SSD and Motherboard Advice requested

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ABU

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Having read through the different threads on SSD's, I couldn't find clear advice on a few points I wanted to find out about:

1- Any particular motherboards that would work better with an SSD?
I bought the i5-2310 system PC Zone had on special, which comes with a MSI H61 Motherboard. This doesn't have any Sata 6gb/s ports, so I suppose I would need a better board.
They seem to have the following in stock, however others could be sourced:
Intel Bearup Lake H67
Intel Buffalo Flat P67
MSI Z68MA-G45
MSI X58 Pro LGA1366

2- Any SSD out there that can be classified as very reliable, not very expensive and offering good speeds?
I am probably going to get it from Newegg, with a friend bringing it to SA for me, so no customs, freight charges etc.
120gb should do, however priority would be to reliability, as sending it back if it fails would be difficult.

3- What is the Sandforce vs Indilinx controller debate about and which should I get?

4- Can I expect a significant difference in performance if I spend the extra R1500 to upgrade the i5 2310 to the i7 2600 or should that money be spend on the SSD?
 
The sandforce SSDs are gaving a lot of problems now, but if you buy right it won't be a problem. I'm running an OCZ Vertex 3 at this point in time on the following hardware:
Asus P8Z68-V
Intel i5 2500K
8GB DDR3-1333 Kingston Valueram

It is perfectly stable and very reliable.

If you are going for a sandforce SSD I would get a Asus P8Z68-V motherboard (R1599 from Esquire excl.), from the OCZ forum it seemed that one doesn't have much in the way of complaints whereas MANY people are having BSOD issues with the P67 series boards.

If you are going the Intel route I can't really comment because I haven't followed them.

None of the 3rd generation SSDs are currently reliable if you want reliable you could try get a 2nd generation SSD (Kingston 96GB v100+ from Esquire @ R1300 isn't a bad deal IMHO), it's stable and reliable and not as fast as the 3rd generation SSDs but it is significantly faster than the current lineup of hard-drives.
 
ABU said:
Having read through the different threads on SSD's, I couldn't find clear advice on a few points I wanted to find out about:

1- Any particular motherboards that would work better with an SSD?
I bought the i5-2310 system PC Zone had on special, which comes with a MSI H61 Motherboard. This doesn't have any Sata 6gb/s ports, so I suppose I would need a better board.
They seem to have the following in stock, however others could be sourced:
Intel Bearup Lake H67
Intel Buffalo Flat P67
MSI Z68MA-G45
MSI X58 Pro LGA1366
Click to expand...

This mobo won't work with your cpu. I would go for the MSI board, if I had to choose between those 3.

2- Any SSD out there that can be classified as very reliable, not very expensive and offering good speeds?
I am probably going to get it from Newegg, with a friend bringing it to SA for me, so no customs, freight charges etc.
120gb should do, however priority would be to reliability, as sending it back if it fails would be difficult.
Click to expand...

From what I have seen, the Intel SSDs are the most reliable. Have never had one. Had a samsung without any issues and currently the vertex 3, also without any issues.

3- What is the Sandforce vs Indilinx controller debate about and which should I get?
Click to expand...

Soz, have no idea.

4- Can I expect a significant difference in performance if I spend the extra R1500 to upgrade the i5 2310 to the i7 2600 or should that money be spend on the SSD?
Click to expand...

Depends on what you are going to use this pc for?
 
The X58 Pro is a different socket, so that won't work.

I suppose it would only be the sequential read & write speeds that would be greatly affected by having just SATA II (3Gbps), so you should be fine with your current H61 motherboard if you get a SATA III SSD.

Could you perhaps tell us the rest of your PC specs and what you're using it for?
 
Thanks for the advice so far, any other advice would be appreciated.
You guys can always be relied upon.

The Pc is used mainly for
- Running a search program that searches through a collection of Access databases, up to 30gb in size
- Storing and retrieving from an huge image collection
- Storing and retrieving files from a huge PDf collection
- Running Quickbooks Point of Sale

No gaming or editing of graphics etc done on this system
The bottleneck seems to be the HDD's.

I currently run the following HDD's on the system:
250gb
320gb
500gb
1tb x 2

I made the mistake of purchasing "Green drives" over the years, which are really slow.
I porbably need to slowly move over to faster HDD's.
 
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No chance of all the images and pdf's fitting on the SSD, so it would just have to be Windows and other installed programs in addition to the 30gb search program and database.
I would need 2 or 3TB for the rest.
 
The WD Black 2TB drives are lekker fast. I have one myself. :) I think you will be better of with the 2600 cpu than a SSD.
 
If you need to have access to all those different systems at the same time, then there is no point in getting a SSD, since it would cost you tens of thousands for that kind of SSD space.

You'll benefit from getting like a RAID 5 of 6 setup with 1 - 2TB Western Digital Black Edition drives. Once you have that kind of RAID system, you'll probably have to get another CPU too.
 
Which RAID depends highly, RAID 5/6 has terrible performance in partial writes which is common on databases and applications constantly modifying files. Essentially the reason is a stripe needs to be read, updated, new checksum calculated and stripe written. If you write a partial stripe you'll have huge performance hit.

RAID 1 + 0 is the better option when you write many small files and/or update files constantly. It is also the DBA's choice for a database oriented server.

However, if you can run the database from an SSD you would see mayor performance increases.

As for storing and retrieving of large files (PDFs, ISOs, etc.), that you can store on RAID 5. Ideally ANY files (PDFs, ISOs, etc.) that are large and not really updated (but read a lot) should be stored on network attached storage (NAS) running RAID-Z (preferable) or RAID 5. Whereas the database files and files constantly being updated by applications (modified) should be stored on the local computer on an SSD.

If you files are large and constantly being updated the problem is the application in 99% of the cases (badly designed) however then the only option really is to RAID SSDs which will cost a fortune.
 
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Thanks Gnome. I never realized RAID 5/6 had such terrible performance with small read & writes.
Won't the server RAID cards with large onboard cache address that issue?
 
You should look into WD veliciraptors. 320gb's are about 3k and blow a normal hdd out the water.

SSD is not really going to help you much if you are searching for 1tb's of data using slower drives. You could run a few velociraptor and it would make life much easier
 
Pada said:
Thanks Gnome. I never realized RAID 5/6 had such terrible performance with small read & writes.
Won't the server RAID cards with large onboard cache address that issue?
Click to expand...

Address, no, help, definitely. Makes a huge difference but if you have a large amount of partial stripe writes the cache will fill up and you are back to slow performance. It is also the reason why you can't risk having RAID 5 with a cache without a battery backup or you'll lose that data and possible risk the RAID 5 becoming irrecoverable.

More info: http://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z

This is the guy who was the main architect of RAID-Z when it was still under the rule of Sun Microsystems (he left recently after Oracle bought Sun). He really, really knows his stuff when it comes to file systems and storage. The blog entry has a lot of interesting info about hardware based RAID and why ZFS is better.

Also Wikipedia stores their own files on ZFS and you can find very detailed information about ZFS and the problems they addressed in ZFS that you will find in RAID 5 (one of which is silent data corruption, even if you have ECC memory, fully redundant hardware and a UPS you will still get silent data corruption with RAID 5. It isn't really a problem with small volumes but for data warehouses it is a mayor problem and the reason ZFS is so popular there). It is intersting how you find out more about the problems of RAID 5 by reading the ZFS wikipedia entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

However ZFS is probably even worse than RAID 5 for databases.

Hency my recommendation of RAID 1+0
 
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Does anyone have any experience with the Intel SSD's and is there any particular one that would be recommended?

Also, how do the WD VelociRaptor's perform compared to SSD's?
I could probably get a 600gb VelociRaptor for under R2500

And would a 6gb/s sata port make much of a difference when running one of them, compared to a 3gb/s ?
 
Raptors are very good, not as fast as ssd's but if you need more speed than a normal hdd offers and more space the raptor is your choice i reckon.

Much faster than a normal hdd, i think the seek time on a raptor is about 4-6ms compared to 11-14ms. So it's much much faster not as fast 0.1ms mind you but 600gb is way more than 120gb if you need the space.
 
This should give you an idea of the performance difference:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65

Go right to the bottom and you'll see the VelociRaptor.

Also note that the latest generation Intel SSDs (3rd generation) are also experiencing failures because of a design flaw! The SSD can go into a panic mode and locks up, thereafter it only shows 8MB of usable space and poof gone is your data. Returning it for a warranty return is your only option. So it isn't a more reliable choice IMHO.

As I said, all the 3rd generation SSDs have a problem, OCZ has BSOD issues, Corsair was recalled (also sandforce like OCZ), Intel has the lock issue. OCZ only has BSODs on a few computers so I personally think it is the lesser of the evils. You can still recover your data after a BSOD and you'll know very quickly if it doesn't work because it BSODs fairly quickly on the systems that it doesn't work with (at which point you can send it back and move to another option).
 
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Gnome said:
As I said, all the 3rd generation SSDs have a problem, OCZ has BSOD issues, Corsair was recalled (also sandforce like OCZ), Intel has the lock issue. OCZ only has BSODs on a few computers so I personally think it is the lesser of the evils. You can still recover your data after a BSOD and you'll know very quickly if it doesn't work because it BSODs fairly quickly on the systems that it doesn't work with (at which point you can send it back and move to another option).
Click to expand...

Thanks for all your help; killadoob and the others as well.

Is there anyway of backing up the data - esp. the operating system files etc -that is on an SSD, so if an OCZ based one gets the BSOD I can salvage my info before sending the drive back?
Something like a Norton Ghost setup, that wouldn't slow it down too much?
 
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