TheVille

Decided to give an SSD a try. Got an Intel 160GB and cloned it as my Op Sys and programs drive. So far so good. Improved the Windows experience and a few performance benchmarks a little. Anyone else have any experience with SSD's?

I have SSDs running as the OS drive in my main rig and the server. It is oh so sweet.

Don't put your swap file on it.

I heart my SSD. I need a bigger one though for my games!

Clay Pigeon wrote:Don't put your swap file on it.

I strongly disagree. The whole point of having an SSD in the first place is having faster access times than a HD.

The Spanish Inquisition wrote:

Clay Pigeon wrote:Don't put your swap file on it.

I strongly disagree. The whole point of having an SSD in the first place is having faster access times than a HD.

Or just remove the swap file all together. Most people have more than enough ram these days.

I need to do this soon, my beard grows betwixt maps in BF3.

The Spanish Inquisition wrote:

Clay Pigeon wrote:Don't put your swap file on it.

I strongly disagree. The whole point of having an SSD in the first place is having faster access times than a HD.

You'll likely end up reaching your SSD's write limit in 2 years.

Putting your OS files and programs on it, that get read often but not written often == good.

putting your swap file on it, which gets rapidly written and rewritten == bad.

SSDs use controllers that include very sophisticated "wear-leveling" algorithms to make sure that no one flash memory cell will wear out first, and so the actual lifetime of an SSD is a lot longer than it would be otherwise. As an example of endurance, Intel rates its 160GB X-25M G2 drives with a lifetime of "at least" 5 years even if you write 20GByte per day to them.

The only reason to disable the page file on an SSD is if you never max out your RAM. And seeing as most people have 4GB or more, just store the page file in RAM.

Ive been Using a 60g SSD for about a year now. For about 5 months I used it to hold the games I was playing on And it was really nice. Then I set it up to dual boot Linux and Win7 With all the SSd optimization (No Swap, Bunch of other things) Finally about a month ago I set it up to just run Win7 And its smooth as butter. I left the page file intact and everything else the same. Its smooth stable and SMART data shows very little wear over that year. I figure if my Page File burns it out in a year it was worth the 100$ for the speed. And I ll just upgrade it

Clay Pigeon wrote:

The Spanish Inquisition wrote:

Clay Pigeon wrote:Don't put your swap file on it.

I strongly disagree. The whole point of having an SSD in the first place is having faster access times than a HD.

You'll likely end up reaching your SSD's write limit in 2 years.

Putting your OS files and programs on it, that get read often but not written often == good.

putting your swap file on it, which gets rapidly written and rewritten == bad.

I've already been using my x25-m 160Gb for over 2 years. The first year of that time without the trim function, masqueraded as a regular HDD through the mobo's fake raid controller.

Comparatively, nobody puts plastic covers on their furniture anymore either.

Ditto. My gaming rig uses the Intel 160 GB model and I built it in March of 2010. I've had zero problems with it once I got it set up right.

The only problem that I did have was I would periodically get a 1sec lockup in games and it turned out that the AHCI driver that installed with win7 (pre SP1) was old. I downloaded the latest from Intel and that fixed the problem.

You need to remember to run your SATA drives in AHCI mode (as opposed to IDE mode) in order for the Intel drive to be able to natively support TRIM commands.

SSDs are kind of like a dishwasher or heated seats in your car. You can do without it but man once you have it, you'll never go back. SOOOOOO much better than mechanical drives in just about every way.

I got mine a couple months ago, was expecting a little more out of it, but its good

Just make sure you are running in ACHI mode, as opposed to IDE.

If you are running windows, you can also check to make sure TRIM is working by typing "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" from the cmd prompt (run as an administrator).

If it passes a value of 0, trim is working; 1 means it is not.

Jesus_Faction wrote:I got mine a couple months ago, was expecting a little more out of it, but its good

You must do your research. Many SSDs for sale are bandwagon jumpers and performance is no better than a HD or even a usb flash drive. My asus eeepro has two ssd drives in it because one is significantly slower. The faster one is used for the O/S but in comparison, both are way slower than my intel drive. In my opinion no one is making better SSD's than intel.

When ever a map changes, I know who is running an SSD in their machine. I am almost always the first person to connect to the next map and can see everyone else who joins later. Sometimes it can be many seconds before the second person 'connects' to the map and then I know that no one has an SSD (or if they do, it's junk.) The speed of the intel SSD is also relatively independent of processor speed or how good your rig is because I've always been first to connect even when I had my old 2006 core2duo machine.