SSD Advice

Gadgetman496

A few questions I'm hoping experienced SSD users here might answer?


1. What make\Model would you recommend? and what should be avoided?

2. Do they come with mounting kits or do they need to be purchased separately?

3. Does "Trim & Alignment" mean the same thing?

4. Is alignment only necessary on older OS's such as XP or it it a requirement across all OS's?

5. Do they come with some sort of alignment utility or what it used to align them?

6. Can I assume that the physical aspect of installation is exactly the same as installing any SATA drive?

6. Any other advice for someone who hasn't used Solid state drives yet?


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Zab

1. What make\Model would you recommend? and what should be avoided?
I have an OCZ Vertex3 that I'm very happy with. It depends on your price bracket, you'll have to read some reviews.

2. Do they come with mounting kits or do they need to be purchased separately?
The OCZ did but you'll have to check on whichever drive you choose.

3. Does "Trim & Alignment" mean the same thing?
No, they're unrelated. TRIM is a command used to allow the drive clean up blocks that are now deleted (SSDs have different needs to HDDs in this regard and can degrade in performance with something like TRIM). I'm pretty sure it's only supported in W7 as far as MS goes. Alignment is where the starting block of the partition is located (again, SSDs have different needs). A modern OS installer should put it in the correct place but there are free tools you can use to move it later if something goes wrong.

4. Is alignment only necessary on older OS's such as XP or it it a requirement across all OS's?
See above

5. Do they come with some sort of alignment utility or what it used to align them?
See above

6. Can I assume that the physical aspect of installation is exactly the same as installing any SATA drive?
Yes

6. Any other advice for someone who hasn't used Solid state drives yet?
Not really, I think you're assuming it's going to be more difficult than it will be.

The above is my experience with them anyway.

Fluffy88

1. No offence to Zab here, but OCZ have had a very poor reputation with their latest SSD's, performance was good but there was huge failure rates. The latest firmware supposedly has helped with the issue though. I would highly recommend the Crucial M4, one of the most reliable and best performing SSD's available and they just had a big price drop in the last few days. €159, from €180~ a week ago.

2. Depends on the drive your buying. Some retailers have two options, with or without a mounting kit. So just check the description of the drive your buying. But you probably don't need a mounting kit anyway. SSD's are not like hard drives, they have no moving parts and so can take a lot more abuse. A lot of people just place their drive on the bottom of their case or use Velcro or some type of tape to secure the drive.

That's all I can comment on
If using the drive on Windows 7 I would recommend googling for a few SSD optimisation guides to get the 'normal' tips.
Disable search indexing, hibernation, disk defragmenting, system restore are a few of the big one's.

U_Fig

i recently bought an OCZ agility 3 and it's working fine..just plugged in and played...did a few optimization things mentioned above but above that nothing more..

one piece of advise i will give is to find out the type of SATA controller this can depend on the speed you will get for example if you have a SATA II (ie SATA 3GB/s ) the max performance you can expect say on read/write is ~200s kb/s even if the drive is SATA III while if you have a SATA III (ie SATA 6gb/s) if you connect a SATA III drive you will be most like looking at ~500s kb/s.

so in saying in general the SATA III drives are better performance wise than the SATA II drives and prob better haddware in general but if you only have a SATA II controller then if you want to save a few squid then a SATA II drive would prob do as you can't really get much of the added benefit of the SATA III drive.