Recent SSD roundup conclusion... 1. Nearly all are OK 2. Some better at IO, others better at throughput. Pick one which seems to match your usage. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-x25-m-vertex,2399.html#xtor=RSS-182 Personally, I'm going to give them another year or so unless one is offered really cheap.
That's doable? I thought the RAID drives had to be identical.. Of course with no experience with RAID I'm liable to be thinking anything at any given time... I'd think that the slowest drive would set the speed if you have it set to mirror image all the time.. maybe the mirroring is a background task relative to the realtime operations? At any rate those SSD drives are charging ahead full steam, last time I looked, and it doesn't seem like it was all that long ago, they were pitifully slow, small , and expensive... now they are just small and expensive.. i'll give them a year or two maybe...
RAID does not HAVE to use identical drives http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=raid+identical+drives&aq=f&aqi=g1&oq=&fp=1db3655b1bbc91d8
You do have to be careful of some of the info in this thread particularly the "only intel's etc" type of stuff as reviews tend to be out of date very quickly. Also some of the reviewers seem remarkably ignorant of the products out there. Things to note re dcraig's good points: - you can also run your SSDs in raid for corresponding gains. Standalone raid controllers are needed to get the sort of potential speed that they can give. - I have an older (read untrimmable and poorer reuse management) SSD so I resolved the issue of writing large numbers of random writes for trading data by using a ramdisk. All my data goes to ramdisk and is periodically automatically backed up to the SSD. My primary goal with the SSD was silence and low power use (my hard drives spend most of the day not spinning) and it achieved that. It was also pleasantly fast. The greatest speed increase comes though because I have browser cache, tws, and my charting apps data store all on the ramdisk. Once I started moving stuff around I realized that ram is so much faster that as long as you resolve backup/risk issues to your satisfaction it should do the bulk of your active storage if possible.
Just because it has a 10 year warranty does not mean they expect it will last that long. They probably figure that the drive will be worth less than $10 5 years from now and that anyone who has one fail will simply decide that it's not worth the effort to go through the warranty procedure for an obsolete drive. Either that or they figure 90% of customers never bother to register their product for the warranty.
I checked Intel's warranty... apparently registration of SSD is not required... as is the case with most makers these days. When the SSDs first came out, their warranty was 1 year or less on some. Nice to know one will be able to use their SSD for 3 years or more if desired, but likely will be replaced by newer, faster, bigger, less cost per GB before then. The Intel SSDs are quite snappy, and Intel says they plan on making random writes faster on future versions. I'm still showing 60 MBs on 4k random writes when dirty (XP).... can't complain about that.
i am getting 40gb Intel X25-V to run XP. any good write-ups about setting up SSD correctly? BTW, one can get it at ~110-120$ http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/982348/