So I want an SSD...

[rebekhar]

...and specs are attached...
...and price range under 150$....

Any suggestions on what kind etc? (No, I'm not addiing more ellipses)

Attachments:

DxDiag.txt (32.12 KB)

[nopantshero]

YAY! I'm useful here!

SSD's are rated a few different ways... and your budget to what you want to do with it will affect your choice.

Questionaire off ssd proportions!
1) Do you plan on using it as a main boot drive for windows? if not, what do you plan to put on it?
2) I see you currently have a hitatchi 1TB drive, is it failing or do you plan on keeping it in your system?
3) Would you prefer raw speed or reliability? or a combination of both?
4) If you answered yes to question 1: do you plan on putting a few hours worth of work in to get it installed and configured properly? (I can totally help with this)
5) If in the occurrence of a drive failure, are you prepared to lose everything on it?

Reasons I ask these questions:
- Many people use the solid state for their OS drive, and have extra drives in their system, however, most people do not set up their temporary files, and page files and small document files to default to their disk drives, this can take months of life off the drives life expectancy
- You should buy a ssd large enough so that at any point in time, the drive is only 66% full. An SSD over 66% full cannot trim properly, and you will lose performance at an exponential growth
- DON'T YOU DARE READ THE MB/S RATING ON ANY OF THEM YOU FILTHY CASUAL. WE READ IOPS AROUND HERE.
- IOPS are input/output operations per second. This is a more realistic measurement of the drives performance because your data will never be nice and neat next to each other in each sector of the ssd
- Proper configuration of an ssd is not just put it in and install windows, you will need to configure user folders, turn off page filing, etc, not only to boost performance, but also for longevity sake. We will be using command line, and "mklink /j" very frequently to set this up right.
- HOLY CRAP IF YOU INSTALL ALL YOUR PROGRAMS TO YOUR SSD ILL MURDER YOU MYSELF. (jokingly, but kinda not). if you install your OS to your ssd, we gunna change some registry settings so programs default to install on your disk drive, and you pick which ones you want on your ssd
- SSD's give zero sign of an upcoming failure, no clicking, grinding, etc. When they die, one day your computer will crash and not boot back up. You wont be able to recover. Be prepared to lose your stuff in 5 years if you take care of your ssd, 2 years if you dont.
- The reason we change all these settings is because any ssd's lifetime is based off of the number of times any given sector's data is changed. Trimming the drive will help even out and use the sectors equally, increasing the lifetime. Putting what you want on an ssd, then leaving it and hardly ever going back and changing any data on it will yield it the most longevity. Temporary files, page files, scratch disks, and buffer files will murder an ssd's lifetime. I once saw a man kill one in 3 months when he used it as a video file editing scratch disk.
- Get ready for zoom zoom

That being said, i'm a pretty big fan of the samsung evo series. i just picked up the 840 evo 500gb for my laptop. loving it so far. Their utility is also fairly usefull in helping with these setup things.

ps - you can find actual performance charts here(based on multiple types of operations, its a good comparison): www.harddrivebenchmark.net/ssd.html

[rebekhar]

1) Well, two options: I wouldn't mind having it as a main boot at all, but I could also use it for select resource hogs that I use often (Autodesk, Adobe, UDK) and/or a select # of games. Given that, I'm curious what would be the most beneficial. (edit) so reading on, it looks like it's no good to use the SSD as a storage for frequent editing programs? Welp lol
2) My hitachi is doing well so far, but I plan on doing a reformat anyway ( do them twice a year) within the month, and this was the main reason I was thinking about getting an SSD. Oh yeah (edit) I would like to keep my hitachi as well.
3) A mixture of both sounds good
4) Yah, I'm pulling to put the time and effort into getting it to work properly either way

-What would you consider a large enough SSD?
-CASUAL 4 LIFE!
-I wont install all my programs, I've read through the googles and the googles say that's no good, bro.
-I tend to save projects over onto my external 1TB hard drive, so I'm not too worried.
-Moosicus

I'll check that out and the link you provided. Thanks for all the helpful info so far, Nopantssssss!

[Logo]

NoPants has it covered, but I'll just say that I too recently bought the Samsung 840 Evo 500 GB and I've been loving it so far. From personal experience, I absolutely would not go lower than 256 GB unless you want to be micromanaging your storage like crazy.

[nopantshero]

What I would suggest...

A 250 gb drive fits most places inside your ideal pricing. This would be adequate for windows, and a few games or applications.

Few notes from where I work at...
Many of the engineering peoples where I work asked me to boost their drive speed because solidworks or POSTing programs were running slow. Admittingly, these programs do take a minute to load, they are massive. So I placed an ssd in their computers, outside of the OS, that had the solidworks installation mklink'd from their c drive. This left the buffer on the disk, which i upgraded to a raid 0 array. All of them were rather happy. For your case, I would changed the default installation to your disk drive, install everything there, this way you can use mklink to move things over to your ssd seemlessly, you will get the performance of the ssd, but windows will look like its operating out of the disk drive, its a funny thing.

Obviously games will have a map that loads faster on an ssd. And most of your large programs will still load and operate a little faster. Will you be able to render faster in autocad? no, but theres other options for that.

A reverse setup of what I did for the engineers at work would probably cover what you want to do, use the ssd for the OS, and a few games and applications. but we will change your defaut installation directory in the registry settings, so that everything will always default to your disk drive, and you can manually copy things over from the disk drive to the ssd at your leasure, then use mklink to restore the connection to the original installation directory.

If you would really like to boost the speed of everything, think about a raid 0 alongside your ssd, and using your external seagate drive for backup purposes.

Newegg still sells your hitachi drive (refurbished, but your would only have to compliment the one you already have) www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4UM1KC2500&cm_re=HDS721010CLA332-_-9SIA4UM1KC2500-_-Product

or look possibly into getting 2 brand new ones (just an example for pricing sakes) www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840&cm_re=1tb-_-22-148-840-_-Product

This would put you a bit over your $150 ideal price, but i think you would be impressed at the performance a raid can have for everything else. Sadly I can't find a screenshot I had when I had that kind of a setup, one of my drives died, and I never replaced it out of laziness. But the sequential read speeds were fairly similar (basically the mb/s rating), the 4kIOPS is where an SSD will shine, which will greatly affect boot and load times on loading things, where as sequential read speeds are a little more tasteful for scratch disk or buffer use.

[rebekhar]

Cooolio, I'll end up ordering the Evo this weekend. Danke!