OCZ Core SSD 64GB

Having one of the Aspire One's with the 120GB drive, and having a couple of these at work now, I have gained a lot of experience with changing out those internal pieces like hard drives and RAM chips. In one of our work machines, I had the chance to switch out the 120GB hard drive for a basic 64GB OCZ Core SSD drive.

I haven't had a chance to benchmark it, the machine was not mine, so I only had the opportunity to do the switch, nothing more. The only benchmarking I have done is Windows XP and a Dell M1330 with these basic level SSD drives, and there was a lot of stuttering. I think the laptop was too fast for a core level SSD, and it created bottlenecks.

Has anyone tried one of these types of SSD drives in a AAO, and have they had success? I'm running Windows 7 at the moment, so I know that will help with SSD friendliness, and I'm curious if I should plunge in.

 

Core and Core 2 SSD:s, together with the majority of "cheap" MLC SSD:s suffer from stuttering in windows OS. You can tweak the OS so that most stuttering is gone but it will always be marginal. The never OCZ SSD:s Vertex and Apex do handle windows better.

 

Lately I've installed an OCZ Solid Series 30G in my AA1-110 and set up XP system volume on it. It works just smooth and fast.

I had been suffering a lot from the original 8GB SSD for incredible stuttering all the time, since I installed Windows XP on it. I don't know if that could be called "stuttering" cause I haven't used OCZ SSD product before and can not compare. The HDD indicator LED on the panel always froze for several seconds and the machine gave little response at the time.

But now, with the new OCZ 30G SSD, no freezing of the HDD light any more. Maybe I still need time or try more complicated tasks on it to encounter one.

 

Good. At least that shows that it works better htan the A110 SSD, which I think is the worst case available.

 

Yes, and it really works well with 110. I've tried ghosting and let the original 8GB and new 30G works side by side under exactly the same XP, guess what, the booting time is shortened from 3m20s to 1m02s and the shutdown time from 46s to 11s. With the OCZ 30G, the HDD led just blinks but never stays fully on like before and the system always responds instantly.

 

is your partition aligned? download diskpar.exe, and run it in a command window with the -i switch to see what the offset is

 

All of the above tells me what I expected.

1) It is better than a hard drive setup.
2) It's far from perfect.

My experiences with this in an M1330, including the stuttering big time, have proven this to be the case for me, that the Core drives aren't perfect, so, just to know that it works somewhat better is still a positive step.

 

I did the partition alignment before I transfered my old XP system onto it. I don't know if that really helps. I have not encountered any stuttering so far with my new SSD and the system just flies, much better than my 14" notebook which uses a 2.5 5400RPM Hitachi HDD.

 

I don't think partition alignment is retained when you restore an xp installation, have you verified that it is still aligned after restoring XP onto it?

 

As I think, the alignment will be changed by restoring a previous disk image, but if you only restore a previous partition image, the alignment will remain. I can not check it any more because I've already done another alignment on my SSD and installed a brand new Windows 7 on it.