sweet and thanks a lot for this info looking forward to getting some locally. (crucial.com started selling them online)

good question. a simple answer is no, in terms of cost effectiveness. say you have 32gb of ram, the most you can do is to create a 24gb ramdisk, provided that 8gb is good enough for your usage. so how much is 24gb of ram? for now it's MYR 900 roughly. with that money you can get a decent 256gb ssd easily. 24gb vs. 256gb. it's obvious.

a ramdisk is useful when you do have a lot of ram. the only problem with it is the sudden power loss.

imo a better system is to ensure you can make full use of the hardware resources that it has, leveraging on strengths of each component. for a system with ssd, a good amount of ram, and uninterrupted power supply (i.e. laptops or pc with UPS), it's good to have a ramdisk like the following:
1. OS drive - ssd;
2. apps/games - ssd;
3. data - hdd, this is still the cheapest option as data storage;
4. temporary reads/writes folders, scratch disk, browser cache, etc. stuff which are essential to have but are safe to discard when you shut your computer down - ramdisk.

since ramdisk has strengths like being the fastest of all in terms of data read/writes, and almost indestructible no matter how many times you write to it, it's good to have some to house at least user-level temporary folders/files and web browser cache. (even a small one, e.g. 2gb, can help a lot).

since you have moved almost all high write/erase operations from ssd to ramdisk, it helps to reduce write/erase cycles in ssd, thus help prolong the lifespan of your ssd too.

.. and this is not about rich or not, you can even do this to a 3k laptop which has a 8gb of ram.

that's what we all should do here: to share haha!

i suggest you try softperfect ramdisk; free for personal use, simple, you can create ramdisk of unlimited size with it, you can re-adjust ram disk when you need more system ram, and i think it's one of the fastest.

not really. perhaps you should pm ronaldjoe to see if he can get one for you.

you can grab it in digital (mall?). it's available in many shops there. however, due to the warranty policy of msi laptops, i think it's best that you consult msi service center for this.

for the 120-240gb range, crucial m500 is kind of low in performance compared to your samsung choice (due to less optimized use of 128gb nand, instead of usual 64gb. this was fixed in new m550 for the similar range).

so in terms of speed and value, imo the samsung drive has more advantages. for common usage samsung drive should be reliable. we have seen many adopted it while seldom read complaints about it.

just fyi, for the 480-960gb of crucial m500, they are still good. in fact, if it's for common usage only (and you have some spares), you should also consider 480-960gb, as the price tags for them will likely be adjusted also.

with new waves of ssd releases in the coming months, hopefully we will have more options to pick from.

you can ask ronaldjoe.

nice far more cost-effective than investing in enterprise ssd's if space and reads are priorities.

if it meets your expectations sshd might be a good choice to be honest.

apart from ssd optimizations, you should also enable rapid mode via samsung magician.

on a side note, for those who use primocache (i use it to enhance hdd reads), rapid mode will fail to start in the presence of primocache. (this happens in 0.9.9; not sure about the new 1.0.1. maybe they are all ram-based enhancements, so there are conflicts between them; like softperfect ramdisk issue previously) so to keep the high hdd reads, i disable rapid mode and replace the ram cache part with primocache. (primocache is more configurable, e.g. allow you to define how much ram you can allocate for ram cache, and it covers all drives, including ssd's and hdd's)

yeah it's a good use case. maybe dell and samsung would like to hear it http://www.ideastorm.com/Idea2SessionIdea?...7000001F5GMNAA3

it looks ok. rapid mode is a ram-based enhancement for samsung drives that depend on several factors other than the ssd. (e.g. mobo, cpu, ram) you can also turn it off and do a test on ssd-only performance. maybe someone with same drive and capacity can compare theirs with yours.

here is mine (samsung 840 pro with and without rapid mode, connected to sata3; samsung 830 and plextor m5m is connected to sata2, hence the apparent bottleneck)

if you're looking at warranty of 5 years or relatively better performance, go for intel 530. if your budget is tight, sandisk looks viable. (unless there are some reasons behind, sandisk's price is a steal if you asked me)

yes, usually permitted writes are larger than 10GB per day for consumer ssd's. for common usage, that's a huge number to overcome. everyday.

for things like torrents, plus the limited internet bandwidth that we have, hdd is still a better choice. spacious and affordable.

yeah that's the same reason why i suggest to take up larger ssd's.

in terms of performance (which most of us translate to speed and iops), yes it's true, you can say samsung 840 evo hands down intel 530. (the samsung drive also include ram-based enhancement, RAPID mode, and when enabled i think none of the sata-based ssd's can beat that).

previously i compared the three ssd's that you have listed. intel 530 was a relatively better option. but if you included samsung 840 evo, then i will choose the samsung drive.

imo lsi sandforce is here to stay. although it's true that this controller had some bad histories previously, with certain characteristics that are not perfect, we still cannot deny the fact that it helped bring down the costs during the early development of consumer ssd technologies, so that we can benefit from it. until now, if we cannot afford those higher-price brands, we still have cheaper options. (relatively not that efficient but still better than hdd)

by the way some notes: the current trend of ssd development is further segmentation into more specific usage. (maybe they think we are not confused enough hehe).

yeah i have read about your incidence before and that's really worrying because i also have some 3tb drives from the same maker lol!

the current sweet spot in terms of ssd size is now 512gb (performance/price ratio is shifting dramatically every year. good sign). however the one thing we wish for, the price drop, is not at the same pace :/

maybe someone with that drive can give you a better insights.

oh nice i am getting some, too hehe

best bang for buck.. AceCombat is selling plextor/liteon m6m (oem) for MYR 280. check out her thread at garage sales if you're interested.

if you want local retail stocks (with full manufacturer warranty), it's better for you check other sellers out.

yeah there is nothing wrong with it. it's just a practice that you set your system up so that you can manage it better. to me it saves some time (to restore the system from a working system image; and to certain extents it saves some writes on ssd's).

i always have systems set up this way, i.e. 1x OS drive (120gb is fine but i prefer to go for 240gb and up, because of 2 reasons: i also have a number of essential apps installed in the OS drive, and i wanna leverage on performance advantages due to ssd size), and then 1x apps/games. (depends on your needs of space, this one could be 240gb or more). i create a system image after everything is fine for the OS drive only, without apps/games. this work for me because i can just restore the working system in very short time if i screwed my system up. (in order to do that i keep the latest system images in a dedicated external hdd)

i use this way to save some gb's of write/erase cycles on the same ssd from my games collection (it's getting huge these days). the process of system restores also doesn't take long. (under half an hour and the computer is good to go, with most of tools i need to work hehe).

these days, with the built-in system imaging tool, there is really no need to go through a full fresh OS installation cycle, which you need to set everything up again from scratch. (e.g. drivers, apps, system optimizations, etc.)