The Glade 4.0

Anyone using these? Any comments good or bad?

I picked up a small one (newer model) from my local computer shop to try running EQ off of (on a gaming only system). It's just sort of an experiment that I went into with a high expectation of failure.

The drive is just installed as a second drive with nothing on it but an Everquest folder. The one thing I've noticed is a huge improvement in load/zone times. I had seen some comments about problems with games 'stuttering when being run from SSD's. I played for a couple of hours last night, and experienced no noticeable negative effects.

It's hard to find current information about these devices. Some of the older articles and forum comments I've read have implied that there are issues with limited number of read/writes over the lifespan of the drive, and that you shouldn't run a pagefile, and should disable indexing, to extend lifespan. Also, I see a lot of references to SSD's causing some games to have a 'stuttering' effect, or even some that won't load at all without a pagefile on the drive.

I understand a lot has changed with controller design, drive integrity/speed, and OS support. I understand that some versions of Win 7 have a TRIM function built into it, and automatically excludes these drives from being defragged, since this function is performed by the controller on SSD's.

I may pick up another small drive for my second computer to run my 2nd instance of EQ, just for the improved load/zone times I'm seeing.

Anyway, just curious if anyone has experimented with these, or has any insight?

I threw an 80gb Intel X-25m in my latest build and i love it!

Running 7 ultimate off of it, most of my steam games and common day app's I use regulary, it is lightning quick, 99.9% of the time, Im first connected on TFT2, when changing maps, it loads a helluva lot faster. I cant read the Tips that appear in loading screens during New Vegas as just loads to darn quick. The Witcher made the biggest difference, loading games off my old IDE controller took a stone's age

I absolutely recommend disabling pagefile and indexing, I try to write to the drive as little as possible, most are rated at 100,000+ hours for lifespan, which should be more than plenty for just about anyone, but being they havent been out to long yet, I havent heard any horror stories of them dying etc.. With 6gb of ram, I completely turned off pagefile. If not, would move it to another non SSD drive, very easy to do in 7. Also during install, common use directories can move to a different drive, like Documents, pictures, games etc.. There are other ways, but that is the most reliable with the least amount of issues. If do save alot of stuff there, would recommend moving those to another drive as well.

Not having indexing is kinding of annoying, but with 1.5 TB of data, I forget where stuff is all the time. One big piece of advice, I would recommend is to create the Windows 7 'god mode' admin folder if you do turn indexing off, although this is my first forrary into 7, and still learning the new Control Panel and where everything is this has been a help.

Just need to Create a folder and name it Admin.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and will pretty much give you every admin tool in one nice folder.

Definately would also recommend a drive with TRIM, the Intel's are a little more pricer than OCZ, Corsair, Kingston etc.. but there was no firmware updates I had to do, was just plug and play. I think 7 ultimate took all of 15-20 minutes to install on it? Intel has there own controller as well, not using Indillix or Sandforce. I would absolutely avoid any jMicron controller drives, they had alot of issues, I am pretty sure no one carries those anymore though.

I have had some 'stuttering' in TFT2, but it only seems to happen with 1 specific server, since deleting local content and re-updating 2 nights ago, havent had, thats the only game I have had any sort of stuttering on, so far played TFT2, New Vegas, The Witcher, Company of Heroes, Bioshock all via steam with no issues, besides the TFT2 stuttering, but it hasnt been that bad, usually maybe 1 second, reboot usually fixes it, as I never turn off or reboot my PC, always have crap running.

I am definitely looking forward to getting one of these, and the prices are dropping...

I have a 60gb solid state hdd in the computer in my car, great in terms of being far more shock resistant than a normal drive and no fluid bearings to freeze in the winter, but honestly I wasn't especially impressed otherwise, it causes a higher CPU load to the point that when I used the GPS software it would cause the music playing to occasionally stutter which didn't happen with the old traditional drive, though this was a drive from a year and a half ago so hopefully they are better now. I was however able to fix the music stuttering by creating a batch file to launch the music playing software in above average priority.

Honestly I haven't really been impressed with these so far. I saw a few comparison videos and benchmarks and I don't think an SSD would really be that drastic of an improvement over my 7200rpm Western Digital Caviar Black drive. In fact, I almost considered getting an SSD for my Windows 7 partition, but changed my mind and ordered 2 more 1 TB drives instead...now I have 3 TB. The extra second or two here and there on load times just isn't worth the price on those. I'd wait until they get bigger and the price drops more.

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The answer depends greatly on which specific SSD you're considering. The X25-M drive mentioned by Kashan is miles apart from other consumer SSDs, but is also quite expensive. I'm using two of them in my Xen servers at work, and I can also vouch that they perform better than pretty much any SATA drive on the market, Raptors included.

"Mid-range" consumer SSDs are a different story. For laptops, they'll beat the **** out of everything, both in terms of performance and battery life, because 2.5" magnetic drives are total ***. On the desktop market, it depends. For the most part, reasonable quality SSDs will be comparable to drives like the Caviar Black series, but can still offer potentially significant performance advantages depending on usage patterns. You'll almost certainly see benefit in boot times, regardless of anything else. Whether or not it offers any other benefit will depend on how you use it.

The general rule of thumb is that you'll see benefit if you heavily multi-task, but that's a bit of an over-generalization. Initial application load times will be faster, but subsequent loads may not be if you have a sufficiently large disk cache. If your system has plenty of memory and therefore has a large disk cache and isn't utilizing the page file at all (that never really happens with Windows, unfortunately, but you can get close), then an SSD may be of marginal benefit over a good magnetic SATA. But even that isn't a hard-and-fast rule. I should think that loading resources in, say, an MMO would likely benefit from SSDs -- at least when you enter areas you haven't been to yet in this session, and that therefore don't reside in the disk cache.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

The drives I had been using were just generic 7200RPM WD drives. I notice a significant improvement when starting EQ, and even more so when zoning using the SSD over the magnetic drives.

I have two of them now. One is an OCZ Vertex 2, the other is one of the Kingston SSDNow consumer grade drives. I didn't reload the systems, and am not booting off of them. I just plugged them in and copied my EQ folder to them as an experiment, and I have to say I'm quite pleased.

I'm prepared for the experiment to be a failure, either if the drives fail prematurely, or if performance degrades over time.

In the mean time, I'm enjoying some seriously improved load times. =)

The Seagate 7200rpm 2.5" laptop drives in my big Asus G73jh seem to perform about as well as the WD Caviar drives I had in my desktop. That said, most Laptop drives aren't that fast.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
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Fair enough. I guess I should have said that 5400 RPM drives are ***, whether 2.5" or not.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Minor Necropost to link a review at Toms Hardware that might be of interest to anyone thinking about giving these a try.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sam ... or=RSS-182