HOW TO: SATA III-SSD-RAID0-Windows Installation: Questions, Troubleshooting Thread

[Nicholaus.rossi]

stay away from any sanforce or marvell controllers. ocz vertex 3 uses sanforce and crucial m4 uses marvell.

i recommend samsung 470 ssd.

I have to agree here. I have several of these drives. It's hard to compete with the $ per GB with these drives. Not to mention the performance is pretty good. 7.6 WEI on my desktop and my wife's M17xR3 with 256gb Samsung 470. Zero issues, no workarounds needed, fast boot times... it just works.

[veritass]

samsung just released new 830 series, the old 470 was just 3gb/s, and the new 830 series supports 6gb/s but i am not sure about the cost of it... and also not sure if they ship to canada as well...

[Nicholaus.rossi]

It sounds like you have your heart set on a SATA III drive. I use 2 SATAIII drives with marvel controllers and have zero issues. I would just avoid the KNOWN problematic drives. Entirely too many people have had issues with the Crucial M4 and the OCZ Vertex 3 drives. I'm a fanboy at heart, and I'd recommend Intel to anyone, anyday. They have a fantastic history of reliability and performance. I hear they make some decent CPU's too

The prices on SATA III drives are out of control at the moment. Here's a couple of decent-priced drives that I'd try:
Intel 510
Kingston HyperX

[veritass]

Hmmm the difference between the Crucial M4 and Intel 510 is about 80$ but if truly is reliable and wont give me any headaches its worth it in the long run.

[Nicholaus.rossi]

As far as I'm concerned, Intel should be the webster definition of reliable.

[veritass]

also, looking to get 128GB, i am assuming thats more than enough to load windows 7 and some normal apps and drivers, and maybe 1 or 2 games into. i plan on getting a seagate or omega external HDD for storage of movies and files...

[Mr. Fox]

I don't have any problems with my Crucial M4. It is rock solid and performs very well. I purchased mine after firmware 0009 was released and there definitely were some people having issues on the previous firmware. Here is a thread specific to Crucial M4 and Micron 300 SSD drives. They also have Marvell controllers (Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2). Intel, Samsung and Crucial are all very solid.

Based on what I have been reading, those that seem to have the most issues with stability are SandForce based SSD.

[veritass]

ya thats what i thought also, and the Crucial M4 is the best performance for the price, thats what i think anyway...

also another questions, after installing the SSD and doing fresh install and bringing back the "alienwareness" how do i reformat my old 500GB HDD to NFTS and use it as a secondary storage device? as in remove the the windows and all other stuff from the HDD and just use it to storage stuff.

[ARGH]

It sounds like you have your heart set on a SATA III drive. I use 2 SATAIII drives with marvel controllers and have zero issues. I would just avoid the KNOWN problematic drives. Entirely too many people have had issues with the Crucial M4 and the OCZ Vertex 3 drives. I'm a fanboy at heart, and I'd recommend Intel to anyone, anyday. They have a fantastic history of reliability and performance. I hear they make some decent CPU's too

The prices on SATA III drives are out of control at the moment. Here's a couple of decent-priced drives that I'd try:
Intel 510
Kingston HyperX

those kingston hyperx use sanforce controllers. i would not recommend anything with sanforce right now.

[Mr. Fox]

arch - ^^^ I thought that was the case with Kingston, but had not looked it up to verify.

veritass - just connect the drive to SATA1 (SSD on SATA0) and reformat it. Very simple... You can open My Computer, right click and select Format. Or, you can go into Device Manager, Disk Management and delete the volume, create a new one and reformat it that way.