Sometime next year were supposed to expect a new series of SSD's based off the current X-25m's. Theyre to have 28 or 22nm technology.

http://onlygizmos.com/new-intel-ssds-would-bump-capacity-to-600gb/2009/12/
http://www.nordichardware.com/news,10363.html
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16846/36/

So whose in? Buy in bulk and save!

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,10363.html

Depends on price, if they are cheap enough, and not $1m dollars per gb then sure no worries

I predict $2000+ pricing for a while

While we are on the subject of SSD's. I'm getting a new pc soon and wondering if its worth having 1 of these guys in it for games or running windows on. Yay? Nay?

SSD's are great for OS and pagefiles. Games would be an overkill, just go HDD for them.

I'm utterly in the dark about them too so do you need any special MoBo features to run them or is it just normal SATA?

generally speaking, plain sata

I'm getting a new pc soon and wondering if its worth having 1 of these guys in it for games or running windows on. Yay? Nay?

Doubt it. Just get 4x500GB drives ($240), put them in RAID 1+0 or 0+1 (doesn't matter which for 4 drives) which most motherboards support. You'll have 1TB storage with 1-2 disk redundancy. You'll be pulling 170MB/s avg (230MB/s peak) without having to spend a fortune or rely on immature SSD technology. Latency isn't everything :)

Don't get me wrong, when SSDs are a little more affordable and reliable and you don't need to wait for firmware updates to fix weird quirks, I'd be all over them. Just a matter of time ...

Latency is closer to everything than transfer speed is

Latency is closer to everything than transfer speed is

Good work ignoring most of my post where I also talk about things other than transfer speed :)

You can have all the lowest latency you like. Doesn't make a difference if you end up only being able to afford a tiny drive due to the high price (causing a significant drop in write speed due to quickly-filled drive), and/or you're waiting for firmware updates on model-specific issues since the technology isn't very mature.

yeh I was saying the same thing to trog the other day - at this point just using several 7200rpm data drives will give you more storage, redudancy, as well as about the same or better speed as an ssd drive - without any of the cons, even if they are diminishing

so if you have the space in your tower, it's a reasonable option

windows and linux are both pretty good at caching reads, which helps mitigate latency in a lot of situations

Yeah I changed my new pc to have 4, 500gb's drive instead of my previously planned 2TB disk.

i bought 300gb raptors have 2 of them and they are sooo fast!!

You'll be pulling 170MB/s avg (230MB/s peak) without having to spend a fortune or rely on immature SSD technology. Latency isn't everything :)

That's a fairly misleading statement to give considering sequential read and write speads mean pretty much nothing for boot and games in general and latency being the key performance indicator for boot drives.

The only downside to a good SSD atm is price/capacity and if you can fit you games on a 60/80/120gb drive and price tag isn't a problem then it is 110% worth it over slower spinning raids, period. It wasn't that long ago you had to budget equivalent prices hard drives in a setup anyway.

Oh, another downside is that in a few months there'll be even faster drives, but whatever you get now will still leave others in the dust heh.

last edited by eXemplar at 17:37:40 21/Dec/09

That's a fairly misleading statement to give considering sequential read and write speads mean pretty much nothing for boot and games in general and latency being the key performance indicator for boot drives.

I just checked out a bunch of my game directories with Windirstat and most of the files were multi-MB in size, great for sequential reads. Not sure how quoting sequential speeds is misleading.

For booting, I reboot once a week or fortnight. While the system is on most of the system files on the RAID-ed OS disk are in disk cache in RAM, not needing to be re-read all the time.

and price tag isn't a problem

If price tag isn't a problem, one can argue that going a huge RAM-disk with battery backup would be awesome.

Anyway just giving people other options, as SSDs still have a while to go.

Not sure how quoting sequential speeds is misleading.

Because a lot of the time the files aren't read straight from start to end, most use their own formats and seek different parts of the files at different times. Not to mention most games being 32bit and the io operations involved in paging to a hard drive vs a ssd.

not needing to be re-read all the time.

For the most part this is true, however your operating system usually does a lot of small background reads and writes (indexing, log files, loading/unloading dlls etc) which can bring a normal system to it's knees and push seek times through the roof. This is made worse when antivirus applications hook reads and writes and put their own overhead on these accesses too. Definately a lesser problem with a fast raid, but is basically non-existant with a good ssd.

If price tag isn't a problem, one can argue that going a huge RAM-disk with battery backup would be awesome.

Haha if only, but you've got the small issue of dram not being able to hold any data without a constant power source and some of those drives with batteries that offload to cf cards and such just seem problematic.

I'm not disagreeing with you on the fact that SSDs having a while to go, but to be honest it's more a while to go until the $/gb ratio is better which is more to do with production of the memory and controllers.

Another question that is slightly off topic, but saves me making a whole new thread. New vid card too. Was gonna go for 2 5770's in xfire but after some reading it seems 1 5850 is a better way to go since when you add another, which I would, it seems to smash the 5770s into the ground. So this is the way to go here yeah?

If you can avoid it, don't crossfire/SLi video cards. One card is always better if they have similar performance and price.
Plus to avoid bottlenecks, you would need to have a motherboard with a chipset that supports 2x PCI-E 2.0 x16 lanes. Only Intel X45 and X55 northbridge chipsets support two full speed PCI-E lanes, and they are expensive.

Doubt it. Just get 4x500GB drives ($240), put them in RAID 1+0 or 0+1 (doesn't matter which for 4 drives) which most motherboards support. You'll have 1TB storage with 1-2 disk redundancy. You'll be pulling 170MB/s avg (230MB/s peak) without having to spend a fortune or rely on immature SSD technology. Latency isn't everything :)

I set up a stripe raid on my media box, 2 x 250gb drives for 500gb of storage and yes it makes a HELL of a difference for loading times. When my main rig needs a format I'll be doing the same thing in it for sure.

^ that's not a life...............lol

so's ur face

My face whips your face way back into the Neolithic Age, BOZO.

If you can avoid it, don't crossfire/SLi video cards. One card is always better if they have similar performance and price.

2 5770's are about $60 cheaper, and beat a single 5850 in every test i've been able to find. However when you crossfire 2 5850's the FPS jump is quite large, around 30 - 40 extra and sometimes higher. If I do go for the 5770's i'm kinda limiting my upgrade options aren't I? I want this PC to last awhile so it looks like i'm gonna go with my single card for now.

last edited by DM at 23:54:27 21/Dec/09

can't wait till SSD drop in price a bit so we can put some SSD shelves in the SANs :P ... Just picked up 8 x 2Tb Sata disks today ... time to spam VM's!!

Best prices I could find on Umart
5870 $599
5770 CF $418
5850 $370
Remember to factor in the added cost of an X55 motherboard, and a LGA1366 CPU if you want to get two full PCI-E 2.0 x16 lanes.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/radeon-hd5770-hd5750-crossfirex/diagr/23_57vs58aa_big.png

From this article.

Personally, I'd go with the 5850.

last edited by Lynx at 01:25:16 22/Dec/09

Yeah seems the 5850 is the way since down the road when I want another, it's a lot cheaper and simpler. Don't really understand why the 5850's range between $370 and $500. They all seem to be the same speed and specs just different brands. I hadn't even seen the one for $370 so that makes things much eaiser to choose now

Just curious what games you guys are running that need that? I ran Dragon Age, MW2, Batman at 1920x1200 on the fullest detail (including highest AA) at a silky smooth framerate on my GTX 275.

Again this is a question just out of pure curiosity.

Is it just me or are intel cpu's friggen expensive? the most expensive AMD chip is less than the cheapest intel one on umart. wtf.

The cards have just been released, price's are all over the place at the moment, as some importers try to cash in. it'll settle by Feb.

Is it just me or are intel cpu's friggen expensive? the most expensive AMD chip is less than the cheapest intel one on umart. wtf.

Yeah that's normal, AMD have decided to fill in the niche below Intel's CPUs. Only way they can compete.

What ever happened to AMD? I remember they used to be the dogs bollocks as far as gaming CPU's went.

Yeah me too. Everyone had them and it was almost funny when someone said they had an Intel cpu. Good times.

I got an Intel X-25m 80gb SSD for my OS and some games and it's the best purchase I've made for my PC for ages. Fast, quiet, less heat and power, supposed long life and physically small (which to me is why they kick the s*** out of a 4 drive raid setup for an OS drive).

I spend all day in photoshop and performance is starting to give me the s***s and I'm dangerously low on space so here's what I've got laid out:

PCI raid card (any recommendations?)

2 x OCZ Vertex SSD 60GB (RAID 0)
3 x 1.5TB WD 7200 RPM (RAID 5)

I'm thinking I'll partition the SSD half for OS and the other half as the photoshop scratch disk.

hmm now thinking

Add 4gig ram (total 8gb ram), set 3 gig as a ram drive for PS swap

1x OCZ VERTEX SSD 60GB (windaz)
3 x 1.5TB WD 7200 RPM (RAID 5)

how big of a scratch disk do you need?
what about using RAM drives?

back in the day at Telstra the team I was working for came up with the idea of using ram drives on a system that just mass produces .rrd (rrdtool) files for graphing/statistics/analysis because the 15krpm drives weren't cutting it

solid state was looked at but with the limit read/write lifetime they were dropped and we just got larger ram drives instead