Corsair Shatters SSD Affordability Barrier

[Thrackan]

There's several threads here and elsewhere about that. You tell windows not to use one, it's likely still using one. If you did manage to completely get rid of it (which is possible, but not simply through the normal method of changing your pagefile size to 0) then you are actually crippling many programs that are designed to use it (including windows.)

Please, enlighten me.

 

[zithe]

What, 20 sec less on boot time? It's not like i'd have to reboot my system every 30 minutes. Cold boot takes less than 60 seconds anyway. Quieter? I hardly ever hear it and pretty much anything starts up in a fraction of a second. I don't see any point in wasting money on useless SSD. I'd rather buy fast HDD. And i did.

Well that's you. People use their computers for things other than just games. Running a (good) dedicated server requires the fastest drives you can get. I'm hosting a gmod server on a less than good laptop and every time someone spawns something not regularly used, everyone connected waits a couple seconds and it can interrupt construction. That's a very specific example, though. If you misplaced a file and you're using a search function it's quicker on a better drive. It improves a massive amount of things.

High read speeds improve game performance. Sometimes a game can catch no matter how good your cpu/gpu is just because your hard drive spent a bit of time figuring out where a file it needed was. That is extremely common in games like oblivion where it has to figure out plant/npc/etc. placement as you're walking through the map, and I definitely notice it going on.

Also, SSDs have a significantly lower chance of failing. Replacing a dead drive through RMAing doesn't make up for lost data and you spend money on backup anyways.

 

[Mussels]

What, 20 sec less on boot time? It's not like i'd have to reboot my system every 30 minutes. Cold boot takes less than 60 seconds anyway. Quieter? I hardly ever hear it and pretty much anything starts up in a fraction of a second. I don't see any point in wasting money on useless SSD. I'd rather buy fast HDD. And i did.

your opinion will change when you actually use one. you're used to the small delays everything has on mechanical drives so you dont notice them.

 

[Thrackan]

your opinion will change when you actually use one. you're used to the small delays everything has on mechanical drives so you dont notice them.

Exactly. Nothing better than programs opening directly when you click 'em

 

[NetSurfer]

32GB. Useless. Half acceptable is 128GB for netbooks. Running just OS on SSD is just plain ridiculous if you ask me.

Agree with that.
32GB is just not enough for most people, let's create a poll

*For netbook users

 

[Papahyooie]

Please, enlighten me.

Well I know this isn't exactly a "source" as I dont even know what this website is, but a quick google search returns an article that adequately describes what I'm talking about.

http://serverfault.com/questions/23...rom-removing-a-pagefile-on-an-8gb-ram-machine

No matter how much ram you have, windows is inherently designed to use a pagefile... its just meant to do so. Taking it away causes panic when you get near the end of your physical memory. Perhaps you never get near the end of your physical memory, in which case you'll be fine for the most part, but it just simply isn't good business. Windows expects a pagefile to exist.

As for other programs, I suppose you probably don't do any 3DS Max work, or video editing. Try doing that without a pagefile. When active file size (loaded into either real of virtual memory) gets higher than 10gbs at points, good luck having that all stored in ram. If there's no pagefile, then you're going to have MAJOR slowdown, not to mention a ton of hard drive thrashing. That's where this drive would fit perfectly.

 

[Mussels]

some programs just crash with no pagefile, so windows always makes one even if you disable it. you cant run without a pagefile in a modern MS OS.

 

[Thrackan]

Well I know this isn't exactly a "source" as I dont even know what this website is, but a quick google search returns an article that adequately describes what I'm talking about.

http://serverfault.com/questions/23...rom-removing-a-pagefile-on-an-8gb-ram-machine

No matter how much ram you have, windows is inherently designed to use a pagefile... its just meant to do so. Taking it away causes panic when you get near the end of your physical memory. Perhaps you never get near the end of your physical memory, in which case you'll be fine for the most part, but it just simply isn't good business. Windows expects a pagefile to exist.

As for other programs, I suppose you probably don't do any 3DS Max work, or video editing. Try doing that without a pagefile. When active file size (loaded into either real of virtual memory) gets higher than 10gbs at points, good luck having that all stored in ram. If there's no pagefile, then you're going to have MAJOR slowdown, not to mention a ton of hard drive thrashing. That's where this drive would fit perfectly.

I suppose I never reach my limits then, as I've got 8GB and don't even play alot of modern games Video editing has been 6 years now 3D work even longer ago...

Damn, I've become an average computer user:shadedshu

some programs just crash with no pagefile, so windows always makes one even if you disable it. you cant run without a pagefile in a modern MS OS.

Well, the good thing is I've yet to find a program crashing just because I have no pagefile. Last time I checked, there was no pagefile present on my system.

 

[Papahyooie]

Well, the good thing is I've yet to find a program crashing just because I have no pagefile. Last time I checked, there was no pagefile present on my system.

And that's what I was saying before... Just telling it to have no pagefile will not completely get rid of the pagefile. It will still make one without your consent in windows, and won't even tell you about it in the dialogue to change it. Check task manager, you'll still see that there is one. I would be willing to put up money that you still get page faults even with pagefile disabled.

 

[RejZoR]

your opinion will change when you actually use one. you're used to the small delays everything has on mechanical drives so you dont notice them.

I have used one (2 in fact). Intel 80GB G2 and Kingston V-Series 128GB (or was it 120GB).
They were ok for netbook as far as shock durability goes and lower power consumption when idling. But other than that i didn't really see much difference in performance.
Same goes for desktop. I found that Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB and WD Caviar Black 2TB are by far better choices. They are both very fast, very big for its segment and by far cheaper than any SSD half the size. I mean, that Caviar Black 2TB cost the same as some crappy 128GB SSD. And i can store almost half an internet on it opposed to crappy 128GB for these times. Hybrid drives would be much better option today really. I wouldn't mind a WD Caviar Black 2TB with dedicated 32GB SSD SLC cache. For 300 EUR ? Massive chunk of space + speed + ok price = pure win.

 

[Thrackan]

I have used one (2 in fact). Intel 80GB G2 and Kingston V-Series 128GB (or was it 120GB).
They were ok for netbook as far as shock durability goes and lower power consumption when idling. But other than that i didn't really see much difference in performance.
Same goes for desktop. I found that Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB and WD Caviar Black 2TB are by far better choices. They are both very fast, very big for its segment and by far cheaper than any SSD half the size. I mean, that Caviar Black 2TB cost the same as some crappy 128GB SSD. And i can store almost half an internet on it opposed to crappy 128GB for these times. Hybrid drives would be much better option today really. I wouldn't mind a WD Caviar Black 2TB with dedicated 32GB SSD SLC cache. For 300 EUR ? Massive chunk of space + speed + ok price = pure win.

There is no way you did not notice improved performance, unless you cloned your OS install straight onto the SSD. No matter what machine you put it in, you will always notice a performance boost. That, or you're doing something very, very wrong.

And that's what I was saying before... Just telling it to have no pagefile will not completely get rid of the pagefile. It will still make one without your consent in windows, and won't even tell you about it in the dialogue to change it. Check task manager, you'll still see that there is one. I would be willing to put up money that you still get page faults even with pagefile disabled.

I'm not at home so I can't check my task manager at the moment, but why on earth would a pagefile be present in the Task Manager while not being physically present on disk?

 

[Thrackan]

8 Gigs of memory, 0 pagefile.

 

[Mussels]

i cant read netherlandish.

anyway:

look on your C: drive, and i bet one is there. if its not, run a game/photoshop/etc and check (without quitting the program)

 

[Thrackan]

i cant read netherlandish.

anyway:

http://img.techpowerup.org/100721/Capture136.jpg

http://img.techpowerup.org/100721/Capture138.jpg


look on your C: drive, and i bet one is there. if its not, run a game/photoshop/etc and check (without quitting the program)

It's not there either, but Sniper: Ghost warrior did crash, together with Firefox, Steam, Portal, Paint.NET, Mass Effect, Visual Studio 2010 and then some
Left some screen corruption and element garble in Firefox and Visual Studio as well, so I suspect that was a memory issue.

So what we've learned: yes, you can turn the pagefile completely off, but no, it's not good practice, not even with 8GB in your system

 

[RejZoR]

@Thrackan
The performance was noticeable for boot time and slightly for initial start of Firefox and Paint.NET.
But since Windows caching mechanisms in Vista kick in automatically even when using HDD, that improvement got limited to boot time only. Which i honestly don't really care with Hybrid Sleep and Hibernation technologies. Besides, cold boot took less than 1 minute on my system with old Spinpoint F1. It takes even less with faster Caviar Black 2TB which is much much faster.