Inexpensive SSDs

Not sure how many of you pay much attention to SSDs but I thought I'd post my experience with the latest round of SSD upgrades on my gaming rig. I'm always looking for hardware updates as they become (relatively) cheap and this week's was new SSD drives. The Samsung 840 Pro 256GB drives are $169 on Amazon and I finally bit the bullet and picked up a couple.

My system is an Intel reference motherboard BOXDP67DEB3 LGA 1155 P67 with an i7-2600K 3.4GHz CPU. I have my OS/Games drive on the two 6gbps ports in RAID0 and a secondary (backup) drive that's a regular old SATA3 512GB/16MB cache 7200 RPM HDD. I tested the (new to me) 840 Pro on a single 3gbps port before swapping both of them into the RAID just to see what kind of performance the newer drives would give me. Below are the results.

Backup drive (HDD):
http://www.l00py.net/misc/atto_samsunghdd.png

Old RAID0 with Samsung 64GB drives from about 18 months ago (note that this setup was about twice as fast as the previous Kingston 48GB SSDs in RAID0:
http://l00py.net/misc/atto_Samsung64gSSDsRAID0.png

Samsung 840 Pro single drive on a 3gbps port:
http://l00py.net/misc/atto_840pro3gbpsport.png

That just shows how much better the controllers on these things have gotten lately.

Then, with both 840 Pros in RAID0 on the 6gbps ports:
http://l00py.net/misc/atto_840proRAID0.png

I am impressed. And my system now takes about 8-10 seconds to cold boot from the end of the RAID init to the desktop.

So, for those of you wondering if SSDs of usable size are affordable, I'd say the answer is finally a resounding "yes!"

Holler if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Ugh