X-25-V... ("V" for "value") With sequential read/write speeds of 170/35, slower than the "M" and "E" versions. But depending upon the speed of 4K random read/writes, could still be a very nice improvement over platter drives. I know, "35 MB/s" is slow by comparison. But if the 4K numbers are anywhere close, users will perceive this drive as FAST! http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...l_releases_125_affordable_SSD?source=rss_news
I put an ssd in my laptop and let's just say SMOKIN' I'm just waiting to build a new desktop but without any doubt a SSD will speed you up considerably.
Have a look at OCZ. They are cheaper then Intel (at least over here in Europe) and you can find a lot of tips and tweaks on the OCZ forum. I have a 30GB Agility and am very happy with it.
How do you use a solid state drive? Do you put the operating system and application software on it? Or strictly for data? I fear that 40GB may not be enough for the data that I access often.
In a desktop, you could have a small SSD boot drive + a few other programs on it.. the rest and data could go on a platter drive. In a notebook, if it doesn't have room for 2 drives, you might want a bigger SSD.
FYI... Bought one of these X25-V to install in wifey's notebook. But before I did, tested it in my primary trading rig. CDM Scores on XP, non-aligned partition... 186/42 157/45 22/42 129/44 Those are really very fine scores. Of course the the bigger SSDs are faster on sequential writes, but you can't do much of that on these due to size. (Few other SSDs, regardless of size or cost, do as well on "overall performance-critical, small file writes"... for which the X25s are optimized.) TRIM isn't automatically supported by XP, but intel has a "manual TRIM" function which takes about 10 seconds to clean the cells. In real-time use, perceived no difference in performance from my usual 80G, X25-M. Notebook boots noticeably faster and seems to defrag at least 10X faster (I know, "they" tell you to never defrag an SSD because it will shorten its life. Yeah, from 100 years down to about 98 years. My sense is that conventional wisdom is also wrong about "fragmentation of an SSD doesn't make any difference to performance".) So... if you want excellent performance on a budget (especially on XP) you could install the X25-V + a large platter drive.. <$200, total. Good bang for your buck!
There is really no need to defragment an ssd. Because of the low access time, it doesn't matter where the blocks of data are located on the disk. An ssd will not slow down because data is fragmented all over the disk. So for performance matters, it makes no difference. Fragmentation is actually a good thing, because if the data is spread all over the disk, individual sectors will be used less frequently and therefor wear slower. And, like you said, fragmenting a disk involves a lot of small writes, which will definately wear an ssd out. Quote from OCZ installation manual: "In fact, clustering data as it is done by defragmenting can cause problems because defragmenting can cause hot-spots in the memory array and negate wear-leveling, a measure used in SSDs to increase life span."
Everyone knows all of that. Still, in my daily use... I find it makes a bit of difference, so I defrag occasionally. (Feel free to disregard everything I say. Won't hurt my feelings, I'm used to it... I have a wife.) As far as "defragging causing excessive wear"... Intel says [paraphrasing] "...if you write your entire drive EVERY DAY, it still should last 83 years...". I likely write more than median users, and it takes me an average of about 18 days to write the drive once. SSD controllers have "wear leveling algos" to spread the writes evenly across the disk.