About selecting SSD

[satimis]

Hi all,

I'm prepared to buy a SSD for testing. This will be my first experience using SSD.

Desktop PC
CPU - AMD 8-Core FX-8150 3.6GHz/16M
Mobo - ASUS M5A97 R2.0 AMD 970,DDR3,USB3.0,SATA3 6Gb/s,ATX M/B
RAM - Corsair Vengeance CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10 DDR3 1600MHz 32GB Kit (4x8GB)

The SSD will be partitioned into 2 partitions. This will be a dualboot SSD, one partition running Ubuntu 12.04 desktop, 64bit for installing OpenStack and another partition running Fedora 17 desktop, 64 bit for installing oVirt.

The size of SSD expected to be 200G~256G, SATA 3 6Gb/s.

Please shed me some light on selecting the SSD. I have no preset budget. However I don't expect to get an expensive SSD for testing.

TIA

B.R.
satimis

[Irithori]

For SOHO use, the usual suspects are (at least for me) OCZ, Samsung and Intel.
The key metric is the reading and especially writing of small random files.
Do not get blinded by X hundreds of Megabytes/s in sequential read/write.
This is nice -and occasionally useful- but not the typical usecase for a desktop.

Also: As SSDs are still somewhat expensive, you might want to rethink dual boot.
Because this means, that you would need at least a 256GByte SSD (imho).


For comparison tests and benchmarks:
- http://www.tomshardware.com/
- http://www.anandtech.com/
- http://www.phoronix.com


Edit:
Oops, you want to run VMs, not primarily a desktop.
Then 256GByte might not be enough.
Are your VMs IO starved, or do you just want ot see the difference vs a regular harddisc?

[satimis]

For SOHO use, the usual suspects are (at least for me) OCZ, Samsung and Intel.
The key metric is the reading and especially writing of small random files.
Do not get blinded by X hundreds of Megabytes/s in sequential read/write.
This is nice -and occasionally useful- but not the typical usecase for a desktop.

Also: As SSDs are still somewhat expensive, you might want to rethink dual boot.
Because this means, that you would need at least a 256GByte SSD (imho).


For comparison tests and benchmarks:
- Tom's Hardware: Hardware News, Tests and Reviews
- AnandTech
- [Phoronix] Linux Hardware Reviews, Benchmarking, & Gaming


Edit:
Oops, you want to run VMs, not primarily a desktop.
Then 256GByte might not be enough.
Are your VMs IO starved, or do you just want ot see the difference vs a regular harddisc?

Hi,

Thanks for your advice.

In another thought I might get a 120G SSD first testing OpenStack. Then buy another 120G SSD later testing oVirt. I can't perform 2 tests simultaneously. Or after testing OpenStack wipe it out to test oVirt.

Yes I would run one or 2 VMs on the test not installing dozens. 120G capacity will be sufficient for the test. Actually my target is to experience the difference vs a regular harddisc.

satimis