PCI-E SSD drives

[terrancelam]

So, is the consensus that the newest generation SATA SSD's are up to par, however the PCIe SSD's need a bit more time?

Yeah, definitely wait on the PCI-E SSDs. They are very likely to be much faster given a bit of time, but give them a year or so to mature in terms of firmware / chipsets. I've played around with some SATA SSDs at work and omg... they make me want to give away my first born for a box full of them (I'd begrudgingly accept 10 units lol).

The only two points I would warn you about is keeping an eye on are:

1.) Wear level, make sure you know what your getting into with regards of life span for a server machine. A lot of the manufacturers are reports 1.5 million hours of operation, but each manufacturer seems to be doing it differently. I personally stick to brands I like and Intel / WD. OCZ seems to have some nice stuff, but I've always been weary of their overall quality.

2.) Speeds / Stuttering. It seems with Win 7 much of the stuttering people experience with SSDs are now a non-problem, but I would look more into how nicely SSDs play with the various server OSes (especially the microsoft flavours).

[Burke]

i hear ya on that Burke, i am just waiting for the price per GB to come down some more until i jump to SSD.

I went all SSD mainly because I don't have that much data, and thusly I don't need larger drives. I think all my data (music, documents, video and photos) takes up around 30 GB.

But I understand why some balk at the price per gigabyte.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Using an SSD is like the first time you used a broadband connection after years of dial-up. You said, "I'm never going back...".

Well said.

[Rivas]

So, is the consensus that the newest generation SATA SSD's are up to par, however the PCIe SSD's need a bit more time?

The PCIe are already out, ummm like 2 months ?

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...Z%20Technology

[YeOldeStonecat]

The PCIe are already out, ummm like 2 months ?

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...Z%20Technology

He's talking about "up to par"...as in need more time to mature, price settling, etc.

[Rivas]

He's talking about "up to par"...as in need more time to mature, price settling, etc.

aaaaa. I missunderstood, my apologies.

[Ken]

Well I ordered some of the SSD SATA 6GB/s using Micron NAND as they seemed to be rated a bit better overall for speed, use and reliability. (Followed by Intel close behind...)

Both boxes will have the OS on a 128GB and the page file on another. I will use my existing SCSI 15k Cheetahs for data storage on 1 build and 10K SATA 6Gb/s VelociRaptors on the other, to play around with and get the feel for them. Depending on the results, I will probably add another very large Micron or Intel for current use data. I am using the 2TB Hitachi's (32 MB cache, 7200 RPM) for long term storage of archives.

When I am happy with my understanding of set up and tweaking on these 2 boxes, I will get into the 2 servers using the PCIe SSD's...

Thanks for all of your input and please feel free to add any other comments and ideas that you have...

[David]

I went all SSD mainly because I don't have that much data, and thusly I don't need larger drives. I think all my data (music, documents, video and photos) takes up around 30 GB.

But I understand why some balk at the price per gigabyte.

I would have thought you had more music.

Presently, the Sandforce based drives are the ones to get.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...D=3160356&SID=

If you can wait the Intel G3 series will be out in a few weeks, promising better a price per GB ratio.

[YARDofSTUF]

G Skill has over come the snadforce firmware limit put on all, except for OCZ, by using higher quality NAND. So itw'll be interesting to see if OCZ moves to higher quality NAND.

But G Skill is also at a nice price.

[Rivas]

I should have benchmark this week (read only tho) Revodrive 120gb vs WD Caviar Sata3 7200rpm 2TB in Raid0.
Waiting for email with pics and story behind it because I heard he had some probs installing the Revo drive heh.

[Burke]

Lost a lot of music and video a while back when I tripped on my external HDD's power cord; the resulting impact caused a head crash. These days, I'm backing up to an external USB-powered HDD (no cords!), a 128 GB thumb drive and Carbonite.

I love how Amazon will warn you that you've already purchased an album but not let you re-download it. You have to buy it again. Even as MP3s, it can get expensive to replace a large music library.

I would have thought you had more music.

Presently, the Sandforce based drives are the ones to get.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...D=3160356&SID=

If you can wait the Intel G3 series will be out in a few weeks, promising better a price per GB ratio.

[Burke]

Make sure to do all the "tweaks." Search for "SSD Tweaker" on Softpedia. Nice little tool.

Also, disable indexing and auto-defrag, as they increase wear, and with an SSD it's so fast you likely don't need the former anyway.

Well I ordered some of the SSD SATA 6GB/s using Micron NAND as they seemed to be rated a bit better overall for speed, use and reliability. (Followed by Intel close behind...)

Both boxes will have the OS on a 128GB and the page file on another. I will use my existing SCSI 15k Cheetahs for data storage on 1 build and 10K SATA 6Gb/s VelociRaptors on the other, to play around with and get the feel for them. Depending on the results, I will probably add another very large Micron or Intel for current use data. I am using the 2TB Hitachi's (32 MB cache, 7200 RPM) for long term storage of archives.

When I am happy with my understanding of set up and tweaking on these 2 boxes, I will get into the 2 servers using the PCIe SSD's...

Thanks for all of your input and please feel free to add any other comments and ideas that you have...

[YeOldeStonecat]

Also, disable auto-defrag, as they increase wear, and with an SSD it's so fast you likely don't need the former anyway.

Yup...you don't want to defrag an SSD, for one....current defraggers organize based on regular HDDs....which is totally different than an SSD. So they defrag WRONG on an SSD. For two...most newer SSDs have a built in...well, they organize different, and know how to organize the data in the most efficient means possible for an SSD, so that placement is done smartly on the hardware level on SSDs. The whole purpose of defrag is negated by an SSD anyways...there's no performance hit if it has to go "search" for fragments of a file as there is with an HDD...it gets the frags of a file in the same amount of time. That method of thinking has to be thrown out.

[Ken]

Hey Guys,

Many THANKS for the tips! I will be starting my first build soon, hopefully with-in the next week...

If you have any other tips and pointers, they will be appreciated!

[David]

Lost a lot of music and video a while back when I tripped on my external HDD's power cord; the resulting impact caused a head crash. These days, I'm backing up to an external USB-powered HDD (no cords!), a 128 GB thumb drive and Carbonite.

I love how Amazon will warn you that you've already purchased an album but not let you re-download it. You have to buy it again. Even as MP3s, it can get expensive to replace a large music library.

OUCH! I do feel for you.

The GO-Flex units are interesting with 1.5TB and USB3/Firewire options.

[Rivas]

Revodrive






Sata3 Drive







NA2k10 was running in the backround during test, been told it's pain in the butt to install the Revodrive, all sata interfaces had to be disabled and run in IDE and also he had to disconnect all drivers except dvd drive.
There is a "guide" on ocz site but it's missing quite a few things.