So I upgraded my school laptop to a 120GB Kingston V+100 SSD a month or so ago. I am able to go from hitting the power button to being ready to write notes for class in under 30 seconds. And as important, I can open programs and be running pretty quickly. Photoshop and Solidworks comes up quite quickly (So far Solidowrks has performed faster on my 1.6 GHz C2D . The downside to that drive was its just too small. I'm already approaching the limits so I have a 240GB OCZ Vertex 2 on the way (I actually received one but it was DOA). It should be somewhat faster than the Kingston. I'm gonna throw the Kingston in my netbook to see how it performs. Its only SATA 1 but other two SATA 2 computers I own don't get much use so I wanna see if I can speed up the Netbook in some way.

So based on my experience with my laptop, I decided to upgrade my desktop as well since we are running programs like Maya, PS, AutoCAD and soon, Solidworks. A few months ago, I had upgraded to a 3.05 GHz Core i7 with an Asus Rampage III Gene board. Since its capable of SATA 3 speeds, I opted for a 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3. I would have liked to do 200GB plus, but since its a stationary PC, I can make use of the network drive and my old laptop drive for data that I don't need such quick access to and to back up the data that will be kept on the SSD (working files for Maya, PS, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, etc.). So I received it yesterday and installed Windows and all the primary software. While boot up times are still long (Long BIOS POST), once Windows comes up, it flies. My GF used it through most of the night to work on her demo reel and she was very happy with it as she did not have to wait long to open files (this was a big complaint she had before).

Of course the damned things can be pretty pricey (especially higher end models), but they are damned fast. Even the "slower" ones are quite fast.

Lastly, if anyone knows of any good back-up software that will allow me to back up selected folders in the background automatically from the SSD to my secondary drive, it would be much appreciated. Despite my enthusiasm for the performance of a SSD, I'm weary of the reliability and would hate to lose important data that might represent a lot of work. And it would be ideal not to have to manually go in and back the important stuff up.

Agreed entirely on SSD. I've got a first gen OCZ Vertex in my netbook (only 30 GB - running Ubuntu) and it screams. Definitely puts the bottleneck on the netbook at the CPU. I've switched all of my computers (two desktops, one netbook and one laptop) to SSD. You can never go back. I've got a 120 GB SSD on my desktop for Windows, and a 30 GB SSD for Ubuntu (dual boot). 120 GB seems to be plenty for a full windows install with software.

As far as backup software goes, I've heard great things about Crashplan. I believe it is free if you are doing your own backups locally (alternatively, if you have another PC off-site running crashplan, I believe you can backup to it for free as well). The cost is only if you want to backup to their servers. I haven't implemented it myself yet, but I plan on going that route once I can afford a decent NAS setup. Currently, all of my data is stored on a Raid 1 pair on my main desktop. If you setup crashplan, please let me know how it works. I'm sure I wont be far behind...

Edit: I found this a while back and it is what introduced me to this software - http://lifehacker.com/5787572/set-up-an ... p-solution

Thanks. I'm trying it out now. Seems to have many of the features I'm looking for. It might be better if it allowed me to back up to another location but with a different back-up schedule. Say, to my NAS on a weekly basis for a longterm back-up solution but the local back-up would be fine for more frequent intervals since the process is going to be much faster.

I might consider this for my laptop if/when I upgrade my NAS. That may be relatively soon though as I'm approaching the space limitations of the one I have and it doesn't do remote access without some hacking. Though, I might prefer a solution for my laptop that allows me to keep a folder on the laptop and on my NAS synced so I can access the same files from my NAS at home if I'm working off of that and not have to put a copy of any modified files on my laptop before heading off somewhere with it. Cloud access might be an option but then I have to make sure I have a connection to use it anyways so it might be moot.

Just picked up a Kingston V+100 96GB for $143 shipped plus a $50 MIR from Amazon. I figured for less than $1/GB I'd pick one up. It'll be used on my HTPC for my OS and whatever else. I don't do any photo or video editing, just watch movies, surf the net, type papers, listen to music, ect... I probably won't even notice an improvement in performance since the only thing I do that's HDD and CPU intensive is starting up Win7.

But in my case I only have one 3.5" and one 2.5" spot open so this SSD can fill that 2.5" spot (hard mounted into the case, not soft mounted with silicon bushings like my 3.5" HDD bays) and because there's no moving parts, I don't have to worry about vibrations and noises coming from the case.

Looneybomber wrote:Just picked up a Kingston V+100 96GB for $143 shipped plus a $50 MIR from Amazon. I figured for less than $1/GB I'd pick one up. It'll be used on my HTPC for my OS and whatever else. I don't do any photo or video editing, just watch movies, surf the net, type papers, listen to music, ect... I probably won't even notice an improvement in performance since the only thing I do that's HDD and CPU intensive is starting up Win7.

Actually, you should notice quite a bit of difference in performance for any programs that are loading off the SSD. My laptop is a 1.6 Ghz C2D but it'll bring up Photoshop faster than it did on my 3.05 Core i7 with 12GB RAM. It has sped up loading times of the entire office suite as well. Of course, it won't do anything to help with streaming movies or music from another drive or the internet, but there will be a noticeable improvement in a lot of things. I'm tempted to get one for my HTPC simply so I can get to using it faster (feels like ages when you are staring at a TV ready to watch something). But I don't use the HTPC enough to warrant it. I could have put the one that went in my netbook into the HTPC, but we use the netbook a lot more than the HTPC. I will keep an eye on slickdeals anyways in case something crazy comes up at 60GB plus. Though, I don't think I can fit another drive in my HTPC case as I built it out of an old HP Slimline micro-atx case.

That said, the SSD rocks in the netbook. Loading times were the particular sore spot for me with running Win7 on the netbook (Albeit much faster than with Vista). I don't expect big performance from a netbook but waiting for the OS to load when all you needed was to check something on the net was a pain. Launching programs feels pretty fast now too so tends to feel a lot less like a netbook now.

I'm waiting for them to get a bit cheaper, but I fully intend to drop a ~120GB SSD into my machine as the OS drive at some point.

96GB V+100's on sale again at Amazon. $95 shipped after MIR. No it's not 120GB, but put two together in RAID0 and there ya go.

From what I've read, raid 0 with an ssd isn't a great idea. Ssd's have a higher failure rate than traditional magnetic drives. Putting it into raid 0 effectively doubles the chances of losing data. And most ssd failures are catastrophic, whereas mechanical hdds may provide signs of an impending failure altering time to backup important data. While kingston drives benchmark on the low end of ssd's, they are still a great deal faster than hdd's. That said, I'm not sure I'd take such a risk for a slight increase in performance. Running 2 ssd's as separate drives would provide just as much space while lowering the risk of losing all your data. Of course, I'd probably back up important data to a more stable storage medium anyways.

Also, SSDs in raid don't support TRIM (as far as I know). That was how I started with SSDs (I could buy smaller ones cheaply). Now I've got all of my operating systems running on single drives.

What do you guys think would be sufficient for a SSD boot drive?

I am looking into getting a 64GB or 128GB SSD for a boot drive, and a 1.5TB secondary drive. I am running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I am not too sure if 64GB will be sufficient. Possibly a 96GB?

A complete load of Windows 7 Professional is less than 20GB.

Since you have an external drive for stuff, I would think that a 64GB SSD should be sufficient if price is a concern.

Z

It really depends on what programs you run and how those programs use the drives. Ideally, you want to load your programs on the SSD. There may be a lot of benefit from putting larger data files (Photoshop, Maya, CAD, etc) on the SSD to reduce loading times. And then you'll want to give yourself some overhead for adding new files. And generally, you want to leave a lot of "blank" space for programs that use a lot of scratchpad/pagefile space. While SSD's reserve a portion of the space for its own scratchpad, most newer good drives will dynamically use as much of the "empty" space as possible to help increase write performance. Having mentioned the reserved scratchpad space, make sure you consider that the space stated on the box is not what Windows will actually see. Look up how much the drives you are considering will use. They do differ based on the controller type and NAND flash used. If you want to understand this in more detail, a great place to start is here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/1

I will warn you though, while Anandtech does a pretty good job of trying to dumb the topic down, its still quite a technical read.

AppleBonker wrote:Also, SSDs in raid don't support TRIM (as far as I know). That was how I started with SSDs (I could buy smaller ones cheaply). Now I've got all of my operating systems running on single drives.

What about the V+100 series that have their own garbage collection system for use in systems that don't have TRIM, for example, XP, Vista, Mac OS, xbox360? Will that work?

C-Kwik wrote:Putting it into raid 0 effectively doubles the chances of losing data. And most ssd failures are catastrophic

Frequent backups would be a must. Luckily 2TB external HDD's go on sale quite often. However, I doubt I would stripe SATA2 because the gain in performance would be limited by the interface. SATA3 though? Yeah.

Looneybomber wrote:

AppleBonker wrote:Also, SSDs in raid don't support TRIM (as far as I know). That was how I started with SSDs (I could buy smaller ones cheaply). Now I've got all of my operating systems running on single drives.

What about the V+100 series that have their own garbage collection system for use in systems that don't have TRIM, for example, XP, Vista, Mac OS, xbox360? Will that work?

Good point. I never really looked into it. But, a quick browse of the anandtech review (here) shows that it should work well (at the cost of longevity). I think that review mentions that it would be ideal to utilize the drive at no more than 80% capacity, and this is probably a good idea.

As far as drive size goes, my desktop is functioning perfectly well on an 80 GB Intel SSD (that's a Win 7 Pro install). Though, I only use it for programs. All of my sensitive data is on a storage drive (and backups). My HTPC is running Win 7 Pro on an OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB drive. The Intel drive is at about 55% of capacity. You should be ok with roughly that size drive. If you went with the 64 GB V+100 series drive you would be getting dangerously close to that 80% capacity wall without too many programs installed. Just my $0.02

It should be recommended that if one is going to try and buy a drive without much extra space, that they should double check the actual formatted size. Its usually lower than the specs on the box and can vary between manufacturers, controllers and even NAND Flash size.