R Soul on 2/9/2013 at 11:34

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I'd like to upgrade my hard drive from a conventional moving parts one to an SSD. My motherboard is an (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813127160) ABIT IS-10 with two SATA connections (1.5GB/s).

I know there are various things to consider with SSDs, but for me the main one is long term reliability. I'd rather have a moderately fast drive that stays the same than a fast monster that deteriorates after a couple of years.

I've heard a few good things about the Crucial M4, but with there being so many things to choose from I thought I'd seek advice from people here.

What experiences have you had with SSDs?

bikerdude on 2/9/2013 at 18:12

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* The primary issue with that mobo is the sata 2 controller will be horribly slow. So with say something like The Crucial M4 the 4k reads/writes with only be half of what you see in reviews. But conversely that will still be 10x faster than any mechanical hard drive.
* Crucial is a good make, but samsung 800 series are better again. Avoid all OCZ drives and any make/model of drive with a sandforce controller (SF controllers are notorious for causing BSODs, but I will conceed that this issue make have been resolved, google your self to be sure)
* I have 3x Samsung 830 SSD's the 256GB in the main pc, the 128GB in the laptop and the 64 in the media PC for the last year or so now. The perf on 256 after a years use of a few hrs per day is roughly 3/4 of what it was when I bought it. But I take good care of it and by that I mean I have moved the temp folder/s, the pagefile.sys, browser cache/temp folders and any other transitory folder off the SSD on to a mechanical drive. Eg SSD is the OS (C:\) and the mechanical (D:\), moving all those folders on to the emchanical drive reduces the amounts of writes to the SSD which helps keep the performance as high as possible for a long as possible.
*

Here is a little comparison of failure rates of some well know makes -

- (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?278896-Statistics-Reliability-of-various-consumer-SSD-models)


The issue with that drive is it is ancient in SSD terms, the tech in that drive is 9yrs old). And to be fair those models have known issues with huge loss of speed over time and they aren't exactly quick to begin with 250/140 MB/s sequential and 50/12 MB/s 4k QD1. Compared to my S830 256GB - 505/450 and 90/25 and the 4K speeds have dropped to a stead 70/20 after a year.

And lastly what OS are you using? because if its Windows XP stop now! as your wasting your time. Upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram (I can help you with this if your on a budget) and then install at least Win7, or as its so cheap now Win8. Both are SSD ready, but Win8 more so due to its superb trim support. Under Win8 the new version of defrag detects you have an SSD and runs trim instead of the usual defrag aimed at mechanical drives.

bikerdude on 3/9/2013 at 19:07

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Er...

- (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140310&p=2150500&viewfull=1#post2150500)
- (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140485&p=2157149&viewfull=1#post2157149)
- (http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14942-tdm-and-windows-8/page__view__findpost__p__315311)

:cheeky:

bikerdude on 4/9/2013 at 20:28

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Yes mista, it effectively turns Win8 into Win7Sp2 (I made up the sp2 bit) :cheeky: