Comments on: SSDs: are you experienced?

By: Louis E.

Louis E. — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:50:39 +0000

I try to keep readers current but the price cuts keep coming:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231456
(if the link works)

By: Louis E.

Louis E. — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:19:40 +0000

(Presto chango,that 3TB Barracuda XT is now $170 [if you believe their hard drives sorted by price page] or $175[if you follow the link to its own page],rather than $200).Your i7-860 component pricing had 4GB of DDR3-1600 at $115 and now 16GB of it cost $125,but it weirds me out that they have separate color heat sinks for people who want to coordinate with their motherboards.Next month may see the AMD Bulldozer launch answered by Intel with an i7-2800K.

By: Louis E.

Louis E. — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:54:29 +0000

I do figure on going with a boot SSD and archive HDD.Right now a 240GB SSD costs $500 and a 3TB HDD costs $200 but things will be very different at mid-term refresh time (for a projected ten-year computer).PCIe SSDs can’t be boot drives but I figure the one installed then would assume archive responsibilities now unaffordable.I just need a motherboard with room for a discrete GPU (I doubt Ivy Bridge’s onboard graphics will match a $100 128-bit GDDR5 card) AND a PCIe 3 SSD…perhaps an ASUS P8Z77 Deluxe will be introduced.(At midterm time,the GPU will likewise be replaceable by better for less).

Still,I want to stay off the enthusiast-end deviation from the bang-per-buck curve..Newegg is currently selling 16GB of G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1866 SDRAM for $170(free shipping),but in DDR3-2200 (which isn’t even in the DDR3 spec range) it’s $600(and $6 shipping).Overclock modestly,stay away from the multi-slot monster GPUs and extra monitors,and you save a bundle without losing anything significant.And hex-core CPUs are not worth it now.

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:18:01 +0000

Well, it's always good to see caching technology, but the whole "Smart Response Technology" seems like it's aimed at the high-end or server market. After reading Anand's review of the Z68 platform (see page 2 for the SSD caching bit), I'd say it's not that applicable to me. It uses up to 64 GB of SSD as a cache for larger, presumably spinning drives; but who needs access to your larger, spinning drives to be so fast -- besides heavy-duty server applications managing a ton of data? If you want your box to be fast, use an SSD as a boot drive, and -- you're in pretty good shape. The Core i7-860 box I built in March 2010, which boots off of a Kingston V-Series 128 GB SSD, is still blazingly fast. What is interesting about the Z68 chipset is that it allows overclocking... now that's cool. Anyway, that's my $0.02.

By: Louis E.

Louis E. — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:27:11 +0000

What are your thoughts on the “smart cache” SSD use Intel has built into the Z68 chipset?…I’m a little hazy on how the SSD used would be installed.

I’ve pretty much talked myself into waiting another year to replace my mother’s Pentium 4 system because PCIe 3.0 won’t be supported until Ivy Bridge,and I need to wait for the second batch of IB products for the first batch to have a price cut…and I want the additional (non-boot) SSD I install in 2016 or 2017 to be on PCIe 3.0,much faster than SATA Revision 3.

By: Prodip Ch Roy

Prodip Ch Roy — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:02:12 +0000

After reading your article on SSD boot drive, I googled the net and was confused with the following terms as, SSD controllers, write amplification, types of SSD- RAM-based, flash (SLC & MLC), PCIe-based. So please write an update showing an enthusiast who want to use SSDs as boot disk, how to choose the right one at present times.

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:59:07 +0000

You would only use the SSD as a boot drive. After I dismantled my RAID-10 array (about 1 TB like your system), I used two of the four 500GB drives to create a 500GB RAID-1 mirror, which I use for system backup and other stuff.

By: James Fleming

James Fleming — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:59:02 +0000

Great article! Wish I read this before I built my server. Then again, with the 1.3T storage I bought a 1T SSD is $4,000, my time isn’t worth that much