SSD Advice

I am eventually some day in the next year or so going to *shudder* build a new PC. I have not built my own in a number of years, the last time I did it was a single core Athlon something or other and SATA drives were coming on the market.

Currently I have a Dell XPS 420 running Windows 7 64 bit. It has dual core Intel E6850 3GHZ. I replaced the Nvidia 8800 GT that came with it and installed a Radeon 5850 for gaming. I had a Radeon 4870 in it before that but this card made the desktop feel like somebody left the oven door open. It blew hot air out the back of the card like it should but it raised the temperature in my room considerably. The 5850 barely emits any heat.

Anyways I will build a new PC and will bring the blu ray drive that came with the Dell, the video card to the new machine.

I notice a lot of hard drive thrashing when I multi task on this machine. It was not always like that I figure the machine is getting older and the games now are making it work harder. I checked performance monitor and my CPU utilization is low, ram available is 1.5 gig out of the three I have.

I figure if WOW is running loading the textures and graphics is making the machine crawl, and I notice some spreadsheets in Excel load slowly (they have macros in them).

Would upgrade the IDE drive to SSD make a noticeable improvement? I was thinking of loading the OS on the SSD drive and a couple of games. I would locate the iTunes directory and my files used less often on the IDE drive which I would set up as a second drive.

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Comments

SteveLord

I run an SSD in my tablet and 4 SSDs in my desktop. No turning back.

They also do a good job at revitalizing older laptops.

hypnotoad

They're also great if you're a consultant and want to spend someone else's money if for no other reason than SSDs excite you.

msteinhilber

tiersten wrote: »

The original OCZ Vertex drives which used an Indilinx controller are awful. They've got software bugs which will quietly corrupt your data if you hit certain configurations. The OCZ response is to wipe it clean and try again.

I was having issues with my 30GB Vertex Turbo's (Indilinx controller) in my configuration where a drive at random would either flag degraded in my stripe or the array would simply not boot after Windows gets corrupted. Since then back in June or July I think it was, FW 1.6 came out and I've been smooth sailing since. But yea, until the new flash version came out there seemed to be certain configurations that just were far from reliable and the typical fix was to perform a sanitary erase and reinstall or reimage. Those were certainly some frustrating times since it seemed like every two or three weeks I was reloading.

Paul Boz

The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

all you need to know about SSDs can be found at Andandtech. The Intel SSDs are still the best on the market according to the studies I've read. I've got a 120gig Intel SSD in my laptop and it flies. 8 gigs of ram, quad core, and SSD = zero lag time for file access. You can get the Intel 120gb drives for as little as $240 now.