To SLC or to MLC

[Ricey]

That's the question.

The Intel Extreme SLCs are still pretty obnoxious.. at $780 for 32 GB. But the writes are all the way up at 170 mb/s and the reads are 250 mb/s.

The Intel Mainstream MLCs are about $720 for about 80 GB. The writes, as always, are pathetic at about 70 mb/s. Even an el cheapo regular HDD will stomp all over those writes.

That's the problem SSDs. The cheap ones are pretty crappy, and the good ones require a couple of your limbs...

[Langer]

What I did was get 4 MLC G.Skill 64GB SSDs and a good RAID card to drive them (HighPoint RocketRAID 3510 with a Battery Backup Unit)

Running all 4 cards in RAID0 with a dedicated controller - and with the added redundancy of the BBU - should make the drives SCREAM (reliably).

The drives were only $184.74CAD each
the RAID Controller was pretty pricey at $378.49CAD
the BBU-03 Battery Backup Unit was $127.36.

All in all I get ~240 solid state gigs in RAID0 (or maybe RAID10) with it's own host for about $1,300.

A better deal than a couple Intel drives methinks.

[zlojack]

There is a lot of stuff on the OCZ forums from Tony on how to get the best performance out of your SSDs.

[Ricey]

The raid controller makes small random writes even worse. It improves the sustained reads and sustained writes, both of which are already very good and don't need help.

Simple test. Open up Crysis Warhead. The single drive SLC would be faster than the gazillion drive MLC.

I know, coming from 8 drive Raptor arrays. Read throughputs are impressive. Writes for video editing are impressive. Windows boots a bit faster, but big apps and games load slower.

The same system that can sustain read 800 mb/sec is pathetic at loading Premier.

[Langer]

What you say is true.
I can't open Crysis for two reasons:
1 -Prometheus is not yet assembled.
2 -I don't many play games

The price was more than right for me, and the biggest part was the size... for the location I wanted the drives even the VelociRaptors were to tall.

My work is programming and video based content creation apps anyways.

[Chilly]

SLC FTMFW

[zlojack]

I read this today:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47183

Even though i didn't understand it all, there is the part about converting random writes to sequential writes that caught my eye.

[Kayin]

I'm getting one or two of the G.Skill drives, I have no room for larger ones like Langer. I even have to use laptop drives for my storage too.

For an MMO gamer with enough RAM, CPU, and video card to play anything made, will it make a difference anywhere but my boot times? Well, that and helping to silence the monster...