I am thinking about upgrading to a new SSD for less than $100, but it has to be equal to a greater than 60GB. I found this one drive on newegg for sale for $60 after rebate, but I dont know what to look for in a solid state drive. Whats good and what to avoid? The feedback on this specific drive linked also has me concerned that it may be a liquidated sale to move bugged hardware, but as is the troubles with most feedback ratings 80%-90% of the feedback are going to be from those who have had problems with it while the remaining 20%-10% will be the users who had success with it and decided to take the time to post positive feedback.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227738&cm_sp=Cat_SSD-_-Spotlight-_-20-227-738My youngest brother suggested Intel or OCZ as the best brands to go with for SSD drives. Obviously any SSD drive will beat the pants off of my 1TB platter drive that I currently use. My intention for the SSD is probably to either use it for OS boot -or- video game execution area for quick read/writes. But if used for the video games, and if the OS is on a platter drive the swap space is still on the platters vs SSD, although that swap location can probably be moved to the SSD. My OS is currently Windows 7 Home Premium and the one main game I play is WoW which is currently like 32GB with patches and I am not sure what Windows 7 is using yet, but I could find out when I get home. Would be neat to have both OS and main game on an SSD for speed for both needs, and then store my important data on the 1TB that would act as a slave drive. I could install Windows XP Pro SP3 to this drive and it may be a lesser pig for storage space to squeeze both onto 60GB as well.
My hardware specs are: AMD Athlon II x4 (quadcore) 2.6Ghz AM3 CPU, 4GB 800mhz DDR2 Crucial Ram, Biostar AM2+ Motherboard, Zotac GeForce 9800GT with 1GB DDR2 dedicated Ram Videocard, and currently a 1TB seagate SATA drive + 2 DVD-RW SATA drives, ( leaving me with 1 available SATA port for that SSD in which my MB would be fully populated with SATA drives with the addition of the SSD ). PSU is 450W no-name brand that came with a cheap $20 rosewill case, that I bought for a cheap 450W PSU and gave the bare ugly and weak thin tin case to my brother for his projects.
Im thinking that the 1TB drive is the only bottleneck I have for speed right now.
My brother also warned me that some of the SSD drives use like 10GB of their space as cache so you only really end up with say 50GB of that 60GB. Not sure if this is true or not, but if so they shoudl market it as 50GB of storage space with a 10GB cache. To me 10GB seems insanely large for a cache space when I am use to seeing like 32MB cache on a platter type drive.
Anyone have any SSD drive suggestions for 60GB or greater capacity for under $100 that are a good buy and quality parts that will last vs something that will fail in 6 months. I suppose this OCZ has a 3 year warranty, but I'd like to avoid having to send a drive back for replacement with then receiving a reconditioned serviced drive.
