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  • JohnNyceis - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    Might have to pick up a couple just to try in RAID!
  • SandmanWN - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    Tomorrow is an SSD super sale at Newegg. At least thats what the newsletter said in my mailbox today. Should be deals like this on all SSD's.
  • yacoub - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Rarely if ever are the NewEgg "sales" much of a deal. In this case it looks like mostly $20-30 off some drives, but I'm too busy to go checking around. It depends on what their current price is at other sites, not the MSRP that no one charges anymore.
  • NICOXIS - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    nice pricing, this clearly demonstrates who fast SSDs had come down in price...should be interesting to see some statistics that show pricing behavior in the last 2 years to estimate when they should reach a really affordable price points.
  • dagamer34 - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I'd rather see a sale on the 80GB drives.
  • jonup - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I just picked up 80G-m1.8 G1 for $150. No TRIM but I am putting it in my company's vista lappy so not TRIM support anyways.
  • Blessedman - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I thought vista did support TRIM
  • jonup - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    If it does, I guess it was implemented after the lunch of Win 7. Can any one second on that.
  • Griswold - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    It doesn have auto-TRIM. Just use Intels Toolbox make a TRIM schedule and forget about it.
  • Griswold - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Nevermind that, I saw you got a G1. Its not the OS thats your problem here, its your G1 that will never support TRIM regardless of OS or usage of Toolbox...
  • jonup - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Thanks bud! You answered my question. I bought the G1 because I will be using it in Vista and I thought Vista does not support TRIM. I did not know that you can enable it with the intel soft. Thank again!
  • QuesoMadness - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    They were in at $99 again today for a brief time (around noon Central, I definitely saw it at the shell shocker price), but I checked again at 3pm and it was back to $125...

    Looks like NewEgg forgot to reset the price and some people were able to sneak in and get the deal before the mistake was noticed.
  • vol7ron - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I just picked up 80GB Intel G2 for $225. That's a considerable drop from $300
  • RU482 - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I realize that it is not a comprehensive test, and I am comparing it to the x18-m and not the x25-v, but here's a little look at the OCZ Onyx drive (scroll down in the post)
    http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=20614...
  • MonkeyPaw - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I keep holding out on SSDs. Eventually, the price is going to be where I want it. As it is now, I probably don't need more than 80gb of storage, so perhaps 2011 will finally be the year to give my laptop a swift kick in the pants!
  • vol7ron - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    I agree. I just now picked up my first SSD for my desktop, only because one of my three Raptors failed.

    Seeing how 2010Q4 is right around the bend, I wanted to hold out for Intel's newer SSDs (faster and cheaper), where I could get at least 160GB at an affordable price. So for my current purchase I debated getting a 40GB boot or an 80GB boot.

    Seeing as how 80GB is not much storage these days, that's what I ended up with, thinking I'll slap some games and performance apps on that partition; but I'm still holding out on my main SSD purchases - I have laptops to fill and need another 2-400 GB for my desktop.

    Prices are dropping though! I can't wait.
  • Kevinmbaron - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I guess the price is cheap. But what good would 40 gigs do me. I'm a gamer, thus 40 gigs is like 3-5 games. The only size SSD i would consider is like 256gigs or more for a main drive. And being those run like 600 and up, it's just not gonna happen. Yes i pay alot of money for parts for my gaming pc. But to justify 600-700 for a the main hard drive is just impossible. I can't imagine they sell many of these drives considering the cost per gig. The like the performance. But I don't see the cost ever coming down to earth. Games are getting bigger and bigger all the time. GTA4 is 15.2gigs installed. It's rapidly becoming the norm for games to be over 10gigs. My primary drive is 500gigs, and i use 267gigs. Yes i have alot of stuff installed. I also have 11 other hard drives just for storage.

    I guess SSD drives are for those guys who think running 2-3($500) Nvidia GTX 295's is a option. I own one GTX 295. I wish i had the money to burn like some people, but it's just unrealistic for me.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I don't think SSDs should be used to store games on, at least not a lot of games today. The cost per GB is just too high. Instead I'd recommend an SSD for your OS + apps and a separate TB drive (or 2 x 1TB drives in RAID-1) for games.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Kevinmbaron - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    For me faster game load times would be a major plus. Sure other things would be faster. But as a gamer i would notice game load times most of all. It would make little sense to get a SSD just for my OS and not installed games and programs. I care about other things, but games i care about most of all.
  • 7Enigma - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    I guess I'm an oddball but I pretty much play 1, maybe 2 games at a time. I purchased an Intel 80gig this past Christmas and it has performed fantastically (yup I said that) with my Win7 install. Documents and movies go on my 250 gig traditional harddrive, but everything else goes to the SSD. STEAM is probably the biggest reason why many people have huge amounts of space for games.

    Anand said it in his original SSD review but I'll reiterate; graphs/charts/data can show they are faster but until you actually sit down and use a system with an SSD you just have no idea how life-changing they are. For most applications/uses the bottleneck is the eye/hand and no longer the computer. I paid ~$250 for the 80 gig back in December but knowing what I know now would have paid $500 and I'm a frugal spender that is always buying in the best bang for the buck category, not the high-end segment.
  • bah12 - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Do as I do and set up some .bat files to move the games from the main storage to SSD when you want to play. If your like me you may have several installed, but only play one or two during a sesion.

    It adds some time, but it does alleviate the space issue. Plus sequential read on mechanical drives is pretty good, so the transfer does not take too long.
  • austonia - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    can't bite on 40gb at any price, space is just too tight after installing Windows. 60-64gb i can do. when it hits $2/gb with a speedy i/o controller.
  • icrf - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I could do 40 GB, I could actually go smaller, but what I'm after more than anything is cheaper. Give me a 16 GB SSD with an Intel controller or $40. I'm not even after speed, just reliability/longevity, without having to run a specialized thumb drive/CD style live OS.
  • vol7ron - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    If you're not after speed and only after reliability and longevity, why don't you just get a standard hard disk? You don't need solid state.

    Aside from the fact that they have moving parts, out of 20+ hard drives, I've only had one fail. There are performance disks I'm using from 10 years ago, albeit they don't have a lot of space on them, but I doubt the SSDs would be as reliable. I think they would wear out in that amount of time.

    Buy to suit your needs, is what I'm saying -- and if you have extra $$, buy what you want :)
  • ClagMaster - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    I am quite satisfied with the performance of my WD6400AAKS harddrives on Windows XP desktop in native IDE. Very fast, reliable and quiet harddrives that I would heartly recommend to my friends. These harddrives are actually faster than the early 36GB Western Digital Raptors.

    There is no rational incentive to for me to drop $200 for two Intel X25-V tSSD's at $2.50/Gigabyte when I already have a great pair of harddrives for $120 at $0.11/Gigabyte. The improvement of the RAID0 SSD to overall performance is not significant for the applications that I run to justify such an expenditure.

    If the price was $0.5/Gigabyte or less for an 120GB SSD (the size of my system partion) with ~4x the bandwidth of this SSD were available, then I will reconsider an SSD upgrade for my PC.

    This SSD would be a wonderful upgrade for a laptop with its speed and power consumption. But I cannot justify this for a desktop.
  • vol7ron - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    I somewhat agree.

    On the one hand, I want SSD prices to drop, but I don't know how these drives will act in the longterm. The failure rates might actually be higher than forecasts.

    The ability to get 1-2TB for $100 these days is amazing. I'm curious if SSD prices drop, that the price of large storage medium might increase (due to lower demand and less of a supply in the future).

    I would add that you are still missing the fact that these drives do reduce boot and load speeds. So perhaps you would pay a premium for a boot drive, for your desktop. The other thing to consider these for, aside from desktop/laptop is for HTPCs. When watching shows and accessing media, you want as minimum lag as possible. SSDs are the solution.
  • ClagMaster - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link

    I agree with your reflections. There are improvements in boottime and media play back with SSD's. I have not overlooked that.

    My real reservations with SSDs is I believe the reliability of the SSD technology is not quite "there" yet. These are 2nd generation SSD devices which are a lot better than the 1st generation JMICON controller SSD devices (that Mr Shimpi disdainfully refers to as "Trash"). These Intel SSD's are fine devices but I feel I could do better if I wait a year for the industry to finally perfect the controllers, controller firmware, and NAND technology with 3rd generation SSD devices available in SATA3.

    I especially do not like the lack of ownership/stewardship of some of these SSD vendors with the firmware of their devices. Some of them appear clueless as to how this firmware works. Thats because they do not write this firmware but contract it out to a 3rd party. When vendors other than Intel and OCZ start owning their firmware and show better accountability for it, I will become more interested in adopting SSD's

    I need a SATA3 motherboard to fully utilize my 4x bandwidth expections. I currently operate a 3 year old Intel motherboard (DG965WH mobo/C2D E6600 processor operating Windows XP Home) which only has SATA2. In addition to purchasing the SSD's, I would have to upgrade the motherboard, processor and memory. An expensive proposition for shaving off a few seconds of boottime. With the exception of the AMD motherboards with the SB850, SATA3 implimentation is presently an afterthought that robs PCIe lanes from graphics. I want a motherboard with native SATA3 in its chipset with dedicated PCIe lanes supporting this capability. That will not happen until late this year.

    In the meantime, I cannot justify SSD's for my current desktop because of high cost, utility and reliability of the present SSD devices. I feel I can get a lot better value for my money with 3rd generation SSD devices that will be available next year.
  • Fastidious - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link

    That was fast. I wasn't sure if I was going to buy any but they are all sold out anyways.
  • Connoisseur - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Actually i think they're back in stock. Jumped on two for a Raid 0 Config. Anyone know if a P5Q Pro can handle TWO Raid 0 setups? I already have two traditional drives in Raid 0 for storage.
  • vol7ron - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    I concur.

    I checked on New Egg and they're in stock. I think Anand might be trying to save some for himself ;)

    I'm not going to get them though. I feel as if the newer, faster, cheaper drives will be out by the time RAID has trim.
  • Kishkumen - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Well they may be in stock again, but I don't see them for $98, more like $125 :/
  • vol7ron - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    When I posted my comment, they were still at $98 + free shipping, but like you said... they are now selling for $125.
  • Connoisseur - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    actually someone in the comments section posted a link to Intel's new drivers that support RAID 0 trim. Apparently it was just released last week.
  • vol7ron - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link

    Yeah I saw that too :) -- I like to have that option, but I'm not sure I trust it just yet.

    Still, I'm going to wait and see if there are any problems in Q4, rather than spend $400-$750 on new storage now. Even if the newer drives will be relatively the same price, they should be faster.

    One thing though, as Anand has pointed out in the past, the smaller the fabrication, the more error-prone the chips are. I'm curious what the life of those SSDs actually will be, if the gates degrade faster over time.

    Hopefully, SATA3 will be a little more mature by then, too. I need to also pick up a motherboard that makes use of the RAIDed Intel SSDs. --- Not trying to discredit Anand's latest article regarding SATA3, just saying the technology should be a little more mature for both Intel and AMD architectures.

    vol7ron
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  • philosofool - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link

    I didn't get one and 40GB isn't enough for me. But I'm really glad to see an SSD that was as cheap as $2.50/GB. That's the lowest I think we've ever seen and I think it means that NAND flash supply is starting to meet demand, or production costs/yields are starting to improve. My next major computer upgrade is going to be a SSD for programs/OS, but since my usage includes some gaming, I can't do that until I can afford 100+ GB, and I can't afford that until the cost is closer to $1.50/GB. I'm guessing that 25nm will get us to about $2/GB
  • MiserableOldFart - Monday, April 12, 2010 - link

    I'm building a new system, and I bought the X-25V. Should be here tomorrow. I am going to use it for a boot drive with only a very few select apps on it. I think it will be fine for the time being. It seems that Windows 7 doesn't generate the huge unmovable 'documents and settings' folder that XP does. Instead, it's in a folder in the root directory that can be permanently moved off the boot drive, and that should not only cut down on the space requirements, but also on the writes to the SSD.

    The numbers we are looking at here are going to look insane in a year or two. They won't be making this size anymore, and they'll probably start around 200 Gigs and sell for about twenty five bucks. So, getting an extra 40 Gigs for an extra hundred bucks might seem to be sensible now, but I think in a year these drives will all be in line for cheaper, faster and bigger replacements. I'll probably feel a bit foolish for spending the $120 on this baby.

    One thing I do have a problem with, though, I thought for sure I read that the X-25 V does support TRIM. .. I know I'm old, but I'm feeling a little senile because I can't find where I read that, other than the disputed statement in this article..

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