for all you SSD wana bz

[JonnyRock]

This is a good deal, 2 of these in raid 0 would be the $h!t. But hurry there are not many left.

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Hard+Drives+(SSD)/Crucial+RealSSD+C300+64GB+2.5%22+SATA+6Gb/s+Solid+State+Hard+Drive+?productId=40695 (http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Hard+Drives+%28SSD%29/Crucial+RealSSD+C300+64GB+2.5%22+SATA+6Gb/s+Solid+State+Hard+Drive+?productId=40695)

[GoRedwings]

You probably be limited by the sata 2 controller even though the speeds would be nothing to be sniffed at unless you had a very modern motherboard which would have the newer sata interface controller. TBH when I had the crucial SSD that was fast enough.

[Saundie]

I'll wait until the price per GB drops below £1 before getting another SSD. 64-128GB isn't enough, and 256GB is far too expensive right now.

[TheMunster]

I'll wait until the price per GB drops below £1 before getting another SSD. 64-128GB isn't enough, and 256GB is far too expensive right now.

Same here Saundie, I'm planning to get an SSD to put my OS + Steam + other games onto so with 20+games on steam I need a 200+gb drive. Not viable with the cost at the moment.

[Weetabix]

Just picked up 2 of these, one for OS+programs, and a second for games. I shall report back sometime next week when I get around to installing em.

[NickyBoyJunior]

Ever so slightly cheaper at Scan: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/64GB-Crucial-C300-MLC-Flash-25-SSD-Read-355MB-s-Write-70MB-s

I'm really tempted to get an SSD as I'm planning on slowly upgrading my rig soon... don't really know what's worth paying for though. The C300 sounds ace although I don't have a SATA-III mobo. The OCZ Vertex 30GB sounds tasty but thats £100 for not much space. Intel X25-V sounds decent too but again £90 for 40GB puts me off.

Haaaalp!

[GoRedwings]

you don;t need a sat 3 motherboard. You can get the plug in asus sata/usb 3 controller amongst others that will bring sata 3 to your existing motherboard if you wish to do so.

[DragonSVD]

been using SSD for a year, i am NOT impressed. There are serious issues with large file transfers if you use win7. I am actaully regretting my decision, and wish i spent the money buying two 1tb wd blacks for the same price

[NickyBoyJunior]

you don;t need a sat 3 motherboard. You can get the plug in asus sata/usb 3 controller amongst others that will bring sata 3 to your existing motherboard if you wish to do so.

I know, I was just thinking about what you said about not taking full advantage of the C300's speed without sata 3. Just seems a bit of a waste of money for me to get one if it's not going to be used to its full potential. Anyway, new gorky bits coming soon hopefully so one of these may be included ;)

[Weetabix]

Just got these installed last night, and I have to say they are severely rapid. Installing em would have been a pain if I hadn't found some brackets lying about, cos these things are so small they wouldn't fit any where in my case;

http://i.imagehost.org/0726/ssd.jpg

[NickyBoyJunior]

Wow they really are tiny! What case is that Weets? Is it quiet... and what make are the fans?? Looking for a new case in the near future.

[Weetabix]

It's a Lian Li X500 (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-135-LL&groupid=701&catid=7&subcat=) case with Akasa Apache (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/120mm-Akasa-Apache-Ultra-Silent-Fan-HDB-Bearing-PWM-fan-w-4-pin-connector-and-Rubber-Pins) fans. At full belt you can hear them but they do shift a ton of air. Stick any kind of fan control on them tho, and they're by far the quietest fans I've had. I'd highly recommend both case and fans, although you're not allowed to buy them cos then you'd be copying....

[NickyBoyJunior]

Hehe no worries I sure as hell can't afford that case anyway :P I thought it was an X500 but was hoping it'd be something cheaper but just as good!

The fans though... 57CFM at 16dB is amazing - my silly thermaltake thunderblades are something like 70CFM at about 30dB, my pc sounds like a concorde taking off... they do have funky blue LEDs though....... :)

[GoRedwings]

Well there is pros and cons really regarding sata 3 for the most part.

A c300 ssd will hit up to about 350mbs on a sata 3 controller. On sata 2 Your looking at about anywhere from 240-270. it sounds likea no brainer and you should get either sata 3 controller or a sata 3 compatiable 3 motherboard. but it not that simple. If you are running the SSD's as single standalone drives then yes sata 3 controller or a sata 3 motherboard makes more sense.

Here's the caveat though. If you want even more raw speed and run them in a Raid 0 array. Then the sata 3 raid controller which I believe to be currently marvell based is slower than Raid 0 on Sata 2 using the intel controller. This applies to the standalone asus sata 3 plug in controller and also the gigabyte and asus motherboards. This seems to be an issue through out their range and it more to do with the marvell chip than the SSd's themselves. Also note TRIM does not work in Raid 0 arrays I believe.

My problem with SSD manufacturers is that they are quoting speeds from their higher end range while a majority of people will be looking at that budget range thinking they will get the same speeds.

Review sites tend to use a benchmarking tool which also produces the max speeds rather than the avg. So when people get their SSD's and find their drives don't match the speeds they tend to second guess themselves on their purchases. I always love the way people go on about how fast their boot times are using SSD. A)When using ACHI to get the most performance out of an SSD the actual boot time is offset by the ACHI bios going through it startup cycle and that's after the post screen. B)My machine is always on 24/7 so I don't see the boot up speed as a primary factor for considering an SSD as it selling point.

While I do find SSD a little more hassle than hard drives setting them up once setup they are fine. Sure you can buy an SSD and drop it into your setup straightaway and you can start using it like a normal hard drive. But over time the performance starts to decrease which most people seem to state but it doesn't have to.

By using AHCI mode set via bios on your motherboard you can a)get the most performance out of your SSD on the corresponding sata controller. b)Win7 has the trim feature built in but it needs to be activated via using AHCI mode. c)You prolong the life of your SSD.

You can either install win7 in ide mode and then registry edit the msachi registry entry and reboot and set it in bios. Or you can install win 7 in ACHI mode straight off the bat. I would suggest the latter option as I did it the former method and when the windows loading animation finished and it was ready to boot into windows it would just bluescreen on me everytime so you may have better luck.

If the SSD is your primary boot drive for most people it will be then I would strongly recommend using it in ACHI mode.

As SSD's become more mainstream and the capacities get more affordable then most of the finicky bits will be refined as generation after generation hits the consumer. Both the C300 and M225 before it represents the most affordable option for the performance at the time they were released.

[NickyBoyJunior]

Dude, how do you know so much!?! Great advice btw :)

I just went ahead and bought one of these - a bargain at £77, brand new and sealed off eBay. It should be arriving tomorrow and I'll give my verdict once I've installed Windows on it and set up all this AHCI and TRIM lark.

As my motherboard isn't true sata 3 it requires the first PCI-e 2.0 slot to be lowered from x16 to x8 mode if sata 3 is turned on. Hopefully that won't be an issue as I'm only using one graphics card. If it is, I'll just have to make do with the C300 in sata 2.

[FireWorm]

NickyBoy, GoRed is THE biggest gork.....ever!

His testament to this is his ability to create a new "gork sentence" prior to saying hello to me whenever I come on shouty.......3 and half years i do believe he's kept it up!

Good job well done so far! :D

+1

[NickyBoyJunior]

Haha, so true!

I do seem to remember roughly a couple of years ago, a gorky conversation I had with redders on the shouty about RAM chips and manufacturers, lasted at least half an hour on the subject. Impressive, there's no denying that :P

[GoRedwings]

Lies -.-

...There I was with my mouth wide open and my next words were "You flashed the 7200.10 drives with the firmware update and it bricked itself?"...hiya wormy...

Nicky>The PCi-E lane dropping from 16x to 8x will not be an issue. It only affects crossfire setups running at 2560x1600 and above and even then the difference in performance is only roughly 5% of course as you start to up the res then this figure will get bigger.

You would need more than the current top end cards are capable of and a shedload of them at that before the pci 2.0 lane get saturated.

[NickyBoyJunior]

Ok, I've got my C300 plugged into a sata 3 port and it's all running fine.

However, I'm not sure how the AHCI thing works because I currently have SATA set to IDE mode (I think) and I manually set the Marvel Controller from IDE to AHCI mode before installing Windows on the SSD.

Does that mean that AHCI is enabled for the SSD and therefore TRIM is running?

I've used the fsutil command in a cmd and it showed that TRIM is on, but as far as I know that only means that it's enabled in Windows and is not necessarily active on the drive when I delete stuff. HAALP!

[Sinnyowns]

I was in the same boat 10 months ago, and when I got windows 7 I checked and checked trawling through the interwebs, but in the end I just accepted that it should be abled, and I, have done all I can, so now I just love the fast speeds and don't worry anymore :)

[GoRedwings]

Download AS SSD benchmark in the top left panel it should say what SSD and what controller. If everything is running as it should be then it will say msachi here's a screenshot for you what it should look like. This is a 2 week old C300 as a primary boot drive and hads loads of stuff written and deleted


http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t58/GoRedwings19/as-ssd-benchC300-CTFDDAC064M72420107-28-18PM.png

as long as you see something like that then trim is enabled and forget about it. If it says pcide then even then it still not a problem but the SSD will slowly degrade performance wise over a period of time. Something like after month or so your SSD will be almost operating at almost half the speeds when you do a fresh install. There will be a small performance decrease in the writes as the SSD fills up but if trim is working and it is in achi mode then the reads will be more or less the same as when you first installed it and should remain to do so.

Unfortunately even after all this time there is still no direct way via software or via windows registry to 100% verify if trim is working. The most software can do or via windows registry it will tell you it is supported but whether or not it is still active. If after a period of short time teh write performance is slowly degrading to almost hard drive levels even though it still will be as fast as the fastest hard drives then that will surely verify that trim is not working or supported.

You can also downlaod CrystalDiskInfo and that will tell you if TRIM is supported but still not if it is active.

I hope that helps.

[NickyBoyJunior]

Thanks redders :)

Here are my results:

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/3129/c300benchmark.png

Looks good to me! That's with 38.2GB used and 21.3GB free, having already installed & uninstalled some games and deleted stuff.


Ooh, umm, one more question: should I be looking to update my drive's firmware if/when possible? Or is it fine to leave it as it is?

[GoRedwings]

If everything is performing fine then leave as it is I would suggest. As much as it is tempting to flash or update to get the last bit of performance it not worth the risk as I find SSD bioses tend to be finicky regardless who makes the SSD drive. While it is no more difficult to upgrade the firmware than flashing a motherboard bios if the update is a bad one it will just brick. Even big manufacturers like intel and crucial have each had a firmware which bricked them.

And this does not apply the SSD's either. Never update, flash, upgrade call it what you like unless you really need to. The amount of people who flash bioses or install drivers becuase they read they will get 1 extra mhz or extra 1 fps and then they have problems. If your machine works fine leave it.

[Sinnyowns]

My Corsair Extreme x64 died today, or so I think, I can't see it as another HDD, luckily I always have another harddrive with the exact same boot for backup, so I've whipped that in and my computer is working as normal, but my SSD is now showing 137gb of HDD space instead of 64gb, and it doesn't say Corsair, it comes up with yatapdong barefoot rom in the BIOS.

After looking up on Corsair forums it looks like a known issue.

So hopefully the RMA won't be to painful.

It started being a prick last night, when my read and write speeds shrunk to 1-2mb/s :(

[Sinnyowns]

My replacement x64, not as good as I thought.

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/3462/asssdbenchcorsaircmfssd.png (http://img245.imageshack.us/i/asssdbenchcorsaircmfssd.png/)

[JonnyRock]

this is the kinda SSD i want to try.

OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCI-Express SSD (http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Hard+Drives+(SSD)/OCZ+RevoDrive+120GB+PCI-Express+SSD+?productId=40784)

[GoRedwings]

Ocz revodrive doesn;t have trim support or garbage collection so while initial speeds would be blistering it would degrade over time.

[GoRedwings]

Currently testing out Raid 0 c300 64gb. Here are the results. Impressions to follow.

http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t58/GoRedwings19/as-ssd-benchPrimary818201011-42-57PM.png

[Sinnyowns]

What do you think of the Intel Controller?

It gave me quite a boost, but not enough to leave TRIM off.

[GoRedwings]

I had at least from my experience no problems whatsoever with the intel controller. Sure in a single disk setup it will never hit the speeds of a sata 3 based marvell controller but I don't think I would notice much difference between the speeds. It kinda like gfx cards I don't notice the difference between a game running at 100 fps or 120 fps. In the one and a half months-two months I ran the c300 the performance of it never changed. This was of course with win 7 and achi mode enabled so that pleasantly suprised me. I was expecting some sort of performance loss but it didn't

My current testing analogy is not so much speed but the stability and reliability of a Raid 0 based SSD. This is the first time I have ever set up a Raid setup and tbh I left most of the settings at default as I just wanted it up and running to test. I am hoping people who mess around with or have experience with, will offer input and how to get the best out of the array. I left the stripe size at 128k as that was the max my bios would allow. And I wasn't really sure what size to set it at.

When researching stripe sizes some people said smaller was better while others said larger was better.

Of course now the biggest problem with Raid 0 and SSD's is there is no TRIM and Raid 0 is known for when a drive fails the whole array fails. I have to rely on garbage collection built in. The thing is I am pretty sure this is not as efficient as the TRIM feature so while it does help I am not sure to what degree it will help. So over the next few weeks and months I will be monitoring the performance drop.

Also I am pretty sure if I were to muck about with stripe sizes and not download the first intel raid driver that came up in google and spend time setting it up I could further optimise it. But I really can't be bothered keep reinstalling for a sake of an extra 10-20MB/s for which I would never notice in real world usage.

[JonnyRock]

ok so this is not the fastest SSD about but £77.54 for a 64GB drive is not bad.

Kingston 64GB SSDNow V-Series (http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Hard+Drives+(SSD)/Kingston+64GB+SSDNow+V-Series+SATA2+2.5%22+?productId=40982)