SSD

So, what's the current favorite SSD for the empeg?

Thanks!

A CF to IDE adapter and a big CF card?

I thought the 2.5" ssd was more capacity?

The problem is you will struggle to find an SSD with an IDE interface and if you do find one it will probably be expensive. The CF cards + adapter will be much more available and cheaper. Unfortunately the 64GB CF never really happened, so you are probably stuck at 32x2.

I'm trying to remember whether anyone managed to get SATA SSDs working with an adapter ?

64GB CF cards are all over eBay.

Weird, I could have sworn that when I had a search on the web generally a few months ago I couldn't find any 64GB cards. But yes, you are right they appear to be everywhere, not just ebay.

It seems 64gb pata ssd are a bit cheaper than 64gb CF cards and don't need adapters. I'm assuming Transcend is the brand to buy?

Buy whatever brand/model is cheapest. The empeg doesn't do much writing (so that's not important), and it reads very slowly (so read speed is unimportant).

Cheers

Thanks, will do.

Which SSD are you looking at?

Transcend. They have a good rep in Taiwan.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...8-431-_-Product

The reviews on NewEgg seem good, too.
linkie

Bonus- 128GB PATA for under $400.

I saw that. It's kind of pushing the $ amount I wanna spend. At least it's nearly double the 64gb price.

Back when I had an IBM AT (a real $10,000 one), the 40mb hard drive died. Back then, a new 40mb was expensive, but a 60 was only a little more, and 80 a little more than that, etc.... I couldn't buy the 40 with the bigger drives available at a good deal, and I couldn't afford the bigger drive, so my AT went almost 2 years without a drive...

I finally got in on a group buy with the UNIX club, a 1.2gb for a measly $1,000. As I recall, it was the 5" wide x about 12" tall Western Digital.

Yah, I have noticed, too, that SSD prices double for each capacity multiple. It makes sense, when you think of the components inside the drive- there are either two times as many or the doubling is in the technology.

I'm gambling that prices will come down in the near future (1-3 years) and PATA will still be a niche market.

I recently got a 64GB SSD for my Samsung Q1-Ultra. I haven't gotten around to installing it yet, but I expect super gains in system response.

Depends on the design really. The larger SSD may have unpopulated spots on the PCB for extra flash chips of the same capacity but it may also just be using the same number of chips but higher capacity ones.


The prices have significantly dropped since SSDs reached the general consumer market but they still command a significant premium.

What I'm more concerned about is the reliability of these drives. The earlier generations have had some significant issues with firmware bugs. The controller chip in these SSDs seems to change every other day and you're always ending up with the bleeding edge firmware with no easy way to downgrade without wiping your SSD.

My computer is currently configured as follows:

3 GHz AMD dual core processor
4 GB RAM
256 MB video card
C: = 80 GB IDE
D: = 300 GB SATA
E: = 300 GB SATA
F: = 1000 GB SATA
G: = 1000 GB SATA (external)
H: = 500 GB USB-2 (external)

My C: & D: drives are backed up to my E: drive;
My F: drive is backed up to my G: drive.
My C: & D: drives are redundantly backed up to my H: drive

My F: and G: drives are 91% filled, and will be replaced with 2-TB drives, the 1-TB drives left over will replace the D: and E: drives.

So, now the question(s). Would I see significant performance improvement if I replaced my C: drive with a 128 GB SSD drive? Can I even do that, since my C: drive is an IDE drive? Would it be possible to replace the C: drive without having to re-install Windows and all my software? If I did have to do that, would it be better to replace my 32-bit Vista with 64-bit WIndows 7?

tanstaafl.

It should make it faster for most cases.


Yes but you'll most probably need to get a bracket to make it into a 3.5" sized drive since consumer SSDs are generally 2.5" laptop drive size.


Vista won't like you moving to a new drive and will most probably require reactivation over the phone.


The benefit would be that you can use more than 3ish GB of memory that is the limit for 32 bit operating systems. The downside is that all your drivers for your hardware need to be 64 bit. If a 64 bit driver doesn't exist then it won't work.

Unless you really need that missing 1 GB of memory, I'd say stick with 32 bit Windows.