Widescreen Gaming Forum

8. Any signs of manufacturers are starting to produce 3.5" SSD specifically for the desktop?

My corsair drive(s) came with a 3.5" conversion frame.

If your MB have raid, consider buying 2-4 smaller and cheaper SSD's and raid0 them. Yes, theoretical failure chance increases, but over a workstations lifespan its still going to be luck or not. One day I'll regret raid0 on 4 drives, but right now I'm enjoying fast operation on nearly 500 GB of storage space... Tomshardware just ran a story on scaling in raid0 and conclusion was that it scales well.

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If you don't have access to TRIM, you can zero the entire drive, and that will restore its speed.

Formatting (not Quick Format) the drive isn't the solution? I have to get a drive wiper utility?

For what it's worth, I've been told that partitioning an SSD is a bad idea, as it breaks the wear levelling algorythms. Whether that is true or not (particularly on new controllers) I have no idea.

Okay, then I'll get 2 Intel SSDs (since Intel's are cheaper). One for the OS, another for storing files.

You don't need a SSD for storing files. Putting your operating system on one is the way to go, I have my OS on an OCZ vertex 2 100GB SATA, my computer boots in seconds. I installed windows 7 in just over 7 minutes via flash drive, and all the updates were done by 13 minutes flat.

8. Any signs of manufacturers are starting to produce 3.5" SSD specifically for the desktop?

My corsair drive(s) came with a 3.5" conversion frame.

If your MB have raid, consider buying 2-4 smaller and cheaper SSD's and raid0 them. Yes, theoretical failure chance increases, but over a workstations lifespan its still going to be luck or not. One day I'll regret raid0 on 4 drives, but right now I'm enjoying fast operation on nearly 500 GB of storage space... Tomshardware just ran a story on scaling in raid0 and conclusion was that it scales well.

The tradeoff isn't worth it in my opinion, but if you do regular backups and it keeps you happy then go for it. With four drives, though, I would go for RAID 0+1. Granted you'll only have half the usable space, but your data is mirrored in case there is ever a failure.

Don't forget backup to a second (non array) drive, preferably one that isn't permanently hooked up so it's more 'virus/accident' proof. ;)

Don't forget backup to a second (non array) drive, preferably one that isn't permanently hooked up so it's more 'virus/accident' proof. ;)

If I attach another SSD to SATA port 2 (port 1 is taken by another SSD), as long as I don't change AHCI to RAID, it'll show up as 2 separate drives in Windows Explorer right?

The main advantage isnt just increased speed, but more the combination of large storage space and general ssd speed.

I would still raid0 my 4 drives even if it gave a slight performance decrease compared to a single smaller ssd.

Large volume files like pictures/music/video goes to a regular hdd. Games live on the raid while I play them, and with steam its easy enough to move games no longer played somewhere else for hibernation...

This is how I use my system now, but who knows, 1 or 2 years down the road I might be the one that says "never ever raid0" :)

THe OCZ Ibis with their new HSDL interface are pretty swanky.

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=56314&vpn=OCZ3HSD1IBS1-360G&manufacture=OCZ%20Technology

They just bypass the sata entirely and made their own interface you plug right into the PCIe bus. Talk about bandwidth.

Even though the read-write speed have slowed down, data integrity is not affected right?

Hi All,

As an owner of a couple of Kingston M Series based on Intel X25-M G2 80GB I want to tell you the following:

Both drives stopped being detected by BIOS after messing with S1,S3 Power modes, setting them to ATA, formatting low level, installing Oracle Enterprise Linux R5U6 x64 (Red Hat 5), powering off the machine after it hung on root / partition formatting during OS install because that damned DELL machine doesn't have a reset button.
I tried to switch back all the parameters, mess with power and sata cables, switching them off and on during boot but no luck, the drives weren't detected. Later, I've read a release note for Oracle Ent Linux about not supporting S3, which my BIOS was using during Linux installation. I guess this was the fatality.
I've went the only one SSD repair shop in my city, since I'd lost a receipt of the purchase and the warranty expired, and have been told by the man that they do not have a proper program on their programmer for my particular model and that they couldn't help.
So I turned back to my office and plugged in on of the drives. ITS WAS DETECTED. My Win7x64 is installed on it now. I couldn't get the second one to life with my own attempts, should be visiting the same repair shop in the near future, just wanted to make you all know about the problems I've met and warn you about the very "SSD + ATA + S3 + Red Hat 5update6 Linux" incompatibility which just bricks the drive. I guess the ata_piix driver embedded in the linux distro sucks as much as the Intel chipset of the G2 version if they allow this thing to happen.

Regards,
Konstantin