The Winchester Killer

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vishalrao

vishalrao

Global Moral Police
Luminary
I see dead peopl...err.. Winchesters...

Any guesses?

See: Picasa Web Albums - Vishal - Winchester Ki...

Cost: about GBP 295/- (UK pounds sterling incl. VAT and shipping)

It's very lightweight too, like under 50 gms probably... lighter than the cardboard box it came in feels like!

edit: PS: "Winchester" was the nickname for some of the first IBM magnetic platter based "hard disks" back in the 1960s I believe...
 
Yea, hopefully Seagate (current enterprise Pulsar SSD seller) and WD will start consumer grade SSD sales in 2010 too and things will take off... (better prices and faster transfers with SATA3 / 6gbps)...

I'm guessing end next year 2010 will be the sweetest time yet to buy a good disk with stable cross-OS TRIM/GC etc support... I just could not resist getting one of these right now :D
 
Congrats :) Me also planning in a couple of months ;)

PS : Can you post some real life transfer rates ? Writes as well as reads.
 
Thanks! Well I'm flying back from London to Pune reaching in the wee hours of xmas (Fri) morning... so I guess it will be next weekend when I get to play with this... :D

In the mean time googling for "crucial m225 ssd review" should get some info... I am trusting comments from reviewers like Anandtech/CodingHorror etc saying "this is the best upgrade you can give your PC" etc...

It's basically an IndiLinx Barefoot controller drive and apparently has good pricing. Current firmware has TRIM support but potential write-perf problems which Crucial will release a fix soon. Plus "GC" support also "coming soon" in another firmware update.

Didn't get Intel coz 80gb/160gb size were too small/large for me plus was wary of the slower write perf - I will multiboot Win7 (80gb partition) along with 2-3 Linux installations so 128 gb is about right for me.

I think you can get this for maybe 20% (Rs 5k) cheaper from US - silly me, a coworker was flying in from US and I forgot to ask him :D But strangely prices seem same with a casual look on newegg.com... (forum threads talking about coupons from Bing etc for discounts).

But really, anyone willing to wait, probably end-2010 should be the best time to buy an SSD guessing more mainstream/stable technology and higher performance with better affordability and local warranty support... if this thing has problems I will be stuck with a Rs 23k paperweight...

In fact, if someone wants to really get one of these in budget right now, get Kingston 40GB (little slow read/write but under Rs 10k) or another 64gb/80gb model (Rs 15k or less maybe) and you can squeeze in a Windows plus Linux dual boot :)
 
vishalrao said:
Thanks! Well I'm flying back from London to Pune reaching in the wee hours of xmas (Fri) morning... so I guess it will be next weekend when I get to play with this... :D

In the mean time googling for "crucial m225 ssd review" should get some info... I am trusting comments from reviewers like Anandtech/CodingHorror etc saying "this is the best upgrade you can give your PC" etc...

It's basically an IndiLinx Barefoot controller drive and apparently has good pricing. Current firmware has TRIM support but potential write-perf problems which Crucial will release a fix soon. Plus "GC" support also "coming soon" in another firmware update.

Didn't get Intel coz 80gb/160gb size were too small/large for me plus was wary of the slower write perf - I will multiboot Win7 (80gb partition) along with 2-3 Linux installations so 128 gb is about right for me.

I think you can get this for maybe 20% (Rs 5k) cheaper from US - silly me, a coworker was flying in from US and I forgot to ask him :D But strangely prices seem same with a casual look on newegg.com... (forum threads talking about coupons from Bing etc for discounts).

But really, anyone willing to wait, probably end-2010 should be the best time to buy an SSD guessing more mainstream/stable technology and higher performance with better affordability and local warranty support... if this thing has problems I will be stuck with a Rs 23k paperweight...

In fact, if someone wants to really get one of these in budget right now, get Kingston 40GB (little slow read/write but under Rs 10k) or another 64gb/80gb model (Rs 15k or less maybe) and you can squeeze in a Windows plus Linux dual boot :)
Click to expand...

Well i am planning something else altogether :ohyeah: (will be avoiding Intel because of their 1 Year warranty). From what i have seen, nearly all brands with the Indilinx chip have nearly the same performance, within 5% of each other, it's the price and ASS that will tilt the balance in favour of any of them. Still have nearly a month before i will be making any kind of upgrade though, as need moolah for an i7 jump along with this.

Do post the speeds though when you can.
 
Crucial seem to have good prices. Though there are these Corsair (Extreme X128) models - little less perf and not much higher price - Not sure about firmware updates. maybe they will offer better local/India warranty support? I should have thought about checking with Corsair about that... sure, I will post a mini review next weekend of this disk's performance...

PhOeNiX said:
Well i am planning something else altogether :ohyeah:
Click to expand...

"something else" ? like what? SSD in striped RAID???
 
Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Jesus! No I ain't no Christian, this SSD is to damn fast I simply had to take the Lord's name in vain this xmas season :D

Windows 7 (RC) boot time down from about 25 sec to 15 sec. Yes, this is a fresh install but I could only think of installing antivirus (installed MS Security Essentials instead of AVG this time) to make the bootup reasonably the same.

Sadly, Ubuntu 9.10 fails to install (freezes) on this SSD - apparently it's a bug in one of its components (libatasmart or udev or something)... so couldn't check its boot time.

Will later on try to do a compilation of some free software to see what is the difference, if any.

This drive came with the latest 1819 firmware which some users say has slow-write-speed problems (90 MBps) which I've not yet seen. Although its just day one, and my write speed does seem about 20% slower than other folks/benchmarks I've seen online... waiting for new firmware from Crucial which should arrive next week.

Posting some benchmark screenshots:

. . . .
 
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