Posted 04/20/2009 at 10:37:38pm

I've owned a OCZ Solid Series SSD for about two months. So far, booting 32-bit WinXP-SP3 to the SSD is definitely faster than booting from my HDD (1 minute vs 4 minutes). But benchmarks put the SSD boot drive only about 20% faster than my Seagate Barracuda 250GB 7200.11 boot drive. I've also tested the SSD with 64-bit Win7 and it performed abysmally - faster reads than the Seagate (18MB/sec vs 8MB/sec for 4KB files) but WAY slower writes (1MB/sec vs 7MB/sec) (using DiskMark). 

The problem, as I've discovered by reading the OCZ forums (THE place for info on SSDs of any stripe), is that there is an inherent problem with the SSD technology. Basically, due to the way SSDs store information, they tend to slow with usage - especially after every cell has been written to at least once. Further, at this point in time (Apr 2009) there is no way to "reset" a SSD disk back to its original condition without using VERY low level apps that don't work on every PC - or by flashing the SSD with a firmware update. And if you use your SSD a lot, expect to do this every two to four months - or get used to slower performance over time.

 This technology is NOT YET READY FOR PRIME TIME. It's tempting to jump in and "feel the burn" of blazing speed - as I did - but it comes at too high a price yet. Perhaps WD will figure out how to make these drives work past this one critical issue - that would be nice. But I don't see it happening any time soon.

Perhaps a MaxPC editor will tackle the job of investigating SSDs further - and give us all the straight skinny on them - and in particular, the issue of performance degredation over time. 

Posted 02/10/2009 at 02:08:33pm

I just bought an OCZ 64GB MLC drive. It is FAST! That is, it's fast once I got it set up right. Initial installation displayed stuttering - as many have reported. Installing MS SteadyState corrected that problem. But other problems slowed the drive - mostly Windows XP. Uninstalling Windows Live Search corrected most of the slowness I was experiencing.I haven't tried Win7 on it yet.

Previous boot times for XP were in the neighborhood of 4 minutes for my Q6600 based rig. Boot time with SSD is close to 60 seconds. SiSandra shows my SSD reads faster than a 300GB Vilociraptor. I'm impressed. Writing is still slow, but by dumping all my temp, My Document folders, and caches to a faster WD 320GB drive solved that issue very well. All in all I'm very happy with the OCZ MLC SSD drive.

I'll bet the Intel SSD smokes! But for the difference in price (about $300), it's hard for me to justify.

Posted 02/10/2009 at 01:52:13pm

I'm still using WinXP after playing with Vista long enough to realize it sucked. Vista's SP1 helped - a lot. Still, it's just not a compelling upgrade from XP for me. Now that I've played around with Win7 for a month, I'm of the same opinion about it - it's just not a compelling upgrade - yet. To make Win7 really worth the upgrade, I'd like to see a new file system and maybe an overhaul of the registry. Win7 is definitely better than Vista - but that's not really saying much. Win7 better than XP? Definitely not yet!