Hardware SSD Buyer's Guide

I have to agree with a poster above and disagree with this article, I feel random performance is far more important as the reason people want SSD's seems to be the snappiness of the OS and boot times not transferring large files. I still think the Intel G2's are by far the best rounded SSDs overall, and at a reasonable £2 per GB pricepoint as well

 

Still too expensive for me. When a 160GB drive is around $175 I will most likely be getting one. Until then I can wait an extra 2 mins on loading screens.

 

any second gen ssd is fine if the price is right, write speed is the only reason I not get the Intel ssd as most do over 100mb/s write speeds

ssd's that use SATA 600 does not offer more for home users/gamers, more useful for servers use that needs high iops

 

I bought a 120GB Vertex 2E yesterday. Had to sell my house to afford it. True story...

 

I'm glad your articles are up to date, Your sister site (PC Pro) put up an SSD blog last month that was a good eighteen months out of date. Slackers!

 

Actually, that's wrong. The SSD loads the game 25 per cent faster than the SpinPoint, but the SpinPoint loads the game 33 per cent slower than the SSD. . Doesn't make sense, I know, but the little mathematician in my head just thought he'd point it out for you

 

I hope to see a Bit-Tech review of the Revodrive soon. I've seen some very promising American reviews.

 

OK, so the Vertex 2 is available for £217 on Aria Superspecial, whereas the 2E is £265 (Scan or Ebuyer).

Worth getting the 100GB version and waiting for a firmware update to unlock the extra 20GB?

 

Great article.

Out of interest, has anyone picked up the Reactor R60? I grabbed one on the basis of this article as I just wanted something small for my boot drive.

A few days in, leaving the PC on whilst heading off to put the kettle on, I came back to find my PC in standby having not yet had chance to dabble with the power management settings. Powering the PC back on provided me with a completely unstable windows.

Turning off and on led to no OS booting.

I checked the BIOS and found that the Reactor was not being detected (whilst all other drives on the SATA and IDE bus were).

A quick look at the Corsair website revealed that there is some sort of issue with the power settings when a PC goes in to S3 or hibernate with this drive attached. The current work around is to prevent the PC going in to standby via power management, which is less that ideal.

Has anyone else has this trouble/did you experience this issue while testing Mr Butler @ BT ?

Cheers,
CAL3H

 

Got a new crucial 256gb realssd for £300 of ebay recently. I was wondering how to connect it to the asus p6x58d e premium motherboard (which hasnt come yet). Do you need a special adapter cable for it as i think the power socket is different?

Also, what are the disadvantages of ssds? Some say they have a limited lifespan, so is it best just to put data that doesnt change much one them (like the os) and not user data (i.e. word docs) to prolong their lifespan?

 

It uses sata power connectors, if your PSU only has molex then you can get one of these

Today's SSDs have wear-levelling, don't need to worry about wearing them out unlike the first generation of SSDs from a few years ago. Install Windows 7, and you're good to go.