500GB Samsung 840 Series 2.5" SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive SSD (MZ-7TD500BW) $290 + Free Shipping

A little Tender Loving Care is priceless. Not sure how I feel about getting it from a computer though... just sayin....

Finally sizes big enough to be practical for single drive systems... Cost is getting there but still needs help IMHO.

This is a great deal, but I am not suppose to be spending mula that I don't have : (

I have been thinking about this... having bought both the 250GB and 500GB versions of this drive... isn't it better to buy two of the 250GB drives and run them in Raid 0? The performance is nearly double... same size.

Would this fit inside the latest MBP 13 Retina? TIA! Will rep+

Quote from justnewbie : Never tried an SSD before. What is the significant difference on this compared to the 64MB cache SATA hard drives? I heard SSD's mostly shines on reads but not much of a speed difference in writes. Kindly enlighten me. Thank you for the response.

The current generation of SSDs is also faster in writes most of the time, though this varies with the drive. Mainstream drives like this one are faster, but not the double (or more) write-speed of high-end SSDs.

As far as read speeds go, it's a huge gap. SSDs are not only measurably 2x-10x as fast (depending on the drives and benchmark compared), but they make your computer feel much more responsive. I swapped my laptop/HTPC's drive for a hybrid drive, which just has a 4GB SSD for read caching, and the difference was astonishing. It boots faster and loads common-used files and programs almost as though they were still cached in memory. An SSD does this for *every* file operation, and as such my upcoming dedicated HTPC build will definitely have one :-)

Quote from maddoggyusa : I have been thinking about this... having bought both the 250GB and 500GB versions of this drive... isn't it better to buy two of the 250GB drives and run them in Raid 0? The performance is nearly double... same size.

For the same price, yes. There's an increased risk (two failure points instead of one) and more effort to set it up, but it's a negligible risk and worth it for anyone who is seriously performance-oriented.

Keep in mind there's a limit on the return, though. SSDs are already becoming bottle-necked by the SATA spec, and once you saturate the bus, you can't get any more performance. 2 SSDs in striped RAID is likely to be the "value limit" in increased performance right now. Also, make sure you have a quality motherboard with a performance chipset if you're going this route, so you're not limited by the bus or poor RAID support.

Quote from ishop247 : Would this fit inside the latest MBP 13 Retina? TIA! Will rep+

negative, none of the retina models use a conventional 2.5" SATA.

Quote from maddoggyusa : I have been thinking about this... having bought both the 250GB and 500GB versions of this drive... isn't it better to buy two of the 250GB drives and run them in Raid 0? The performance is nearly double... same size.

I believe if 1 fails, you lose everything. Depends on your scale of risk vs reward.

I cannot apply the code S9999991.. it says:
Sorry, we can’t apply this coupon. Please re-enter code:

What did I do wrong?

Quote from ishop247 : Would this fit inside the latest MBP 13 Retina? TIA! Will rep+

Yes it does .... Rep Me!!! Rep Me!!!


Dunno actually

I couldn't resist it anymore, had to get one.

Quote from siennaLe2008 : I cannot apply the code S9999991.. it says: Sorry, we can’t apply this coupon. Please re-enter code: What did I do wrong?

Where do you enter in the coupon code?

Quote from BloodGain : For the same price, yes. There's an increased risk (two failure points instead of one) and more effort to set it up, but it's a negligible risk and worth it for anyone who is seriously performance-oriented. Keep in mind there's a limit on the return, though. SSDs are already becoming bottle-necked by the SATA spec, and once you saturate the bus, you can't get any more performance. 2 SSDs in striped RAID is likely to be the "value limit" in increased performance right now. Also, make sure you have a quality motherboard with a performance chipset if you're going this route, so you're not limited by the bus or poor RAID support.

Testing has shown a single larger SSD to be typically faster than 2 smaller SSDs that add up to the same. The way a SSD is designed, the chips basically are RAID 0 inside the drive, so the bigger you get, the more channels of read/write you get. While you can get a boost on write speeds early into the life of the drive, as it fills up you will lose performance over a single drive unless you have a high end RAID controller or the newer intel chipsets that support TRIM and other drive monitoring tools.

Personally I feel money could be better spent other places to increase performance. Most who do SSD in RAID 0 will never encounter a real world situation this will help outside of synthetic benchmarks and a few seconds saved copying files. You would need another RAID array or RAM drive to take advantage of the speed.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/...html#sect0