SSD Are Me!

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

That makes perfect sense, you should do that.

Except that will lead to odd sleep/wake issues, if you are booting off the SSD, because the power management on the optical bay doesn't work the same way. This is from what I've read - many people have had issues with the OS drive being in the optical bay.

[FanIn80]

Well, I have everything installed. So far, so good...

Went with this drive: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...23361(ME).aspx

(The drive bay that came is extremely cheap. I had to monkey around with it a bit, but I finally got it to work properly. I did this whole thing on the cheap. The SSD was a Christmas gift... I really only spent $80 on the drive and $12 on the bay.)

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Except that will lead to odd sleep/wake issues, if you are booting off the SSD, because the power management on the optical bay doesn't work the same way. This is from what I've read - many people have had issues with the OS drive being in the optical bay.

That's correct, there's a setting in the OSX preferences you have to change to mark it as the primary boot first.

[MickMcGeough]

Ugh, now I have to upgrade again:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/05/o...3-pcie-ssd-at/

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Ugh, now I have to upgrade again:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/05/o...3-pcie-ssd-at/

Nooo.... No more! I have an SSD system drive and a secondary storage drive in each of my laptops now. I'm not spending anymore money until I graduate next year and go back to some kind of a real job again!

Then I'm going nuts buying up all the crap I missed out on over the last couple years.

[photon]

Lol nice. Cmon Intel, where's your drives? Last thing I read though was that their drives will only be 250MB/s / 170MB/s this generation, which puts them far behind.. maybe that's why they're late, they're rejigging.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

That's correct, there's a setting in the OSX preferences you have to change to mark it as the primary boot first.

link?

[photon]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4100/o...ndforce-sf2000

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

link?

This article has a ton of great info on this upgrade:
http://remiel.info/post/1601242301/m...d-on-a-macbook

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

This article has a ton of great info on this upgrade:
http://remiel.info/post/1601242301/m...d-on-a-macbook

Cool, I didn't realize the issue was only with safe sleep, a feature I disable as a part of my Mac builds anyways. No way I'm willing to write out a 4GB file to my precious SSD every time I close the lid.

[FanIn80]

Whoa, whoa, whoa... safe sleep, wha?

Edit: Never mind. Just read that article. Whew, some nice tips in there. Safe sleep disabled, and I even killed the sudden motion sensor too.

Incidentally, that article refers a lot to Carbon Copy which is free in the Mac App Store right now ()... Is making a disk image with this better than just using Time Machine (using the second drive as storage)?

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Incidentally, that article refers a lot to Carbon Copy which is free in the Mac App Store right now ()... Is making a disk image with this better than just using Time Machine (using the second drive as storage)?

Depends on the type of backup you want. I like being able to easily rollback apps (or code if I'm neglecting SVN) so TimeMachine works perfectly for me.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Depends on the type of backup you want. I like being able to easily rollback apps (or code if I'm neglecting SVN) so TimeMachine works perfectly for me.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Btw, I'm loving this whole Time-Capsule-on-the second-disk-thing.

[MickMcGeough]

Must have this.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4159/o...st-sf2500-ssd/

[burn_this_city]

Bump...

I'm thinking about picking up one of the 120gb drives this weekend when I'm back in town. Any brands to avoid?? Also how is the installation? I have an ASUS gaming laptop and I'm pretty clueless when it comes to laptop hardware. Once its installed how should I set it up so the OS is on the SSD? Format and start fresh or can I move the OS from one drive to the other?

[Hack&Lube]

What's the sccop on the new Intel 510 drives? Going to be building a laptop soon. Have the choice of any SSD on the market. What should I use for most performance in the 100-128GB segment?

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...32562(ME).aspx

Sustained Sequential Read: up to 450 MB/s
Sustained Sequential Write: up to 210 MB/s

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

Bump...

I'm thinking about picking up one of the 120gb drives this weekend when I'm back in town. Any brands to avoid?? Also how is the installation? I have an ASUS gaming laptop and I'm pretty clueless when it comes to laptop hardware. Once its installed how should I set it up so the OS is on the SSD? Format and start fresh or can I move the OS from one drive to the other?

Always format and start fresh

Installation is different on every laptop, but I've never had a laptop which was extremely hard to replace the disk.

As for brands, worry less about the brand and more about the controller. The Sandforce SF-1222 controller is the best consumer-level SSD controller today, with Intel's X-25 line matching it in read performance but falling behind in write performance.

If you can - I'd hold off on buying an SSD right now altogether. Sandforce's SF-2281 controller is about to start appearing on shelves and being benchmarked at over twice as fast as any current consumer level drive. Of course you probably don't have a motherboard that can read at 525MB/s, but they're apparently going to cost just slightly higher than equivalently-sized drives cost now, plus they'll push the price of SF-1222 drives down even lower.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/27/o...dforce-sf-228/

Intel's got the 510s coming out soon too, which should perform at about the same level for around the same price.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/04/i...inst-vertex-3/

In short - it's the worst time to buy an SSD since the prices first came down into reasonable levels.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

What's the sccop on the new Intel 510 drives? Going to be building a laptop soon. Have the choice of any SSD on the market. What should I use for most performance in the 100-128GB segment?

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...32562(ME).aspx

Sustained Sequential Read: up to 450 MB/s
Sustained Sequential Write: up to 210 MB/s

Whoa, I didn't realize these were out.

Still, they don't quite measure up against the SF-2281 drives, but they're close:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4186/o...cused-sf2200/8

[burn_this_city]

Awesome thanks, I'll hold off for a bit then.

[photon]

For all but the newest laptops if there's a good deal on a current generation Sandforce drive then I think that'd be sufficient, the new ones need SATA III to take advantage of the performance.

How much the current generation of drives' prices go down when the new ones come out is the question, but I'm not convinced they'll go a huge amount lower since it seems that they're wanting to keep the same level of pricing on the next gen drives rather than going with a price drop like the last time there was a die shrink for flash. So they don't want to devalue their products too much.

But for a desktop or high end laptop with SATA III in it I'd wait for a bit for the new generation of drives to shake out.

The biggest surprise is that Intel didn't make their own controller for their drive this time, they went with a Marvell chip! Their own firmware, but still...