Which SSD

[jpenguin]

So, I'm going to order a new lappy from S76. IF I get it with a 250GB 5400RPM HDD $929. Or, I can get prinstalled with a 120 GB Intel 510 Series SATA III 6 Gb/s Solid State Disk Drive for $1228.

If I choose the first option I will order a seperate 120GB GB Intel 320 Series SATA II 3 Gb/s Solid State Disk Drive for $239 and a USB2 SATA drive case for $6. I would put the SSD in the lappy and the 250GB HDD in the case for a backup drive

So would you go for the extra speed or the backup drive?

[dibl]

Re: Which SSD

I don't know how you use your laptop, but 120GB seems like lots of space for documents, spreadsheets, some photos, and common software packages, and a reasonable collection of music. I have only a 40GB Corsair SSD in my Toshiba netbook, and that is plenty for casual use. So I would go for the SSD performance, and find a way to backup excess data to some other storage device if you need to. The SSDs boot way faster, and they take an occasional bounce off the floor better than the HDD.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Which SSD

Laptop + SSD = Quite, better battery life, faster = no brainer

I'd take the faster SSD and forget the slow old 5400 drive.

[wizard10000]

Re: Which SSD

Posted in another thread, but I just installed a 60gb OCZ Agility 2 in my netbook this morning - as a matter of fact I'm posting from it

I'd originally put a fairly speedy 500gb hard drive in the netbook but it occurred to me that I really don't need all my multimedia on my primary hard drive, so I put the 500gb drive in an external enclosure, installed the SSD and used the data from the old drive to migrate my configuration to the SSD.

After that I wiped the (now) external drive, reformatted it as NTFS and reinstalled my multimedia on it from my desktop PC.

This is the way I should have done things in the first place.

Here's what I'd do.

Get the laptop with the mechanical drive and buy an external enclosure to house the thing - they only cost about $20. The SSD I just got as an early Father's Day present was only $120 at newegg - and real world the OCZ drives perform just about as well as Intel SSDs do.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Which SSD

The OCZ Vertex and Agility 3 drives would be the best bet if you have an sata III connection

[wizard10000]

Re: Which SSD

The OCZ Vertex and Agility 3 drives would be the best bet if you have an sata III connection

Meh. No current SSD can keep up with even a SATA 1.0 interface

I'd do it if they didn't charge extra for it - but the amount of hype around SATA (and for that matter, USB 3) has got folks drooling over the latest and greatest, when the fact is that no single disk can transfer data at even SATA 1.0 speeds

[oshunluvr]

Re: Which SSD

According to OCZ, the series 3 drives can achieve 500ish mbs on an sata III interface and about half that on sata II.

My point being, if you're using a laptop and it has the sata III interface, why not use it to it's fullest extent? If it only has sata II then why spend the extra money.

Arguing the semantics behind those definitions and their theoretical vs. actual speeds would be an exercise in futility.

[wizard10000]

Re: Which SSD

According to OCZ, the series 3 drives can achieve 500ish mbs on an sata III interface and about half that on sata II.

Wonder why that is?

I will say that the spousal unit's brand new laptop has one USB3 port and I noticed transfers to an external drive were quicker even though the drive enclosure is USB2.

[jpenguin]

Re: Which SSD

Thanks for all the input, I'll defenintly go with a SSD. I'm told the pangolin has SATA III, so I may have them preinstall the 510 serries 120G; that would also keep the drive + computer under one warrenty.

http://www.system76.com/product_info...roducts_id=118

I guess I really don't need another backup drive, I have a 2TB FW800 drive for my desktop, an internal 640GB backup for my other desktop & a spare USB2 500GB drive.

[wizard10000]

Re: Which SSD

You may be right about the quality control as the SSD I installed this morning is going back to OCZ. I just finished the RMA request.

The drive shows up fine in BIOS but is throwing multiple read/write errors.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Which SSD

My first SSD (a Patriot), died exactly three days after the warrentee expired. They replaced it anyway without question.

I really think properly aligning for trim and such helps with longevity. Ask dibl about it.

[jpenguin]

Re: Which SSD

http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology...rBy=addOneStar


I have a 64GB Kinsgton in my desktop, almost a year- no prob; but they don't make it anymore, and the new model dpesn't have great reviews

[dibl]

Re: Which SSD

Ask dibl about it.

I'm knocking on wood, and wasn't going to say anything further.

Yes, the SSD in my netbook is turning 1 year old this month (or maybe next month) -- it's been to Europe and back, and is running like a champ. Likewise the PCI-e Revodrive SSD in my desktop is over 6 months old now, running more or less continuously, with no issues. I did two things on both of them that I think probably/hopefully contributed to their longevity:

1. Aligned the partitions to 512K cylinder boundaries

2. Mounted /tmp, /var/tmp, /var/log, and /var/spool to tmpfs filesystems, and slowed down the ext4 commit interval to 120 seconds, vs. the default 5 seconds.

Now, having shot off my mouth, I fully expect a crash tomorrow.

EDIT: I don't know why I wrote "Corsair" up above, the SATA SSD is one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227610

[wizard10000]

Re: Which SSD

I've got a Corsair Extreme X64 in my desktop PC that's been going strong for almost two years now.

I RMA'd the OCZ SSD yesterday, which ended up making a real mess out of my netbook. Not only would it not read over 125mb/sec, it started throwing write errors. Took me about three hours to clean up the mess.

My definitive file repository is my desktop PC, which rsyncs to an external drive. I don't back up the netbook - I just NFS files up to the desktop PC where they get picked up and archived.

One of the things that got corrupted on the netbook was my daily dpkg dump of installed packages - so I swiped the one off the desktop PC, which *should be* pretty close to it.

Did I forget to remove nvidia-current from the list before I did the dselect-upgrade? Yes. Does my netbook have Nvidia hardware? No.

Had some trashed file permissions in my home directory and got a crash course in chown and chmod but I learned that all dotfiles and .directories in your home directory are rwx------. All other files and regular directories are rwxr--r--

But I digress

I benchmarked the Corsair with and without aligned partitions and the difference in throughput was about one percent - everybody's free to set up their hardware any way they like, but as I said earlier the difference in any given disk operation is gonna be only one block so I decided not to mess with it.

I don't know why, but I haven't had good luck moving /tmp to tmpfs - the few times I've tried it I either got slow boot or no boot. My guess is I'm doing it wrong

I do like the idea of changing the commit interval - think I may try that on the machines here.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Which SSD

I would like to add your initial reported boot time seemed longish to me. I assumed it was because you hadn't taken the time to align and optimize for SSD's but it seems more likely now that is was the faulty hardware all along.

My netbook with an average Patriot SSD is power button-to-desktop in about 19 secs. Although it is not running Kubuntu so a direct comparison is unfair. I have Bodhi linux on that one - a light weight Ubuntu based distro with Enlightenment as the DE.