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I bought an SSD and I'm crazy.


VooDooPC

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So, I splurged and bought an SSD. I have an older motherboard which doesn't have SATA 3 support which gave me two options, buying a PCI-e add-on card and then an SATA 3 SSD or I could just buy a PCI-e SSD. I decided to go the more expensive but faster route, the PCI-e SSD. Well, it was kind of more expensive, buying a good SATA 3 add-on card is pretty expensive.

 

I bought the RevoDrive 3 240gb. It was around $550 (inorite?) and is really the last upgrade I wanted to do to my PC before I held off on updating for a while. The rest of my PC is from around early 2009 (i7 920, GTX 480 6gb DDR 3 memory), I've been wanting an SSD since then but never had the cash on hand until now.

 

I know people are all like, "oh my, windows starts so fast!" and you know what? They are totally right! From seeing the Windows logo to my computer being done starting with all programs loaded (Steam, Skype, Logitech stuff, Daemon Tools, EVGA Precision, FiTbit tracker, Kasperksy, Nvidia Settings thing, some motherboard sound junk) It takes about 3-5 seconds. File copying is around 160mb/s, my old hard-drive copied at around 30mb/s when it was settled. Most programs start near instantly and I'm usually the first or second person to load levels in MP.

 

The rated transfer speed is 1000mb read and 900mb write.

 

For comparison sakes:

My Old Drive

atto_hdd.png

 

My New Drive

atto_ssd.png

 

As you can see from the Transfer Rate at the bottom this makes my new drive about... ummm.... carry the one...uhhh.... A BILLION TIMES faster!

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Yeah i was just looking at these things, and I'm a little worried.

 

Why am I worried? Well, I don't understand the speeds. How can i compare the speeds to that of traditional harddrives that are rated in RPM? Anyone?

 

Also, the price. These are scary expensive right now, I'm hoping they go down in price over the next year or so before i build another computer. I had thought about putting one in the PC I currently have to upgrade it, but I don't know if it's worth it with only 3GB/s SATA connectors instead of 6GB/s connectors. At these prices currently, I would have to replace my 500Gb seagate for like a 120GB SSD cuz I can't afford the larger ones.

 

Then I'm reading all about how many of them are failing over just a few weeks/months or the firmware updates that are being rolled out. Are they very stable yet? This is just a few of my concerns, but I plan to put one in the next compy i build, just not for a while in hopes that they go down in price and up in reliability.

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Then I'm reading all about how many of them are failing over just a few weeks/months or the firmware updates that are being rolled out. Are they very stable yet? This is just a few of my concerns, but I plan to put one in the next compy i build, just not for a while in hopes that they go down in price and up in reliability.

 

If you're buying a sandforce based SSD, the 2.15 firmware seems to have fixed most if not all of the BSODs that have plague the controller.

 

For price, they are coming down. During the last Black Friday, the cost per gigabyte for a 120GB or less SSD was about $1, which was less than an equally sized HDD thanks to the flooding in Thailand. You'd have to give up your 500GB primary drive (though you could have it serve as your data drive)

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(edited)

Yeah i was just looking at these things, and I'm a little worried.

 

Why am I worried? Well, I don't understand the speeds. How can i compare the speeds to that of traditional harddrives that are rated in RPM? Anyone?

 

Also, the price. These are scary expensive right now, I'm hoping they go down in price over the next year or so before i build another computer. I had thought about putting one in the PC I currently have to upgrade it, but I don't know if it's worth it with only 3GB/s SATA connectors instead of 6GB/s connectors. At these prices currently, I would have to replace my 500Gb seagate for like a 120GB SSD cuz I can't afford the larger ones.

 

Then I'm reading all about how many of them are failing over just a few weeks/months or the firmware updates that are being rolled out. Are they very stable yet? This is just a few of my concerns, but I plan to put one in the next compy i build, just not for a while in hopes that they go down in price and up in reliability.

 

I'm not exactly sure how the speed tests relate to real world speeds. I sure as hell don't get 1gb/s copying files. As for comparing the tests, my old HDD was a 7,200 RPM Seagate 500gb HD. It maxes it out at 70mb/s on the tests. My SSD maxes out at 980mb/s (Advertised is 1gb/s, but it dependings on usage and such). Windows Experience Index of my old drive was 5.7, this drive is 7.9.

 

And yes, the price is crazy expensive, but it's been the single most noticeable improvement with my computer besides a graphics card. My mom, who isn't very tech savvy, was over the weekend before last on Christmas Eve. She wanted to check something real quick online so I sat her down and started the computer. She thought my computer was coming out of sleep mode it was in Windows so fast. Of course, I didn't tell her how much it costs. :D

 

This will probably be my last real PC, so I have to make it last.

 

Edit: This SSD also has a 3 year warranty from OCZ.

Edited by VooDooPC
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lol this thread

Shouldn't you be... playing scary games or something? :P

This will probably be my last real PC

 

Wait, what???

SO many games now adays are just console ports, having a really fast PC to run a port from a 6 year old console is becoming a waste. When the next generation of consoles hit and we start getting PC ports that stress my PC, I'll think about it. That's still a few years away though.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a friend with a box full of these for reliability testing against some FusionIO $10k+ cards for some large DB servers. He rather likes them, cheap and hasn't had issues yet.

 

So, I splurged and bought an SSD. I have an older motherboard which doesn't have SATA 3 support which gave me two options, buying a PCI-e add-on card and then an SATA 3 SSD or I could just buy a PCI-e SSD. I decided to go the more expensive but faster route, the PCI-e SSD. Well, it was kind of more expensive, buying a good SATA 3 add-on card is pretty expensive.

 

Just a side note thats not an "actual" PCIe SSD. The card is a Marvell SAS controller and two SandForce 22xx based SSDs. In other words you bought a SATA 3 controller(SAS) and two SSDs all on one card, along with some custom software intergration. So if you would have done it the other way you would have bought a 2 port SATA/SAS 6G card($50), and two 120GB SF-2200 drives($220). It would have cost you more money and you wouldn't get TRIM support and slightly lower performance. There are some other SSDs which dont use a SATA/SAS layer and are even(much) faster but nothing in the consumer market :). Also, that is a *beast* of a SSD. The only bad part is while the card supports TRIM but Windows 7 doesn't support TRIM over SCSI/SAS drives(to be more techincal Windows 7's SCSI/SAS stack doesn't support the Unmap command, the equivlent of ATA's TRIM command). I'm curious to see how much the card slows down with time as you use it, and if Microsoft will release a patch to allow TRIM/Unmap to SCSI/SAS devices.

Edited by amertrash
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  • 3 months later...
(edited)

Update: No issues, no regrets, still awesome.

 

I'm currently using 150/223gb. I did a speed test last weekend because my brother bought two Agility 3 drives. The speed is basically the same as it was new.

 

My brother's 60gb Agility 3 drives in RAID 0 are slightly faster than my RevoDrive 3, maybe about 100mb/s faster in the final test of ATTO.

Edited by VooDooPC
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Are you guys all using Vista/7 or XP? I've been thinking off and on about getting a SSD but not really sure if XP will handle it right.

Ya..gotta use Win7 to get TRIM support.

 

I LOVE my SSD...I used to get so mad waiting for Battlefield maps to load, it went from 2 to 3 minutes, down to about 5 to 8 seconds....now I actually get in there while the freezetime is still active, lol.

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Are you guys all using Vista/7 or XP? I've been thinking off and on about getting a SSD but not really sure if XP will handle it right.

Ya..gotta use Win7 to get TRIM support.

 

I LOVE my SSD...I used to get so mad waiting for Battlefield maps to load, it went from 2 to 3 minutes, down to about 5 to 8 seconds....now I actually get in there while the freezetime is still active, lol.

 

Same here. Now I find the computers at work to be painfully slow because I'm so used to my SSD at home :P

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