Solid State HDD

[spacesurfer]

How many people use solid states drives?

I'm thinking about buying a small 32 gb just for my OS install. I need advice on a good one that doesn't have the well-known problem of pausing or stuttering during writes.

Also, since all of them I know are 2.5'', how to mount them in a 3.5'' bay.

[CoffeeFiend]

Well, the cheaper SSDs' performance isn't quite as good as the "nicer" ones (like Intel's, which are very pricey) and in some cases slower than a classic mechanical HD... The main advantage is seek times. When it comes to transfer speeds, there's not that much difference. It's a pretty hefty price tag ($420 for the 32GB Intel X25-E) for a relatively minimal gain IMO.

Anyways. Mounting is the easy part. They've been making mounting brackets specifically for this for just about forever, like these.

[James_A]

If you are set upon using an SSD the Intels are the way to go. But, like CoffeeFiend has said, you are going to be paying a high price per GB

The Intels are way ahead of anything else on the market and will remain so until other manufacturers redesign their onboard memory controllers like Intel has done.

Stuttering occurs due to the way SSDs block erase instead of page erase as part of the write operation. Even well-known makes (Crucial, OCZ, Patriot) suffer from this.

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[puntoMX]

Even well-known makes (Crucial, OCZ, Patriot) suffer from this.

Indeed, as they don't use "In-house" technology and Intel isn't going to give theirs.

2009 Still isn't the year for SSD .

[pointertovoid]

Random access time and contiguous read speed aren't the whole picture in disk performance. One good reason for this is that accesses aren't random at all - Windows 98 and above make big efforts to avoid random file placing, Xp improves it further, Vista a bit more.

So solutions like CF cards on Pata adapters which may look fantastic can be - and generally are - very disappointing.

If you measure read and write speed at about 8kB chunk size with Atto (forget HdTach and HdTune) the figures match far better the speed you'll experience from a Flash storage. Notice that mechanical drives are better at Atto than most Flash - especially multilayer cells MLC must be banned as OS disks - and installing an OS on them confirms it.

[puntoMX]

Notice that mechanical drives are better at Atto than most Flash - especially multilayer cells MLC must be banned as OS disks - and installing an OS on them confirms it.

Don't forget the time to access the drives. I have found that accessing the drive is mostly the bottleneck with cheap SSDs. Windows 7 should support SSD way better then Vista.