The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I believe sam recommended me an intel before. Fact of the matter is, I bought one. But they sent me the wrong drive. Or rather Intel had packaged the wrong drive in the wrong box. It was a total cluster F#$K up LOL! I received a 1.8" drive, where I ordered a 2.5. Newegg reimbursed me, and I just put off SSD once again. I always seem to run into financial situations :S

 

That's bad luck, but you can't really blame the SSDs for retailer incompetence

 

No no. I understand that stuff happens from time to time. I'm finally in a situation where I can get one though. Honestly I don't believe the read/write performance is the most important factor. Much like you said, IOPS is very good, as is most SSD's. I suppose I could settle for a smaller drive. But I know I'm gonna regret it down the road. I'm currently using over 63Gb, and I know I could easily put another 40Gb on there. I suppose Games really don't benefit from being on the SSD's that much. Perhaps GTA IV might get a performance boost in load times.

 

AFAIK my WD1001FALS is still a fairly high-end drive in its class. It's just my OS/programs on one partition at the outer edge of the disk, then some 700GB of low disk usage storage. Gives me very reasonable response

Games are actually one of the 500GB Barracudas. Very adequate drives for most stuff.

 

Sam,

Judging by the specs on the one I bought, I should run away and hide from them! LOL!!

Max Sequential Read
Up to 520MB/s

Max Sequential Write
Up to 490MB/s

4KB Random Write
Up to 80,000 IOPS

I'm guessing that I'm the first one here who is buying the Patriot Pyros, so we'll all get to know if it's any good after I install it. From what I've read about the drive, most get those kind of numbers out of them. Sounds Blurry fast to me.

Question: Will trim work with 64 bit XP-Pro?

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Very interesting, but I'm imagining they're monster expensive yes? I'm looking more mid-end maybe $200 max for a really exceptional drive with decent space. Reliability and lifespan are also a concern for me. I use my drives 24/7 because my machines Fold@Home. I've had something like 99% uptime for the last 4 years lol.

 

Generally speaking you should get shot of XP as soon as you can, that's nothing to do with functionality and like/dislike of XP, the older OS doesn't have the proper automatic safeguards to prevent excessive cycle usage, enable TRIM and so on. There are ways of doing this, but compared to Vista/7, it's a bit of a tedious process.

By specification that drive seems good, but you'd have to check some real world transfer benchmarks to see if that many IOPS hold up at the 4K level in the real world. A high IOPS count and a high continuous transfer rate don't always meet in the middle for a high random speed. Typically speaking most good modern SSDs manage between 10K and 20K IOPS at 4K Random write, so the 80K figure is very suspicious.

 

Sam,

You are right it is suspicious. I went and looked on their website, and it's 60,000 IOPS, not the 80,000 listed on Newegg. They do make one that is rated 85,000, that costs $24 more. Both use the SandForce SF-2281 controller, so I'll let you know how it all works after I install it.

Russ

 

Well XP is getting a bit long in the tooth but that doesn't prevent me from using it. Is still the main OS for my Intel drive box.

 

I'd go with the SandyBridge and then add an SSD down the road. They will drop in price and hopefully be even better.

I think Russ went the right path and OCZ scares me the most of the SSD's but I would buy an OCZ if the price was right. The Intel's are what I was looking at first and I would still consider them, I think they are the most solid as it seem Sam has stated.

 

Yep AFAIK the Intel units are the only ones with a fairly clean track record. Everything else is plagued with issues be they widespread or hardware-specific. Specifically the OCZ Sandforce controllers are supposed to have the best performance by far, but the drives are so wrought with issues it's hardly even worth trying.

Of course there's the off chance that it really is all in the set-up and a lot of poorly rated drives are actually exquisite.

 

my first gen sandforce corsair f60 is treating me well, and had been for quite a while now

 

I know it's expensive, but it sure has me drooling! Any chance the price could drop soon?
Intel 510 Elm Crest Sata III

 

That's one I've been eye balling too. I've seen it as low as $249 so I'm sure it will drop some soon, maybe around Christmas? The Corsair and Russ's were also on my pallet of things to consider. But now I have to consider a new notebook, I'll probably go cheap this time as my Special Edition HP was just a Special Piece of Crap. No More HP!!

 

Stevo,

The new drive works fine except there is no way to install the AHCI drivers. The only way to do it with XP is with a floppy drive. Even then, all I can find is an external floppy, and I'm not so sure you can make an "A" drive out of it. No "A" drive, no AHCI. I'm going to have to hunt and see if I can find or borrow a PCI controller card, and just install it temporary.

Even without AHCI it still reads at 400MB/s and writes about 260MB/s. I may just say the hell with it and leave it as it is.

Russ

 

Russ,

I have an external USB Floppy and it does work as A: drive, I can even set the bios to boot from it, but at any rate try it as it should work for you even in XP were I've used it successfully there too.

You could run without AHCI it certainly wouldn't be the end of the world and you seem to have good through-put but give it a go with the external, it should work.

Stevo

 

I can use an Active Boot USB drive to update the bios, and that sees it as the "A" drive, but when you click on it to load the AHCI drivers, no drive "A" appears, and there is no search function. I just may go ahead and purchase a 32 bit Win7 Professional, because the laptop has Win7 Home Ultimate in it. I can also run it in XP Mode, which should make learning 7 a little easier. I figure it might give me a little more flexibility with 32 bit programs, and I can load the AHCI drivers with a flash drive on Win7. I found the 32 bit for $90 and the 64 bit for $101. These are OEMs.
http://www.discountmountainsoftware.com/miwi7prfuveo5.html?cmp=shopping
I'll sleep on it and decide in the AM.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Russ,

If you buy the Pro (x86) you can use the key to for (x64) as well as they work both ways. So if you have a x64 version around it would be cheaper to buy the $90 Pro over the $101. Also if you install Pro or Enterprise on a system it will not install the Windows games by default so you will need to go into the "All Control Panel Items/Programs and Features/Turn Windows features on or off" and add them.

It's too bad I'm not closer to your location as I have a FDD controller and some floppy drives around you could use, provided your board would still have a old PCI slot which is going away of course. The motherboards I've used my USB Floppy on you could still designate use of a floppy drive in so maybe that is your problem because like I said I've specifically bought and used my USB Floppy for that reason on Servers, Notebooks, and Desktops running 2K/XP/2003.

NOTE: You may already know this but I thought I would point a few issues out just in case.
XP Mode
1) I love having XP VM(s) but there is a snag on architecture that could cause you problems. Any device that works on XP but only has drivers for XP will probably won't work in your Windows 7 (Ultimate/Pro/Enterprise) XP Mode because Seven needs to see it first to share it with XP Mode.

2) USB devices other than the mouse and keyboard have to be mounted and unmounted in XP Mode as you can't share devices across both platforms at the same time. So if you don't unmount a device in XP Mode when you exit back to Seven that device will still be reserved for XP and not usable in Seven.

The nice thing as you have mentioned is that XP Mode will allow you to run certain programs that might not run on Seven still. The programs once installed in XP Mode can then be run right from your Seven Start menu without entering XP Mode first which is also very nice.

Hope that helps,
Stevo

 

I solved the whole problem. Newegg has a subscriber (E-Blast) sale on Win 7 Professional for $119.99 with free shipping, so I ordered it. It should be here tomorrow or Monday at the latest.

I believe you said you were looking for a new laptop. Here's what I bought back in August. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215190 I got a good deal on it at the time, and it was $267 delivered! 16x9 15.6 screen, Great webcam and wireless, with a full keyboard. Nice machine, highly recommended!

Warmest Regards,
Russ

 

That is one of the notebooks I was considering but I'm also looking at this one too which has 4GB RAM. Both can be upgraded to 8GB so really either would work fine however Win7x64 does prefer 4GB's RAM even though you can run it on as low as 2GB's.

TOSHIBA Satellite C655-S5339 Notebook Intel Pentium B950(2.10GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR3 1333 320GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi Intel HD Graphics $379.99 free shipping

So you like your Acer are there any issues that really bother you?

I too saw the eBlast deal and new you would get it to as you are a subscriber as well. That is a real good deal!

Stevo