SSD Upgrade Advice

Serephucus

So, the day has finally come - I've talked myself into upgrading my very old 32GB OCZ Onyx.

Just looking for general opinion. I'm going for the 120GB area, and I'm pretty sure everyone here will recommend the M4, but I might as well be thorough.

Truth be told, I'm not that bothered about performance. My SSD only gets 130/70 read/write, so any one of these will be a huge improvement, and even then I find my SSD a big jump over a regular drive. I'm mainly going for capacity here. So, with that in mind:

M4 for €158
Petrol for €128
830 for €183
Force 3 for €141
Agility 3 for €144

Yeah, I know, SF3 drives = 98% chance of BSOD hell, but AFAIK most of the problems have been ironed out by now, correct? Any other thoughts / suggestions?

M00lers

You already know the answer dude!! M4 is a bargain a the moment.

Unregistered.

Serephucus wrote: »

So, the day has finally come - I've talked myself into upgrading my very old 32GB OCZ Onyx.

Just looking for general opinion. I'm going for the 120GB area, and I'm pretty sure everyone here will recommend the M4, but I might as well be thorough.

Truth be told, I'm not that bothered about performance. My SSD only gets 130/70 read/write, so any one of these will be a huge improvement, and even then I find my SSD a big jump over a regular drive. I'm mainly going for capacity here. So, with that in mind:

M4 for €158
Petrol for €128
830 for €183
Force 3 for €141
Agility 3 for €144

Yeah, I know, SF3 drives = 98% chance of BSOD hell, but AFAIK most of the problems have been ironed out by now, correct? Any other thoughts / suggestions?

M4 looks like the best value when you take all-round performance into account as well as factoring in reliability. Remember both the Force 3 and the Agility 3 are only 120 GB, so are probably close to the M4 in €/GB.

Serephucus

Just ordered the M4. Should get here by the end of next week. Going to use this opportunity to reinstall Windows, as I haven't done it in over a year, so there'll be a LOT of application installs ahead of me, I think.

dwighet

I have the corsair one...Have had it for around three mths now and have had no hassles with it...
Im well impressed with its performance...Its a rocket of a yoke..
[IMG][/img]

Serephucus

My thing has always been that, sure, the Force / Agility 3s will do 550MB/s read and whatever else, but does that actually impact performance any? I'm sure it's not a linear relationship, and that's without taking into account the point at which someone will notice the improvements.

deceit

Does everyone not know that sandforce issues where sorted about a month back with a firmware upgrade. I've a sandforce ssd and its never gave an ounch of trouble.

uncle_sam_ie

I got my M4 128GB yesterday. It came with the latest firmware update so, there was no need to flash it. This is an awesome guild for setting an SSD up, http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds

Unregistered.

Serephucus wrote: »

My thing has always been that, sure, the Force / Agility 3s will do up to 550MB/s read and whatever else when the data is highly compressible

FYP. M4 is a better all rounder. Also, high random read/write speeds have a bigger impact than high sequential speeds IMO.

Serephucus

Unregistered. wrote: »

FYP. M4 is a better all rounder. Also, high random read/write speeds have a bigger impact than high sequential speeds IMO.

Yeah, I know most of the theory of SSDs, etc. I'm just unsure how much of it translates into real-world. I did figure though that given SSDs are virtually always OS drives, that random I/O would make much more of a difference in that regard.

Monotype

I think it's actually in the real world that it makes more difference than the benchmarks - a lot of data is already compressed today. Video and sound files are usually at their limit of compression, although you probably wouldn't be storing those kinds of files much on an SSD.

You made the right choice, IMO. The petrol is a budget product and there's just not enough info yet. The M4 is certainly superior to the agility/force 3 - you'd want to be looking at the Vertex/Force GT for a fair comparison. The difference between these drives is actually bigger than many reviews would lead you to believe. HardOCP have a good article about asynchronous vs synchronous NAND. Even then, I would still probably go with the M4 is price is similar. Corsair also sell their own variation of the Micron (Crucial M4) drive in their Performance line.
That leaves the Samsung 830. A good drive and given closer prices, I think it would have an edge over the Crucial.

I wouldn't be as bothered about the reliability of the Sandforce drives in comparison to a few months ago. No drive is perfect anyway.

To be very honest though, you'd probably notice little difference in most situations between any of them.

uncle_sam_ie wrote: »

This is an awesome guild for setting an SSD up, http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds

There's a lot of questionable advice in that and unnecessary trimming.

Moon54

Monotype wrote: »

http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds
There's a lot of questionable advice in that and unnecessary trimming.

I agree, way over the top advice for something as simple as an SSD install.

I'd recommend this guide for a quick and easy SSD setup;
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911.html

Not all the tweaks are necessary as Windows 7 does a good job of auto-configuring for an SSD,
but it's a useful guide to verify the SSD is set up right,
and it also has some space-saving tweaks in there.

Serephucus

Monotype wrote: »

To be very honest though, you'd probably notice little difference in most situations between any of them.

That's sort of what I was thinking. I was considering the Petrol though just because of that oh-so-good price.

There's a lot of questionable advice in that and unnecessary trimming.

And most of it is copy/pasted from a guide on the OCZ forums. There's some nifty tricks in there though. Removing the window padding is something I liked.

Monotype

Even that's still excessive.

I have no idea why they keep recommending disabling pre/superfetch. Are they copying each other? The idea is that you load part or all of a program into RAM.
The argument is that SSDs are already fast so it's not necessary. Well wouldn't it be faster to already have it in RAM regardless of how fast the SSD is? Also, not all programs are on the SSD. It has a huge impact on stuff stored on your hard drive(s) too. An excellent Windows feature just thrown away in these guides, especially with plenty of RAM so readily available. It's not as if you need to hoard the RAM away for some other reason.

IMO - SSD tweak guide for Windows 7:
-Enable AHCI
-Disable any other drives and install to SSD
You're done.

Yes, it's a good idea to check for de-fragmentation to be off for the SSD, but unless there was an error, W7 should have detected it. If you want to be chasing after additional space for hibernation & page file, then that's fine too but certainly not essential or provide amazing benefits.

uncle_sam_ie

Monotype wrote: »

Even that's still excessive.



IMO - SSD tweak guide for Windows 7:
-Enable AHCI
-Disable any other drives and install to SSD
You're done.

Yes, it's a good idea to check for de-fragmentation to be off for the SSD, but unless there was an error, W7 should have detected it. If you want to be chasing after additional space for hibernation & page file, then that's fine too but certainly not essential or provide amazing benefits.

In fairness the guy does say that in the being of the guide,

"A quick word on SSDs:
SSDs do NOT require the confusing and intense setup that a lot of people seem to suggest. The current day SSDs are much more reliable and literally all that is necessary is to change the SATA mode to AHCI in the BIOS/UEFI, install, and you are good to go."

Serephucus

Mine would be something like:

Enable AHCI
Remove drives, install Windows, etc.
Disable hibernation (I never use it), System Restore (ditto), defrag, and pagefile.

midtower

I have a query on ssd specs and I cannot open a thread myself so I hope that I will be forgiven for usurping someone else's thread.

http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=ECE2009129
http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=ECE2229252

It appears to me that the slower drive (top) is nearly twice the cost of the faster one (bottom). This leads me to believe that there is something about the specs that I do not understand??????????????

I would be obliged for any help from the experts here.

Best Regards

Serephucus

Just a weird pricing algorithm feck-up. They happen occasionally.

If you're looking for a drive like that though:

http://www.dabs.ie/products/crucial-256gb-m4-sata-6gb-s-2-5--solid-state-drive-7GL2.html?q=256gb&src=16

Much better value, especially when you consider you get an extra 16GB of storage.

M00lers

I don't blame you, it's hard to make sense of elaras pricing at the best of times!

midtower

Serephucus wrote: »

Just a weird pricing algorithm feck-up. They happen occasionally.

If you're looking for a drive like that though:

http://www.dabs.ie/products/crucial-256gb-m4-sata-6gb-s-2-5--solid-state-drive-7GL2.html?q=256gb&src=16

Much better value, especially when you consider you get an extra 16GB of storage.

This would have been my first choice but it is not on Elara and the option of picking up in Parkwest (or being able to bang on a door if there is an issue) is attractive. However. the cheaper Corsair unit seems to have much higher speeds or am I missing something?

Monotype

The more expensive one is last generation.
Speeds don't mean everything though as you can see that despite the Corsair drive having being quoted as reaching higher speeds, quite often it will end up slower than the Crucial.

If acquiring the drive locally is important, you can get the 256GB M4 for a not-too-bad-price of €315 from komplett. You can find them in Blanchardstown but they delivery for free too.

http://komplett.ie/Komplett/product/ZKB_01OPSL/11_HDD/09_SSD/productdetails/80003342/Crucial_M4_SSD_256GB_2_5_SATA_600/CT256M4SSD2/default.aspx

Edit: That's also the old firmware speeds marked on the M4 too, I think. They're a bit faster now than they used to be.