solid state hard drive?

j2011

Has anyone replaced their hard drive with a solid state hard drive and has it made a significant difference to the speed of their computer?

dg1dd1ngs_2

I have two Agility 2 100GB SS Drives for my new set up and Windows 7 64bit cold boots in around 30 seconds. It loads applications, software, games much faster. They are still quite expensive but they certainly do make a big difference. Also they are REALLY reliable

Toxteth_OGrady

Yes. Massively. One of the best upgrades you can make imho.

KillerWatt

Yes, and yes.

First SSD was an Intel X25-M (80GB), but the write speeds (75MB/sec) just weren't doing it for me so I gave that to the missus.
The read speed was (still is) quite impressive at 220MB/sec, which gives Win 7 Ultimate a startup (to desktop) time of 11 seconds on her 4 year old Toshiba laptop.
The only flaw is that her BIOS doesn't support AHCI (so no TRIM support), but Intel provide their own SSD management utility for that.

The replacement drive I chose for my system was the Crucial RealSSD C300 (256GB), currently the fastest consumer level 2.5" form factor SSD out there with read speeds of 355MB/sec, and write speeds of 220MB/sec.
To give you an idea of what that means in real life, it took me 6½ minutes to install Win 7 Ultimate from start to finish (installed from USB stick), and Windows is fully loaded to desktop in 8 seconds from startup.

Of course that sort of performance comes at a price, and the price of SSD is probably still too much for some to justify - but it was worth every penny to me for the speed increases I have seen on both machines.

The Intel drive cost me £180 from Novatech when purchased (they are down to £140 now), and the Crucial drive set me back £340 from Amazon.

Toxteth_OGrady

KillerWatt wrote: »

The replacement drive I chose for my system was the Crucial RealSSD C300 (256GB), currently the fastest consumer level 2.5" form factor SSD out there with read speeds of 355MB/sec, and write speeds of 220MB/sec.

Got the 64gig C300 with Rev2 firmware. I hear the latest Rev 6 firmware is one to avoid as it cause frequent freezes in Win 7. Unfortunately it can't be flashed back to Rev 2.

Also my mobo's (R3E) Marvell SATA III controller doesn't support TRIM with this drive so I have to run it off the Intel SATA II port. It's still amazing performance though albeit sub-300.

Probably gonna change it for a Kingston V+ 100.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Yes - pair of C300's on REV 6

KillerWatt

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

Got the 64gig C300 with Rev2 firmware. I hear the latest Rev 6 firmware is one to avoid as it cause frequent freezes in Win 7. Unfortunately it can't be flashed back to Rev 2.

I'm running Rev 0006 firmware in mine with no problems at all, in fact I needed Rev 0006 for TRIM to work correctly.

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

Also my mobo's (R3E) Marvell SATA III controller doesn't support TRIM with this drive so I have to run it off the Intel SATA II port. It's still amazing performance though albeit sub-300.

Same problem with my current 3 year old board, the SATA headers (Intel ICH10) are restricted to 3Gbps which castrates the read speeds to around 250MB/sec.

Toxteth_OGrady

28 pages of the tale of woe here (and apparently it's still not fixed):

http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/C300-Disk-Freeze-ups-in-Windows-7/td-p/18840

Caveat emptor

KillerWatt

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

28 pages of the tale of woe here (and apparently it's still not fixed):

http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/C300-Disk-Freeze-ups-in-Windows-7/td-p/18840

Caveat emptor

Only had a quick read of the first handful of pages, but I haven't experienced any of those issues (yet).
Having said that, the Crucial drive has only been up & running properly since yesterday (been too ill) and all those reported issues only showed up after a couple of weeks use....so I'll keep an eye on it and report back if it does start playing up.

dealer_wins

Will these SS drives work in older PCs? I have an 8 year old Dell 8400 with a 250GB Sata hardrive, could I buy a SS drive and just "put it in" ?

Thanks

KillerWatt

dealer_wins wrote: »

Will these SS drives work in older PCs? I have an 8 year old Dell 8400 with a 250GB Sata hardrive, could I buy a SS drive and just "put it in" ?

Thanks

You can if you like, but I suspect that both your BIOS and operating system won't be able to support all of the drive features.