Picked up two SSD's, put them in raid0:



Here is one of my sataII 7200rpm 500Gb Hard drives. You can see how it performs, normal for a mechanical hardrive. It can't even saturate the line to the controler.



Here are the SSD's after initial install of win 7 ult, default raid driver, no tweaking. Fast, but poor performance by these drives standards.



Here are the SSD's with the latest Intel driver that supports trim and the OS tweaked to disable superfetch & prefetcher, clear page file at shutdown, disable large system cache and disable defrag:



Fast and smooth as it should be. These drives are well worth it.

Awesome!

I've been on the verge of picking up an SSD for use as an OS drive. I'm a bit weary of their lifespan though... do you think it's an issue still? There was a lot of talk when SSD's started coming out about them dying after so many writes. I assume this is still true, but if it's about on par with a mechanical drive I wouldn't mind.

How much did they run you?

These drives are $144 right now. As to the life span and writes decreasing its overall life, that is not an issue any more. When flash SSD's first came out in the early 90's, those drives used to have 10,000 writes per available block before that block became unusable. Now a days, that number is between 1 and 5 million writes, depending on drive. These drives I purchased are considered a value series of Solid State Drives at a projected 200MB/s read, and 100MB/s write (more like 90), where as top of the line OCZ's drives can hit 280/220... but those drives are $700 lol. I found a formula online to calculate the life of an average SSD before I purchased and it sold me on the life span:

Say the number of writes until a block is considered unusable is 3 million (since we fall somewhere between 1-5 million), on a 64gb drive, and write speeds sustained at 200 MB/sec
3 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 90Mbytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds... now you have to convert 90 MegaBytes into gigabytes to determine the life.... and also take into account the output from this formula is in seconds so you have to do some conversions further. Aboves end results turns out to be 69.185 years until the entire drive is unusable, and since I have two, I should be fine. Manufacturers are also now starting to implent transparent flash to their drives, basically that means as visable flash goes useless, transparent flash that was not seen by the OS becomes seemlessly integrated into the storage count and takes over where the unusable flash left off.

Best resource for SSD and flash memory: http://www.storagesearch.com/

Awesome, thanks for the information!

I'll have to look into these drives for my next build (when Rage comes out...).

Wow, $109 AMIR.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820139133

I don't see any difference in these drives and the plain S2 drives I purchased. I had to purchase the $12 mount kit, this comes with one. Quite a deal, I may pick up another lol.

I guess that deal was for only one day... that blows.

Here is HD Tune Pro results at 34 days from the last benchmark run above:



The first benchmark had a minimum Read of 412.0 MB/sec, where as now I am seeing inconsistent spikes like the pattern above where my Reads fall as far as 228.6 MB/sec. Mind you that still kills mechanical drives, but in a raid 0 array those numbers should be higher. The benchmark will start strong, then at about 40-60 seconds of the test, HD Tune pretty much locks up, the graph doesn't build at a consistent pace, it hangs too. Then you see the dips in performance, something chugs the array down after sustained reads. For some reason I can't bench Writes with HD Tune Pro, I get this error:




I took the screenshot above a few days after the first run's of HD Tune. This app can test Sequential and Random Writes.

Now look at the writes as compared to 30+ days ago.



Performance does degrade, even with the Intel Driver that supports trim in a Raid array. Still worth the money though, you just have to stay diligent with what you put on your drive, and have Primary Storage on a secondary drive.

The degradation is due to more files on the SSDs or is it due to the drives just wearing down? I'm assuming the former but I just wanted to be sure.

It is related to how many files are added and removed from the drives, but they aren't wearing down. If I were to nuke the drives, format and install clean I would yield similar results in the first run of this thread.