SSDs

Does anyone have one? (Dynamik, it doesn't say "STDs")

I'm probably getting a new laptop around September timeframe (need more screen real estate).

I'd really like to pick up an SSD from the start. Is anyone using one? Any recommendations?

I'm looking at this one: Newegg.com - Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2MH160G2R5 2.5" 160GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I'm really hoping that prices will drop significantly by then. I'd feel better getting 200GB+, which seems to be the point where the price skyrockets at the moment.

MS

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cablegod

eMeS wrote: »

Does anyone have one? (Dynamik, it doesn't say "STDs")

I'm probably getting a new laptop around September timeframe (need more screen real estate).

I'd really like to pick up an SSD from the start. Is anyone using one? Any recommendations?

I'm looking at this one: Newegg.com - Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2MH160G2R5 2.5" 160GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I'm really hoping that prices will drop significantly by then. I'd feel better getting 200GB+, which seems to be the point where the price skyrockets at the moment.

MS

I have a couple of users with that model drive, and they are pretty snappy for what they use them for. I just put a 200GB version of the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE in our SVP's Latitude E6510 (quad-i7, 8gb ram). I know, it's ridiculously priced, but the performance is ridiculous too. He needs it though. He does on-site demos of our software to prospective clients and does demos at trade shows. Speed sells when it comes to our applications. They run on an Oracle backend, and he needs all the speed he can get for those demos since he has a demo-customized copy of one of our development DB schemas running in a local Oracle instance on his laptop. It works great for his use of it.

Compare the Read/Write numbers, and the other features of the OWC drive if speed is of the essence to you. You may be fine with a $400 SSD, but then again, you might want the even faster writes of the OWC drive. I know the ones we are using has a 5 year warranty too, and the wear-leveling technology it uses is supposedly great.

Check it out here: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE Solid State Drive (SSD) RAID Ready - High Performance, Reliability, and Endurance

eMeS

cablegod wrote: »

I have a couple of users with that model drive, and they are pretty snappy for what they use them for. I just put a 200GB version of the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE in our SVP's Latitude E6510 (quad-i7, 8gb ram). I know, it's ridiculously priced, but the performance is ridiculous too. He needs it though. He does on-site demos of our software to prospective clients and does demos at trade shows. Speed sells when it comes to our applications. They run on an Oracle backend, and he needs all the speed he can get for those demos since he has a demo-customized copy of one of our development DB schemas running in a local Oracle instance on his laptop. It works great for his use of it.

Compare the Read/Write numbers, and the other features of the OWC drive if speed is of the essence to you. You may be fine with a $400 SSD, but then again, you might want the even faster writes of the OWC drive. I know the ones we are using has a 5 year warranty too, and the wear-leveling technology it uses is supposedly great.

Check it out here: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE Solid State Drive (SSD) RAID Ready - High Performance, Reliability, and Endurance

Thanks! That's a sweet drive. I like it, but I can't see dropping $700 on one...I'll only end up spending about $1200 on the laptop.

Also the dilemma I'm having at the moment is that I'll be dropping down from a 500GB drive in my current laptop to whatever I end up with. It's nice to not have to worry about deleting stuff and keeping it clean....

MS

cablegod

Maybe look into getting a notebook with 2 drive bays? SSD in one and 7200rpm sata in the other?

eMeS

cablegod wrote: »

Maybe look into getting a notebook with 2 drive bays? SSD in one and 7200rpm sata in the other?

Nah...I'm getting another MBP...get a sweet deal on them. If I'm not mistaken you can't get two disks in them.

MS

cablegod

Ah, I knew you were a smart man. I love the uni-body design of the newer models. They sure have gorgeous displays. I take it you're going for the 17" one. Our guys run 15's and a few 13's. We've had zero problems except for 2 disk failures. No 17's yet. I had a 17" pre-unibody one and loved it. I sold it off and got a new 15" unibody one to replace it.

dynamik

Why don't you just get an external 2.5" USB drive for archive data? There's no sense in paying a premium for storing data that's going to be accessed infrequently.

For example, you could put all your work stuff on that and then use your SSD for your high-def midget S&M pr0n (which is what I presume you need a higher resolution screen for).

eMeS

cablegod wrote: »

Ah, I knew you were a smart man. I love the uni-body design of the newer models. They sure have gorgeous displays. I take it you're going for the 17" one. Our guys run 15's and a few 13's. We've had zero problems except for 2 disk failures. No 17's yet. I had a 17" pre-unibody one and loved it. I sold it off and got a new 15" unibody one to replace it.

I haven't actually seen one of the unibody's dissected...I have an MBP 15" from 2008....taking it apart and putting a new disk in is like doing brain surgery...I really hope it's better on the new ones.

I am going for a 17" display. I always thought that would be too big of a laptop, but have recently changed my mind.

MS

Devilsbane

cablegod wrote: »

Maybe look into getting a notebook with 2 drive bays? SSD in one and 7200rpm sata in the other?

Thats what I did. My C: drive is a 60GB SSD and my secondary drive is a 640GB 5400RPM which is where I keep documents and install programs to.

The SSD is going to save battery life because the OS is installed on it. My secondary drive usually only gets used when I am accessing files and I can hear it spin up.

Between my ssd, windows 7, an i7, and ddr3 ram my laptop turns on in 26 seconds. It takes longer to come out of hibernation.

My SSD was like $250 and the HDD was $110 or something like that both off of newegg.

tpatt100

I can't justify for myself to get one. But maybe I need to see a side by side comparison.

eMeS

dynamik wrote: »

Why don't you just get an external 2.5" USB drive for archive data? There's no sense in paying a premium for storing data that's going to be accessed infrequently.

For example, you could put all your work stuff on that and then use your SSD for your high-def midget S&M pr0n (which is what I presume you need a higher resolution screen for).

Because I want to carry as little stuff around as possible...

MS

Lamini

Ive purchased two Sager NP9280s. Theyre almost identical. These are (were?) the only laptops in the world using desktop processors, the I7-920. Of course, two of the hard drives are Intel X25 (gen 2) SSDs in raid0. Takes 13seconds to boot once the micro$oft stuff is shown. ~5-10MB Photo$hop files open in the blink of an eye, compared to ~15sec on a dual core. I opened up google the first time and thought it was cached, for the first time in years, I was not waiting for the computer, it was waiting for me. However, this was probably the laptop itself and not the SSDs alone.

Tomshardware has the benchmarks SSDs, Anandtech has some of the most detailed and thorough details, Intel has whitepapers. Read the newegg/amazon reviews, they cost pay they themselves back in no time. I started putting these into my systems and wow. Compared to my standard pair of velociraptors in raid0, you can still tell the difference, but coming as a standard non power user (typical dual core laptop), the difference is "night and day". It is the best upgrade you can probably get for a laptop that doesnt already have SSDs. Ive purchased more and replaced standard laptop HDDs with the SSDs, I would say the improvement is 30%+ compared to the OEM drives (4500rpm-5400rpm), but I also compared it to WDs Scorpio (7200rpm SATA Laptop drive - gets hot). I did not even get into IOPS, this is where SSDs SHINE (yes, I have a pair of SSDs (raid0) on a server (s2k8+e2k10), with a backup drive of course... not that Ive needed it, its been running solid for months).

Remember, the HDD is one the last mechanical part of our computers and probably what slows down todays computers more than anything. Windows 7 and Server 2008 (?) has native support for ICH10, built in support for TRIM, etc.

phantasm

I'm really interested in the SSD's but I'm waiting for the price per GB to come down a bit. I can't justify the current prices, no matter how cool it is.

MentholMoose

Unless you want to spend $600+ then you will just have to decide if the massive performance increase outweighs the loss in storage space. The Intel SSDs have been consistently well-rounded, having good performance and space for the price, so they are a good choice. The OWC Mercury Extreme and other SSDs with SandForce controllers (OCZ Vertex LE and Vertex 2) are generally acknowledged to have the performance crown right now, but they have less space for the price.

eMeS

MentholMoose wrote: »

Unless you want to spend $600+ then you will just have to decide if the massive performance increase outweighs the loss in storage space. The Intel SSDs have been consistently well-rounded, having good performance and space for the price, so they are a good choice. The OWC Mercury Extreme and other SSDs with SandForce controllers (OCZ Vertex LE and Vertex 2) are generally acknowledged to have the performance crown right now, but they have less space for the price.

The really sad thing is that 3-5 years from now this will be a really dumb discussion....

My first hard disk ever was for an Apple IIe back in the late 80's. It was a whopping 10MB, was about 1 foot long x 6 inches tall x 4 inches thick, and cost about $900 I think...I'm guessing that 3-5 years from now SSDs will be a standard thing and will be provide much more space per $.

MS

MentholMoose

eMeS wrote: »

I'm guessing that 3-5 years from now SSDs will be a standard thing and will be provide much more space per $.

I can't wait!!

Devilsbane

MentholMoose wrote: »

Unless you want to spend $600+ then you will just have to decide if the massive performance increase outweighs the loss in storage space. The Intel SSDs have been consistently well-rounded, having good performance and space for the price, so they are a good choice. The OWC Mercury Extreme and other SSDs with SandForce controllers (OCZ Vertex LE and Vertex 2) are generally acknowledged to have the performance crown right now, but they have less space for the price.

I have an OCZ, they seem to be the best for the price. Again, you don't need to have a 300GB SSD, if your laptop has two drive bays just stick a smaller and cheaper one to boot off of and use a conventional drive to save files to.

hypnotoad

I have several SSDs from Intel and OCZ because our boss read they were good so now every rotational hard drive is "an abomination". He won't buy even a netbook without an SSD.

Remember, if a system breaks, no matter what the cause, the solution is to buy an SSD to fix the abomination.

I personally dont care for them.

Devilsbane

hypnotoad wrote: »

Remember, if a system breaks, no matter what the cause, the solution is to buy an SSD to fix the abomination.

SSD's will replace duct tape as the #1 fixer. Car won't start? Install an SSD.

excalibur1814

Macbook: " zero problems except for 2 disk failures"

Could mean that the macpros have poor ventilation!

I've used Crucial 64Gb drives with no problems at all and although they might not be as fast as the Intel versions, the price seems just fine (But then again, they could be cheaper)

cablegod

I really believe that SSD will eventually replace server spindles within the next 10 years for performance-sensitive use. I'm talking about enterprise-class SSD. Not the type most people know of or use. Most SSD that ships in servers today isn't worth the money, with the exception of HP's use of the Fusion I/O PCI-E SSD. That SSD is a beast. OCZ has enterprise-class PCI-E SSD available today in MLC NAND and SLC NAND flavors. I have some on order right now, right after I finished proof-of-concept testing the 2TB MLC version with Oracle 11g R2. The amount of spindles required in a SAN to hit ~3GByte/s read/write and 200000+ IOPS is dizzying in comparison. Count the savings in rackspace, power, cooling, SAN expertise, man-hours maintaining said SAN, and developer time building complex indexing schemes to get a performance gain from spindle storage, and you'll see the light just like I did. SAN will not go away completely, don't get me wrong. It will still be used for some light clustering, file sharing, etc, but it will not be used as much for high performance storage. Companies will use a combination of localized SSD and SAN SSD (read: Texas Memory Systems and the like) for HPCC and database storage. EMC's currently available EFD (Enterprise Flash Drive) is a pure joke to me performance/cost-wise. They should drop it all together and buy Texas Memory Systems & re-brand it as EMC. I've tested both, and the EMC EFD cannot even think about the galaxy TMS is in performance-wise and cost-wise.

Ok, I'm off my soapbox now.