SG Broadband Community

I'm looking for a solid state drive. I don't care about absolute top performance, I just want something that works, isn't flaky and will last. Appears that I'll be spending somewhere near $200 (note, in Canada...a bit more expensive here).

I was thinking of getting a Crucial 256MB one. Was considering Intel and Samsung as well.

Opinions/advice would be appreciated.

Crucial or Intel come to mind first. The Crucial M4s have been great.

Yappers......Intel or Crucial.

I've only used Intel. Fast and I like their SSD cleanup utility. You'll see all kinds of one star votes on SSDs at NewEgg, people claiming the drive died after a month or whatever. I've never had any performance or longevity issues with the Intels I've purchased.

What does the cleanup utility do? I thought I had read somewhere not to bother defragging SSDs because it just stresses them out for no real reason in most cases so I assume this cleanup thing is something else.

Among other things like drive health, life remaining on the flash cells, etc., it can invoke the TRIM command manually. Helps optimize the drive. Defragging is frowned upon with SSDs strictly because of the number of disk writes it performs. Defragging a mechanical hard drive arranges the data closer to the center of the disk platter for performance, but SSD read speeds are the same no matter where the data is on the drive, so defragging them is unnecessary.

purecomedy wrote:What does the cleanup utility do? I thought I had read somewhere not to bother defragging SSDs because it just stresses them out for no real reason in most cases so I assume this cleanup thing is something else.

Burke wrote: Defragging a mechanical hard drive arranges the data closer to the PERIMETER (outer tracks) of the disk platter for performance,.

*fixed*
Surface read of the edges of a spinning platter....more inches per second travel past the head. Slower in the middle.
Located data on the outer tracks of the disk were introduced as a feature with Win9X defrag....but it's not the primary purpose of a defrag. It's about putting a file down in as much contiguous space as possible, across free blocks within the file system.

TRIM is natively supported in Windows 7, older OS's need the utilities to perform that function.

Alright, all sounds good. I'll hunt for price and return policies a little and get my order in this weekend!

I've been wrong all these years? Crap.

YeOldeStonecat wrote:*fixed*
Surface read of the edges of a spinning platter....more inches per second travel past the head. Slower in the middle.

I got 2 120 gig intel 330 series in raid 0. Very quick! Nice thing about the intels is they come with a sata3 cable and a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter.

I do not believe TRIM operates on RAID0 set ups.

I have enjoyed crucial m4's, no issues whatsoever. I just purchased a Samsung 840Pro. It feels a touch quicker.

David wrote: I have enjoyed crucial m4's, no issues whatsoever.

+2 32g, 128g

David wrote:I do not believe TRIM operates on RAID0 set ups. .

Support for it has recently been added to the latest chipsets/RAID controllers.