Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

You know gulf what you wrote was very insulting, my comment was about ati firepro graphics and how nvidia is better, sheesh you don't have to be that mean. Hey airblazer i am wondering will the new m6500 have x2 quadro cards it has to happen. Are there any new mobile quadro cards coming out soon?

 

Sorry, didn't mean it as such, I just went through the whole 'new' forum and couldn't find any such question. And since I didn't find it (did I miss it?) at the time it seemed a logical question. If I missed it, and I went through the 8 or so pages twice, sorry. I tried to make it a little funny but you shouldn't be too thin skinned around here. I've been called all kinds of things, some of which were true.

 

Defrag is a load of crap now for SSDs. Since your access time is so quick defragging your drive makes no difference and it actually harmful to it in the long term.
Basically flash memory (both SLC and MLC) has a set number of times it can be written to.
Normal operation this would take years and years.
However using the page file/defragging means you're rewriting information to the drive thus shortening it's lifespan.
Now it will still last years but why run the risk of data failure?

As regards to SLC/MLC obviously SLC are faster and have a longer lifetime.
But they're hugely more expensive and honestly MLC has come such a long way I'm more than happy to use them.
Plus if you read about Intel's MLC drives they're one of the highest performers around.
Anandtech have some great articles on SSD..check em out

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

 

I used to be a neatness freak as well WRT defragging, had daily PerfectDisk defrag runs on my RAID 0+1 array on my destop for two years. Then two out of four disks failed within a week, both with read errors at 41-43% into the volume - this is where NTFS by default keeps the MFT (the disk allocation map). Nowadays I limit defragging to once a month.

I suspect that the MFT area gets much more reading/writing when defragging than the data areas. If so, then defragging an SSD would clearly be harmful in the long run.

 

Does anyone know anything about the performance and quality of the Photofast SSD's sold in the US by DVNation?

http://www.dvnation.com/SATA-SSD.html

My wife used some of their Compact Flash Cards and really likes their price/performance compared to SanDisk.

 

From Ireland so I've never heard of them..their speed claims are very fast though...practically at the limits of the Sata 2 bandwidth

 

Seem to have a issue, hope I can find an answer here. I have been getting an error on the bios page concerning my raid 1 set up. On my mirror drive(wd-250gb) seems that an "error occured" now my system is "degraded"! My question is, is there a utility on the 6400 that might tell me just what the "ERROR" is and/or how to correct this. Might be someone out here that has experienced the same. I am running XP x64. Also for "those" who know of a good software utility so I can monitor the "health" of my mirror drive. Thanx for any help input.

 

Thanks very much for the link, I now know about twice what I knew before I read it and all things considered I think the drive I chose is perfect for me. That said though I've been formatting it and cloning to it a lot in the last six months and it turns out formatting it does nothing about the problem of gradually degraded performance no matter what you do. Except do a total erase, which returns it to factory new condition by erasing the 'pages'. Does anyone have an understanding how to do a 'total erase' on an SSD? Because it turns out all of them will need that eventually as they fill with data. And all the instructions I've found so far are complicated and sound like something I could eF up. And maybe because it's so small 64GB, it fills the pages quicker.

And where did you get the 256 Samsung if you'd care to say? Seems they don't sell them retail. Do you know if Dells 256GB SSD is really a Samsung? The Intel MLC drives have by far the best reputation but still have enough failures (I trust 'buyers comments' on New Egg as being a decent gauge of stuff) to make me look to Samsung, since I've had a lot of Samsung stuff and none of it's ever failed. The 64GB Samsung I have is more than sufficient but the 256GB is cheap enough to justify as an experiment. And it would take much longer to fill up each the 'pages' as well as being twice as fast as what I'm using now.

 

The Samsungs do look good, and lots of storage for a reasonable (in SSD terms) price.

Personally though I would wait for TRIM support to be standard (and stable) on a given SSD drive before I bought it.

Waiting will only result in them getting cheaper/bigger Note that SSDs and NAND flash capacities are in general currently beating Moores law! Every 12 months they essentially double in capacity for around the same price, or put it another way, around the same capacity for half the price. Hard drives will be all but dead in 4-5 years. Yay!

Paul.

 

All Dell SSDs are Samsung drives Gulf...