Got the 52" LCD mounted on the wall, and it is awesome! ( I rarely use that word ) The 3 120 gig SSD drives are due today, and if there are no surprises waiting for me to repair, I'll raid those bad boys and see what kind of boot speed we can get. Hopefully my copy of Win 7 Ultimate shows up today as well...
" I don't like the idea of getting shot in the hand" -Blackie in "Rustlers Rhapsody"
" It is a proud and lonely thing, to be a Stainless Steel Rat." - Slippery Jim DiGriz
I really, really, like SSDs. I've done some builds with Vertex 3 120s and Caviar Black 1 TB drives as data disks, and they are pretty mindblowing.
Of course, my SSDs have been problem children. I went through two Vertex 2 180s in six months! This time around OCZ sent me an Agility 3 240 as a replacement, so I'm currently a happy camper. Even with a motherboard that only supports SATA II, I'm at a usable desktop in roughly 10 seconds after Windows starts loading. And that includes NOD32's startup scan, etc.
If you haven't played with SSDs much, there are a couple of points to watch. If you don't set your controller to AHCI mode, the SSDs may under-perform, and any garbage collection/wear leveling functions (such as TRIM) won't work. Secondly, while Win7 normally detects an SSD correctly and disables automatic defrag during installation, sometimes it doesn't. You should check your settings in Defrag and verify that automatic defragmentation is disabled. I've never had a Win7 installation on an SSD (when the controller was set to AHCI mode) fail to implement TRIM correctly, but you can check it by opening an elevated command prompt and typing:
fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify
The possible results are:
DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)
If TRIM isn't enabled, fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 will enable it.
Last edited by slgrieb; April 9th, 2012 at 10:12 AM.
Yes, Mr. Death... I'll play you a game! But not CHESS !!! BAH... FOOEY! My game is... WIFFLEBALL!
There is a pretty cool little program called SSDtweaker.
Not that it's truly necessary but it does show everything. http://elpamsoft.com/Downloads.aspx
Gigabyte 990XA-UD3
AMD FX 8120 OCTO-Core
Windows 7 Enterprise 64
Adata 120 gig SSD
Kingston HyperX 1600 16 Gigs
Sapphire 7770 1gig
Enermax Liberty Modular 620 www.northernaurora.net
I'm way less keen on RAID arrays than I used to be, but even a single SSD with synchronous NAND and a fast controller (like an OCZ Vertex3 or similar) can saturate the data bus even with a system that supports SATA III. That's really a huge change in drive performance. Conventional HDDs in any RAID configuration can't deliver 6 MB per second read rates. A single SSD can.
Yes, Mr. Death... I'll play you a game! But not CHESS !!! BAH... FOOEY! My game is... WIFFLEBALL!
I agree. I am less then thrilled with the raid failures I have had.
Gimme a good SSD, a sata 3 board, and acronis true image and I am set.
Personally, when I win the lottery, I'm buying one of those astronomically expensive PCI-E based drives like one of these puppies! no not the little ones.
Yes, Mr. Death... I'll play you a game! But not CHESS !!! BAH... FOOEY! My game is... WIFFLEBALL!
Not the hybrid drives, the reviews on those are lukewarm. I still think my best bet all round is a mirror raid of 2 120 gig SSD's and a pair of 2 terabyte data drives to hold all of my por... I mean portable files. Yes.
" I don't like the idea of getting shot in the hand" -Blackie in "Rustlers Rhapsody"
" It is a proud and lonely thing, to be a Stainless Steel Rat." - Slippery Jim DiGriz
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Originally Posted by Ferrit
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