64 Gb SSD acceptable?

[MiRai]

Do these SSDs go on sale regularly? I keep reading about people saying, "I got mine for $99. last week." Right now I am looking at, but I am completely open to suggestions, the Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148357

You missed the sale on those 11 days ago. Keep your eye open though, when I bought my Intel 510's at $60+
off on the overall total.

And lastly, I too am curious if Catamer's experience has been the experience of many?

Not sure, I have one SSD for my OS drive and one for my games drive. Seeing as these are the first SSDs I
had ever purchased I have nothing else to compare them to. When you RAID SSDs together you lose the TRIM
support for the drive and have to rely on the drive's internal garbage collection to do its thing. With as many
people that seem to like the TRIM feature and unless I had money to burn or needed ultimate fast speed (as if
they're not fast enough already) I personally wouldn't RAID SSDs together -- but that's just me.

[Acidburning]

You missed the sale on those 11 days ago. Keep your eye open though, when I bought my Intel 510's at $60+
off on the overall total.

Not sure, I have one SSD for my OS drive and one for my games drive. Seeing as these are the first SSDs I
had ever purchased I have nothing else to compare them to. When you RAID SSDs together you lose the TRIM
support for the drive and have to rely on the drive's internal garbage collection to do its thing. With as many
people that seem to like the TRIM feature and unless I had money to burn or needed ultimate fast speed (as if
they're not fast enough already) I personally wouldn't RAID SSDs together -- but that's just me.

and other applications get installed on a 3rd standard drive?

[MiRai]

and other applications get installed on a 3rd standard drive?

Yes, I have a drive for FRAPS and then another few TB of storage in RAID for everything else.

EDIT: Sorry, some programs I do install on my OS SSD and somethings I install on the storage drive.

[ElectronDF]

I have 64GB OS drive and a 128GB games drive. Both about 280/220 MB/sec read/write. I love them and haven't had any problems with them. OS is big enough to put all programs on it (Office, video converting software, etc). Games drive is big enough to put all games on it (WOW, SC1-2, Warcraft III, Diablo 2, RTS's, etc). I have a 500GB spinning HD for my big storage (videos mostly). I put my swap file on it since I am pretending that it would wear out an SSD to do constant writes to it. Yeah, I should have enough RAM so that doesn't happen often, but still. I partitioned the 64GB OS drive for 60GB (to allow for wearing) and the 128GB drive for 120GB.

I am not an expert, just my thoughts and info.
The thing I would recommend as much as an authenticator now that drives are cheap is a full 100% backup of your OS and a 100% backup of your WTF folder for WOW. You really don't want to have to do all the customizing you did to get WOW to play how you want it again.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I don't know I was dissatisfied with my SSD, (ozc revo drive 50G)

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-rev...press-ssd.html

Gonna try and sell it for $190. Looking at specs it should be blowing away hard drives but I just dont see that. Maybe you have to defrag them daily to get that I dont know but after a week or so they is not so hots.

Maybe its cause it didnt have trim or is like one generation old but Im going back to Raptors.

I have two raptors in raid 0 but they are only getting 100mbs for some reason (well one raptor is old maybe), while a single is getting 75mbs in my other computer.

Think Im going to go to a single 32mcache velociraptor and call it a day. All these other plans don't seem ready for prime time yet. They seem fine with raw specs but dont really seem to make enough difference in game.

50 was to small for wow as you have to leave like 16-20 empty. 64 will be ok for now but 1 or 2 more expansions and it will fill again. My wow folder is 36G right now but I am sure you can get by with less as there might be some SS and to many addons ....

I think money is way better spent at this point for 2G video ram card and just as much system ram as you can get.


Still as you have read many are happy with their SSD choice, so maybe i just bought the wrong one .....

[MiRai]

Gonna try and sell it for $190. Looking at specs it should be blowing away hard drives but I just dont see that. Maybe you have to defrag them daily to get that I dont know but after a week or so they is not so hots.

I hope for your SSD's sake that you're trying to troll us all by saying you defrag your SSD...

[Sam DeathWalker]

Without trim you need to do something daily but its not a defrag exactly, ya I know does sound stupid to defrag a SSD. Some kind of garbage collection or something, not really sure.

Anyway here is some lastest infos:

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1437&pageID=5993

Look at the 4K read chart. Now wow does a lot of reading in tiny chunks (cept when zoneing) as textures of individual characters are going to be really small, so the 4K test is best for WoW (cept when zoneing).

The Intel SSD comes out on top at 22Mb/sec. But the thing to note is that 22Mb/sec sux compared to the 400Mb/sec you get when you move large files that are next to each other. Out of the box I was getting 400Mb/sec with my revo on the Sandra test, which isn't limited to 4K blocks.

Now I am started to see what is going on here, why SSD are not feeling like they are blowing away HD like their specs indicate. Ya the velociraptors are doing 1-2Mb/sec and the SSD is 10X or more faster but it still is sux at 22Mb/sec (another reason why my old buss is up to the task). And why there is no noticable speed up using the 6G sata vs. the 3G or even the 1.5 sata connection, as you are miles away from stressing even the 1.5 sata. Heck you not even up to 133 IDE speed.

SSD or HD, if you have to go to the drive for textures you screwed. You are screwed less with the SSD but you are still screwed.

Of course loading the game or loading the OS and your SSD will feel a lot faster but for running around in org .... nope.

[MiRai]

Without trim you need to do something daily but its not a defrag exactly, ya I know does sound stupid to defrag a SSD. Some kind of garbage collection or something, not really sure.

Gotcha. TRIM or not, each manufacturer does have some sort of app that you run on the SSD. My Intel drives
have the Intel SSD Toolbox that I do run daily.

[Grail]

Thanks to Starbuck_Jones, ElectronDF, Sam_Deathwalker, Acidburning, and all who have pitched in here.

I also was thinking I could go with a 10,000 rpm raptor (not Veloci) for OS, 64 GB for WoW, and then a 640 GB Caviar Black for everything else. I have the two platter drives on a shelf. Just need to decide what to do about an SSD. If I can catch one on sale, I just about get next years prices I suppose.

Thank you Fenril for tipping me off to that site. Might make it easier for me to find deals.

I realize that for my new build, if I don't put the OS on an SSD I might not get 7 sec boot up times, but that is fine. The new computer I built for my brother boots from a cold start to a Firefox in about a minute and ten seconds. That is very good in my book for now. And, I might have a faster cpu and the 10,000 rpm hard drive. But, ...

If I use the 64 GB SSD just for the WoW folder, will I see the same kind of gains as I would if it shared the space with an OS? In other words, I know the OS will not be operating at blazing speeds, but will I still see the kinds of gains to make a gamer smile? Right now, I am having problems loading when I first log in and then new zones, etc. Game play is mostly good.

So is that where my SSD Read speeds are going to come in handy?

Thanks!

-Grail

[Sam DeathWalker]

Once you are in the game I would think that the OS is stable. Its not the OS per se its the pagefile where a lot of writing and reading is going on. The drive that the OS is on is only important for loading windows at the very start, once it is loading thats the end of the good use of that drive. The swap file is different as that is always in use, but you can put the swap file (about 1.5X times your system ram ... thats a rough figure some say zero others say 3X) on any drive.

Anyway you can fit the pagefile and the full wow folder on a 64G SSD, and you should see whatever gains you will get. But keep in mind my prior post. 22Mb/sec is sux no matter what even if a Raptor is only 1-2Mb/sec under the same circumstances.

I think it is very important you run that program for the SSD every 24 hours as Fenril pointed out. After doing nothing for 30 days my SSD was worthless.