Thread: SSD now or wait for further price drop

Originally Posted by rar110

I am looking to fit a SSD to the macbook and use the 512GB HDD as an external drive for storing big data files like movies and backup. The read/write speed is amazing.

I see the price for a OCZ 240GB SSD (which will be ok size for me) has dropped to about $220 (512GB is $420). That's a price drop of about $140 in the last couple of months.

What's the consensus will SSC price/GB continue to plummet or will it start to level out?

I think prices are settling down. Put one in my last latest laptop. Boot time is about 40% less than the old one, Both Win7 64 bit. If you can afford it grab one.

I've just replaced the primary drive in my desktop with a 128Gb SSD, the speed is amazing (partly due, no doubt, to a clean install of W7). I can get away with the size because I use a server for data storage. Even with W7/ O2010 and a few other programs (Photoshop Elements etc) I only used 60 Gb, so 128 Gb is more than enough.

The 1Tb drive that used to be the primary is just for virtual machines (I test and document software for a living) and I'm trying to get back in the habit of creating disk images on a regular basis, saved here for speedy recovery (if needed).

I think they're on the standard price drop over time for new'ish technology to be honest. I bought my first SSD about 3 years ago (64GB ) and just recently upgraded. I ended up with a 256GB for the same price 3 years later. I reckon that's pretty standard, so my advice is just buy now and start enjoying the benefits.

You can wait for it to come down, but then by the time that happens, why not wait for the next size up to come down a little more....... You could wait forever!

Personally I wouldnt buy the OCZ I would buy an Intel 5 series, and once you get one you'll wish you bought one many months ago, they are simply brilliant.

I recently built/rebuilt two PC's with OCZ Octane SATA II SSD's as the boot drive. One PC was an Intel Core II Duo E8400 with 4 gig RAM and W7 32 bit, the other was AMD FX6200 six core with 8 Gig RAM and W7 64 bit.

Both failed with HDD issues within 2 weeks. It was a gradual degradation and whilst both HDD's tested OK the problem appeared to be data corruption especially on bigger files (*.pst) for example. The PC's would end up booting OK then lock up with HDD light on and little W7 whizzy circle thing rotating. If left the PC would re boot with a 'insert boot disk' message.

It appeared to me to be a flow control/buffer over run/swap file issue.

Anyway cutting to the chase. For an SSD to operate efficiently as a boot HDD it needs to run in AHCI (Advanced Host Control Interface) mode which is an extension of the SATA 'protocol'. No big deal if your motherboard bios supports it. If AHCI isn't specifically stated as supported in bios but RAID is this should (support AHCI) do it for you.
The AHCI drivers are included in W7 but need to be downloaded for XP.

It's important to set bios to AHCI (or RAID) BEFORE loading Widows onto the SSD as registry settings are made at install which will NOT automatically update if you change the bios setting later. This can be done manually later if you're comfortable with registry editing.

It took a fair bit of time and effort to work this out and it solved the issue with the newer AMD PC but AHCI is not an option on the older PC and even though it (OCZ Octane SSD) is supposed to work as SATA (no AHCI) this is not the case for me . Motherboard is gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L.

What I am trying to say here is don't just buy an SSD and just 'plug it' and expect it to work straight up. (as I did).


Deano

Too bad you missed this thread some months back, might have saved you some grief

http://www.aulro.com/afvb/computers/...lling-ssd.html