The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Sam,

I chose the Patriot for the 60GB SSD in my computer, and was ready to replace it with a 120GB one, when their prices went sky high. I was going to ask about this one, and see what you thought.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167121

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Earlier this morning I purchased this OCZ Agility 4 128GB $69.99, with $15 MIR. One heck of a deal, IMO.

 

I saw that and yes it's a great buy. I'm sure you'll have good luck with it too.

 

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

 

Smashing price indeed on the Intel SSD. I believe prices like this are what I was waiting for. Will have to look into bundling one with my new PSU.

 

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

 

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%?

 

That, plus also, where are you getting those figures?

 

I hope you guys don't mind, but let me ask you a super dumb noob question about using an SSD, since it appears we're all going to be owning one very soon.

I heard the advice - don't put the paging file on it, and I think you also said turn off indexing. And I know about not defragging it. So when Miles recently got shipped the new i7 - that new model with about 4 billion transistors - and the samsung ssd, and the 2TB hdd (that picture I posted about the damage to the Lian Li hdd cage from rough shipping) over the phone I walked him through how to reset his paging file to the hard drive. And I guess those things come with lots of utilities, and to be properly educated, one should do some reading.

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.

(I just cloned, using the acronis program, my 1 TB hdd to a 750hdd that I keep just for that purpose - and the 400 gigs of w7 and games took about an hour to clone over. The clone stays in the case, but with its sata power cable unplugged. I have one other active drive, a 320 gig with xp on it - with the clone program and a few other things, and also half of the W7 paging file which I thought would give me a two-head benefit at least for paging. I have 8 gigs of Ram, that's the max, and I have an 8-gig paging file on the XP disk, and 8 gigs on the W7 disk. XP sees the 8 gig paging file - that confuses me - I thought XP could not see a file that large? Perhaps I should think about installing some of the games on the smaller, mostly empty drive, but now that I think about it, I am getting a short-stroke effect so far by only using 40% of the 1TB, and I don't really notice much of a loading time lag - nothing excessive - never beyond 20-30 seconds at the longest for example with crysis, and maybe 10 seconds at the longest with sleeping dogs.)

Rich

 

You could make a folder on the hard drive and tell programs that you want installed on it to install on it when you install them (it's as easy as browsing to the directory that you want to install the program to when it offers this; most installers have this option).

SSDs aren't necessarily less reliable than HDDs. Some are, especially those with SandForce controllers, but SSDs such as the Samsung 830 and SSDs with Marvell controllers (Crucial drives, Plextor drives, and the OCZ Vertex 4 and Agility 4, but not any other OCZ drives at this time) are quite reliable. Intel's Sandforce SSDs are the only SandForce SSDs that are arguably reliable.

Windows XP can address files much larger than 8GB. The older FAT32 file system does not support larger than 4GB files and this was a common file system for Windows XP systems back in the day, but using NTFS, Windows XP can address files as large as Windows Vista/7/8 x86 can.

 

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.

 

Blazorthon,
It's the same thing no matter how you say it. We were discussing the high failure rate of the Vertex 3, 120GB SSD. It starts right out of the box, roughly 2/3 more likely to fail than the Intel. 16% is an atrociously high failure rate, when compared to the 5% failure rate of the Intel!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

One of the many many reasons I haven't bought an SSD yet. Very few models have stuck around long enough to have an established reputation of quality.

 

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

 

That would be true in Windows 7 too, on the RAM limitation.

 

Windows 7 32 sees even less RAM than XP due to the extra software layer. Basically what lets you adjust the volume of individual processes and whatnot. It also affects audio quality and a few other things. Win 7 counts a small part of its virtual memory as part of the 4GB limit.

Basically for me, XP = 3.25-3.5GB, Win7 3-3.25GB

Other things affecting it being primarily video memory and even XRAM on Creative X-Fi cards. I would imagine it becomes quite cramped with 2GB video cards.

 

AMD 1090t is on its way Not too fond of the price (228USD shipped), but I figured I'd treat myself to a new-ish processor

Besides, I believe I can make use of its potential

 

Jealous

 

If you want my address so you can send it to me I'll give it to you, I don't expect you to pay for shipping though! LOL