So I made the jump to an SSD..

Corey Naish

Obliviot
For a couple of years now I've really been wanting an SSD as a boot drive. When the 1TB drives came down in price a bit when I was in college I built my system around a "boot drive" and a "data" drive configuration and have kept it organized like that ever since.

It was certainly not without issue, but I managed to get it up, running, and learned a little bit the process.

am4lep.jpg


I decided on the 520 series because, well, it's first drive that's had the speed and reliability out of the whole segment. A few months ago I was trying to decide between the 510 series and the OCZ Vertex 3 MAXIOPS. I settled on the 120gb model (womp womp, I know, the 180/240 perform a little better but realistically it's the only one I consider a good value for the money without breaking budget) for around 250$.

Installation was, well, as expected.. it's a hard drive. Thew the 3.5 mounting plate on and installed it in a few minutes. Installing Windows on the other hand was a bit of a pain in the ass. My optical drive is broken and I honestly forgot when I placed the order online, or I would've simply bought a new one to save the hassle. Threw together a USB boot drive with one of those crappy "easy boot usb" utilities because I was too lazy to figure out the right way... So it ran the thumbdrive without LBA or anything like that and took about an hour to get Windows 7 setup booted (from then everything was loaded over, so the install went pretty quick).

It however, did not boot into Windows. After a BIOS update and a bit of trial and error, it turns out you have to manually select the Intel SSD as the primary boot drive every single time you make a change to anything in the BIOS. Alright, so, no problem, let's boot into windows and get this sucker up n running.

I installed all my drivers, made sure TRIM was working in the command prompt, and set up the Intel SSD Toolbox. Great little tool. Did a diagnostic scan and looked all the neat little statics.. but the Optimizer was grayed out. To Google! A few minutes later I learned you should manually set all of your IDE/ATA controllers as "standard" instead of Nforce 750i controllers. So after the quick change and a reboot, I have S.M.A.R.T support now! For the record, if you ever find your SSDs showing up as SCSI devices and smart isn't working, try switching your controllers over to standard drivers.

For someone who hasn't made the switch yet to an SSD and is thinking about it, I highly recommend it. Is is one of the most noticeable upgrades you can do for around 250$. My system boot time went from around 40s to 15flat. Read/writes aren't quite as high as they are in most of the reviews around the net, but I'm also just running off of a SATA2 port on a 3-4 year old system.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Welcome to the forums Corey! Thanks for posting your experiences with your first SSD. :)

The 520 is definitely an awesome drive, if it wasn't for the price premium it'd be unbeatable really. Even so it's the best drive to have right now, in my opinion. The 120GB has good performance, it's the 60GB model where performance really, really falls off...

Regarding the nForce 750i controller setting, that's interesting to here! Non-NVIDIA chipsets won't have that problem, and NVIDIA no longer produces chipsets for current boards. Some users have run into sticky issues trying to use nForce boards, so I'm glad to hear you were able to get yours up and running without too much trouble. :)

After a BIOS update and a bit of trial and error, it turns out you have to manually select the Intel SSD as the primary boot drive every single time you make a change to anything in the BIOS.

That's a bit unusual to put it mildly, but at least you don't have to do it every boot I guess! Not heard of this issue before.

For someone who hasn't made the switch yet to an SSD and is thinking about it, I highly recommend it. Is is one of the most noticeable upgrades you can do for around 250$. My system boot time went from around 40s to 15flat. Read/writes aren't quite as high as they are in most of the reviews around the net, but I'm also just running off of a SATA2 port on a 3-4 year old system.

I cannot agree more with ya here! Hard to underscore that point enough. :)
 

Corey Naish

Obliviot
Thanks Kougar.

As far as I know the whole "I think the Samsung drive should go first!" issue is just mine, possibly only related to the 750i as well. I rarely ever make changes so I doubt I'll ever worry about it again.

My next major upgrade is going to be an Ivy Bridge system. I'll be posting my experience with that as well, but I won't have any revelant benchmarks(maybe a "before and after upgrade" Vantage score). I have a G0 Q6600 and nowdays it's still okay for gaming but that i7-3770 sounds awful tempting... going throw an H80(or whatever the 120mm sized equivalent ends up being in May) on that sucker and see if I can hit 5ghz stable.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
My next major upgrade is going to be an Ivy Bridge system. I'll be posting my experience with that as well, but I won't have any revelant benchmarks(maybe a "before and after upgrade" Vantage score). I have a G0 Q6600 and nowdays it's still okay for gaming but that i7-3770 sounds awful tempting... going throw an H80(or whatever the 120mm sized equivalent ends up being in May) on that sucker and see if I can hit 5ghz stable.

Oh, it will be a very nice upgrade! I used to have a Q6600 and honestly I loved that chip. But I gotta admit, it will get trounced if you compare it to any i7 these days.

I assume you mean throw an H80 on the i7-3770 right? :D THe Q6600 won't go above 4.2Ghz unless you're using subzero, pretty much! 4Ghz is already pushing things with those chips, 4.23ghz was the highest I could get with chilled watercoooling on mine, and wasn't stable. :rolleyes:
 
Top