Computer finally crashed this morning.

[Turbineguy]

Weird symptoms on mobo. Sudden shutdown followed instantly with restart. The machine was at least 6 years old and in need. Drove down to Fry's and resuscitated the whole fucking economy (on my credit card, just like Bush would have done it! Only I'll be around to pay the bill).

Intel i5 and an SSD. W764 bit. Geforce 9800 video card. The SSD is only 40gigs so I'm using my Raptor drive for data.

Recovered all my data. Still working out a few bugs.

[struggle4progress]

1. What mobo did you pick?

[Turbineguy]

2. Gigabyte

P55A-UD3

[BlueJazz]

3. Just a nice Hint. DO NOT defrag a ssd Drive. It just wears on the cells and shortens their life.

:)

[Turbineguy]

4. Thanks!

Yeah I've been reading about that. I still have more research to do, but it seems like you have to do some sort of cleaning out. I'm thinking this is a bit like a graphite moderated nuclear reactor where you have to bake it out every so often.

[struggle4progress]

5. Dunno for sure, but everything I've read suggests that the SSDs can only

survive a certain number of writes. If you're going to write to it frequently, look for some "wear-leveling" code that will ensure the writes get spread more-or-less evenly across the SSD to prolong life

There also seems to be a second performance issue with SSDs: writing requires erasing and rewriting a write block, and write-blocks are much larger than read-blocks, so writes take longer than reads and writes on used but unerased portions of the SSD take longer than writes on fresh or already-erased portions of the SSD; notifying the OS that a portion of the SSD is now free and can be erased can make later writes faster if the OS can erase in the background; I think this is what TRIM is about

I did a build with an SSD earlier this year and separated the OS installation so that the stable stuff was mostly on the SSD and directories that got written often were on the HDD

[IDemo]

6. Wear-leveling is already implemented in the SSD controller firmware

Although each manufacturer may use different algorithms.

If I were to purchase an SSD now, I'd probably get a 32GB for the OS and some apps and an external hard drive for data. They're going to have to drop in price a lot
before most consumers are going to shell out the bucks.

[Turbineguy]

7. I have the OS

and programs on the SSD and data on the Raptor drive. The only exception is Outlook. I would like to have the mail file on the second HD but it seems that cannot be done. Or can it?

BTW I bought the Intel SSD. I just got their SSD Toolbox.

[struggle4progress]

8. You may be right. I'm no expert. I did considerable websearch

before buying an SSD, and my impression is that not all manufacturers document well what they do, including changes in models, and that neither TRIM nor wear-leveling should simply be assumed. In some cases, SSD firmware updates might be indicated.