The Official SSD Club

[Maverick123w]

I've sworn off OCZ for the time being. I have gotten countless bad sticks in the shop lately and their rma process is extremely slow.

[shaker718]

I received my Intel G2 80gb ssd, got it installed and man is this thing fast. I haven't done any benches yet but my programs open so ridiculously fast it puts my previous RAID0 Set up to shame.

[Rakeesh]

Mine arrived at my door this morning just as I woke up, just installed windows now I'm working on getting my apps up. So far it's decent.

[Rakeesh]

Originally Posted by Maverick123w

The 1 and only issue I'm currently having, is that when I have the AMD AHCI driver installed, the intel toolbox no longer works. I have to uninstall the ahci drivers to run the toolbox, so I'm not positive if trim is running or not... (is there a way to check this?)

Indeed there is. Open an administrative console, then type this:

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

If the reply is DisableDeleteNotify = 0, then TRIM support is enabled. If the reply is DisableDeleteNotify 1, then TRIM support is not functioning.

TRIM support is very important for an SSD, and TRIM requires AHCI mode in order to function, therefore you should enable AHCI. You probably won't notice a performance increase from a fresh install (although YMMV) however it will improve the lifespan of your SSD by reducing the number of writes necessary for regular file move/delete operations, and it will prevent performance degredation over time.

If you installed windows 7 without AHCI enabled, then you'll need to do this before enabling it (otherwise you'll BSOD) :

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25...ahci-mode-only

After following those steps when you reboot TRIM support should automatically turn on.

And speak of performance, in case anybody is thinking about it, DO NOT DEFRAGMENT SSD DRIVES. It puts unnecessary wear on the drive and it doesn't offer any performance benefit whatsoever. NAND chips can only be written to so many times before they're no good. Fortunately that number is very large, but still, no need to wear it out sooner rather than later. Defragmenting is obsolete.

[Rakeesh]

Some other useful information:

Given that these drives are small, you may consider disabling hibernate support and getting rid of hiberfil.sys, turning off memory paging (if you have a lot of ram) which gets rid of pagefile.sys, as well as turning off the system restore function. Or alternatively, you can relocate these to your larger magnetic hard drive. This will easily save you a good 10GB or more, depending on how much ram you have.

Also since these drives are pretty fast, you can disable things like superfetch, file indexing, etc, with an almost unnoticeable drop in search speed, while saving a ton of ram. There's a tool out there which does all of this in one step:

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4926-ssd-tweaker.html

Last, and probably the most important, partition alignment is key to optimum performance. Partitions should be created with a block size of 4096 bytes, and should start at a byte offset evenly divisible by the same number. If you want to make sure your partition is aligned correctly, open msinfo32 and go under components > storage > disks and look for the segment containing information about your solid state drive(s). Under the field labeled "Partition Starting Offset," take this number, divide it by 4096, and if the result is an even number then your partition is aligned correctly.

[DiscipleDOC]

Originally Posted by zoomy942

so how do i know which kind to get?

Originally Posted by Bearclaw

Hopefully DD chimes in. He knows more. Although - check his sig. The one he got seems to be hot selling rightnow

Sorry guys....I am just now seeing the ???.

My suggestion is for you (Zoomy) to read on the links posted in this thread. If you're looking for a solid 64 GB SSD, then I would suggest the one in my sig. It is cheap, and it is also pretty fast.

I'm pretty sure as time go by, we're going to see cheaper SSD. In the meantime, the Kingston V Series are hard to beat.

[Revs]

My buddy got the Corsair R60 a few weeks back. Seemed the best 60Gb drive for the money. Product code: CSSD-R60GB2-BRKT

[musman]

CPU magazine has a good writeup on a bunch of SSD's in the latest issue. I think it's available for download off their site.

[wheeljack12]

I have two Vertex LE's in my system and I love them. I little expensive at $400 CDN each for 100 gb but they are around the same price as the original vertex's (120gb)at my shop (Canada Computers). Actually got two for my brother at $390 CDN just after at the same place just as they were dropping the prices again to $370 cdn. I was contemplating the Corsair Force f100 (sandforce sf-1200) since there read/write speeds were ahead of the vertex le's. And then there's ocz vertex 2's which are the same as the force f100's. The only reason I didn't go with f100's is that the only place that had them was tigerdirect and they wanted $500 each for them. Man, with the odd exception, does tigerdiect gouge.

[Rakeesh]

Here's another tip for SSD owners:

If you have plenty of ram (these days, I'd say 6 or more GB is plenty) create yourself a ramdisk using dataram's ramdisk driver:

http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...ftware/ramdisk

Then make firefox put its cache files on that drive. Instructions for doing so can be found here:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/1...another-drive/

This will prolong the life of your SSD not to mention make firefox faster. A 60mb drive should do.

[nekrosoft13]

just brought home a 80gb intel

[nekrosoft13]

won't have time to install it, till the weekend.

won't be reinstalling windows, just have to move some partitions around.