Windows 7 I have decided to buy an SSD

whoosh

Cooler King
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l_07656639.jpg It will allow me to do demanding things with less overhead . Less heat while converting videos to dvd . It is not that large 64GB but plenty large to run the software and system I intend to use . I will have standard hard drives for the more mundane backup tasks :) Now just a few days to wait !

Unlike standard hard drives, Solid State Drives have no moving parts. That makes them faster, sturdier, lighter and less power-consuming.

This drive complies with the SATA 3GB/s standard, which allows top-notch access speeds. That's why some users like to use drives like this one to store their operating system and applications: the whole system becomes more nimble.
 
I have been looking at them but to me the Seagate Momentus XT Solid State hybrid Drive drive seem's to be a better choice if you are going to do heavy crunching. Price is definitely better for the GB and they compare well to the SSD. Have seen too many crash and burn stories on them SSD right now but things should improve with age.
SSD certainly wouldn't work for me doing a lot of reinstalling cause the life expectancy will go down dramatic. Just running an OS on them might not be so bad

Lots of Luck with it.
 
I have been looking at them but to me the Seagate Momentus XT Solid State hybrid Drive drive seem's to be a better choice if you are going to do heavy crunching. Price is definitely better for the GB and they compare well to the SSD. Have seen too many crash and burn stories on them SSD right now but things should improve with age.
SSD certainly wouldn't work for me doing a lot of reinstalling cause the life expectancy will go down dramatic. Just running an OS on them might not be so bad

Lots of Luck with it.
It is my first foray into the world of SSD. I will try to report on how I found the experience . I will for sure report back with any negative feed . Fingers crossed it will all be good . :)
 
SSD certainly wouldn't work for me doing a lot of reinstalling cause the life expectancy will go down dramatic.
I think that's an obsolete concern, if it ever really was a valid - at least for home users. Earlier SSDs (from 3 - 4 years ago) were rated at 100,000 writes per cell. You don't have enough time in your lifetime to install Windows 100,000 times. And even if you did, were talking per cell, not per drive and "wear leveling" algorithms in the controller ensure the same cell is not written to over and over again. Read rates are infinite.

Today's SSDs are rated at 1 - 2 million write cycles per cell. At 1 million, if you wrote to a cell every 5 minutes every hour, every day, it would take nearly 10 years to burn out that cell. Not many hard drives last 10 years because the motor bearings wear out. This means, in terms of robustness and reliability, SSDs are suitable even in enterprise sever applications. Yes, they still cost much more per gigabyte, but reliability is no longer an issue, or excuse. In fact, reliability of SSDs is becoming a justification for spending the extra money on SSDs.

I do agree, however, that hybrid drives show great promise in bridging the gap between the speed of SSDs, and the cost/gigabyte of traditional harddrives. At least for now. But soon, SSDs will be commonplace.
 
Today's SSDs are rated at 1 - 2 million write cycles per cell. At 1 million, if you wrote to a cell every 5 minutes every hour, every day, it would take nearly 10 years to burn out that cell. Not many hard drives last 10 years because the motor bearings wear out. This means, in terms of robustness and reliability, SSDs are suitable even in enterprise sever applications. Yes, they still cost much more per gigabyte, but reliability is no longer an issue, or excuse. In fact, reliability of SSDs is becoming a justification for spending the extra money on SSDs.
I have installed the SSD and I am very happy with it . I look forward to many years of reliable computing . The drive just feels right . No noise of course . No moving parts so no friction of any kind . I just wish I had bought one some time back . It has been a very enjoyable experience . The speed of reboots and increase in performance is very noticable . It is also kinda understated . It does everything without fuss . No bells and whistles it just works = fantastically :)
 
Perhaps most my observations come from the unknowing on how to install and make these thing's right or they do things that make them crash. I see that you should not use defrag or any of those drive optimizer programs. Those are really unnecessary with Win 7 anyway. I do reinstall 7 sometimes a couple times a week and usually format then install. I should have went ahead and gotten one for my OS drive but have spent my money on a better vid card and replaced the os drive with a smaller 7200 which improved my WEI score.
Maybe if I win the pot on Super bowl I can slide into a SSD for my desktop. :)
 
I just bought an OCZ Vertex 2 64GB at Newegg for $99.99 incl. rebate with free shipping!

Best price I have found yet.
 
Good price indeed Nibiru2012 ! Just as a matter of interest : You can defrag but there is no need . I include this just because some houskeeping software throws a defrag utility in there ;)

So called SSD hard drives are becoming increasingly popular especially in the netbook sector. Solid State Drives have several distinctive advantages like faster access times, lower power usage and being completely silent while running. The main disadvantage that you might notice especially in netbooks is the write speed of those drives which is usually lower than those of conventional hard drives.
With more and more Solid State Drives hitting the streets it is important to understand the differences. Defragmentation describes the process of physically organizing the contents of a hard drive or partition so that the data sectors of each file will be stored close together to reduce load and seek times.
Solid State Drives can access any location on the drive in the same time. This is one of the main advantages over hard drives. This also means that there is no need to defragment a Solid State Drive ever. These drives have actually been designed to write data evenly in all sectors of the drive which the industry is calling wear leveling. Each sector of a Solid State Drive has a limited number of writes before it cannot be overwritten anymore. (this is a theoretical limit which cannot be reached in work environments)
If you did defragment your Solid State Disk you can rest assured that you did not harm it in any way. It is just that this process is not needed and that defragmentation causes lots of write processes which means that the drive will reach its write limits sooner.
No need for defragmentation is therefor another advantage of Solid State Drives.
 
Should I load the Intel RST driver during the install?

Some have said NOT to do this but to wait and install the Intel Chipset .inf drivers first after install is complete and then the Intel RST driver. That the RST driver then modifies the Intel Chipset .inf drivers during it's install.

I have always with a hard drive install done the RST driver install followed by the .inf drivers after install.

Many Thanks,
~Nibs
 
I for my part installed the SSD without any special preparation . Just let the bios know it should boot from it etc . Windows 7 automatically detected it was an SSD and so will not defrag it .
I do a lot of converting of video formats to DVD . That is the main reason I bought the SSD . While converting from one format to the other the hard drive is working overtime . Heat etc .
Now I have felt the back of my computer where the power housing is and even during the most intense conversion operations , icy cool :)
Love may be too strong a word but happy , oh yes :)
 
I for my part installed the SSD without any special preparation . Just let the bios know it should boot from it etc .
So you started fresh with a clean install rather than migrate your current installation to it?
 
That is so . I started fresh . I had never installed a SSD before and was not sure what to expect at first . I also wanted to install as lean as possible . I mean no superflous files etc .
Due to having only 64GB of space on the hard drive I must enforce good housekeeping . That is not a bad thing though :)
 
I'm not sure being as lean as possible is necessary with a 64Gb SSD. I have Windows 7 64-bit and all my hardware drivers on my boot disk and only using 22.4Gb. I have moved my Documents, download and temp files to another drive, and I install all my apps on another drive too so only Windows and drivers are on the boot drive. But still, there's nothing wrong with lean and mean! ;) Especially if that is the only drive you have installed.
 
I have two standard drives of 500GB . I on the new SSD drive have my OS, my MS Office and general software . I am not constricted as far as space is concerned really on the SSD . It is more I am used to the more capacous space available on a standard drive . To be confronted with a drive of such limited space is really a novel experience . It means I must be more careful about my use of the available space it provides . I am though not feeling to hemmed in by it ;)
 
Yeah right. My first PC hard drive was a whopping 20Mb! Yes, megabyte.

My first hard drive was 500MB . When I went into PC World to buy a 1GB drive the guy there said , " You will never use all that space !"
 
I hear you. My first computer was a Commodore 64 - with 65Kb of RAM - and a 170Kb floppy drive and that was hot stuff not having to deal with the tape drive any longer.
 
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