The professional blog of Christopher Randel

SSD and You

I’ve been onboard with SSD for a while now, I bought myself a Gigabyte I-RAM a couple years ago, and have been using it for games/windows profile, and later page file for a while. Other than the capacity and price, I’m really happy with it. It ran me about 200$ total, with 4 x 1GB Crucial DDR. Currently this serves on faithfully as my Pagefile, though with 8GB of memory, it’s pretty rare that you need it.

More recently I’ve also bought an Acard 9010B and set it up on my file server [on 24/7] and was running it for OS through E-SATA. It was mildly flaky because of this fact. I’ve relegated this to applications and games, and even though it’s still flaky, it’s still pretty sweet. Cost me just over 400$ for 12GB of space. It’s using 6 2GB Kingston DDR2-533 ECC unregistered sticks I bought on newegg for 21$ each. It’s even faster than the I-RAM because of it’s SATA-II interface. Because of the flakyness [it likes to disappear every other reboot] I’ve shelved it from the glorious life of being my main system drive, now relegated to noncritical applications, like Microsoft Office, Warcraft III and DAOC.

Now I’m shopping for a reliable, fast Solid State disk. I want the drive to last a long time, be reliable, and be fast.Doing a lot of research you run into questions you have about SSD’s, and I’ve compiled a list of interesting things to read before you buy. I will be updating this more

• SLC flash or MLC flash? Why? [Read]
• Disk stuttering due to write latency on jMicron controllers
• Vista automatically doing disk alignment with partition size, and how to do it manually with xp or vista
• speed loss through long term usage [2]

So far I’ve come to the conclusion that the Intel SLC – X25-E series kicks ass and is the fastest SLC drive around, except drives like the FusionIO and the like. MLC drives, the Intel X25-M [forum thread] is still the king, but the OCZ Vertex Series [forum thread] have overcome initial jMicron Issues and are quite fast, and much more reasonably priced.

More to come as I update the post.