Following on from Chris GBs thread....

My PC is a Intel Core2 thing, a few years old. Dell Precision (380?) 64 bit jobber with 4GB of ram in it. As of late it has been a bit sluggish running win7, so I am think that for a quick performance upgrade I should get a SSD for the boot drive, and keep the 750GB for my data.

Now the question is do I get a 64GB one or a 128GB one. Was looking at the Crucial offering. I run visual studio and the like on it so 64GB may be a bit cramped. I was also thinking it would make sense to stick my VMs on it for speedier performance too.... which pushes me towards the 128GB one (plus it is bit more future proof).....

Comments please.

Thanks,

Matt

Edited 27 December, 201015 yr by mbames

If you're only putting the software and some fairly static VM's on there then that should be fine, but make sure you put the regularly updated bits, including anything such as the VM swap files on a traditional hard disk.

Ive been asking myself the same question.TBH at the moment i would sway towards a OCZ offering...

The Crucial C300 has faster read if you have 6g sata (although unlikely you will have it).. otherwise sandforce based SSDs are the king...

If it was my money id go for a OCZ vertex 2E 120gb which are around the £170 mark... although other manufacturers also use sandforce controllers (corsair force series etc) - OCZ have a close relationship which means they get better firmware and performance.

I'm assuming they are all MLC devices?

I don't think having VMs on it would make them run a lot faster unless you have 20 VMs running at the same time so latency and seek times come into play.

I have a 64GB C300 and love it to bits (probably said so on the other thread).

And whatever you do, disable your paging or make sure it's on another spinning HDD partition

I don't think having VMs on it would make them run a lot faster unless you have 20 VMs running at the same time so latency and seek times come into play.

I have a 64GB C300 and love it to bits (probably said so on the other thread).

And whatever you do, disable your paging or make sure it's on another spinning HDD partition

Does the pagefile thing still apply these days?.. i thought it was mostly scaremongering when SSDs were fairly new tech.. now theres wear-levelling, garbage collection and TRIM to keep everything in order.... and from what ive read theres pretty much no-way that you could wear out a modern SSD in a desktop PC..

I dunno Colin. I just move it onto another harddrive or disable it completely so I know it's not a problem. W7 nowadays seems to keep soo many temporary files anyway (all the prefetch stuff)...

Also, I would think the less data you have on the drive, the longer it will last as it has more free space to move data around. But I reckon that the technology is moving along pretty fast so chances are you'd upgrade to a newer generation of drive before your current one dies

Does the pagefile thing still apply these days?.. i thought it was mostly scaremongering when SSDs were fairly new tech.. now theres wear-levelling, garbage collection and TRIM to keep everything in order.... and from what ive read theres pretty much no-way that you could wear out a modern SSD in a desktop PC..

There might be wear levelling, but there are still a limited number of write cycles a cell can do and putting a page file will still reduce the time until these limits are reached.

All the wear levelling is doing is spreading it over the drive, but if your page file is then spread in places all over the drive, that increases the randomness of your data and will require reads from more places.

As for no way... well you know what they say about what you read and how you should always verify the information

With all of this wear your on about, whats the life expectancy of a modern SSD drive then?

With all of this wear your on about, whats the life expectancy of a modern SSD drive then?

Depends on many factors, including the sequentiality and write level of the data.

As such I couldn't give a figure that would be realistic without that sort of data as it could be misleading or at the least way wide of the mark.

If you look at the data sheet, pay attention the the write cycle lifetime and obviously the higher this is the better (Obviously look out for companies who might put an * next to that and then disclaimers).

FWIW I think a small SSD as a boot device, with not too much going on in terms of writes (DB, Swap file etc), backed up with a big HDD for bulk writes and data should be fine for a home user.

FWIW I think a small SSD as a boot device, with not too much going on in terms of writes (DB, Swap file etc), backed up with a big HDD for bulk writes and data should be fine for a home user.

I have ordered a 128GB one, just awaiting for it to arrive and then I can experiment. I suspect the rest of the PC really needs an upgrade, but this should do for now. I'll keep my normal 750GB disk for data, swap, etc.

Swutched my media pc over to a 40gb intel ssd for windows and then a tradiional for record data.

It does seem to be a little quicker but still early days.