Fun with SSD's

[Zach]

I've heard lots of varying opinions on what to disable and what not to, and I've never been able to make up my mind.

I always disabled indexing on all drives regardless as it is useless to me, but I think I left prefetch enabled. I did make sure and disable hibernation (not just in CP but through the command prompt) and I keep my swap file on a mechanical. That's about the extent of what I do though and everything has been fine. I don't think it is such a big deal that you need to move the temp folder (and yes PB does use it depending on how you have it setup. a compile/run that generates a temporary executable usually ends up using the Temp folder unless you explicitly define otherwise IIRC)


Samsung 840's are definitely the best drives on the market right now. I'd love to own one if I had the spare cash.

[luis]

You will love the Samsung 840 Evo it's the best drive on the market right now.

Samsung 840's are definitely the best drives on the market right now.

One (or some) of the best. The 840 EVO does not have power loss protection and cross-die redundancy available on the Crucial 500 for example, AFAIK.
All depends on what you are looking for. Rarely one product is THE BEST. It can be the best for you though, and that's the important thing.

[Zach]

How many drives actually boast "power loss protection" though?

What does that even entail? It's always an assumed risk if your power goes wonky that your PC may end up fux0red.

[luis]

How many drives actually boast "power loss protection" though?

If you want a number I don't know how many, but some are noted here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-stat ... _capacitor

What does that even entail?

Some background: -> http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-power-going-down.html

Understanding the Robustness of SSDs under Power Fault -> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/con ... inal80.pdf

It's always an assumed risk if your power goes wonky that your PC may end up fux0red.

This is pretty rare (if by wonky you mean "power loss").
It's a lot more dangerous for the entire PC hardware a brief interruption just long enough to deploy the power-supply capacitors than a sustained power loss.
But talking about power loss: usually the circuitry of a HDD and the inherent inertia of the rotating platters give enough time to completely write what the drive has in cache.
The rotation of the platters can also be used to generate energy for a while.
In the worst case a power loss with mechanical drives usually causes some KB lost and the need for a filesystem check (checkdsk, fsck, etc.) and more often than not the problem is external to the drive (filesystem caching, third party cache with deferred write, etc.)
There are always exceptions but...

I also mentioned cross-die redundancy, some prefer over-provisioning to map future errors and some prefer just nothing to offer more space more cheaply.

Maybe nothing of the above will ever be needed in your experience unless you are unlucky, but having them it's better then not IMHO.

It's good there is variety of prices and features like in everything else, so anyone can choose based on what he consider important.

I don't have a SSD, I don't particularly care for higher transfer rates, or if the OS boots in 1 second, or all the absurd firmware problems of the first generations, or the need to baby-sitting them to keep them working near specifications in time (almost all initially, some notable exception now).
What makes them interesting to me in order of decreasing importance is:

1) the seek time is practically erased (the heaviest burden on mechanical disks)

[ a lot of distance here ]

2) the power consumption is low (1-5 Watts)
3) they have a transfer rate a lot higher than HDD
4) they make less noise than a HDD (should be none)

[Zach]

I don't have to do any kind of upkeep maintenance on my system really.

I don't have generation 1 drives though, far as I know. The first to market is always going to be sub-optimal when it comes to technology, I think this is a given. That being said, I while high transfer rates are nice, they are meaningless unless you have a system that is purely SSD as the mechanicals will always be a bottleneck.

I like them for the fast boot time, and the overall response time increase from the system itself. For I/O heavy games they can be nice too. But I haven't really noticed a huge catastrophic slowdown or anything and I haven't done a clean format/install for months now.

Some concerns may have been warranted for early adoption, but we are at a point now where the product has really matured and a lot of those concerns are moot. But I also has an UPS, so short of the PSU itself catastrophically failing, I'm not very worried. I've already been through dozens of brown-outs.

[Thorium]

I like them for the fast boot time

I dont realy care about boot time. It's fast enough with a mechanicle drive. I dont care if it boots in 10 seconds or 20 seconds.

What makes the difference is the fast access time. Copying tons of small files is dramaticly faster with a SSD. As well as searching text in tons of small files. You also notice a huge difference in a lot of games that stream levels from the disk as they tend to use a lot of random accesses.

I also dont do any maintenance to my SSD.

[Opcode]

You will love the Samsung 840 Evo it's the best drive on the market right now.

Samsung 840's are definitely the best drives on the market right now.

One (or some) of the best. The 840 EVO does not have power loss protection and cross-die redundancy available on the Crucial 500 for example, AFAIK.
All depends on what you are looking for. Rarely one product is THE BEST. It can be the best for you though, and that's the important thing.

Crucial drives have been some of the worst conflicted drives on the market. Lets not even begin talking about their boat load of firmware bugs (*cough* M4 *cough*). Samsung doesn't have safety nets in place for power loss to prevent the drive from corrupting itself. Tho that happens on such a rare occasion that its really not needed. Besides the drive comes with a 3 year warranty so you can always get it replaced. In terms of speed and reliability, the Samsung 830 and 840 series are among the best drives available on the consumer market. This is comparing the drive with all the other drives on the market, to establishing what is best for anybody. The Plextor M5 drives are pretty good too. Other than that most other drives face cheap NAND, faulty firmware, among other issues. If you want a dependable SSD, get a Samsung 830 or 840. Even the TLC models will outlast as long as you would want to own one.

[blueznl]

Well, at least I can confirm that the Evo does its job wel, and it definitely speeds up some things. I've played a bit with the location of the temp files, and for PB development it doesn't make any difference (as expected).

Was the upgrade worth it? Barely. Actually, the answer should be yes, but my PC SATA transfer rate is too slow. Should you upgrade? Probably, and definitely if you have a newer chipset.