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Wasn't impressed OCZ Vertex and Windows 7, but now...

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mhiner

Member
Joined
May 4, 2006
Location
Akron, Ohio USA
Ok, so the back story is that I bought an OCZ Vertex and Windows 7 Professional because everything I've read for the last year is how great SSD drives were and Windows 7 supports trim. So taking the plunge on a drive that will be half price 4 months from now was a little heart wrenching when all I need is a motherboard and cpu to build another pc. (I have a 7600gt, 2gb ocz ddr2-1066, case, power supply, dvd burner, 22 samsung flat panel monitor and a 250gb wd sata2 laying here in the basement) So I wondered through MicroCenter debating about buying that stupid drive when I could get an quad core athlon and motherboard for less than this drive, I decided I needed to sack up and try it.

Purchased the drive and had windows 7 laying around here. Got home and starting moving water lines in my pc out of the way so I could plug the extra sata drive in. Found out the wonderfully intellegent employee gave me a 3.5 to 5.25 drive rack instead of 2.5 to 3.5 but whatever, 4 zipties and I'm ticked off but its installed. Unplugged power to all the other drives and fired up the beast and installed win7. It really installed fast but not so quick I was like WOW! Anyway played around with settings and moving files and directories to my wd 1tb, transfers seem faster but still nothing to be wowed.

Today installed more software and was like, really? Then I realized that by this point with vista ultimate and my raptor had already slowed down the system. After some boot tests and launch tests I'm really frick'n impressed with this thing. I know a lot of you have written about the speed and I have read almost all the posts but I thought I would let anyone who was on the fence about spending the money know, I'm buying one for each of the three laptops and two additional desktops I have in the house. Probably will buy a couple larger ones and raid them because I'm a true believer now!!!
 
The price premium is well worth it. There's many who say it isn't but I tend to find these are people who haven't used a good SSD yet. People sometimes have perceptions that they believe to be true without having actually tried what it is they are thinking negatively of.
 
I was impressed with my raptor before I loaded a bunch of stuff on it, but this thing is fast no matter what. The weird part is that my 1tb drive is doing almost 100mb/s and the raptor is in the 70's. Random access time is averaging in the 8ms's and the ssd is .05 at the slowest... Still have a way to go to get the system back where I had it with Vista but I'm truly impressed, I think I'm going to put OS/2 warp on my old raptor since I won't need it anymore!

I agree about people flapping their gums prior to owning the actual hardware or owning the hardware and not knowing how to use the search box or google...
 
The price premium is well worth it. There's many who say it isn't but I tend to find these are people who haven't used a good SSD yet. People sometimes have perceptions that they believe to be true without having actually tried what it is they are thinking negatively of.


I was one of those non-believers, I pumped lots of money into fast CPU's , lotsa RAM, Raptor drives just to make my 24/7 system faster. I can tell you with a SSD , a C2D OC to 3.6 and a few sticks of budget RAM your system will feel and act faster than any fancy i7 with 12 gigs of RAM, not talking benchmarking here or gaming FPS, just how fast your system boots, apps load, Firefox loads etc ...it is worth every cent to get a SSD in my opinion.

For example, I have just in the last few minutes switched rigs...from a Raptor with a i5-650 OC'd to 4.5 G's, RAM at 1800 Mhz and it feels very noticeably slower than the C2D OC'd to 4 G's, RAM at 1400Mhz and a nice speedy Vertex, as I said, worth it all the way.
 
Though you where installing from other mechanical HDD's. Try installing software that is on the SSD. You'll see it whip through it. Let alone even updates to the OS fly.

Raid-0 FTW :)
 
I love how with a good SSD, you can truly multitask/switch in between and the system still responds. With my mechanical HDD's, copying from the HDD to a USB HDD or my server, trying to do other things created perceptible lag. Not so with the SSD.
 
will brolloks be the first on OCF to own a Vertex II?
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=632753
already a single 100gb drive beats my raid-0 agility drives across the board. that is from what i can make out from the atto graphs, harder for me to read vs atto graphs. if you go that way bro you may to look into a raid card for full benefit of the transfer-rates. hmm i wonder is it SATAIII, cause i dont recall seeing that said....
 
I'm ready to pull the trigger as soon as they hit the shelves Dr Evil :)

Edit...depends what CPU's are out there as that gets priority ;)
 
Gixxerguy I'm not buying them all at once, my wife would kill me. But over the next couple months I will start buying and will definitely raid-0 on my primary rig! I will start putting some of my games on there but still this stinking thing is fast and I'm not even letting it put any temp files on there yet. I'm still doing 220+mb/s transfer after getting all of my programs installed on windows but they are mostly on the mechanical drive. My wife doesn't need quicken to open (she's an accountant as well) that fast.
 
The raid-0 bug will bite you next. Trust me, it will happen. :D


I did it just for capacity, actual performance won't increase that much by running them raid 0. I have my documents and my desktop mapped to the 1TB's. I got 90% of my games and apps on the ssds. I hope I can kill them, maybe in another 2 years intel will replace these with 160gb :D
 
I did it just for capacity, actual performance won't increase that much by running them raid 0. I have my documents and my desktop mapped to the 1TB's. I got 90% of my games and apps on the ssds. I hope I can kill them, maybe in another 2 years intel will replace these with 160gb :D

Heh, yeah I said something like that as well.



...and now I own four SSDs.

2 P128 Corsair's
1 Intel X25M G2
1 Kingston (Intel) X25M G2

and I'll probably buy another one or two when something strikes my fancy. :D
 
Oh the pain, the agony! I just booted back to my raptor setup prior to my ssd venture. Wow I'm clicking on things like I had just booted to my ssd. Then realized I still had another 30 seconds before windows becomes usable and then I hear the raptor read/write arm start flinging around (I still my covers off my case as I'll be removing a couple drives when conversion is over). Again I can not believe I wasn't impressed with windows 7 and that little ssd drive.

Oh on a side note, I saw a post about the new OCZ solid 2 60gb drives at newegg for $169. I got my Vertex 60gb drive from MicroCenter for $179 and by the specs its a whole lot faster for 10 bucks.
 
Last week I picked a used 80GB Intel X25-M G2 on eBay for $220 shipped for my couple of years old pentium dual-core laptop. It came with the updated firmware installed and I cloned my cranky 80GB 5400 rpm Seagate drive that had been recently upgraded to Windows 7 from Vista. The "Windows experience" hard drive score went from 4.4 to 7.1 but it feels so much faster I really didn't need to run the test. I couldn't tell from the crappy HP/Compaq BIOS what SATA controller was previously installed (the selection was Enabled or Disabled), but after checking the Device Manager I found msahci.sys (Microsoft AHCI) was in place, so Trim is activated.

It is curious to me that the current Intel AHCI drivers can't implement Trim though. Since it's a laptop that can only take a single drive, the 30GB, 40GB, and 60GB SSDs were just too small, and the 128GB ones too expensive, so the 80GB Intel is just right. There's still more than 30GB free, which is plenty.

One of these days I'll have to check on any improvement to battery life, which IMO, is pathetic on almost all laptops. Anecdotally, I do notice that the fan comes on much less often and only runs for a few seconds when it does. Anyway, it makes the laptop feel equal to my much higher-end desktops during normal usage. I still hate the little oddly configured keyboards on these things though. But you really need to get one of these things if you use a laptop.
 
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