cheap way to see whether an OS install can do otherwise than constantly writing to its installed partition.

I'm just not motivated, personally. The hibernation file ought to be relocatable but isn't, in XP at least.

ST Dragon · Post by **ST Dragon** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 7:14 pm

It would seem that the SLC SSD are the better ones, but they're way too expensive to buy one at the moment. The one I mentioned above is an MLC SSD and not that reliable as the SLC version.

I guess I'll have to wait for this technology to ripe before I start spending my hard-earned cash on this...

What about the fusionIO drive? Does it live up to its incredible claims? 600MB/s write and read??
http://www.fusionio.com/Products.aspx

iatneH · Post by **iatneH** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 11:16 pm

You might want to read some of the complaints of MLC drives over at the eeeuser forum, especially for running an OS from one.

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 11:56 pm

price : performance for SSCs isn't quite up there to make them worth it yet - even before factoring in the much smaller size. Maybe in two years.

ST Dragon · Post by **ST Dragon** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 8:50 am

This RiDATA NSSD is it SLC or MLC?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820183202

But does it really matter for booting an O/S if it's SLC or MLC?
I mean with these speeds:
Sequential Access - Read 152Mb/s
Sequential Access - Write 96MB/s

and even the OCZ SSD 60GB (Sata II Core Series V2)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227360

Sequential Access - Read Up to 170 MB/s
Sequential Access - Write Up to 98 MB/s

They both put a 10000RPM HD to shame!

I'm really considering of getting one but I'll have to read through some forums 1st!

I also found this article concerning SSD:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/731- ... alent.html

trivial · Post by **trivial** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 3:52 pm

Price would be no object here if MS had the foresight to force lazy writes for everything, until shutdown or until the (dedicated?) RAM write buffer ran out. Could a caching SATA/SAS controller possibly fix?

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 10:29 pm

trivial wrote:Price would be no object here if MS had the foresight to force lazy writes for everything, until shutdown or until the (dedicated?) RAM write buffer ran out. Could a caching SATA/SAS controller possibly fix?

Intel's latest (the X-25) does this in hardware and while there is a lot of benefit, it doesn't put it above regular platter drives in all categories; it doesn't perform all that much better than platter drives in the best of cases, and still costs all out of proportion.

However, it's very close now, on performance alone.

I'm all for green and better tech, but wait for the things to come down in price / capacities to go up, I say. Alternatively, if Intel couples newer flash tech (SLC and 65nm technology) with their new write chip, it possibly could be an instantly winning technology (price again aside, of course).

Twiddle · Post by **Twiddle** » Tue Oct 14, 2008 2:33 am

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820609330

this is pretty good for an SSD drive, but it's more for the insane transfer rate (and far better reliability than lolraptorlol) than the 4 watt savings you'll get

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Tue Oct 14, 2008 4:20 am

Seagate moving to SSDs in 2009 - pretty much in line with what we've all been thinking so far.

A minor point towards SSDs: here storage space is defined in the same way as RAM, i.e. by powers-of-two 1024 byte kilobytes (renamed kibble bytes by people with overactive imaginations and an unholy love for dogfood), whereas traditional platter drives have 1000 byte kilobytes and 1BN byte gigabytes. The difference stays proportionally the same year in and out, but it's annoying to be losing (on platter drives) 300 MB or more from what you'd think you'll get on the box.

Twiddle · Post by **Twiddle** » Wed Oct 15, 2008 5:19 pm

i wonder if they ever fixed that "static spark = whoops your flash drive is wiped" thing

ST Dragon · Post by **ST Dragon** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 9:09 pm

That happened to me last month on my 8GB supertalent pico usb!

A very frustrating experience indeed!

iatneH · Post by **iatneH** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 10:03 pm

OK, my eeePC 900 has a 4GB SLC drive and a 16GB MLC drive.

The MLC........ is...... bloody.... slow.....

I copied a ~780MB file to it and it took over 20 minutes. I tried installing MS Visual Studio 2005 to it (about 2 GB) and it took the better part of 3 hours.

Copying the same file to the SLC drive took about 5 minutes. Better, but still no match for a mechanical hard drive.

At any rate, you DO NOT want to run an OS from a MLC drive.

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 10:18 pm

iatneH wrote:At any rate, you DO NOT want to run an OS from a MLC drive.

Writes = slow
Reads = faster

Even aside painting all MLC drives with a broad brush (yes the tech is generally inferior, but not all MLC drives are) - You're using the drive for installing regular programs and writing data, aren't you? If you can put up with the initial time period required to write the OS, and the infrequent small updates from Microsoft Update, it should fine if you use another, faster drive for data and program storage.

JigsawMan · Post by **JigsawMan** » Sat Oct 18, 2008 2:20 pm

I put 4 Raptor 150 drives in my desktop and put them in RAID-0. Using HD Tach I get 250MB/s constant transfer speeds on the Long bench and 150MB/s on the Quick benchmark. Burst transfer is 2260MB/s. That is with the built in Intel Matrix Raid. It isn't that noisy either. It makes photoshop fly...

I have had Solid state in my laptop for a while (32GB but I forget the brand) and I am not that fussed on it, but the newer models are much better.