Originally posted by Estuansis:

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Well it has Seasonic internals and is essentially another 620HX so I guess I don't have much issue with it.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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I'll be honest, I haven't had the time to look at it to determine if it was the drive or the controller to blame. For now I'm only using 2TB drives in live storage.

It's now come to the stage where it's cheaper to buy a 64GB SSD for an entry level machine than a 500GB mechanical drive (the smallest common size now). SSDs are growing quite rapidly at long last - I'm looking at purchasing a 180GB SSD for c. 50% more than my 40GB originally cost me a couple of years back.

Agreed on the Seasonic internals, Antec PSUs are very variable, but if you know what's on the inside, that's arguably what matters, and they have made some good units over time. The low-end Zalman PSUs for example are pretty questionable, but the high-end units with different OEMs are pretty good.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Thanks anyway for the offer Russ, but apart from living in the UK and not the US so newegg being of no value to me, I prefer to stick to the Intel SSDs. Admittedly they use Sandforce controllers now rather than bespoke Intel ones, but the experiences of others with OCZ SSDs as well as my own makes me not interested. OCZ SSDs have failure rates higher than most mechanical drives, and are one of the main contributing factors to why SSDs still have a higher mean failure rate than mechanicals. Conversely, whatever you say about how well Intel do business or how price-competitive or otherwise their products are, they build stuff properly, and always have done. Over here the 120GB Vertex 3 is £79.34 which works out to be $107 before tax, so it's a little more expensive over here, admittedly.

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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I'll be honest, I haven't had the time to look at it to determine if it was the drive or the controller to blame. For now I'm only using 2TB drives in live storage.

It's now come to the stage where it's cheaper to buy a 64GB SSD for an entry level machine than a 500GB mechanical drive (the smallest common size now). SSDs are growing quite rapidly at long last - I'm looking at purchasing a 180GB SSD for c. 50% more than my 40GB originally cost me a couple of years back.

Agreed on the Seasonic internals, Antec PSUs are very variable, but if you know what's on the inside, that's arguably what matters, and they have made some good units over time. The low-end Zalman PSUs for example are pretty questionable, but the high-end units with different OEMs are pretty good.

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Sam,

Newegg has this OCZ Vertex 3, 120GB Sata III SSD on sale for $85 with a $10 MIR.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706

Russ

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Very impressive price for what it is on the Intel SSD, I'd take that over anything else in its price bracket imo.

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Very impressive price for what it is on the Intel SSD, I'd take that over anything else in its price bracket imo.

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Sam,

I went ahead and bought the Intel 330. It's pretty hard to argue quality when your product comes with a built in 16% failure rate, while the Intel is still a solid 5%! 11% more reliable than the Vertex 3, make's it a no-brainer for me! LOL!! The Patriot will work fine on Sata II, but about 50% slower. Still, much better performance than a conventional HDD can produce, even in IDE mode! I look at it this way, "my first Intel SSD!" May there be more in my future! It could be here tomorrow or Friday. I'll have to see if I am up to tackling mine, this weekend, if it does come. It shouldn't be difficult, only time consuming.

Thanks again,
Russ

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Originally posted by harvardguy:

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So, here's the dumb question: Assuming of course that you really can't fit everything on the SSD - you have a 120 gig SSD and a 2 TB hdd- is there any trick to it, or when you want to install programs to the hdd, you just create a Program Files folder over on the hdd, and do a custom install, telling w7 to install over there? Is there any difficulty to the process at all? I'm embarrassed to ask, but I have always had a bit of doubt in my mind, like maybe it isn't quite that easy.

Second question while I'm on the subject. Same level of noob-ness. Talking about failure rates reminds me that SSDs are know to be nowhere near as reliable as HDDs and if you can get 2 years out of an SSD, that is considered good. So, would one want to clone the SSD to a small HDD from time to time - like let's say every 6 months or so - to avoid the tedious process of re-installing the operating system and whatever programs you have running on it, when your SSD finally fails? I didn't talk to Miles about that.


Rich

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Originally posted by Blazorthon:

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Very impressive price for what it is on the Intel SSD, I'd take that over anything else in its price bracket imo.

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Sam,

I went ahead and bought the Intel 330. It's pretty hard to argue quality when your product comes with a built in 16% failure rate, while the Intel is still a solid 5%! 11% more reliable than the Vertex 3, make's it a no-brainer for me! LOL!! The Patriot will work fine on Sata II, but about 50% slower. Still, much better performance than a conventional HDD can produce, even in IDE mode! I look at it this way, "my first Intel SSD!" May there be more in my future! It could be here tomorrow or Friday. I'll have to see if I am up to tackling mine, this weekend, if it does come. It shouldn't be difficult, only time consuming.

Thanks again,
Russ

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Wouldn't that be about three times more reliable if the failure rate is estimated to be about one third of that of the Vertex 3, not a mere 11%?

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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First question: No as long as you have recently new defrag tools that will only optimise SSD's you're fine. And you can treat your SSD like any other hard drive when installing. You can have your page file on it and you can use indexing however anything that is going to be real repetitive on one area of the SSD could do damage. I always put my profile on a different drive then my OS. Also DO NOT use bench mark tools on your SSD's unless they have specific tests just for SSD's. Burn in tools and some benchmark tools can destroy a SSD fast so be careful.

Second question: No they aren't.

XP can't handle an 8GB files using FAT32, nothing 4GB or higher if I recall correctly.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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First question: No as long as you have recently new defrag tools that will only optimise SSD's you're fine. And you can treat your SSD like any other hard drive when installing. You can have your page file on it and you can use indexing however anything that is going to be real repetitive on one area of the SSD could do damage. I always put my profile on a different drive then my OS. Also DO NOT use bench mark tools on your SSD's unless they have specific tests just for SSD's. Burn in tools and some benchmark tools can destroy a SSD fast so be careful.

Second question: No they aren't.

XP can't handle an 8GB files using FAT32, nothing 4GB or higher if I recall correctly.

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Rich might be confusing this with the fact that a 32-bit OS (which xp almost always is) can only address 4GB of RAM.

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