Lords of Death Forums Lords of Death Forums LoD General Discussion SSD's My head is hurting.

First let me say this is a technical post so if you don't know your way around a computer its BIOS and hardware components you need not respond with potentials or maybes.

I am building a new computer and in doing so I will be switching from conventional HDD's to SSD's. I know simple right....yeah thats what I thought. So in my research this morning for which SSD will give me the best performance, I settled on the OCZ Vertex EX Series SATA II 2.5" SSD. Ready to purchase from amazon.com I saw something on the corner of the screen.

OCZ Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_z_drive_pci_express_ssd

...this is where my brain started to hurt. If the drive is configured for a PCIe slot does that mean you can't boot from it? "The headache begins" Wait....the drive has an on-board RAID controller, I can boot to that...or can I. I wonder if my BIOS will detect it as a raid controller or if it will just stare at me and say WTF you idiot I don't know what that is.

For those of you who are thinking OMG thats a $1500 SSD I need to put somthing into perspective.
The slowest link in a new computer is the storage device. RAM "memory" responds in nanoseconds....storage drives respond in milliseconds. If you are any good at math or know computers. thats a difference of 1,000,000 times. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it.

So on a serious note if you are a tech savy person and have a logical response or know the answer to this question please post a reply. If I just made your head hurt well good im not alone.

I actually called tech support for OCZ on this already but I got some kid who said he couldn't tell me for sure. I asked for someone who could answer the question and he put me on hold and came back about 3 min later and said he asked around and no one was sure...

don't be a pussy, buy it and slap that bitch in. see what happens.

and why settle for 250 mb? get that 1TB

If its got built in raid controller hopefully it should all auto detect in a new bios. I would personally go out and assume that everything built in would allow it to be detected by a regular bios board. And of course once the raid is detected via pci-e it of course should tell your computer that it has a bootable/active hd available as well.

I dont think too many people can speak on ssd from experience as I know I cant, but maybe you will get lucky and someone can share some experience. I would just buy it from some place locally so that in the worst case it just stares at you on boot, you can return it.

I just got done building 3 new comps for work and used SSD's in em. While they definitely make the system more responsive, it only helps during load times. I'm using 32gb drives and could have gotten away with 16gb - that's pleanty to install windows and a few programs. So I have to ask, why would you need/want a 256gb+ SSD? Any music/video can only stream as fast as the playback, video processing is going to be limited by your CPU... what kind of bulk data do you need that kind of instant access to for that price?

As for the PCI-E card, check your bios for boot options to see if something like "PCI Device" is listed. Any new mobo should handle it just fine. The RAID controller should report that it's just a drive.

As for your research, I hope you checked forums. The reported speeds are usually burst speeds (doing transfers from the SSD's onboard cache) and I know the last generation OCZ drives had major stuttering issues when dealing with lots of small reads (which is what your doing during program/windows loading). Basically, the specced speeds are extremely situational and you'll never hit any of them in real world tests.

I bought Samsung drives mostly because they've been making SSD's for awhile now, they make their own memory and controller chips, and they've been selling them to big businesses for awhile now. Their rated speeds aren't the greatest, but from what I've read, they just work.

The smallest drive offered in that PCI-e setup is the 250GB. So there isn't really another alternative thats more cost effective to my storage requirements. I know Fusion io has PCI-e cards with lower capacities but they dont have built-in RAID controllers, so booting from them is not an option.

I have looked at a few reviews regarding average read/write speeds and it is really surprising how consistant it is.

Regarding the studdering from the older models I really have no idea, I may have to wait for more testing to see if it is still an issue.

I was considering just what you are saying originally but after seeing the specs on this thing with a 5x performance increase over other SSD's it is hard for me to not seriously consider it.

Why PCI-e? Those are primarily for file/web servers to expand existing storage. I sure hope you aren't spending that much on a gaming machine. Newegg has the SATA version of that drive for half the cost.

The drive in that link doesn't have nearly the same read and write speeds.

I doubt the interface would change the underlying performance, but I never even looked at PCI-e cards so I don't know. It's your money

But if you want real performance, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Edit: like I said in my first post, the specced speeds are utterly useless. Find some real world performance tests from independent sources (eg. forums)