Which boot drive?

[Bolas]

Trying to figure out the overall fastest boot drive setup for my current build. Something that will stay fast even as the drive gets used -- in other words, if it doesn't have garbage collection or TRIM of some kind, it could be a problem.

Looks like the prices have jumped up on all of these by about 15% over last week's prices, bleah!

Intel X25-M G2 160GB, $430-$500

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167024

OCZ Vertex LE 200GB, $820-$900

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227509

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB, $660-$760

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148349

OCZ Z-Drive 256GB, $980

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227498

Alternately, I could do a pair of smaller drives in RAID-0, but I'm not too keen on that because of the lack of TRIM support. I'm leaning towards getting a SATA 6Gb/s motherboard that would make use of the Crucial SSD and going that route -- most storage for best price. Still a bit leery of it though because it's not a proven design like the Intel SSD's.

I'd love some insight into the current SSD choices, thanks in advance for any input provided. Am I missing any obvious choices in the under-$1000 price range for boot drives?

[mbreslin]

I have 8 of those c300s and they're great although sort of high latency generally (over 1ms). But if I were buying just 1 drive for boot I would try and force myself to wait for the intel refresh and get a 100gb x25-e. If either a) I couldn't wait or b) 100gb isn't enough, the vertex le sure looks sexy, although I might just be caught up in the LE hype. Considering it's the cheapest on your list AND a known EXCELLENT performer, I recommend you get the x25 or if money doesn't matter spring for the vertex le.

My 2c.

[Bolas]

Hmm... looks like I forgot to put X25-E 64GB as an option.

[Particle]

If you're out for raw performance, the PCIe card is going to win flat out.

[Metroid]

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB is the best option, Price / Performance / Size, now if you opt for the 100 ~ 128GB then get the OCZ Vertex LE Sandforce.

[Ao1]

Looking at those prices you could near on get 2 x X25-m’s for the price of the Vertex LE and use raid 0 to get a faster set up and an extra 120GB of storage space. All I’ve read about the Vertex LE so far is disappearing drives and slowdowns in performance.

The Crucial C300 is not a bad drive by the looks of it but the latency seems to suck a bit. Not sure if that would be noticeable. Price per GB is comparable to the X25-M.

What about the X25-V version? $125 for 40GB. You could raid 6 of them and have some change left over for the price of the Vertex LE.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...7025&Tpk=X25-V

http://vimeo.com/9343954

[mpower1001]

I think he's trying to stay away from Raid because of trim.

I'm in the same situation as you, decisions, decisions, I think I'm leaning towards the intel 160gb

[SteveRo]

intel is working on trim over raid and in all honesty to break down the array and run the intel tool box once a quarter should be no big deal.
I like the 4x intel x25-v on an LSI 9211-8i - it will equal or beat 99% of what is out there for less than $750 bucks - hard to beat that!
You want cheaper? - just go with 4x x25-v on ich10 for ~500$ - should be a killer set up.

[Bolas]

I think he's trying to stay away from Raid because of trim.

I'm in the same situation as you, decisions, decisions, I think I'm leaning towards the intel 160gb

I am staying away from RAID because of TRIM, correct.

Supposedly, next generation drives will come out in the fall, and they'll have significantly improved capacities. So maybe I should get something cheap now, like the Intel, then get much larger capacity drive in the fall? Or when TRIM and RAID play nicely together, then put together an array.

[Bolas]

If you're out for raw performance, the PCIe card is going to win flat out.

I didn't think it would win flat out -- I thought the boot times were slower on the pcie cards because of having to initialize the RAID card took a while. Which meant that a single SSD would end up booting faster than the pcie card? Or am I mistaken on that?

[SteveRo]

raid needs time to initialize - if your doing a lot of oc'ing raid is a pain but for just about everything else raid 0 gives better performance.
In some games (maybe even most games) you will not notice an improvement due to the processing that has to go on while the level is loading.
If not for the trim problem - SSD's in raid would be the clear performance winner most of the time.

[Particle]

I don't generally think of performance in terms of initialization duration. Once up and running, it's clearly faster. From the time you see the Windows loading bar, it's going to win. Unless starting your PC is most of what you do in a day, I'd be more concerned with how initialized performance looks. It'll be the important part when loading apps and such.

[mbreslin]

I'm not the best judge of "snappyness" because I came from an old slow 120gb maxtor spinner as a boot drive, but immediately after windows load no matter how big of a program it loads nearly instantly photoshop crysis visual studio all nearly instant, and smaller things like firefox practically seem to load before I click on them. Raid 0 for life.

my other 2c ;p

[Bolas]

I'm not the best judge of "snappyness" because I came from an old slow 120gb maxtor spinner as a boot drive, but immediately after windows load no matter how big of a program it loads nearly instantly photoshop crysis visual studio all nearly instant, and smaller things like firefox practically seem to load before I click on them. Raid 0 for life.

my other 2c ;p

Well, my current drives suck so bad that ANY SSD is going to seem just plain awesome. I'm running off of a 120GB 5400RPM notebook hard drive at the moment, so an SSD will be ten times faster than that, I would think.

[SteveRo]

I recently replaced a 160GB 5400 drive with a new x25-v in a new dell inspiron - installed new os using ahci driver to get trim.
Wow - huge difference in responsivness.
Boot and wake up time cut in half at least.
You can also see this same kind of improvement in upgrading older laptops.
You should see a very nice improvement upgrading from a 5400 drive - make sure you install the os with your bios set to ahci.

[Bolas]

bios set to ahci... no idea what that means, but I'll see if I can figure it out.

News flash: TRIM is now enabled for some SSD RAID. Not sure which, but when I figure that out, I'm going with RAID-0 for sure. So now I'm looking at a pair of SSD's in RAID-0 instead of a single SSD.

[SteveRo]

wikipedia -

The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is an application programming interface defined by Intel which defines the operation of Serial ATA host bus adapters in a non-implementation-specific manner. The specification describes a system memory structure for computer hardware vendors to exchange data between host system memory and attached storage devices. As of June 2008, the current version of the specification is v. 1.3.[1] AHCI gives software developers and hardware designers a standard method for detecting, configuring, and programming SATA/AHCI adapters. AHCI is separate from the SATA 3Gb/s standard, although it exposes SATA's advanced capabilities (such as hot-plugging and native command queuing) such that host systems can utilize them.

Many SATA controllers offer selectable modes of operation: legacy Parallel ATA emulation, standard AHCI mode, or vendor-specific RAID. Intel recommends choosing RAID mode on their motherboards (which also enables AHCI) rather than the plain AHCI/SATA mode for maximum flexibility, due to the issues caused when the mode is switched once an operating system has already been installed.[2] Legacy mode is a software backward-compatibility mechanism intended to allow the SATA controller to run in legacy operating systems which are not SATA-aware or where a driver does not exist to make the operating systems SATA-aware.

AHCI is fully supported out of the box for Windows Vista and Linux operating systems from kernel 2.6.19, as well as later operating systems such as Windows 7. NetBSD also supports drivers in AHCI mode out of the box in certain versions. OpenBSD has had an AHCI driver starting with OpenBSD 4.1. DragonFlyBSD based its AHCI implementation on OpenBSD's and added extended features such as port multiplier support. FreeBSD supports AHCI as well. Solaris 10 introduced AHCI support in the 8/07 release [3]. Older operating systems require hardware-specific drivers to support AHCI.