120GB SSD @ NCIX for $209 (After MIR)

[photon]

Nice, thanks!

There's also the Seagate Momentus XT which combines a normal HDD with a very small SSD on a single drive. Good for laptops if you absolutely need 500GB of storage.

But the dual drive thing would be better.

[photon]

Got the drive today, and ended up doing a rebuild instead of an image over because I guess getting the partitioning right is important to the drive's performance or something.

Anyway, works good, quite fast, and nice and quiet. It'll take me days to get my machine back up and running to where I need it though.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

For the macheads that would like an SSD boot drive, but still want lots of space on their Macbooks, this is a wonderful invention: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

There are knockoff versions of this on ebay for considerably less, but MCE has a long track record making these, if that matters to you.

That's robbery if you asked me.

I use the newmodeus one. The one I ordered came with a bevel for tray load mods but this one has no bevel for slot loads:

http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?...roducts_id=259

Easy installation and haven't had any problems at all.

[Coys1882]

I bought the Corsair 64gig one from Memory Express yesterday - threw Windows 7 on it last night and I can't believe the difference. 10 second boot times to fully responsive O/S.

I'm really happy with the results.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by photon

Got the drive today, and ended up doing a rebuild instead of an image over because I guess getting the partitioning right is important to the drive's performance or something.

Anyway, works good, quite fast, and nice and quiet. It'll take me days to get my machine back up and running to where I need it though.

Really good call. If the sector alignment is off, the drive will be doing double reads/writes to get your data. In addition to hampering performance, it will double the speed at which you are consuming write cycles on the drive, shortening drive life.

Here’s some info on the issue: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...alignment.html

It’s a much bigger issue for people clinging to XP installs, since XP doesn’t know how to deal with non-traditional sector alignments by default. I believe there are ways to correct this, but my general advice for people would be to avoid XP

[MickMcGeough]

OCZ laughs at your piddly SSD drives:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/29/o...es-ssd-compet/

[amorak]

So wait, this 120GB drive doesn't support TRIM? My OCZ Vertex II 30GB OS disk does! I love it, boot time is so fast, but 30GB is too small for me, I want enough space to not be rotating games off and on the disk to conserve space...

[amorak]

Originally Posted by photon

Doesn't concern me much, they'll add it eventually and under normal conditions these Sandforce drives have seemed to be quite resilient as far as performance degradation is concerned.

Looks like it does support TRIM, per the NCIX listing:

• Available in 120GB extended capacities
• Native TRIM support

...or did you guys mean just that OSX doesn't support it...

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by amorak

...or did you guys mean just that OSX doesn't support it...

Yeah - pretty much any new SSD drive will support TRIM, but OSX doesn't yet.

[amorak]

So tempted to jump on this...