Renzatic on 15/10/2009 at 06:05
Right. I'm wondering about PCI-E drives specifically. They don't hook in through a SATA or IDE ribbon. They just go straight through the slot. I'm curious how the BIOS, or windows during install, will identify the thing is even there. If you're just using it alone, the computer obviously won't see anything on the aforementioned channels, and will probably assume you don't have a drive in the computer.
I can't find any info on it. There's plenty on SSD drives, but they go through SATA, so there's nothing too weird going on there. My best guess right now is I'll more than likely have to slipstream drivers on my Windows disc if I want to use it as a primary...or hope it magically works.
Edit: Holy shit. I just looked up the price on the OCZ Z-Drive. I thought I had read they were gonna run in the $600 range. Nooooo. They're twice as expensive. I think I'm gonna wait on jumping the tech game curb and go with a regular SSD drive for my next upgrade. Wait for the PCI-E RAID flavors to work their way into the market a little more. $1200-1300 for a 250GB drive is a little....yeah. Damn.
mudi on 15/10/2009 at 16:41
A PCI-E hard drive would work the same way a PCI/PCI-E SATA card would work, I would think.
heywood on 15/10/2009 at 17:34
They have a hard disk controller embedded on the card. Your computer sees the extra controller the same way it sees the controller(s) you already have in the chipset and/or on the motherboard.
[EDIT: mudi beat me to it]
I wanted to pull the trigger on SSD myself recently, but I ended up going with a WD Velociraptor instead. I'm still waiting for the issues with SSD performance degradation over time to be addressed. Last I checked, Intel X-25 drives were the only ones that didn't suffer majorly from this problem, and they have a lot better random read & write performance than anybody else. But they're still too expensive and will probably remain that way until they get some real competition. I'm not sure the OCZ Z-drives are it. They boast some pretty huge sustained read & write speeds, but there's no information or benchmarks on random read & write speeds, which are more important in real use. I'd also like to know what flash controller they're using in the Z-drives. Previously, OCX used JMicron which was shit. They switched to Indilinx in the Vertex drives, which is much better but still not comparable to Intel.
I'm guessing that next year will be the breakout year for SSDs.
Al_B on 15/10/2009 at 22:10
Quote Posted by heywood
I'm guessing that next year will be the breakout year for SSDs.
I'm interested myself in seeing how this will develop. I have certain reservations (even when wear levelling is taken into account) about how robust a SSD built with modern FLASH technology will be in the long term. I realise I'm being a cynic - particularly when comparing a solid state architecture to one which involves using magnetic fields for reading and writing to mechanical discs rotating at very high speeds.
As far as the original subject is concerned, I've not really noticed a huge failure rate difference between SATA drives and IDE. If I've seen any problems it's usually been down to the motherboard and not to the drive itself.
Renzatic on 16/10/2009 at 03:39
Quote Posted by Mudi
A PCI-E hard drive would work the same way a PCI/PCI-E SATA card would work, I would think.
I have no idea why I didn't think of that beforehand. Guess that pretty much puts that question to rest.
