500 Gbyte holographic DVD's coming soon!:

Originally posted by wormwood
10 000 writes for older ssd's and 3000-5000 writes for current ones.

but the thing with real life is, you're not gonna saturate that in any normal usage anytime soon. the files you write frequently, are VERY small. while the big files are very infrequent. it takes a lot of time to fill up a 100+ gb drive, no matter what you do. for an average movie/music ...[text shortened]... rite over that space.


you're not gonna run out of writes, not in the real world.

While we are on the topic of drives, does anyone know how to install Win XP on a SATA drive. I have XP with SP2 and it just will not recognise my SATA drive. I've tried downloading the SATA drivers and installing them via floppy and even embedding them in an XP disk using Nlite. Nope. Nothing. Nada. "Windows does not recognise the disk" blah effing blah. I'm done with pulling my hair out and have reverted back to my old IDE hard drive.

Originally posted by jimslyp69
While we are on the topic of drives, does anyone know how to install Win XP on a SATA drive. I have XP with SP2 and it just will not recognise my SATA drive. I've tried downloading the SATA drivers and installing them via floppy and even embedding them in an XP disk using Nlite. Nope. Nothing. Nada. "Windows does not recognise the disk" blah effing blah. I'm done with pulling my hair out and have reverted back to my old IDE hard drive.

That's odd. I just got a dual core cheapo from a computer shop with just that combination, XP and SATA drives. They don't seem to have a problem. Maybe a problem with your windows disc?

Originally posted by wormwood
you're not gonna run out of writes, not in the real world.

Also, the drive controller should handle the dead clusters/blocks, so your drive should* continue on with just a little less space.

Data and 'working' files should also really be moved to a 'traditional' HDD.

Do you still have a page/swap file? I'm not sure if you actually use Windows? That's the one thing that probably shouldn't be located on your SSD. These days with cheap RAM you can safely disable paging, as there's really no reason to not have at least 4GB in a 32bit OS, and definitely 6GB in 64bit systems.


* I've been hearing a lot lately about SSDs just dying after a few months. What's the story there? It's not something I've read up about too much.

If I had the money I'd love to just chuck 6 SSDs in a RAID6 configuration. I'm not really up to speed with the hardware anymore these days, but I've always wanted to have a rig with a nice juicy RAID setup inside...
I'm sure SSDs remove most of the latency concerns for RAID setups.

Originally posted by Palynka
Not sure this is true for the film industry. Video needs huge amounts of space.

Not sure I understand what you mean...? Do you mean on the distribution end? Sure, but not for long.

I don't think discs are dead today, but I definitely won't be buying into any new tech soon. Hell, I don't even have anything that can read Blu-Ray, but that's just because I stream and download content and don't care about HD and 3D.
There will probably be one more iteration and it may well be these discs in the OP, but it won't see adoption along the lines that CDs and DVDs had.

This is where we're going, I believe:
Storage is just getting so cheap that everyone is gonna have NAS setups instead of towers of discs, complemented by cheap fat data pipes to the net with cloud storage and stream the rest directly to all the new 'connected' devices that are commonplace now.
Netflix-, Steam- and Spotify-like services all streaming to wirelessly connected gear from your network gear connected to a fibre optic link to the Internet.

Originally posted by jimslyp69
While we are on the topic of drives, does anyone know how to install Win XP on a SATA drive. I have XP with SP2 and it just will not recognise my SATA drive. I've tried downloading the SATA drivers and installing them via floppy and even embedding them in an XP disk using Nlite. Nope. Nothing. Nada. "Windows does not recognise the disk" blah effing blah. I'm done with pulling my hair out and have reverted back to my old IDE hard drive.

How big is the drive? I think WinXP32 MBR has a 2TB limit. Not sure, just remember reading something about that. Just get Windows 7 buddy 😀

Originally posted by Crowley
How big is the drive? I think WinXP32 MBR has a 2TB limit. Not sure, just remember reading something about that. Just get Windows 7 buddy 😀

80GB which should suffice. Don't think I'd ever manage to fill 2TB.

@Sonhouse. I am informed that XP with SP2 on should have the necessary drivers but apparently not. I had exactly the same problem trying to install XP on a friend's SATA drive. I spent 10 hours on his to no avail. Not going to spend that long on this. I'd rather just buy 'Seven' and have done with it.

Originally posted by Crowley
How big is the drive? I think WinXP32 MBR has a 2TB limit. Not sure, just remember reading something about that. Just get Windows 7 buddy 😀

the Big disk limit was my first thought too. I've had drive recognition problems with xp,vista and 7. the usual cure was using the drive's manufacturer's installation software. but that's always been from within the OS, never before installing windows (as far as I can remember).

Originally posted by wormwood
the Big disk limit was my first thought too. I've had drive recognition problems with xp,vista and 7. the usual cure was using the drive's manufacturer's installation software. but that's always been from within the OS, never before installing windows (as far as I can remember).

The HD limit is a bios problem, which has been solved in the latest versions of the bios. It is not a windows thing.

Originally posted by jimslyp69
80GB which should suffice. Don't think I'd ever manage to fill 2TB.

@Sonhouse. I am informed that XP with SP2 on should have the necessary drivers but apparently not. I had exactly the same problem trying to install XP on a friend's SATA drive. I spent 10 hours on his to no avail. Not going to spend that long on this. I'd rather just buy 'Seven' and have done with it.

I'll talk to my computer guru and ask him what he did.

Originally posted by Crowley
Also, the drive controller should handle the dead clusters/blocks, so your drive should* continue on with just a little less space.

Data and 'working' files should also really be moved to a 'traditional' HDD.

Do you still have a page/swap file? I'm not sure if you actually use Windows? That's the one thing that probably shouldn't be located on your SS ...[text shortened]... p inside...
I'm sure SSDs remove most of the latency concerns for RAID setups.

yeah I have 8gb of ram on 64bit windows, but I'll get more again. used to have 12gb on the old machine, after hitting the roof all the time with 6gb. (a big chess db alone can choke on 6gb)

my first thought was to offload pagefile to a disk drive as well, but as I read up on it, MS has done analysis on that and it turns out the pagefile is EXACTLY the kind of file you'd want to put on the SSD. seems counterintuitive, but that's what the results were. so I kept it on.

don't know what the dying thing is, but OCZ had a big firmware issue right now that's been widespread. and I know other manufacturers have had similar problems of their own. apparently you can also lock the drive permanently by doing stupid things to it while updating firmware, so maybe it's something like that?

Originally posted by sonhouse
The HD limit is a bios problem, which has been solved in the latest versions of the bios. It is not a windows thing.

there are several kinds of big drive problems. it's not always bios related. in fact it's quite unlikely to be a bios problem nowadays as most computers are 'new' in that regard.

I can't remember having to flash bios in close to a decade because of big drive support.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I'll talk to my computer guru and ask him what he did.

He says the first thing to check is the bios, there are 4 Sata drive channels, any one of which may be off and that may be the one you are connected to. It may be automatic in which case you look for something else but the bios is a good place to start.

Originally posted by wormwood
there are several kinds of big drive problems. it's not always bios related. in fact it's quite unlikely to be a bios problem nowadays as most computers are 'new' in that regard.

I can't remember having to flash bios in close to a decade because of big drive support.

Ten years ago, 2001, a big drive was 200 gigs, one tenth and less the size of today's drives, there was no need for a big drive bios then.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Ten years ago, 2001, a big drive was 200 gigs, one tenth and less the size of today's drives, there was no need for a big drive bios then.

2gb limit was the problem those days.

checking the specific sata port is enabled is a good idea though. also if there are additional sata ports by another manufacturer, they usually need separate drivers to function.

Originally posted by sonhouse
He says the first thing to check is the bios, there are 4 Sata drive channels, any one of which may be off and that may be the one you are connected to. It may be automatic in which case you look for something else but the bios is a good place to start.

Well Windows setup 'sees' the drive. It just says that it is not compatible with XP. I can delete and crate a prtition on it too. This tells me that the port is enabled. I think...