Recommendations for SSD

sArge_sF said:
Okay - So I am going to up the RAM first before buying the SSD unnecessarily, although, from what I have read, having both more RAM and an SSD will dramatically improve performance - so its definitely on my list for the future.
/QUOTE]

Real life difference:

4gb RAM to whatever --------------------->
HDD to SSD -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

:)
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Pada said:
@Slick:
I've mixed and matched RAM on many occasions. The most important one is to have RAM with the same voltages.
If you can get RAM with the same voltages, clock speed and clock latencies - then you shouldn't have any issues.
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I'm not trying to argue here, my opinion isn't just formed off reading on the web. I own my own PC shop and have done multiple installs and more often than not mixing and matching RAM has lead to strange and usually irritating errors/BSoD's etc.

I'm not saying you can't mix and match, I'm saying it's not a good idea generally speaking. Especially not if you are buying an XMP matched kit. XMP won't work if you mix it with other ram.

sArge_sF said:
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

Good point about the PSU. I've had my 480W Superchannel for about 6 years. Maybe I should start with upgrading this, then go onto RAM, and finally onto SSD.

Keeping in mind that I have a 9500GT GPU (which I plan to eventually upgrade to a medium range GPU at a later stage) along with the other specs I mentioned in my original post, what PSU is recommended wattage and brand wise? After all upgrades would I be more in the 500W range or 650W range? I've heard good things about this: http://www.corsair.com/builder-series-cx500-v2-80plus-certified-power-supply.html

Thanks
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Good idea, I can REALLY recommend the Seasonic Range of Powersupplies. The M520 is a particularly good psu as it's semi-modular Bronze rated for efficiency and not badly priced. I believe that unit has 3 years warranty.

http://www.sybaritic.co.za/store/product_info.php?cPath=73_269&products_id=67729

Seasonic make argueably the best psu's in the world and most high end Corsair PSU's are rebranded Seasonic's.

P.S The Corsair unit isn't bad, it's just that the Seasonic is far better.
 
Replace the 500GB with a nice 2TB 7200RPM drive and replace the RAM with at least 8-16GB.

If you going to be buying a SSD,it would just fill up within weeks and the ratio to storage/price is just not worth buying.
 
Rickster said:
Replace the 500GB with a nice 2TB 7200RPM drive and replace the RAM with at least 8-16GB.

If you going to be buying a SSD,it would just fill up within weeks and the ratio to storage/price is just not worth buying.
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I Disagree.

You don't buy an SSD for storage, you buy an SSD for speed. Normal mechanical HDD's work well for storage.

Much like you don't buy a Ferrrari to move your house, you buy a Ferrrari to get from point A to B very fast, and you buy a truck to move your house.
 
Rickster said:
Replace the 500GB with a nice 2TB 7200RPM drive and replace the RAM with at least 8-16GB.

If you going to be buying a SSD,it would just fill up within weeks and the ratio to storage/price is just not worth buying.
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You don't fill it up... you use it for your OS.

Keep all you documents/media on another drive and use the SSD for your OS and the games you are running.

SSD's are about performance, its an upgrade like no other.
 
SLicK said:
I'm not trying to argue here, my opinion isn't just formed off reading on the web. I own my own PC shop and have done multiple installs and more often than not mixing and matching RAM has lead to strange and usually irritating errors/BSoD's etc.

I'm not saying you can't mix and match, I'm saying it's not a good idea generally speaking. Especially not if you are buying an XMP matched kit. XMP won't work if you mix it with other ram.



Good idea, I can REALLY recommend the Seasonic Range of Powersupplies. The M520 is a particularly good psu as it's semi-modular Bronze rated for efficiency and not badly priced. I believe that unit has 3 years warranty.

http://www.sybaritic.co.za/store/product_info.php?cPath=73_269&products_id=67729

Seasonic make argueably the best psu's in the world and most high end Corsair PSU's are rebranded Seasonic's.

P.S The Corsair unit isn't bad, it's just that the Seasonic is far better.
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Thanks for the suggestion. Regarding the RAM, the specific model I have now - which is the 2x2GB Apacer Giant II OC - is end of life, so I would rather replace it completely. Would you recommend going for 2x4GB or 2x8GB? At most I have about 50 tabs open across 2 browsers, pretty much using up all my RAM. Is 2x8GB worth it for the price?
 
sArge_sF said:
Thanks for the suggestion. Regarding the RAM, the specific model I have now - which is the 2x2GB Apacer Giant II OC - is end of life, so I would rather replace it completely. Would you recommend going for 2x4GB or 2x8GB? At most I have about 50 tabs open across 2 browsers, pretty much using up all my RAM. Is 2x8GB worth it for the price?
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Well there isn't a very big price difference between 2x4gb and 2x8gb (it's less than double the price). Depending on what's open on your tab RAM might become an issue, if you wish to make sure and be a bit future proof, just get 2x8gb and get it done with.

Also please note, don't get 4x4gb as that can lead to issues as well, 2x8gb is your best bet.
 
The cheap 2x 8GB DDR3 1600MHz modules usually come with CL10 where as the 2x 4GB modules come with CL9, making them slightly faster - but you won't really notice the difference with anything other than benchmarking.

Slick has made some valid concerns regarding mixing & matching RAM modules. If you know how to tweak the clock latencies of your RAM, then you shouldn't really have issues with RAM modules when you mix & match them. If you don't know how to tweak that, then I'd advise against mixing different memory modules.

So far the only issues that I've had with RAM were when the modules were damaged or too high density.

I'm running 4x 4GB G.Skill modules - different versions - and I have absolutely no issues whatsoever. I started out with 2x 2GB TeamXtreme, then upgraded to 2x 2GB TeamXtreme + 2x 2GB Corsair, then 2x 2GB TeamXtreme + 2x 4GB G.Skill and now I'm at 4x 4GB G.Skill. Next week I'm going to have 4x 8GB CL10 instead of my current 4x 4GB CL9.
 
sArge_sF said:
Hi guys,


If the SSD can fix this issue, which one is the best to go with? I think I would need a 256GB due to the amount of programs I have. I have about R2500 to spend. Suggestions for the motherboard (± R2000) are also welcome.

Thanks for the help!
S
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Best SSD most likely is OWC's Mercury Extreme Pro. see macsales.com. They will ship it out FedEx for $35 the same day you order it. I'm running one of their 480GB drives (480GB + 7% for over provisioning) for almost 2 years now.
 
SLicK said:
I Disagree.

You don't buy an SSD for storage, you buy an SSD for speed. Normal mechanical HDD's work well for storage.

Much like you don't buy a Ferrrari to move your house, you buy a Ferrrari to get from point A to B very fast, and you buy a truck to move your house.
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You buy what you can afford. An SSD makes ideal storage because you do want fast access to your data too. However because SSDs are still very expensive few people use them for this purpose. In the long run, SSDs will replace all magnetic harddrives. Solid state is better than a movable device.
 
Space_Chief said:
You buy what you can afford. An SSD makes ideal storage because you do want fast access to your data too. However because SSDs are still very expensive few people use them for this purpose. In the long run, SSDs will replace all magnetic harddrives. Solid state is better than a movable device.
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Once again I disagree. Your comments are off topic and not helping the OP at all.

SSD is there purely for speed. If you can afford a 400gb drive sure you could use it for storage but that's overkill spending R6k+ on a SSD for storage.

Mechanical drives right now are used for pure storage and SSD's for caching and speed/load times.

SSD's will remain costly at least for the next 3-5 years simply because of the cost involved for the flash memory, so mechanical drives will stay around for a long time. Considering that mechanical drives are pushing 4TB in a single disk (vs 1tb max for SSD unless you RAID or go PCI-E) SSD's won't take mechanical drive's role for storage.

@ Pada

As much as I agree, the OP isn't as advanced as us (no offence). He/she isn't going to use benching from what I can tell so the CAS latency is irrelevant. Whether it be 9 or 10, the OP requires MORE ram rather than FASTER ram. CL9 will only ever be better than CL10 in pure benching. But you already know this :p

Also @ Space_Chief

LOL dude, that drive is VERY old. The only 3 SSD's I'd consider right now are :

OCZ Vertex 4
Plextor M5 Pro
Corsair Neutron GTX

And the only reason for that is they are non-sandforce based drives with toggle nand Flash.

I forgot to add, I own both a Vertex4 and Plextor M5 SSD :)
 
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I installed an SSD in my laptop and a crawling computer is suddenly sprinting again. Much better than a RAM upgrade. I spent about R1000 on an SSD and I think that it is the best money I have ever spent. Yes it is still small, but you can store most of your non-portable data on an external drive
 
RAM and SSD upgrade would be nice, but be careful not to throw hardware at the problem before making sure the your OS is nice and healthy (eg. you've ran CCleaner, defragged your HDD with something like Auslogic's defrag app, disabled all unnecessary crap in msconfig, you're not running crappy 3rd party resource hogging anti virus apps etc.)

My i5 2500K system ram for months with 4GB RAM an no SSD and I don't ever recall having the kind of slow downs you're reporting.
 
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SLicK said:
LOL dude, that drive is VERY old. The only 3 SSD's I'd consider right now are :

OCZ Vertex 4
Plextor M5 Pro
Corsair Neutron GTX

And the only reason for that is they are non-sandforce based drives with toggle nand Flash.

I forgot to add, I own both a Vertex4 and Plextor M5 SSD :)
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I wouldn't get the M5 Pro, since it is very expensive. At the moment, I'd get the Plextor M3(S) 256GB, considering that it is one of the cheaper 256GB drives at the moment and is Marvel (and even Toggle) and I don't think the performance to the M5 Pro is justified in price. The M5S is also pretty much identical to the M3S in performance, just with IMFT, and so price is the only real difference there.

I totally agree with going for non-sandforce controllers (I'm going to wait on OCZ firmware, given that I don't really trust them in this regard), though I don't think that the Toggle/IMFT NAND difference is an issue unless you want the ultimate best performance.
 
Rudimental said:
I wouldn't get the M5 Pro, since it is very expensive. At the moment, I'd get the Plextor M3(S) 256GB, considering that it is one of the cheaper 256GB drives at the moment and is Marvel (and even Toggle) and I don't think the performance to the M5 Pro is justified in price. The M5S is also pretty much identical to the M3S in performance, just with IMFT, and so price is the only real difference there.

I totally agree with going for non-sandforce controllers (I'm going to wait on OCZ firmware, given that I don't really trust them in this regard), though I don't think that the Toggle/IMFT NAND difference is an issue unless you want the ultimate best performance.
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Agreed on the M5 Pro Pricing, that's mostly because of the local guys making it so expensive. That being said however, the reason I suggested non-Sandforce based drives is my experience with sandforce based drives.

Thus far I had RMA close on 35% of the total drives I've sold to my customers. I've personally had 2x Corsair Force 3 GT 120gb's die on me in the space of a week.
 
Sorry to bump this thread, but I'm looking at upgrading my notebook's (Asus N53SV) 650 GB magnetic drive to a 240 - 256 GB SSD. What would you guys recommend?

I also want to buy some RAM (currently have 4GB, want to buy 2x4GB modules) and don't want to spend more than R3k in total. I am not doing any major high-performance stuff, this is more for general Windows use (with office, browsing with lots of tabs and development).

Also where to buy it? I live in PTA.

Thanks! :)

EDIT: Was reading Rudimental's post about the Plextor M3 256, and saw ComX selling it here for R2235 - http://www.comx.co.za/PX-256M3S-Ple...Drive-Information-Price-Buy-Cheap-p-55984.php

Good buy?

Anandtech has a pretty decent review on the drive: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5628/the-plextor-m3-review

What's the warrenty on the Plextors?
 
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