 It's fast. Solid return for money spent. |
| Review Date: January 28, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Steve S., Chicago, IL USA |
Pros: It's power consumption is lower. It fit into my laptop case just fine. I would say boot speed is faster than a Raptor. I have not experienced any of the stutters or delays associated with these sorts of drives at this price point.
Cons: It's a little pricey for 30GB.
Other Thoughts: I took an extra 5 minutes and formatted it according to the OCZ recommendations prior to installing XP Pro. I have experienced the random-write stutter issues on other SSD's I have, so I know what to look for. I am not experiencing these issues with this drive. It did not seem to like installation from a SATA-based CD-ROM, so I used an IDE-based one with no problem. Could be the SSD, could be the Optical drive. I don't know. I suspect it's my make and model of SATA CD/DVD drive.
I don't subscribe to synthetic benchmarks because they are, well, synthetic. What I can tell you is that it does not stutter or lock up for brief periods of time. XP Pro installed quickly-much faster than a 7200RPM drive. SP3 installed quickly.
However, I doubt this drive could keep up with a sustained write if pitted against a decent 7.2K or 10K drive.
Finally, I suggest you follow the additional SSD tips such as disabling indexing, system restore, using appropriate cache settings, and such. If you have a second mechanical drive you should use that drive for your page file. Don't defragment SSD's, regardless of how much your defragmenter nags you to. A few extra minutes of work upfront will be repaid with a much quicker SSD down the road. |
Pretty good
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| Review Date: June 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: JLDET5, |
| I'm using this as a secondary drive and secondary boot drive. No problems and seems pretty good. I'm going to try their faster Vertex performance version as a primary very soon! |
Solid Improvement For An Aging OSX Apple MacBook
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| Review Date: May 23, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Mac Gizmo Guy, Minneapolis, MN USA |
| This low-end 'value' SSD from OCZ is markedly fast compared to the stock hard drive my 1st-generation MacBook came with. It's performed flawlessly running OS X Leopard 10.5 the past few months, and I consider an SSD to be the singularly smartest computer upgrade I've ever done. My Mac starts up, launches and switches apps, shuts down in a *fraction* of the time. I've never detected any of the 'stuttering' or 'pausing' Windows XP users moan about with these original JMicron controller based drives: OSX responds admirably. Given that most Macs - until rather recently - have SATA I speed controller chips, buying the absolute latest, greatest, fastest SATA II SSD may be overkill anyways. However, I do think my NEXT SSD will decidedly be an OCZ *Vertex* drive two-tiers up from the Solid Series. |
Great for simple RAID 10 Configuration
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| Review Date: February 9, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: R. Hsu, Los Angeles, CA |
| Not sure what happened on the price, but I came across this drive at much lower price and I pulled the trigger to see how much faster a SSD RAID 10 would be faster than my Raptor (I bought four of these w/ Amazon Prime). I saw about a 100% increase in performance in data transfer tests, but still not quite what I saw in reviews of other drives. I'm guessing its probably my on board RAID hardware that is hardly near the enterprise grade stuff that I read up in the Battleship MTron test. Definitely worth the investment though. All I hear now sitting at my desktop is the fan of the computer. No more noisy hard drives! Of course this drive is 2.5" in size so its ideal for a laptop. Size is a little on the small size individually though. Running Windows Vista OS and MS Office, you'll easily be close to the capacity of the drive. If you're looking to run a single SSD drive, I'd recommend you go bigger than 30 GB. If you're curious about the technology, this is a great entry level size to try it out and replace an old/dying drive! |
Solid series not a good value anymore
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| Review Date: February 19, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: A. Wiersch, Lantana, TX USA (near Dallas) |
This is my "story" for upgrading an older Seagate 7200.1 2.5" hard drive in a Windows XP notebook to a new OCZ Solid Series SSD.
For my main system, I have a Vista x64 system with two drive docks, an eSATA one and a USB one. I removed the old Seagate 7200.1 80GB HD from my Windows XP Dell E1505 notebook. Unfortunately I forgot the hard drive was password protected so I had to install it back into the notebook and remove the password before I could put it in the dock and my computer would see data on the drive. I wonder if the OCZ drive supports password protection? I may have to investigate that.
I put the OCZ 60GB Solid drive in my eSATA dock and followed the directions on the OCZ forum for using diskpar to create an aligned partition. NOTE: I use a program called "HotSwap!" to install/remove drives in my eSATA dock which I find very handy (makes it work more like USB drives). NOTE: Don't forget to make the new partition on the SSD the actve partition.
I then used robocopy (included in my Vista install) to copy the files to the OCZ drive (two commands because two partitions):
robocopy d: l: /MIR /COPY:DATSOU /R:2 /W:2
robocopy f: m: /MIR /COPY:DATSOU /R:2 /W:2
I had some errors trying to copy some "crypto" files (and some others). Security related?
To restore the MBR, I used "mbrfix64.exe" from [...]
I then put the drive back in the notebook and hoped it would boot up... and it did!
I then applied some of the tweaks mentioned on the OCZ forum. This included some registry tweaks and disabling the Indexing Service. I did not do the "tweak in beta test" and I did not disable my page file even though I have 2 GB of RAM in the computer. I also did not setup a RAM disk.
I had some problems with Outlook XP. It may have been how the files were copied with robocopy (I would have preferred to use Acronic True Image but was concerned about it preserving the partition alignment). Doing a "Detect and Repair" operation in outlook and then shutting down and restarting Outlook seems to have fixed it.
So far my impressions are very positive. The computer boots much faster and is very quiet. Programs load faster. I have not experienced any obvious stuttering.
UPDATE 2009-06-18: I'm reducing this to 2 stars now because this drive use to be "cheap" but the price has risen and better SSD prices have come down making it (at this time) a bad buy. I recommend a Vertex or other Indilinx based SSD. Intel is also tops but more expensive. A Samsung ontroller is another good choice. |
Nice replacement for harddrive
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| Review Date: January 18, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Maria Evelyn, Florida,USA |
| Nice alternative for your hard drive if you are the careless type of person.They said it could handle shock.In terms of speed there's no noticeable improvement compared to my 7200 hard drive.The quality is excellent. |
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