Which SSD?

[LSainsbury]

Hi all,

I'm thinking of getting an SSD to use as my main OS partition - no data will be stored on it - just the OS and apps.

Looking around I shee the OCZ 120GB Agility 3 SSD - AGT3-25SAT3-120G appears to be fairly high spec, but I've also read that they've had issues.

Is there anything else around with a better than 525MB/s Read 500MB/s Write spec?

The system board is Asus P6X58D Premium which has 2 x SATA3 connectors onboard with a Marvell 9123 Controller - so are there any issues with that type of controller?

Recommendations anybody?

[Ignitionnet]

I have one of these in my Beast.

555MB/s read speed, 510MB/s write.

I've seen it run at over 400MB/s in normal operation but haven't benchmarked it.

[LSainsbury]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

I have one of these in my Beast.

555MB/s read speed, 510MB/s write.

I've seen it run at over 400MB/s in normal operation but haven't benchmarked it.

Which model??

[Ignitionnet]

I've the SH100S3B/240G.

Oddly Kingston list it as having slightly lower performance than everywhere else.

[Jameseh]

Shame they don't do the faster speeds on the lower storage versions, I have no need for 30GB yet alone 120.

[LSainsbury]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

I've the SH100S3B/240G.

Oddly Kingston list it as having slightly lower performance than everywhere else.

...and it's £302 for only a slight increase in read speed....not worth the money...

[Rob]

It's surprising how much space you do need. I realsied that a 120GB SSD would not be big enough. You want it to speed up the start time and operation of the PC, so you need it to hold the OS. You also want to speed up your main applications, in my case games, especially the load times when maps change. Even with data like music, video and even word documents elsewhere, by the time I have Windows 7, Office, Call of Duty and Battlefield 3, together with a couple of other lesser apps installed I'm heading for 100GB used.

Most of the problems with SSDs and their day to day operation seem to have been related to the controler chips. I anticipate most of these will have been resolved with the drives available today.

Oh and make sure you have a 6.0 standard SATA port on your motherboard i.e SATA 3 generation or you won't get the speed advantage of the SSD.

[Jayster]

OCZ Agility 3's seems to be the best value for money at the minute however OCZ are coming out with Indilinx based ssd's and they should be fairly well priced considering OCZ bought Indilinx.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by LSainsbury

...and it's £302 for only a slight increase in read speed....not worth the money...

Part of the reason I've gone with the 240GB drive is endurance - twice the cells, twice the writes before failure.

[Jayster]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

Part of the reason I've gone with the 240GB drive is endurance - twice the cells, twice the writes before failure.

That is pretty much a non issue MLC SSD's will survive 3-5 years of constant writing before running out of write cycles and chances are your controller would die before that, so with normal ware they should survive about 50 years by which time they will be obsolete and probably not compatible with anything. Plus with a bit of TLC you can extend their life quite a bit. If its going into a desktop chances are you will be combining it with a HDD, when downloading I put it onto my HDD, I have moved my pagefile onto my HDD, when rendering anything I put it onto my HDD etc and only reading files from the SSD and thats something an ssd can do forever.

[LSainsbury]

Originally Posted by Rob

It's surprising how much space you do need. I realsied that a 120GB SSD would not be big enough. You want it to speed up the start time and operation of the PC, so you need it to hold the OS. You also want to speed up your main applications, in my case games, especially the load times when maps change. Even with data like music, video and even word documents elsewhere, by the time I have Windows 7, Office, Call of Duty and Battlefield 3, together with a couple of other lesser apps installed I'm heading for 100GB used.

Most of the problems with SSDs and their day to day operation seem to have been related to the controler chips. I anticipate most of these will have been resolved with the drives available today.

Oh and make sure you have a 6.0 standard SATA port on your motherboard i.e SATA 3 generation or you won't get the speed advantage of the SSD.

My OS / apps partition is only 60GB at the moment. I don't play games and the must bulky apps are Office, Adobe Audition and Emements so 120GB will be enough for me.

---------- Post added at 13:53 ---------- Previous post was at 13:46 ----------

Originally Posted by Jayster

OCZ Agility 3's seems to be the best value for money at the minute however OCZ are coming out with Indilinx based ssd's and they should be fairly well priced considering OCZ bought Indilinx.

Just been reading about that - the Octane series, so this must be one of them - correct?

http://www.dabs.com/products/ocz-tec...rive-7V1P.html

• Max Read: 535 MB/s
• Max Write: 170 MB/s

The write is worse than the Aglity so why bother with that one?

[Jayster]

Originally Posted by LSainsbury

Just been reading about that - the Octane series, so this must be one of them - correct?

http://www.dabs.com/products/ocz-tec...rive-7V1P.html

• Max Read: 535 MB/s
• Max Write: 170 MB/s

The write is worse than the Aglity so why bother with that one?

I was talking about ones they are planning on bringing out and yes the agility 3 are the best atm. Also the speeds although important are not what makes an SSD what it is. SSD's feel quick because of their response times around 0.1ms compared to 9 or so of a traditional HDD and your going to be writing less than you are reading. But yes the Agility 3 is still probably the best buy currently.

[damien c]

I have a Corsair Force 3 and it's rapid.

Takes my pc less than 40 second's to be in windows and opening a program from touching the post screen.

Think it cost me £150 when I got it and they are now £120'ish from Scan, so I will be buying another soon and putting them in Raid.

[ZrByte]

Originally Posted by Rob

It's surprising how much space you do need. I realsied that a 120GB SSD would not be big enough. You want it to speed up the start time and operation of the PC, so you need it to hold the OS. You also want to speed up your main applications, in my case games, especially the load times when maps change. Even with data like music, video and even word documents elsewhere, by the time I have Windows 7, Office, Call of Duty and Battlefield 3, together with a couple of other lesser apps installed I'm heading for 100GB used.

Most of the problems with SSDs and their day to day operation seem to have been related to the controler chips. I anticipate most of these will have been resolved with the drives available today.

Oh and make sure you have a 6.0 standard SATA port on your motherboard i.e SATA 3 generation or you won't get the speed advantage of the SSD.

Though you wont get the full speed advantage it will still be faster than a standard hard drive even on sata 2.

[Rob]

Yes there is a speed increase but, in my view, not justified for the expense of the drive.