hey guys I'm just now getting into the Solid State Drive thing now. I was wondering can someone recommend and point out a good but not too pricey Solid State Drive even though they are. I think I would prefer them over the raptors after doing some reading on them. I was actually looking into the 64GB OCz SSD, and the specs look nice btw. I also do have one question. Can SSD's run in raid? Is it possible. And are they going to fully replace harddrives for the future?

I pretty sure it'll replace harddrives will be replace by Solid State Drives in the future, but not anytime soon.
Im not sure if harddrives run in RAID..

Yes and they scale very well, especially on a hardware RAID card



Once density is high enough, why not!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820220342
This one looks like a pretty good deal for 60GB

There are a few reviews of ssd's in a raid setup. They seem to scale fairly well too. I seem to remember that all ssd's aren't created equal though so you'll want to make sure the specs are good.

Battleship Mtron: 9 ssd's raid 0

How to equip your PC with SSD for about $200

Nice article, I might pick up an OCZ 64GB SSD for my laptop and even if the perfomance difference isn't crazy, it's mainly about having no moving parts and all the power saving associated with that. It'll be hard parting with my 320gb drive I have in there now. I may just wait.

SSD's will run in a RAID configuration just fine. For desktop use when looking at the drives from a cost/size/performance point of view it really doesn't make sense for most users to choose a SSD over a Raptor.

well idk the VelociRaptor is kinda rediculous in price, especially with Western Digital being the cache stingy folk they always are and only putting 16mb on there....GIVE ME 32MB OF CACHE!!!. I will not buy it SPECIFICALLY because of that reason

lol. This makes SSD drives even more ridiculously priced. A 128GB SSD for $500.00 vs a 300GB Raptor for $300.00 in what amounts to a small perceived performance increase with 24/7 use. I'm in no way downing SSD drives as I've been using them for a while now. Just stating the reality of the situation. If one has the money to throw at them then by all means use them.

yeah of course but i meant for a power situation in a laptop a small one isn't too bad. I just don't know why Western digital never wants to put the best possible technology into their flagship harddrive. Plus the average harddrive has improved so much I bet a standard caviar or barracuda of todays technology could keep up with if not equal my raptors I have now. I was kinda ticked off that when my 150gb raptors were released they were only SATA 1 instead of SATA 2 which was out at the same time. That probably helped the performance increase with the velociraptor, they opened up the bandwidth to the drive. Now imagine the possibilities if they would only use a bigger cache.

If you go with the ocz ssd, get the version 2.

But read the reviews, regardless which one you get. Many have problems with random lock ups for a couple seconds, and/or really slow random writes (aka turn off page files, move temp folders to another drive, dont ever defrag!)

The diy ssd talked about in the link above will let you say you have ssd, but notice they don't talk about the performance. Those small types of storage are usually really slow, in comparison.

I really want 2 or 3 of these smaller drives (ocz 32gb) in raid-0, but with all the bad reviews, I plan to wait until the intel's drop in price and get more reviews. The Patriot's just don't have enough reviews yet. The transcends have many poor reviews. The ocz version 1's have alot of poor reviews, and alot of good reviews too. Super Talent? idk

I can't believe anyone would seriously deny a velociraptor because of 16mb cache. Someone please explain, in what real world application, 16 vs 32 would make a noticeable difference. Sure maybe burst speed in some synthetic benchmark.

About the same thing WD says which is why they are made with 16Mb.

but why not? for 300 dollars I can raid two much larger harddrives and probably break even with the one velociraptor and then still have all the storage space I want
I'm just saying if it's the best drive they offer then they should be on the cutting edge of absolutely every aspect of what makes a harddrive good, why hold back on the cache? even if it provided a minuscule amount of performance increase, it's still an improvement.

Break even in a sequential read test maybe. But not access time or cpu%. And most times, access time is where it's at (well os chores and gaming atleast). How often do we need to sequentially read hundred's of mb for that one test to even matter? If you need more space, and dependant on how much money you have, sure 2 larger drives may be better. I'd take a velociraptor and it's scrawny 16mb cache over 2 larger drives in raid-0 with 64mb combined cache any day.

Doing a search of raid-0 vs velociraptor, I found the following results. It has 2 150x's in raid-0 and 2 of the faster wd640's in raid-0 vs velociraptor, in several tests. Once you load this page, you can go to the tests previous page and see that the read and writes are similar, and the access time as I stated above, but I like the pc tests since they are more real world usage type.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2288837,00.asp

The OCZ Core series SSDs are currently the best price:performance I have found. I was researching heavily since my next storage setup will be 2x of their 64gbs in a RAID0 setup. Not all SSDs are created equal by far, and since they are just starting to come down in price it is easy to end up paying more for a slower drive without doing your homework first.

Just be sure not to ever defrag them! It will shorten their lifespan and does nothing for performance on an SSD.

Simple, the raptors are ALSO targeted at the entry level server market and therefore they use time tested tech for reliability that might not be as fast as the alternative, but they know it should last.

My Christmas bonus is going to go towards a good hardware RAID card and 4-6 64 GB SSDs.

That's a pretty good bonus

why wouldn't they just be reliable to begin with? Seagates aren't having any problems and they include lots of cache left and right

Yeah, it's a funny thing about getting grants...you have to spend them.