SSD storage, Good time to buy or worth another wait?

imitation

I'm currently eyeing up SSD devices as a mini upgrade to my PC. The main reason is that my current hard drive is a bit of a pig and by rights should just be formatted. I have heard promising stories of the new generation SSDs that are out now, especially for loading times for video games (such as WoW) and general boot up time. I would need about 100gb for all my space hogging games. Is it a good time to buy or is there something better on the horizon already ?

Outkast_IRE

the best prices are for the 80gb drives , i like the intel ones myself, the bigger drives the prices tend to go crazy, if you can get by on a 80gb drive then go for the intel ones, good prices at the moment, if you want bigger id hold off for prices to drop

PogMoThoin

They're way too pricey to use for storage, use them for operating system only where 60-80Gb is loads, move Your documents and music etc to another drive. They have limited number of writes so You'll have to disable the pagefile (or move it) and don't defrag it (they dont need it anyways)

Tea_Bag

ive been keeping an eye on SSD's for quite some time now, looking for a bargain to justify the price.

the absolute best value for money SSD out there at the moment is this, its only just got the permanent price on ebuyer to being under £100. its by far one of the fastest out there, has a sandforce controller, and 50 000 IOPS.

if you can stretch, buy 2 and RAID0 them to get 120gb with insane speeds.

...or you could get a nice cheap intel X25 SSD

Tea_Bag

hmm

while looking up SSD's again, i stumbled across a misspriced 90gb SSD. ordered 2, but i doubt amazon will send it out.

price is fixed now, but not an order of magnitude fix, which is interesting.

Solitaire

If that arrived it would be EPIC LULZ

indough

im going for a c300 64gb at 134euro
was considering a revodrive but dont want to give up a pcie slot as i already need to stick a decent prosumer sound card in one

Tea_Bag

Tea_Bag wrote: »

the absolute best value for money SSD out there at the moment is this, its only just got the permanent price on ebuyer to being under £100. its by far one of the fastest out there, has a sandforce controller, and 50 000 IOPS.

now down to £89.99 with promo code SOLID

Jonny7

Anyone have any experience running XP on one of these? any issues? I still refuse to upgrade but would like to get myself an ssd soon.

Tea_Bag

Jonny7 wrote: »

Anyone have any experience running XP on one of these? any issues? I still refuse to upgrade but would like to get myself an ssd soon.

you're going to have issues because XP/Vista doesn't support TRIM or page file optimizations, so the SSD will degrade very very quickly.

im an XP fan myself, i still think its the best OS to date, but since i built my new PC, i moved to W7 (dredded it too) but in all honesty, ive adjusted far faster than i thought it would.

also XP x64 (which i concidered) is woefull, and not industry supported.

imitation

Thanks for the replys, I would need at least a 100 gig to fit on windows + my most used games. Drives at that price bracket are a bit saucy (200 + euros) so I think I might wait it out. Hybrid drives are looking interesting too though, like the Seagate Momentus XT, but theres a few wrinkles there too, like lack of raid support and some performance problems caused by power saving mode.

Tea_Bag

should i be worried that the amazon marketplace seller im buying my cheapo SSD's from isnt selling anything anymore?

i havent gotten a cancelation email, nor a dispatched email.

sorry for the thread hijack OP.

Solitaire

Um... yes

Surely you have some level of fraud protection on that card anyway?

Tea_Bag

Solitaire wrote: »

Um... yes

Surely you have some level of fraud protection on that card anyway?

yeah i assume so, no money has been taken out anyway.

Solitaire

Fail transaction is fail??

Tea_Bag

Solitaire wrote: »

Fail transaction is fail??

well i only started getting my hopes up after no cancelation email came up....

Tea_Bag

just got the cancelation email. no reason given for the cancelation.

******** *** *** *** ****** **** **** ***** !!!!
bloody chunders.

Solitaire

Ah well, it was a one-in-a-million shot anyway :)

imitation

No problem, its typical that after finding an amazon market place that will ship to Ireland they disappear. I'll always wonder why amazon decided to dilute there own rather good service with a bunch of ebay wannabes.

On topic, I went for a Momentus XT, it has 5x the storage of a 100gb ssd at half the price, and according to a friend its very good for gaming, and pretty close to ssd performance (provided you disable some power management feature that spins down the disk after a few minutes).

marco_polo

imitation wrote: »

No problem, its typical that after finding an amazon market place that will ship to Ireland they disappear. I'll always wonder why amazon decided to dilute there own rather good service with a bunch of ebay wannabes.

On topic, I went for a Momentus XT, it has 5x the storage of a 100gb ssd at half the price, and according to a friend its very good for gaming, and pretty close to ssd performance (provided you disable some power management feature that spins down the disk after a few minutes).

Not too bad a compromise all considered, as it is quite good at improving start times of certain repetitive read tasks like game and OSloading, especially if you only tend to have one or two games on the go at any one time (so they stay in the 4Gb flash cache). Shame you have to put the OS on it though as rebooting overwrites much of the cached application data each time. As all round drives though I still think the top 3.5" HDDs are perhaps a slightly better option.

The load performance here is very good (For certain usage profiles)
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/seagate-momentus-xt_8.html#sect0

Outkast_IRE

Just to reawaken this thread a bit just found a Intel X25-M 160GB SSD SATA Solit State 2,5 - BRAND NEW for 270

that seems like a pretty good deal ya? heres the ebay seller

http://cgi.ebay.ie/Intel-X25-M-160GB-SSD-SATA-Solit-State-2-5-BRAND-NEW-/260690371353?pt=UK_Computing_HardDrives_RL&hash=item3cb25b6319

was thinkin of upgrading graphics card but this is tempting me:)

Jonny7

search for intel x25 160 and click the completed listings box (you may need to sign in)

some go for a good bit less but you may have to be the early bird to get them

slave1

Lads, Ebuyer have a 60gig SSD (Corsair/OCZ/Crucial) for a list price of £84.99 until 1PM today...P+P extra of course, spiffing value