I have decided to go with a couple of Sandforce based Kingston HyperX 256 gb ssds in raid 0 as my next upgrade. This thread has truly been pic in terms of helping me make my decision. Christmas here I come. Obviously that does mean video cards get pushed back to next year. But that is probably a good thing what with the next gen cards will be out.
SSD advice please
- Thread starter suryad
- Start date
Well, after a day of using my PC with the OS installed on my new SSD I am extremely happy with it. Installed Crysis and had a fun couple of hours on that. I didn't think it would have an impact on the gameplay aside shorter times between levels but it seems my minimums were a lot better than they were. I wish I'd have tested to be sure, but I was only playing Crysis on my machine the night before installing the new drive and it felt quite stuttery in places. Now it's just smooth all the way.
/edit
Found something to back that up: SSD can double min FPS in Crysis
Bonus!
/edit
Found something to back that up: SSD can double min FPS in Crysis
Bonus!
wouldn't putting them to RAID turn off TRIM support?
Apparently though I was reading somewhere that the Kingston SSD has very good garbage collection and thus it does not need TRIM as much and thus you can RAID these suckers. I am not entirely sure I understand all the terminology but that is my understanding from reading an article in Anandtech IIRC.
I'm very happy with my new Samsung SS805 100GB SLC drive. Can't compete on pure numbers with new gen MLC drives but it's plenty fast for W7 OS drive and what was most crucial for me, protected from data loss thanks to SuperCap. Enterprise drive for the price lover than current MLC 
.
Boy oh boy I moved from 2x1TB Samsung F1 RAID 0 to this drive with my OS and there's no comparison at all. Very pleased!
.Boy oh boy I moved from 2x1TB Samsung F1 RAID 0 to this drive with my OS and there's no comparison at all
. Very pleased!In the most strict sense, TRIM is not "necessary." A good SSD controller should be able to consolidate empty spaces and erase them at idle time. However, in the case of deleting files, the OS simply mark those sectors as "available," so there is no way for the SSD to know which sectors are made available. This is where TRIM comes in.
Of course, in general, these available sectors will eventually be written over so they will eventually be reclaimed, although TRIM does provide potentially more empty spaces for better consolidation. The worst (or best) case is, supposed that you fill up the SSD with very little remaining empty space, then you delete a lot of files, without TRIM, the SSD would have only the spare spaces for consolidation and that generally leads to poor performance. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, it's a good idea to always maintain a sizable empty space on any HDD or SSD, so this "worst case" should rarely happen, if ever.
Ideally I could get Windows to not allow me to go less than a certain amount of gigs in free space on my SSD.
Can this be done?
- Partition - don't think this will allow the SSD to use the space, so no.
- Limit user profile usage - won't help if I'm installing programs, or doing other adminy level stuff
Can this be done?
Partitioning the drive WILL WORK in reserving extra space for reclaiming if you do not use the sectors on it.
Behind the scenes the controller is managing ALL the flash cell blocks on the entire device, it doesn't matter what filesystem you have on top of it so long as an unused sector has nothing written to it. A partition does not use any particular flash cell blocks, they are referenced indirectly through a lookup table.
Behind the scenes the controller is managing ALL the flash cell blocks on the entire device, it doesn't matter what filesystem you have on top of it so long as an unused sector has nothing written to it. A partition does not use any particular flash cell blocks, they are referenced indirectly through a lookup table.
My habit of using my hard drives that are internal to my PC is to not fill it up. Even my current velociraptor raid 0 setup of 300 gb is only 50% full. I move most of the stuff off to external hard drives anyway. It's a weird habit I have developed over time. So that means there will be plenty of free space for SSDs as well especially with 2 x 256 gb in RAID. Because of that I am thinking I don't have to worry about TRIM as much. Would that be a correct statement?
Anybody here actually doing this with SSDs?
How dare you....
continue with this disgraceful behaviour and the Gaming Gods will smite thee...
If you have a nice SSD controller, then yes
Actually, if you fill your MLC SSD nearly full, its performance won't be very good even if it has TRIM (of course, that depends on the size of its spare space).lol I guess it won't please the gaming gods to know then I have left Witcher 2 incomplete and I am on the last chapter...and I have not gone back to the game in over a month?
If you have a nice SSD controller, then yes
Ah cool. I am going to assume the Sandforce based controllers are a nice SSD controller then...once they get all the glitches sorted out. I have not heard of any major issues with people who have gone the Kingston route.
Reading around the reviews of my drive (or slightly different sized versions) it seems that they're getting better speeds than I am.
If anyone with a Kingston SSDNow Plus 100 96GB would like to share their benchmarks I'd be very interested in comparing. Here's mine, using HDTune:
Average Read: 147.5 MB/s
Access Time: 0.17 ms
Burst rate: 154.4 MB/s
If anyone with a Kingston SSDNow Plus 100 96GB would like to share their benchmarks I'd be very interested in comparing. Here's mine, using HDTune:
Average Read: 147.5 MB/s
Access Time: 0.17 ms
Burst rate: 154.4 MB/s
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