OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)

[Coltimar]

So just any old 2.5" to 3.5" bracket will do? No trouble with vibration or any other garbage?

I guess I was just looking for something built for this purpose.

[ChaoticMonk]

So whats the cheapest solution when it comes to SSDs? for example, if you only intend on using it for WoW then maybe 16GB is enough?

[puppychow]

the 32GB OCZ drive is on sale for $99 afaik on newegg, the $70 rebate ends today I think though. I've been running one for 2 weeks now, and tbh I'd only buy one if you have a quad core CPU, a good GPU (the latest gen ATI/nvidia), and running under Vista with 8GB of memory or more. For those of us with dual core, 8800GTs (or lower), frankly the performance improvements are not that huge.

This is for people 5 boxing on a single PC, if you have fewer of course I think it may help more.

I do plan on upgrading to vista/8gb/quad core in a month or so, so that'll let me just carry my drive forward into my new rig.

[ChaoticMonk]

Well I do have a quadcore cpu and a 8800GT but I'm only running vista 32bit with 3gigs of ram...I'll go ahead and up it to 4gigs and save up for vista+4gigs of ram for the future.

[alcattle]

The prices have really dropped since you first wrote the review. Would the >$100 upgrade be noticable on a 1 HD system? The HD is newer, SATA II 3.0. Most are rated at 100MHZ read which is the one used in WOW.

[-silencer-]

The prices have really dropped since you first wrote the review. Would the >$100 upgrade be noticable on a 1 HD system? The HD is newer, SATA II 3.0. Most are rated at 100MHZ read which is the one used in WOW.

Yes, prices have changed a ton in 6 months. However, for our purposes, the only specs on the SSD we really care about is access time and read transfer rate to be overall better than 10k rpm drives. The specs on the OCZ Solid 30GB SSD for $75-90 look fine. I've installed two of them into computers I've built for people, and although I didn't get to test it out for more than a day, it appeared to work just as well as my 64GB model. Since WotLK only uses about 12GB, 30GB is plenty for now.

100MHz? You mean 100 MB/s? Many inexpensive SSDs are rated at 150-170 MB/s and are SATA 3.0. The higher-end SSDs (like the Intel X25-M 80GB for $400+) are 250MB/s. Also, SSD's don't get slower as data is read further from the center of a disk like standard hard drives. The real benefit is that the SSD random access time (time it takes to find and start transferring a file) is around 0.1-0.3 ms, while the fastest 10k rpm drives are just over 4ms. Since this is latency, lower is better. Some people like to point out that SSDs have a limited amount of writes before blocks of memory are no longer usable, but I've had quite a few standard hard drives fail over the years due to use. Since we're not going to be doing much writing to the drive (only during patches/expansions), this negative aspect doesn't matter.

[Mukade]

I'm considering getting a couple of 30GB drives. Would certainly be a good way to make use of the spare PERC 5i I've got sitting around, and get rid of the single figure FPS I get every time I log in in a town. My HDDs are probably the oldest parts in the computer, being rather old 300GB SATA1 maxtors (one for OS, one for games). At the moment I'm having to log each character in separately and wait for the FPS to stabilise, otherwise having all 3 trying to load at the same time has me seeing a max of 4Fps on each window for at least 10 minutes, where I usually get 60/30/30.

[Clanked]

[quote='-silencer-',index.php?page=Thread&postID=167764#post167764]Some people like to point out that SSDs have a limited amount of writes before blocks of memory are no longer usable, but I've had quite a few standard hard drives fail over the years due to use. Since we're not going to be doing much writing to the drive (only during patches/expansions), this negative aspect doesn't matter.[/quote]

Please, stop posting this myth. The limited amount of writes on affected the very first few SSD's. They all have wear leveling algorithms now, which even assuming constant reads and writes, will easily outlast your computer. It will take 50 years for you to render the drive unusable due to read/writes. If you are still using a 64GB drive in 50 years, you have issues. [url='http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html'][Citation][/url] Couple that with the fact that you will in no way shape or form be constantly reading and writing to the drive, 24hrs a day, at the fastest rate the drive will allow, and you can easily see that the lifetime will outlast even you.

So please stop running around shouting "SSDs Will Die! They have limited read/writes!!1"
Every time you post it, someone who doesn't know any better gets it in their head that SSDs will wear out. Technically, they do, but it will take 50+ years for it to even possibly affect you.

[-silencer-]

[Citation][/url] Couple that with the fact that you will in no way shape or form be constantly reading and writing to the drive, 24hrs a day, at the fastest rate the drive will allow, and you can easily see that the lifetime will outlast even you.

So please stop running around shouting "SSDs Will Die! They have limited read/writes!!1"
Every time you post it, someone who doesn't know any better gets it in their head that SSDs will wear out. Technically, they do, but it will take 50+ years for it to even possibly affect you.

Please, go back to high school reading comprehension. I'm not shouting that SSDs have limited writes - I'm stating that even though some people like to say they do, it doesn't matter either way in our application. In fact, I'm saying that reliability of mechanical hard drives is no better than SSDs, and believe mechanical drives are actually WORSE for reliability.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Between this thread and the Evilseed thread

I did some digging into why these intel SSDs provide such a massive performance gain and it is all about the IOPS and seek times. The real strain on a PC is that running multiple wows, symlinked or not, requires a ton of random reads from random files. The more reads that exist, the lower your throughput will be. For example, while 1 read constant may yield you 100mbs, 10 reads will NOT yield you 10mbps per read. Rather, it'll do maybe 1.5mbps per read. The reason for the througput cut is the seek time latency. With my raid0/1 array using 4x x25e SSDs, I'm able to hit over 1000mb/s read *and* write, and can have 10,000 open file handlers reading/writing and still obtain over 400mbs. My wow multiboxing is now insane.

I am considering selling my raptors.

Is there any way to confirm that wow does in fact get its texturs and what not from a lot of tiny files and not one big one?


Here $83:

http://www.hkepc.com/1955 (145 mb/sec transfer .2ms seek time)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ADATA-300-series...QQcmdZViewItem

Hey anyone want to go in on some I bet if we buy like 20 at the same time we could get for less then $83 each (I need 6).