and installed.

Twin 60 GB

$125 each

Clean install of Windows 7 Build 7057, took less than 10 minutes.

Windows boots up in under 12 seconds

Shuts down in 2 seconds..


System specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHZ
4 GB RAM
(2) OCZ Solid State Hard drives 60 GB
(1) Western Digital 1 TB
ATI Radeon 4850 with 512 mb video RAM


The performance boost is VERY noticeable.. hard drives seem to be the biggest bottleneck these days, more than ever.

 

Sweet. Ive been looking at them myself.

 

I admittedly went cheap on these, I dont see the point in spending 600 bucks on the fancy Intel drives when they'll be half that price in a couple months. They're literally twice the read speed as what i have though.

Dollar per dollar, I'd say I'm quite happy.

 

that's a pretty awesome budget build Ken. what was the total damage?

 

I'll assume they are running in RAID 0? What's the Windows Experience Score for those things? I have similar setup except for the SSD and I have an Nvidia 8800gt

 

For everything in the case, about 850 over the past year or so. Its been an upgrade here and there, so I don't have a precise figure.

It all got started with an upgrade from a Dual Core to a Quad and kind of went downhill from there...

 

Yep Raid 0

Experience score is as follows:

Processor = 7.1
Memory = 6.8
Graphics = 6.4
Gaming graphics = 6.6
Primary hard disk = 7.2

Overall score (based on lowest) 6.4

 

I will switch to a solid state drive for my laptop for sure, but am in no rush. I am waiting for prices to come way down and then it'll be all I'll use.

 

The radiation will kill you though...

 

I'm getting ready to build a new Core i7-based computer (it's been 5 years -- I'm soldiering along on a 3.2G P4).

I was thinking of setting up a pair of cheap SSDs like you did as the boot drives and then a pair of 1TB SATAs as the application/data pair. Are you at all concerned about the RAID0 reliability with these? I had a bad experience with RAID0 when I first built this machine and have never used any RAID without redundancy since (either 1, 1+0, or 5ish).

 

I've never had Raid problems myself..

 

has anyone gotten a 10 on the windows experience score?

 

Nope, the highest you can go is 7.9 in any category

 

so for vista the highest you can go is 5.9 and windows 7 the highest is 7.9?




for me my lowest score is my CPU, core 2 duo E6600 @ 5.3

 

same thing i am plannig to do eventually i have a 3.2 p4 as well I dont do any computer gaming so its never really been a big issue with me but i would like to be able to take advantage of the hot new shit. plus a co-worker is building a core i7 so hopefully i can get my hads on it to see it in action first hand for fee

 

Waiting for the prices to fall, then I'll build a new tower altogether.

 

want to build a core i7 computer, but too cheap to pay for it.

sick and tired of spending over 1 grand on a computer.

 

they upped the highest scores attainable to keep up with the increase in performance with todays technology. IDK if this will change in Vista Sp2 but I don't think it will.

 

i'm waiting for the OCZ vertex, apex, summit series to come down in price. however after some research i really want the Vertex in a 120gig, my laptop would enjoy the boost.

even for some of the first gen OCZ SSD's those are very nice numbers. very nice Ken

 

I settled on a single 120GB OCZ Vertex as my boot drive.

 

I've found there are things I want to do but I'm avoiding (like running Lightroom + Photoshop) because it's just too slow. So I ordered a nice Core i7 build today.

 

I wish I knew what any of this means

 

What are you running right now?

 

A six-year-old 3.2GHz P4.

 

Here is an very interesting and informative article on SSDS:
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

- Frank

 

 

Nice find!!!

 

Man, I couldn't resist and got a OCZ 120gb vertex from newegg.

Prices aren't that bad, not that much more expensive than a really fast hard drive.
Do your homework - You have to create partitions a certain way or you'll lose a bunch of performance (alignment, blah). You can't fill the drives or you tank performance. And
you shouldn't do stuff that excessively writes (unless you need the performance boost) or you'll hurt the life of the drive. Bittorrent, for example, wouldn't be the best idea.

It's surprisingly non-trivial. But.... it makes a hell of a boot/app drive. Windows XP Pro
took a mere 8 minutes to install, and it boots up a handful of seconds. I'm currently reinstalling everything as we speak.

- Frank

 

Price...
Price...
Price...

This is what is keeping me from getting one!

 

This is all true. OCZ's support forum has some good tips. I didn't know about the partition alignment thing, so at some point I'll probably back up the drive, reflash with the 1275 load if necessary, realign, and restore it. But it's still awfully fast.

Also turn off things that do a lot of writing, like drive indexing and hibernation.

Here's another good follow-on article on Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535

 

Have you guys seen these things! Fuck SATA SSD drives, I'm waiting for these to drop in price. Holy shit these things blow SATA drives out of the water, even the yet to be released SATA 3 spec doesn't have a chance against these. They're taking MLC or SLC chips and putting them in an on board RAID array like the OCZ apex drive but instead of using SATA they're using the PCIe port and they're acheiving thoroughputs of 1.5GBps per drive!!!! That's like 15 times faster than a WD Raptor drive and six times faster than the Intel X-25!! Jesus Christ at those speeds you might as well say fuck RAM all together and just stick with one of these. I bet if you ran out of RAM and started paging your hard drive with one of these things your system would probably get faster. (I know I'm exagerrating) There's a few companies that make these and in up to 2TB varieties.

Super Talent


Fusioin-io ioDrive Duo


You can then run two or more of these cards in a RAID array for absolutely redonkulous speeds! Your computer would literally be instant-on with two of these and a dual quad core setup! Unfortunately they're quite expensive but I'm going to look at one of those 160gb Fusion-io drives when they come out later this month. But I bet there's no way I could afford one. but the future looks so good!

 

im too lazy to google, whats the price on one of those bad boys?

 

those PCIe drives sound hot! and expensive.

 

$2400 for 80GB, $4800 for 160GB, and $8900 for 320GB.

sounds like shopping for drives in the 80's, lol