Who here has some SSD insight?

[Crest]

[I tried posting this like 10 times, so if there is another one of these topics, sorry Mod can close whichever]

Hey there,

So I'm about to buy the rest of my build this week when I get paid. I had projected it to cost roughly 950-960 in order give me a couple hundred left over for all my other expenses.

The parts I was going to get were....

Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200Watt
Gigabyte Z68XP-UD4
G.Skill Sniper 4x4gb

But I told myself I wanted an SSD for an OS and my main programs. So I did some trimming...

New plan:

Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000Watt
Gigabyte Z68XP-UD4
G.Skill Sniper 2x4gb

1200watts was probably way more than just excessive overkill, 1000Watts should be fine for what I'm running, and later on I'll order two more sticks of sniper ram for 16gb total. So this frees up about 140 or so dollars. So I went on newegg and looked for the highest rated SSD's between 100-200 dollars and with good capacity. The Crucial M4 and the Crucial C300 both were at the top at 64gb. 64gb should be fine for my main apps.

I think I'm using something like 75gb right now on my main partition on my main harddrive, but I dump a lot of downloads on there so I think 64gb should be do-able for windows 7 professional x64 and all my main apps that I run. I run all games and on a Raid 0, and all video I save to a mirrored 2TB Raid 1, so I think 64gb should be fine for OS and all main programs.

Any other suggestions for SSD's, simple response time and reliability are what I care about. SSD's already destroy most HDD's at reads and writes so I don't really mind about transfer speeds.

[WarriorXK]

The Vertex 2 and 3 are probably the most popular in the area of SSDs, however i've read that the Intel 510 and 310 are more reliable in the longer run.

[Darkimmortal]

Newer SandForce (e.g. Vertex 3) for speed, anything but SandForce for reliability

[nikomo]

You could cut off 90$ from your current price by swapping the 2600k for a 2500k.
It's only a few hundred MHz and in my opinion the 2600k is overkill when you can overclock the 2500k to the clocks of stock 2600k, not to forget that past that.

[ManningQB18]

[QUOTE=nikomo;30437965]You could cut off 90$ from your current price by swapping the 2600k for a 2500k.
It's only a few hundred MHz and in my opinion the 2600k is overkill when you can overclock the 2500k to the clocks of stock 2600k, not to forget that past that.[/QUOTE]

He does a lot of video rendering and such, he would use the hyperthreading of the i7

[nikomo]

Ah, that explains it, didn't know about that.
I'd stick with the 2600k in that case.

[Crest]

Part of my income is through youtube and removing as much time waiting for projects to finish the more time I can either reply to peoples comments or keep working. If I could I'd buy a 16 thread SB since encoding and rendering scale so well.

So what do you all think about the Crucial M4. When I mean reliability, I just mean it will last like 4 years before I upgrade to the next big SSD technology. Like I said it's holding my OS, Documents, and main apps. I do all my heavy video recording and dumping to my Raid's.

[Generic.Monk]

I assume you're running a multi-gpu config otherwise 1000W would be massive overkill. As for the SSD, most are rated for about 2 years, and that's with them assuming they deal with hundreds of gigabytes of data every day, which if you're running just the OS and main programs from them won't be the case. YOu'' easily last 4 years.

[Darkimmortal]

Crucial M4 would be a good choice, though IIRC it's got a shorter lifetime than its predecessor.

[Crest]

[QUOTE=Generic.Monk;30438689]I assume you're running a multi-gpu config otherwise 1000W would be massive overkill. As for the SSD, most are rated for about 2 years, and that's with them assuming they deal with hundreds of gigabytes of data every day, which if you're running just the OS and main programs from them won't be the case. YOu'' easily last 4 years.[/QUOTE]

Yea, I'm running two of these 580 lightnings. And yes, the heavy usage is on my HDD's.

[DrDevin]

[QUOTE=Generic.Monk;30438689]I assume you're running a multi-gpu config otherwise 1000W would be massive overkill. As for the SSD, most are rated for about 2 years, and that's with them assuming they deal with hundreds of gigabytes of data every day, which if you're running just the OS and main programs from them won't be the case. YOu'' easily last 4 years.[/QUOTE]

Where do people get these time frames from!?

[QUOTE]My personal desktop sees about 7GB of writes per day. That can be pretty typical for a power user and a bit high for a mainstream user but it's nothing insane.

If I never install another application and just go about my business, my drive has 203.4GB of space to spread out those 7GB of writes per day. That means in roughly 29 days my SSD, if it wear levels perfectly, I will have written to every single available flash block on my drive. Tack on another 7 days if the drive is smart enough to move my static data around to wear level even more properly. So we're at approximately 36 days before I exhaust one out of my ~10,000 write cycles. Multiply that out and it would take 360,000 days of using my machine for all of my NAND to wear out; once again, assuming perfect wear leveling. That's 986 years. Your NAND flash cells will actually lose their charge well before that time comes, in about 10 years.

Now that calculation is based on 50nm 10,000 p/e cycle NAND. What about 34nm NAND with only 5,000 program/erase cycles? Cut the time in half - 180,000 days. If we're talking about 25nm with only 3,000 p/e cycles the number drops to 108,000 days.[/QUOTE]

Taken from [url]http://www.anandtech.com/show/4159/ocz-vertex-3-pro-preview-the-first-sf2500-ssd/2[/url]

A drive with NAND rated for 10,000 p/e under a pretty heavy workload can theoretically last for [B]986 YEARS[/B] (ignoring NAND's actual electronic lifespan).

[QUOTE]Even with the cheap NAND rated for only 3000 program/erase cycles will do way beyond 2 years with regular use.

Furthermore, as we've demonstrated in the past, given a normal desktop usage model even NAND rated for only 3000 program/erase cycles will last for a very long time given a controller with good wear leveling.

Let's quickly do the math again. If you have a 100GB drive and you write 7GB per day you'll program every MLC NAND cell in the drive in just over 14 days—that's one cycle out of three thousand. Outside of SandForce controllers, most SSD controllers will have a write amplification factor greater than 1 in any workload. If we assume a constant write amplification of 20x (and perfect wear leveling) we're still talking about a useful NAND lifespan of almost 6 years. In practice, write amplification for desktop workloads is significantly lower than that.[/QUOTE]

Taken from [url]http://www.anandtech.com/show/4253/the-crucial-m4-micron-c400-ssd-review/[/url]

Even drives with rated for a measly 3000 p/e will be able to make it 6 years before they will no longer be able to write data.

[Crest]

alright, looks like the m4 is the one to get for me, fits the budget, big enough for my needs and reliability isn't an issue for an OS disk. I'll be buying Wednesday prolly, so if someone finds a deal or has a better suggestion, m4 it is. 320 is nice, though it just doesn't hit the price point for me.

THanks for the help guys

[Crest]

Haha, the C300 64gb is going to be on sale on shellshocker for 90, quite coincidental, in which case, I wish it was like 128gb.

[Darkimmortal]

[QUOTE=Brt5470;30448193]Haha, the C300 64gb is going to be on sale on shellshocker for 90, quite coincidental, in which case, I wish it was like 128gb.[/QUOTE]

64GB is all you need for an OS drive. I've installed Windows along with ~300 programs on my SSD - everything but games, downloads, documents and VMs fits on my 64GB C300 just fine.

Currently I have about 8GB free, and could easily free up more if I go crazy with symlinks again.

[ManningQB18]

Yeah, I'm considering buying a small SSD for OS now that I've discovered symlinks. That's honestly an amazing program

[Crest]

alright, well then, that saves me like 30-40 bucks. Thanks

[Generic.Monk]

[QUOTE=DrDevin;30443519]Where do people get these time frames from!?
[/QUOTE]

out of my ass

[Crest]

Solid State Anus

[cathal6606]

What about [url=http://www.scan.co.uk/products/60gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-475mb-s-50k-iops]this[/url]?

[Crest]

That's like 50USD more and smaller size, Speed isn't the concern, simply the fact that it's an SSD with those lightning fast response times is what matters to me.

[toliman]

[QUOTE=ManningQB18;30448765]Yeah, I'm considering buying a small SSD for OS now that I've discovered symlinks. That's honestly an amazing program[/QUOTE]

if gaming, 120gb should fit Win7 + 3 favourite games or so. any Sandforce 12xx works fine. for the new 25nm, crucial or corsairs are ideal, while the vertex 3 can be good. if you need critical speed, the intel 510's and crucial M4 is a better bet, as are the more optimised MLC's, but really, the tangible benefit of SSD optimised apps, are on another level of crazy.

as is the new Z68's HDD caching via ~40gb SSDs, RST. it sounds great if you need cached access over time, a lot of people don't. and the biggest issue for SSD is the problem that larger drives work faster than small drives, so having an OS SSD vs caviar black (or any other 7200RPM) + RST, the OS SSD would win most times due to throughput.

but as always, keep lots of regular OS image backups and test your backup app recognises the SSD as a drive it can restore to. being able to boot from an image (via a restore CD/USB flash drive or partition) , can also be handy for restoring data to an SSD if it wipes or the SSD fails to boot.

ATM i'm hitting 110gb on the OS SSD (from 85gb) just due to DB's inflating over time, which can be an issue when you have 10tb of drives attached and apps want indexes, etc.

to combat the 'inflation', you have lots of options, i.e. SteamMover 's a good UI ( [url]http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover[/url] ) for symlinking folders (frontend for xcopy) , it won't move or copy some active programs and services (locked files / in use files) , so you have to be conscious of programs, i.e. databases, "speedup apps", services, etc.

occasionally you have to uninstall, symlink, then reinstall so it works as intended, knowing how to command-line symlink helps.

[aVoN]

[QUOTE=Darkimmortal;30437848]Newer SandForce (e.g. Vertex 3) for speed, anything but SandForce for reliability[/QUOTE]

Using my Vertex 2 Sandforce SSD now for over a year. No problems at all. But I really only have my OS, Apps and SWAP on it. No data at all (like "My Documents"). Also I left 8 GB unpartitioned. Partitions are aligned to the SSDs erase-blocks also. Works like a charm if you treat it well :)