SSD System Drives

[cerwillis]

Good to see you migrated everything properly. Personally, I'd reckomend you format everything, do a fresh instand and just measure everything then... I kinda love formating everything its a nice process

I normally would have formatted, and I may still, but I was intrigued by the live cloning software and I wanted to see what it could do.

[theckhd]

I would like to clone to a new SSD, but now that I've swapped this Win7 installation to two new motherboards (nForce->SandyBridge r1 -> SandyBridge r3), it's clearly "having issues." It hasn't properly cleared out the old hardware, so much of it has extraneous labeling (examples: "Local Area Connection 2" on a board with only 1 network port, similar "2-" appendages on several other pieces of hardware).

It sounds like a fresh install on the SSD would make sense anyway, since it would let Win7 configure itself properly for such a drive. I usually format every 2-3 years or so anyway, so it's about due.

Aside: the biggest gripe I have about re-installing Win7 is shortcuts. There's no (or wasn't a year ago, anyway) easy way to make a shortcut run in administrative mode. Some things (Vent in particular) need this to function. So you have to go through a series of illogical steps to make it work (in short, go through Task Manager to create a task and make a shortcut to the task). The fact that such a loophole even exists makes it all the more ridiculous, because it means there would be absolutely no harm in having a "run as administrator" checkbox when creating the shortcut that requires the admin user/pass to activate. I don't look forward to re-creating the 2 or 3 shortcuts like this that I have, not because they're difficult, but because the illogical process irritates me.

[cerwillis]

I've never had to do any special configuration for Vent. Is your "everyday" user profile an admin account?

[theckhd]

Yes, but I believe it's because I have some of the User Access Control stuff enabled. If I remember correctly (this was over a year ago, so my memory is fuzzy) shortcuts worked fine if I turned off the UAC stuff. But from a security standpoint, I like the fact that things have to ask permission to perform potentially-system-altering modifications. It's the windows version of "sudo."

Admittedly, I ran XP and 2000 under an admin-level account for years without any virus or malware problems, so I doubt I'd be opening myself up to much by turning off UAC. It just felt silly not to take advantage of the extra security since I had it.

[cerwillis]

Even with UAC turned off, you get warnings when software wants to make changes to your computer, it may be slightly less protection, but it beats having to enter your password all the time.

[theckhd]

I never have to put in a password for those alerts, just have to hit the "Allow" button. However, I tweaked my setup to automatically log me in when I boot up, so maybe that's why?

[Punkss2]

If you are using an account with admin rights, then it won't ask for a password, just the "are you sure" prompt. If you are logged in with a user account and do a "run as" then you will be prompted for username and password.

[Bluedragon]

Aside: the biggest gripe I have about re-installing Win7 is shortcuts. There's no (or wasn't a year ago, anyway) easy way to make a shortcut run in administrative mode.

I can just check the shortcut properties, compatibility tab, then check "run as administrator" at the bottom.

[theckhd]

I'm fairly sure that didn't work for Ventrilo, at least when I was setting up my shortcuts (which was shortly after Win7 released). The box was there, but it just didn't work. I had to use a guide like this one to get it to work.

Again though, this may be related to the level of UAC you have applied - I do remember it worked with everything turned off, just not with UAC enabled. And for all I know, it's been fixed/changed since release, because I haven't fooled with it since.

[theckhd]

Anyone seen any Vertex 3's for sale yet? I read somewhere that the release date was March 23rd, but I've yet to see any on newegg.

[gibborim]

Anyone seen any Vertex 3's for sale yet? I read somewhere that the release date was March 23rd, but I've yet to see any on newegg.

Thoughts on getting a second SSD the same size as your WoW one and just running them in RAID 0? That is, if your mobo has support for a system drive RAID. Presumably, all you need from your SSDs is space for your OS, WoW, and whatever 1-2 other games/data intensive applications you may be using. The speed boost from data striping should be enough to give it that bleeding edge feel you would get from a Vertex 3 without all the bleeding.

To answer the question you posed, I can't find them either. Also, I haven't seen any benchmarks go up for them on PassMark, so I imagine no one has them yet.


Pre-posting-edit:

Taken from one of the sites with the release date of the 23rd: "*Update* The 3/23/2011 date was actually when OCZ plans on beginning the shipments to vendors. You will probably have to wait to the end of the month to get your new drives. We apologize for the confusion."

[theckhd]

Thoughts on getting a second SSD the same size as your WoW one and just running them in RAID 0? That is, if your mobo has support for a system drive RAID. Presumably, all you need from your SSDs is space for your OS, WoW, and whatever 1-2 other games/data intensive applications you may be using. The speed boost from data striping should be enough to give it that bleeding edge feel you would get from a Vertex 3 without all the bleeding.

My WoW SSD is one of the old OCZ Agility drives. Even striping those in a RAID formation is probably not going to keep up with a Vertex 3. Plus I'd rather keep WoW and the system drive separate.

[Tev]

Anyone have a link to some recent benchmark testing on current SSDs?

My MoBo is currently limited to 3GB/s SATA, so I've been looking at some of the new Intel 320 series drives, (supposedly up to 220 MB/s sequential writes and 270 MB/s sequential reads). Price wise the 120G seems the best cost per Gig, but I wanted to see what else is out there. I'm also debating how much it would cost in all if I were to upgrade my MoBo for SATA III and what level of difference I could see.

In all I'd like to get 2 SSDs, 1 for my OS, 1 for my Games, converting my other 3 drives for storage. Now that I'm seeing SSDs up to 600G in size, I'm getting tempted to wait for a while and see how much drives of that size start to push down the price of smaller drives.

[theckhd]

In the next day or two I plan on buying a 120GB vertex 3 to serve as a new system drive. The 240GB version is more expensive than I can justify (I doubt my entire C: drive is larger than 120GB right now anyway, but I'll have to check that when I get home). In any event, the goal will be to put Win7 and a few programs (maybe Adobe and Matlab, but not much else) on that drive. All of the other programs will be stored on a HDD, and all media/documents are already on a separate HDD.

The question I have at this point is what to do about WoW. My WoW install is on an old 60GB agility-series drive. It has that drive all to itself, more or less, after being moved there from a HDD.

I'd like to keep it on the 60GB drive, since I don't have much other use for the drive and it keeps it separate from the OS. However,
-it's only a SATA II interface
-read/write access is significantly slower compared to the new drive (at least a factor of 2 by spec), and
-I'm not certain that it has TRIM support, which means read/write access is probably a LOT slower than the specs would imply.

One of my minor gripes at the moment is how long WoW takes to load everything the first time I choose a character. I run 150-200 addons, and from the time I hit "enter world" for the first time until the blue bar is done loading can be 30s to a minute. Subsequent loads are relatively fast (5-15 seconds, it varies based on day/time/phase of the moon/etc.).

So the question is whether it makes sense to move WoW to the system drive as well (and if so, what to do with the old SSD), or whether to leave it on the old drive (and if so, are there ways to improve the performance?). If anyone has a suggestion for a good (preferably free) benchmark program I can run to evaluate how well my Agility drive is operating, I'd be happy to fool around with it this evening and post results.

[gibborim]

The question I have at this point is what to do about WoW. My WoW install is on an old 60GB agility-series drive. It has that drive all to itself, more or less, after being moved there from a HDD.

I'd like to keep it on the 60GB drive, since I don't have much other use for the drive and it keeps it separate from the OS. However,
-it's only a SATA II interface
-read/write access is significantly slower compared to the new drive (at least a factor of 2 by spec), and
-I'm not certain that it has TRIM support, which means read/write access is probably a LOT slower than the specs would imply.

One of my minor gripes at the moment is how long WoW takes to load everything the first time I choose a character. I run 150-200 addons, and from the time I hit "enter world" for the first time until the blue bar is done loading can be 30s to a minute. Subsequent loads are relatively fast (5-15 seconds, it varies based on day/time/phase of the moon/etc.).

So the question is whether it makes sense to move WoW to the system drive as well (and if so, what to do with the old SSD), or whether to leave it on the old drive (and if so, are there ways to improve the performance?). If anyone has a suggestion for a good (preferably free) benchmark program I can run to evaluate how well my Agility drive is operating, I'd be happy to fool around with it this evening and post results.

For benchmarking your SSDs: http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm It is trialware, but should be more than sufficient for testing your SSD drives for now.

This is what I would do: WoW and Windows 7 on the good SSD, other programs on the 'slow' SSD. Make sure you backup your WoW installation if you are not already.

Also, make sure you have an actual SATA 3 cable, otherwise your read speed will be limited to ~255 MB/sec.