Please, make some contests available for outside the US :)
So easy.. I'm using a hard-drive that was ment for windows 98...it so slow. I need to get a raid card, but good ones are to much. Who ever win that sexy thing going to ow so lucky.. Drool!
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
It's a desktop drive, and a trained monkey could install it. Just read up on how to install a SSD and you'd be fine.
These drives are purely(atm) meant for OS/primary functions/most played games on your system. Meaning, throw your OS(w/e it may be), WoW/CoD/SC2, whatever you may play the most. Then toss your video/music players on it. The problem is that the drive itself will chokepoint on your slower terabyte drives that actually store all your music/movies. As other have stated over the 4 pages I'm sure(can't read that many pages in the middle of work) it is not anywhere near a necessary improvement for even "hardcore" gamers. In fact I personally would not recommend this drive for anyone that wants to use it for gaming. It's just not a worthwhile improvement looking at space/$. If you run major processing programs, then you absolutely want these drives. "Major" being defined as: video/music processing programs(DJs, remixers), and CAD designers that will see the most out of the speed increase(going from old speeds to blistering speeds which will cut down on time used to complete a given project.) Once these drives become more current technology and the price drops, it'll be the best around. But atm when my 500gb cost me around 1400$, and my 160gb costing 350-400ish, that just hurts for anyone that just wants good performance. Stick with the nice 7200 1+TB for now. Maybe get a 80+gb SSD, and just run 4+1TB drives in sync to see the best results/$.
I have 2 questions:1: Since the small amount of Hard Drive space (160gb), If your computer has more than one slot for Hard Drives, can you use two or more of these? (I wouldn't see why not but since I know nothing about computer building, it's always better to ask :-) )2: Also, I have seen in stores that you can buy boxes where you can put a computer Hard Drive in it and it will act as an external Hard Drive. Think it can be done with this?Thanks for answering
I read through all the comments, and I did find a few little things I would like to point out.For gaming you don't entirely need a dedicated an SSD drive that's attached to the motherboard. I've used a 32GB Kingston CompactFlash card and reading WoW off of it wasn't an issue. However writing to the card, especially 3.x.x patches took forever. The card did go faster than my hard drive but at the same time the machine I used was not optimally configured. As for SSDs they do tend tend to fare better but it really depends on the make and model. The 16GB Samsung SSD I've used in one device and a Transcend 4GB SSD in a DOS/Win95/Win98 laptop works wonderfully. There are, in fact a few other catches I haven't seen.1. When a hard drive suddenly loses power, the only data affected is what is being written. SSDs, at least most of them, exercise wear leveling and it is possible to damage surrounding sectors. Fixing this issue is in the works or so I think.2. Newer, bigger SSDs use MLC instead of SLC. Multi-level and Single-Level Cell respectively. The Intel x25 is MLC and has 10% of the write cycle durability of a SLC drive. However unlike the CF card it should be able to handle multiple reads and writes at the same time.3. Fragmentation can cause some read issues. It's just not nearly as noticeable and depends on all processes.4. Using some peer to peer (such as downloading StarCraft II) will continually write to the SSD. Even if no information is being downloaded it is still writing to it.As for the performance shown. Unless the hard drives were duplicated with the same sector layout (not ignoring blank sectors when copying which some copy software does) there is a bit of bias. A lot of times a computer that has been running with the same install longer can slow down over time. It just depends on what the user is doing.Finally. I play WoW on an older XP based ThinkPad with a 30GB Hitachi. Load speeds, despite the entire game being fragmented and usually having less than 15% drive space the loading times are not too bad. In fact most screens are always under 30 seconds. For those running Vista, disable SuperFetch.SSDs are a nice and I enjoy using them. I just don't plan on getting an SSD for a gaming desktop because I don't feel the need at the moment.Edited 4 times cause I'm just revising for grammatical errors.
Are you guys on windows 7? 30 seconds for wow to load seems quite long for a ssd. I'm using a seagate momentus xt hybrid drive and mine takes about 17 seconds.The velociraptor isn't really worth it imo. It's louder, uses more power, costs more, gets not a lot of improvement over a 7200 rpm drive. So I'm not surprised at all you zoomed going to a ssd.I would check out some tom's hardware benchmarks if anyone is setting up a new rig. This article helped me decide on the momentus xt. Basically I get all the loading advantages of a ssd with the storage capacity of a conventional drive at much much lower costs than a ssd. Since games mostly just load (and are optimized for saves even on normal hds) it suits my needs fine.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-momentus-xt-hybrid-hard-drive-ssd,2638.html
I don't know about you, but RAM is significantly more expensive than a mechanical hard drive...At least I've always felt that way.When looking at the HDD as a bottleneck just make sure to have enough RAM. It makes a lot of difference in that sometimes it's actually the memory creating a bottleneck than the platters.
Honestly? I don't know what's up with Lore's hard drive, maybe it's not being properly defragged once a week or what, but my "regular old 7200 rpm hard drive" loads my game up in 20 seconds. I don't think my game loading up 10 seconds faster is worth $230. Oh and I'm not even running any kind of Raid setup. I've got everything running in regular IDE because one of my drives is an IDE and the other 2 are SATA, and I haven't figured out how to run it in Raid mode and keep the IDE one running. I can spend $230 on 120GB and 10 seconds faster loading speed on WoW or ~$200 for my 1.3TB and have to "deal" with 20 seconds to load my game. Go figure. Solid State Drives just don't impress me yet. Maybe when they have the capacity of a normal hard drive and double the speed they have now I'll see about getting one.
Gasp. Admin first post?There's someone who keeps quiet even more than Mystadio? UNPOSSIBLEZ.
I've been using a 80GB Intel X25-M on my home gaming computer for about a year now. It is one of the most noticeable and immediate computer upgrades I have seen from a usability standpoint. Every program opens within a couple of seconds at most. Startup and shutdown are greatly improved. I can come out of sleep mode and have a working desktop almost instantly. If you are a serious gamer or power computer user, consider an SSD, you won't regret it.