Budget Sub-$150 Solid State Drive Round-up

My motherboard doesn't not show POST, but it takes longer to start than Windows 7 to load though. It takes about 40 seconds to get to W7 and ready to use it. I only have antivirus software, sound card and video card drivers running with boot.

So, if I get a Momentus XT, will I see an improvement at least in games' loading times and when windows starts? They are more than enough reasons to go and get it xD
SSD drives are just way too expensive for me and they lack of capacity, so I'm not considering buying one until I'm rich lol (a 60GB Ocz Vertex is U$S190 or $760 and a Vertex 2 same capacity U$S290=1160). Sorry for the re-post, thanks again!

I have not noticed this at all but then the graphics card that I game with produces such a high frame rate that’s not surprising. As you say when benchmarking the first run is discarded but then again I have not notice the SSDs producing higher results, I will have to look into it. Still as I said this has had no impact on my gaming experience what so ever.

So you could put that down to it being the games I play which I can assure you does not include WoW or the fact that the rest of the system is fast enough to sustain a high-end frame rate that the hard drive does not impact performance as much. I would assume anyone spending the kind of money it takes to acquire an SSD would already have a decent graphics card.

At the end of the day if you do see a performance increase that is great, it just adds to everything good we have been saying about SSD technology. After all I believe SSDs do enhance the gaming experience, I just feel most should expect to see better load times more so than improved frames per second performance but as with everything there is the exception.

Well I found Windows loading was much faster but not game level loading though this might vary depending on the game. I would recommend going for an SSD instead like one of the models we suggested in the conclusion. Yes the capacity is small but the performance was consistently impressive and you only need to install the applications you are using on the SSD and store things like high-res images (if you have lots), movies and music for example of a secondary hard drive.

The author doesn't make much distinction between Single-Level Cell (SLC) and Multi-Level Cell (MLC) SSD drives. Of which, the MLC drives are cheaper than SLC drives but sacrifice some performance in the process. All the drives listed here are MLC drives (since there was a price cap) and we would see better performances out of their more expensive SLC counterparts.

I'm waiting for the and which leads to your point...

In past reviews where SLC was an option we discussed the merits of it, we have even reviewed a few SLC based SSDs.

http://www.techspot.com/review/201-ocz-agility-60gb-slc-ssd/

As you said there was a pricing cap on this article and anyone on a budget that wants to get a taste for what SSD technology is about is not going to worry about anything using SLC memory as the cost is astronomical.

Well after reading this article, just bought 2 x Kingston SNV425-S2 64GB. I don't play as much Starcraft 2 as I play World of Warcraft, but I can imagine it's the same deal. Thanks for the good article!

I didn't see any reference to TRIM support for any of these SSD drives. Without that (and an OS that implements it like Windows 7), none of these drives will stay very fast very long.

Please indicate which, if any, of these supports the TRIM function.

You guys have never used computer with windows 7, right? If you HAVE used you would know that SSD nowadays are waste of cash. Windows 7 just by itself will take 16GB. Nowadays to have proper Boot Drive it has to be around 100GB to cover the ESSENTIAL crap that all those useless companies offer like:
-Adobe Pgotoshop CS5+ other = 10GB (why somebody would wish more than Photoshop 6.0?)
-Itunes + apps like navigon = 5GB
-MS Office = 2GB
-Adobe REader = 150MB (WTF???? just for reading) - use foxit reader instead - 5 MB and does more than adobe reader will ever do.
-Shall I stop or continue???
- ...
In real live you end up with atleast 60 - 70 GB of crap you must have on the boot partition/drive. You need to have at least 20% free in order not to defragment every week...
Don't waste time reading useless comparisons or waste money in SSD. if you want to be pimping and money is not problem for you, buy yourself two computers and do the job simultaneously or I can give you my Paypal account to donate.

No you are right we have never used Windows 7, we just test with it. I still use Windows ME because it fits on my boot drive better and loads faster

How is your copy of Windows 7 16GB by itself? That is impressive for a program that comes on a single DVD and even then only takes up 3.4GB of that DVD, phenomenal compression going on there, the program should take 3 days to install.

Sorry Per troll feed.

First Per says don't feed'em...the Steve feeds'em...I'm so confused:haha:

Just as a quick aside. I use the Kingston SNV425S264GB and it works well, but I've always wondered about how well it uses TRIM. Is there any way in the present iteration of Win7 for users to see how TRIM is working, and how long it takes for TRIM to do its job? i.e. is there a utility or a way to see how much nand needs to be returned to state 1 and how long it will take for TRIM to return everything to 'like new'? When you are using Perfect Disk, or Diskkeeper for instance, you are able to see something like 54% done, 23 minutes remaining etc.

Thanks in advance,

Norm

Defragmentation puts all the little chunks of file in sequence to reduce the latency when opening/reading files. If you have a chunk of file on platter1 and a chunk on platter 4 then the next chunk on platter 3, with a seek time of 1.8ms, that will take a while (hence the delay when opening files). De-fragmentation solves this.

SSD's do not have platters or anything mechanical. The seek time is 0.1ms on my Vertex2 meaning every sector can be accessed with the same 0.1ms delay, no matter where they're located. In this case, De-fragmentation is useless and as I put on my blog, should NOT be done.

And to the guy who said 30GB is not enough for a windows install with apps...

I have a 60GB Vertex2 and I have a 28GB windows partition and the rest are linux partitions. Everything else is mapped to my gigabit NAS and in linux, I actually made a 'ramdisk' where I mount /tmp into the RAM, completely saving the SSD from temp file writes (firefox cache, etc).

As for windows, I have Office2010, Photoshop, Crysis Ware-head, SQL server, Oracle, IIS7, VirtualBox, Opera,Firefox,Chrome(Browsers), Ultravnc, Foxit(pdf), infraburn(4MB freeware burning suite, snappier than Nero) and some other things.

You can do it in 32GB EASILY. Just be sure to disable things like System Restore, Hybernation, defrag, indexing, firefox cache, etc. Also map your docs, etc to network storage or a mech drive.

-Paul

No, he's not speaking rubbish, W7 Ultimate 64-bits installed takes 16GB from your hard-drive. And yes, it's a great compression, the greatest I've ever seen myself, but, there's a illegal "repack" of Alien vs. Predator that the .iso it's 2.37 GB and once the game's installed it sucks 25GB!!! How much does it takes to install? "90-240 minutes, no joke" But I've not seen it yet.