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