Solid State Hard Drive

[Kyrillian]

Word to the wise, do not do the expedited processing option for $2.99. I did it and paid for overnight shipping because I was hoping to get the SSD today to start the process this weekend. I put the order in on Wednesday and as of today it still hasn't even shipped. Seems like the expedited processing is there version of an extended warranty. Either that or normal processing is ridiculously slow.

[Kyrillian]

Too add insult to injury with this expedited processing bs, Monica has been having issues with her HD and decided to upgrade to an SSD. So I buy one and this time I don't pay the $2.99 for expedited processing. I placed her order on Jan 8th, a Sunday, it got charged today and will ship tomorrow. My order was placed on Jan 4th and shipped yesterday. WHAT THE EFF!

[Jomama]

One thing different with SSD, turn off any auto-defrag schedule, don't want to defrag SSD's. And here's a little program widget that gives you info about the drive, read/writes, anticipated lifespan, and tells you if TRIM is enabled, etc
http://ssd-life.com/

[Eric]

I bought a 240gb OCZ SSD from Micro Center and it's glorious.

$5 says this is the early I/T trend this year now that the prices are dropping. I know I just bought $20k worth for all the laptops at my company as we're moving to Windows 7 in the next couple months so why not SSD's as well? I spoil my users...

[Eric]

Oh but a word to the wise: when you're reinstalling TOR it'll find the old install on your slave drive and attempt to just reinstall there. Make sure you point to your new SSD and do a fresh install.

[Klaus]

Ok, I hesitated to post this tool but wtf. Here is a simple tool to see how fast your SSD is. It caused me to purchase a SATA3 add on card so I could get faster (my mb is only SATA2).

[Klaus]

So are you guys seeing even close to the advertised speed? Even after I upgraded to a stand alone SataIII card I am still only seeing about half the speed.

[Kyrillian]

I ran the test and my result were abyssmal. It appears I have SATA 1, the slowest of them all. I scored like a 260 on that test, I looked up a forum where people post their scores and a guy with the exact same SSD as me posted a score of 1200something.

Does anyone know if I can get a SATA 3 controller to increase the speed or if I have to go to SATA 2?

Even with the lower performance it is still about twice as fast as my HDD. Yesterday I exited TOR to restart the computer for some changes to take effect. I was shut down and back in TOR within about 45 seconds, the majority of that time was TOR loading.

[Kyrillian]

OK so here is something else I don't get. I checked the specs on my SSD to see what the max read/write is. It is basically 500mb/s for both. But when I ran Klauso's tester, it tested at 100mb/s for each.

SATA 1 is supposed to be capable of 1.5gb/s. Shouldn't I be able to get to 500mb/s without upgrading the controller?

I am also going to try upgrading my SSD Firmware. I remember before I bought it there were some complaints that it needed new firmware but it wasn't clear. Hope that makes it faster.

[Eric]

I haven't tested data speeds, but my boot times/app load times are awesome. I've been moving a lot of data around from my SATA 1 TB to my 250gb SSD and the times weren't noticeably bad. I'll test using that tool sometime...