just a couple of question chaps.....

right im thinking of putting a ssd drive in my puter just for the o/s.

i know that certain ssd drives perform so much different from each other....

so the questions are what are the better ones and the ones to avoid.

where would be the best place to get one from.

i was thinking of a 60 gig one.... will this be ok.

if its a sata 3 will it still work with my motherboard which is only sata 2, just thinking about future proofing thats all when i decide to upgrade again....

thanks for your time

I got a Corsair Extreme Series 64gb around 18 months ago. At the time is was £160, and to be honest I wish I hadn't wasted my money.

I'm on the third one, the other 2 died and were replaced.

It's supposed to have 220MB/s sequential read and 175MB/s sequential write, but it boots only about 30 seconds quicker than the Segate spinner it replaced.

I also haven't noticed that much improvement with windows in general.

Lots of people say the same and that the only true way to speed up the system dramatically is to have 2 SSD drives in a raid configuration.

I've tried everything and done lots of tests, I don't have a swap file as I have 8gig of ram and that improves windows more, but it was the same having the swap file on the SSD or spinner.

i have one in my quadcore and only have 4gb ram, it now boots under 15 secs on windows 7 proff, never had any issues from them and works as it should with a 500gb drive for storage its this one i bought - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...00_i00_details

SATA III drives connect and work on SATA II hosts just fine, but will obviously only run at SATA II speeds. There are SATA III PCI-e cards, but the only one I'm familiar with is the U3S6 from Asus. Compatibility of which is a bit flakey - mine worked with an LGA775 socketed Gigabyte board, but many have had trouble with Asus boards not on the compatible list. If you intend to upgrade to a SATA III mobo in the future it would be a wasted purchase anyway.

I've got a 60GB Corsair Force F60 in the laptop. It drastically improved boot time and battry life over the factory fitted 5400RPM (still installed for storage, but can be spun down). With the cloned Win 7 HP OEM install + SP1, it's nearly full; but unlike mechanical drives, there is no performace drop off for it. To contrast, on the main rig I've got 2x128GB Crucial C300 SSDs on the entry level LSI MegaRAID 9240-4i hardware RAID controller in a RAID0 config. Boot time over 2x160GB Samsung F1 mechanicals in software RAID0 was only slightly quicker - although Photoshop CS4 now loads in about 15 seconds rather than 90-120 seconds. So, as much as I recommend SSDs, unless you game online a lot (faster level load) or are forever in and out of programs (quicker program start) they're not really aimed at casual users.

UEFI + Windows 8 may subvert the arguement for most desktop users to boot from SSDs too. If, when it launches, Windows 8 does make question your SSD purchase it's worth noting Intel's Z68 chipset has an interesting feature called Smart Responce Technology. This allows you to pair an SSD with a mechanical in a sort of JBOD-RAID0 mashup to effectively create a hybrid drive. The setup caches regularly used and speed critical items to the SSD and keeps data and programs used less often on the mechanical drive.

That being said, with a formatted capacity of 48-55GB, a 60GB SSD would be the minimum I'd recommend for a Win7 install unless you want to start messing round with symbolic links (XP should be ok with the 30GB drives).

The best drive seems to vary on the end user, but the Crucial M4, OCZ Vertex 3 and Samsung SSD 830 range of drives seem to trade places depending on the drive and who's firmware is newest. As the write speed of the M4 drives drops off on lower capacities (read speed is unaffected), for the 60/64GB capacity I'd be looking at the Vertex 3 or SSD 830. Before splashing out on the Vertex 3 (as it's £30 cheaper than the 830) read up on "spare area" on SandForce based drives.

When you get your drive see if there is a firmware update, as the majority of firmware updates are "destructive" (i.e. they wipe the drive data).

ok i went for the OCZ drive in the end.....

so ill use ssd drive for the o/s and i can use my existing hard drive for data storage....

thanks for the help and advice

lot of people seem to have probs with the OCZ ssds but i'v had a 120gb OCZ agility 3 for about a year and the thing is still flying, don't think i could go back to having my os on a hdd.

unless i had to

Originally Posted by Explosivo

lot of people seem to have probs with the OCZ ssds but i'v had a 120gb OCZ agility 3 for about a year and the thing is still flying, don't think i could go back to having my os on a hdd.

unless i had to

well, just an update....

i got my ssd and fitted it yesterday and i cant believe what a difference it has made, speeds every thing up a lot .... and i had a wd black hd which is now used as my data hd...

same as you explosive i cant see me ever having my os on a hdd again, i well happy

thanks again for all your help and advice