Customized computer?

[Buffalobiian]

Considering the pricing is lower than SATA SSD drives, I'm surprised at the performance. Is it because of modularity/flexibility of the standalone SATA drives?

Where are you getting these prices? Of the old-gen OCZ PCI-E cards, or their latest ones? Their latest ones are around 3x more expensive than a SATA drive of comparable storage size, like Twist said.

I got a Corsair Force GT Series 3 120 GB over a year ago and it's been working awesome. And i only have Sata-300. But i have been thinking of getting a OCZ Revodrive 3 PCI-E x4 SSD 120 GB. A guy said he booted up Win 7 in 7 seconds. Any of you have any experience with PCI-E SSDs? Would it be worth the 3x price to get the speed upgrade? Or should i just keep with my Force GT and wait for when i upgrade CPU and MB so i get Sata-600?

Not all motherboards support booting from a PCI-E storage device. You'll have to check if yours allows it first. Do you do a lot of heavy file transferring with your drive, or does it benefit mostly from the snappiness and IOP?

If you do use the drive for lots of large file transfers (sequential reads/writes), then you'll benefit from SATA3 upgrade later since it'll raise your cap from around 250MB/s to 500+.

If you're after snappiness (IOP and random writes), there is a theoretical upgrade there going from SATA2 to SATA3 as well, but I don't think you'll notice it much. It won't wow you.


My opinion is the same as Kraco's. With the money I'd look for a larger SSD to put more things on, rather than having something really (but marginally noticeably) fast.

@Kraco: Have you tried to make your BIOS load faster by skipping RAM checks and all? You can also skip the windows logo screen, because by default that icon stays on screen for a certain amount of time, even if your computer is ready for the next step. I used to keep the RAM-checks on, but it has never found a problem anyway, so I ended up getting rid of it for a faster boot. It doesn't matter either way since I use sleep a lot, and when I did have a ram problem back a year ago, the RAM check didn't pick up anything anyway.

edit: Just timed my own boot.

00.00 - pressed button, black screen
15.23 - black screen shows white words from BIOS
24.73 - the words "Starting Windows" is shown on the screen (W7).
45.80 - Start Bar appeared