Hard Drive Performance

Soldier4Real

Soldier4Real

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Oct 15, 2008
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I have quick question for some of you. I'm thinking of upgrading my current hard drive to try and increase performance. I was just wondering what you guys run and like. I've been looking at SSD's but the write speeds definitely leave something to be desired. I'm assuming the Raptor/VelociRaptor is pretty much the gaming gold standard. Is there really any advantage versus a traditional SATA 7200 RPM drive? Opinions?
 
I just read a review on Anandtech yesterday that OCZ was coming out with an updated firmware (1275) for the Vertex drives. According to the benchmarks, it's a lot better then any JMicron controlled drive.

As for the Raptor/Velociraptor, you will see a quite noticeable speed boost in the read and writes.

If you have some money, get 1 Intel X25 SSD. The random access is where the SSD's shine, which is where the majority of all use comes from. They are very expensive, but if you want some solid proof of the performance I'm talking about, check this YouTube:

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Most people recommend getting a SSD for performance (OS/Games) and a HDD for storage.
 
Getting an SSD for BF to be installed on or anyother game, a raptor for windows and a nice 2tb drive for media storage would probably be the best route. If you are oozing money you could get 2 SSDs but at their current pricing I don't think putting windows on one is gonna be that great of a benefit. Also putting your page file on the SSD would give you an additional speed boost.
 
I have to VelociRaptor in Raid 0 and they fly; the old raptors are just a little bit slower; but, for SSD I would wait a bit because the price is just too expensive; plus, the size of the drive is a draw back. I would love to have a couple because of no mechanical parts and the lifetime of the drives are unmatched to a standard hard drive.
 
Windows 7 is suppose to be optimized for both SSD's and HDD's.
 
I've been reading mixed reviews on SSDs. A lot of people seen to be having severe problems with them - severe speed degradation after just a week of use, failures, etc.

When the products become more mature, a raid 0 with SSDs would be very nice though.

Edit: I just saw there was a sale on the 30gb OCZ Vertex at newegg for only $83 (after rebate)!!!!! Prices are going down which is awesome. It's still an insane price per gigabyte over mech HDD's but holy shit my dick is getting a bit hard thinking about a couple of those in raid 0.

Think 450-500mb/s sustained throughput and close to 0 seek times... The throughput alone is TEN times what my drive does now AT BEST, nevermind the seek time which is another 10 times better.

I think my tipping point for the 30GB vertex will be $75. If I see one for that price sometime, two are mine, thank you very much. Hopefully by the end of the summer.
 
A lot of the speed degradation in SSD's comes from poor quality, i.e. the JMicron controller. OCZ Vortex' uses the Indilink controller while the Intel X-25 uses a Samsung based controller.

The main reason for the price premium on Intel is that Intel has hundreds of error checking facilities to find most, if not all the bugs in their design. I don't even think OCZ has close to the amount of test beds to test their SSD's.
 
im thinking of a ssd for my main tower, which is pretty much built just for 2142/L4D.

i have two 1TB drives for data storage on the NAS box. i should order an ssd but i dont want to rebuild the OS.

soulzz i need to talk to you more in-depth, but if i make an image of my setup now, can i switch to a SSD and reload the image? assuming the image wasnt larger than the SSD.
 
nah i dont have to keep it. it could probably use a restore by now anyway.
 
I have previously transferred a system to a new HDD. All you need to do is copy the system directories - the &quot;windows&quot; directory, the &quot;program files&quot; and &quot;documents and settings&quot; directories, &quot;system volume information&quot; and such, and it works just fine.

Mind you, it's impossible to copy windows from itself (it just doesn't work because it's constantly writing stuff to itself and some files are locked), but you can easily do it with a bootable windows CD like this: http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

You can also use imaging software with no issues. If you're not changing any other hardware, you can just unload it on the SSD and it should work just fine. It will probably detect/install drivers if needed on the first boot.

... also even though they're using the indilink controller, the vertex drives (although quite a bit above the jmicron-based drive quality) are prone to the same degradation over time, which people are saying is pretty severe with lots of writing...

If you're buying a SSD NOW though, indilink-based (OCZ Vertex) is really THE way to go. I would advise NOT buying anything else right now. As a bonus, it requires virtually no tweaking for best performance (except the recommended disabling of now useless features such as indexing, etc. which I have disabled on my windows system anyway). I _HATE_ precaching/indexing... although prefetch seems to be OK.
 
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