New to the land of SSD... and disapointed

[viper37]

Well, I expected better performance.

I upgraded my office system to one with DDR3 ram, SATA3 hard drive and 120gb SSD OCZ Agility 3 and an AMD quad core CPU (the cheapest Bulldozer).  I kept my silent video card (no fan).

It's a little faster to boot Windows, I save maybe one minute of boot time, after I'm in Windows.  Maybe 20 seconds less to get to the "Welcome" screen where it takes forever to load Windows and have it "ready for use".

Firefox is definately faster to load, so is Comodo Dragon, though not by as much.  I think Office loads faster too... but going from SATA 2 to Sata 3 didn't really change the speed at wich my files load in Office.  Hasn't done nothing for the accounting software, so I suspect the bottleneck is software based, not hardware (really, that piece of shit looks like a Windows XP interface stuck on top of an old DOS Foxbase software...).

For all the frustration I experienced transfering my Windows and making it boot, I expected more speed than that.  Heck, I deserved more speed!!

Will have to look for other software solutions in the near future.  <sigh> So many investments, so little money

[Caliga]

When I upgraded from an HDD to an SSD it made a tremendous difference.  My PC boots in like six seconds and shuts down in 2-3 seconds.

[DontSayBanana]

Well, I expected better performance.

I upgraded my office system to one with DDR3 ram, SATA3 hard drive and 120gb SSD OCZ Agility 3 and an AMD quad core CPU (the cheapest Bulldozer).  I kept my silent video card (no fan).

It's a little faster to boot Windows, I save maybe one minute of boot time, after I'm in Windows.  Maybe 20 seconds less to get to the "Welcome" screen where it takes forever to load Windows and have it "ready for use".

Firefox is definately faster to load, so is Comodo Dragon, though not by as much.  I think Office loads faster too... but going from SATA 2 to Sata 3 didn't really change the speed at wich my files load in Office.  Hasn't done nothing for the accounting software, so I suspect the bottleneck is software based, not hardware (really, that piece of shit looks like a Windows XP interface stuck on top of an old DOS Foxbase software...).

For all the frustration I experienced transfering my Windows and making it boot, I expected more speed than that.  Heck, I deserved more speed!!

Will have to look for other software solutions in the near future.  <sigh> So many investments, so little money

There could be other software bottlenecks.  For example, do you know if the accounting software is large-address-aware?  Anything in "Program Files (x86)" is likely to need an LAA patch to use more than 2GB of system memory.

[viper37]

When I upgraded from an HDD to an SSD it made a tremendous difference.  My PC boots in like six seconds and shuts down in 2-3 seconds.

I'm nowhere near that.  I haven't timed it, but 6 seconds might be what it takes to get to the "Welcom" Windows screen.

I suspect the SQL softwares (I think MS SQL is still there, it's a pain to uninstall) I have installed on this computer, plus the anti-virus are slowing it down.

[viper37]

Well, I expected better performance.

I upgraded my office system to one with DDR3 ram, SATA3 hard drive and 120gb SSD OCZ Agility 3 and an AMD quad core CPU (the cheapest Bulldozer).  I kept my silent video card (no fan).

It's a little faster to boot Windows, I save maybe one minute of boot time, after I'm in Windows.  Maybe 20 seconds less to get to the "Welcome" screen where it takes forever to load Windows and have it "ready for use".

Firefox is definately faster to load, so is Comodo Dragon, though not by as much.  I think Office loads faster too... but going from SATA 2 to Sata 3 didn't really change the speed at wich my files load in Office.  Hasn't done nothing for the accounting software, so I suspect the bottleneck is software based, not hardware (really, that piece of shit looks like a Windows XP interface stuck on top of an old DOS Foxbase software...).

For all the frustration I experienced transfering my Windows and making it boot, I expected more speed than that.  Heck, I deserved more speed!!

Will have to look for other software solutions in the near future.  <sigh> So many investments, so little money

There could be other software bottlenecks.  For example, do you know if the accounting software is large-address-aware?  Anything in "Program Files (x86)" is likely to need an LAA patch to use more than 2GB of system memory.

I'm pretty sure the accounting software is not large-address-aware.  It's an antique system, despite having regular "updates" (I still can't figure where are the updates...)

[Caliga]

Yesterday my SSD somehow got 'corrupted' and I had to reformat it and reinstall the OS and everything on there.

Fortunately I keep most of my important stuff on a secondary HDD so I didn't lose that much stuff, but now I'm thinking of implementing some sort of formal backup system, which I guess I need an external HD for.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Bastards. 

How the frig does a drive just 'get corrupted'? Because I'm running one too and would like to know so I can not panic.

[Caliga]

No idea man.  It's an Intel 510 series SSD, which is supposed to be very good.  I Googled this and didn't see too many other people bitching about it.  Since I reformatted and reinstalled Win 7 everything seems to be stable.  Still... it's time to invest in a formal backup system.

[viper37]

Bastards. 

How the frig does a drive just 'get corrupted'? Because I'm running one too and would like to know so I can not panic.

general principles: make sure the drive is not filled to near full capacity, it needs at least 5% free space.  Some drive manufacturers deliberately block space from being used, like my Corsair, it's a 128gb drive, but I can only use 120gb of it.
Do not defragment the drive.
Use a good power supply, this is even more critical than with a regular disk drive, it will tolerate even less variation.

People say they are less reliable than HDD, but so far from what I've read, the return rate is half that of conventional hard drive... might be they're just less used and used by pros/hard core users first&foremost, hard to tell, there could be any kind of bias in the stats.

[viper37]

Still... it's time to invest in a formal backup system.

I use Nova Backup with an external hd, and I quite like this.

[viper37]

Latest firmware update for the Agility 3 did the trick: now, it's fast, as it should be.  Booting into Windows takes about 1 minute from power on to usability.

However, my brand new Vertex 4 died on me.  About a month in service before dying.  On the downside, I lost all my e-mails, all my bookmarks, a few softwares for wich I might not have backups.  All my data were on a seperate partition, so that's ok.  OCZ is at least paying for the shipping of the drive, so it's totally zero costs for me.

I took the opportunity to install Linux Mint, instead of installing Windows and moving it to the SSD.  What a fucking mistake.  Contrary to what's being told, that OS is totally not ready for Windows desktop replacement.  They are on the right track, at least some old wi-fi adapters are working.  Bu they may need a couple more years to fully adapt.

[Grey Fox]

Ubuntu is still much much closer.

[Vricklund]

<-- running ubuntu 12.04 right here, right now, on my work machine. No problem whatsoever but I don't get along with the new Unity interface.

[viper37]

Ubuntu is still much much closer.

Mint is based on Ubuntu.  I used the Cinammon interface, it's nice.

Anyway:
- aMule slows down my computer after a while
- the sound card is only detected as 4.0 not 5.1, nothing comes out from the center or the subwoofer
- the wireless connection only works with a PCI-e card (DWA-556) not with my USB adapter connected to my range extender
- the wireless connections drops every 15 minutes
- the system is not that stable, I got it to crash a few times now and then.
- the repository stopped working over the week-end, I can't get updates anymore

On the plus side, the firewall is easy to set up, there's no need for a dozen different codecs as they are all there, I can read blu rays and HD-DVDs for free and I can get get a free proxy if I want to.