So, I just bought meself my first SSD ever!

Crucial M500 240GB. It was on sale and within my affordable range.
The 256GB was about $60 more.

Cleaning out stuff on the primary partition and defragging it before cloning/backing up what's there.
The total effective size of stuff I use on the primary partition is only about 45GB.
I could do without a few Steam games or so. Meh. I have 240GB to use.

So, being entirely new to this, I want to see who else is part of the SSD revolution?

Things I'm interested in learning:

How did you decide to get one? (save up for larger capacity, "Pro" series, waited for a sale, etc?)
What did you get? (brand, make, capacity, geekstats, etc)
How do you prepare your machine for your SSD? (what BackingUp/Cloning programs did you use? Freeware/TrialWare/Shareware/Payware/?)
What do you use your SSD for? (gaming, video editing/processing/converting, heavy image editing/processing, server-based activities like game hosting or server hosting?, got it just for the internet/etc?)
How do you look after your drive? (TRIM enabled? defrag or avoid defragging? write new files to it and delete constantly for work station?)
Misc. Info (do you have a RAMDisk installed as well? how did merging virtual drives like Daemon Tools or other virtual environments turn out?)



I got:
I want to use it for my primary partition with the OS and all my good programs.
I really wanted to get one to speed up program initializing. Starting most programs takes some time and when you're running on "internet time", HDD seems like eternity. I also want to use it greatly speed up video editing. Working from Blu-ray will greatly benefit from SSD, me thinks.

Mostly, I'm going to use it to edit/convert movies with Avisynth to x264 encoding (or HCenc for DVD). Will sometimes do some editing with Sony Vegas.
A tiny bit of gaming. Minecraft counts. A few Steam games here and there. Most recent game I have is Arkham City. From a "Humble Bumble" charity sale. I buy mostly old games on Steam (Age of Empires 3: complete set) or really good games from GOG.com. So, that's the extent of my gaming environment lol.

Crucial M500 240GB internal for my desktop.

Right now, looking into Acronis, EaseUS, etc programs for Cloning/BackingUp my HDD. Just the primary partition with the OS. The secondary partition can easily be deleted so I don't partition the SSD. I'm not sure how well the SSD will handle partitions.

I hear TRIM should come in very handy. I have to read up on what it does though.
I hear defragging should be avoided, no matter how "professional" some defraggers advertise themselves. Raxco's "PerfectDisk" supposedly is designed to defrag SSD's without causing any damage or degrading life-span of an SSD, but I've not really looked into reviews about said Raxco technology.
I hear constantly writing files to the SSD and deleting them afterward (due to heavy video editing/processing work stations) can lower life-expectancy of an SSD. A cost I'll have to take into consideration in the future. Maybe a couple years, maybe one, maybe 4, who knows.

I have a RAMDisk currently installed, so I'm thinking of uninstalling it to be on the safe side. I could google about SSD's and RAMdisks but have zero faith about internet people... :( Zero.



So, people, spill the beans on your SSD and how it's made you feel.
Love it? Hate it? Need to upgrade soon?

Particularly interested in people who do video editing with theirs.
I imagine gaming will feel smooth.

---------- Post added at 04:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:50 PM ----------

Another note!

I like to use Smooth Video Project (SVP) (http://anonym.to/?http://www.svp-team.com/) a lot when watching movies.
It requries Avisynth with a bunch of awesome plugins to interpolate the FPS to a new (higher) FPS.

24fps to 60fps.
Or double the FPS (24fps to 48fps).

24 is the standard film rate, the original recording speed.

NTSC regions will convert to 23.976fps for blu-ray and telecine from 23.976 to 29.97 for DVD.
PAL regions will keep 24fps for blu-ray and convert from 24 to 25 fps for DVD.

With SVP, I got o 59.96 fps for movies.
It's quite intensive processing for HD movies.
And I use different mods of the plugins since they're faster. I haven't tested with the official plugins and builds, but with the SSD, I'm planning to.
Even with an upgraded NVidia (ZOTAC GeForce GT 640; upgraded from integrated Intel i5 HD Graphics), it's still heavy processing for a full BD remux. I have to downscale movies from 1080p to 720p. Sometimes even 800x434p. o_O My desktop can handle 720p@60fps. But my dated laptop can only do 434p@60fps.

---------- Post added at 04:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:09 PM ----------

PLUS! I can finally play NES/SNES/MAME emulator. Hell yeah.

I read two great thread starts today, this being one of them. You've answered your own questions for the most part. First off, don't bother defragging. In fact never do this. You're just wearing down your memory for no gain/effect. The memory is true random access, not disc based 'random access'. I mentioned wear back there. Don't keep anything on the SSD that isn't backed up elsewhere, as when they fail, they fail without warning and usually nothing can be recovered. (I find this to be the only downside - besides the cost/capacity ratio, but that's going to improve hopefully.) And yes, you did the right thing in getting one. They're quiet and fast, and in laptops use way less battery juice, although they probably won't blow your socks off. My choice was to use it as a standard C: drive holding the O/S. The pagefile and all that jazz goes on there along with the installed applications. Personally, I keep data on a normal HDD, but it's always a doddle to copy something to the SSD if needed, but generally, processing large video files is usually a burden on the CPU, not the disk. Regarding partitions, you can do what you usually do - there's no difference. Only that the new SSDs are SATA3 and some may not be backward compatible with SATA2 or SATA1. So if it isn't being picked up by the BIOS, the M/B may not be SATA3 ready. I find freeware partitioning programs to be sufficient and better than software I've purchased, go figure.

With respect to 24p films, the only solution for smooth true 24p playback is to use a monitor which is 24p compatible with a gfx card that can be set to 24p. Some nVidia can do this, but the monitor needs to be able to switch too. Anything else is not so clever. Modern TVs or BD players will read MKV files on USB flash drives/HDDs and convert from 24 to 60fps. This can be somewhat irritating, because the technology is in there, but cannot be used to display at 24p. I've looked around for plug in devices which will play MKVs and AVIs, but they all do the NTSC style telecine shite. The only other way to get 24p from a downloaded/ripped video, is to make a BD-video, which kind of defeats the purpose and play it on a BD player which is also 24p compatible (most of them are these days). The downscaling you mention sounds nasty, and I've no idea why that's necessary [scratches head in puzzled fashion]. If you're making DVDs, you may want to consider changing the frame rate from 24 (23.976) to 25 (PAL format), remembering to resample the audio to match the new length. You can do this AVISynth easily enough, even handling stereo sound. However 6 channel audio needs to be sorted in a sound editor.

The downscaling you mention sounds nasty, and I've no idea why that's necessary [scratches head in puzzled fashion]. If you're making DVDs, you may want to consider changing the frame rate from 24 (23.976) to 25 (PAL format), remembering to resample the audio to match the new length. You can do this AVISynth easily enough, even handling stereo sound. However 6 channel audio needs to be sorted in a sound editor.

You have to be familiar in using SmoothVideoProject (SVP) to understand how it works and how downscaling works.


SmoothVideoProject (SVP) interpolates video as you watch it, by using Avisynth to process the video through your media player.

To playback 1080p as 1080p interpolated to 60fps, you need a very high-end graphics card (PCIE-3 would be nice) to playback at 1080p@60fps with "max" settings.
With "max" settings, and my rig, I can only get the smoothest playback if I were to downscale the video to 720p, for 60fps interpolating.

There are a lot of settings and tweaks that can be done to adjust how smooth you want to interpolate video while using SVP.



With regards to converting to DVD, I don't have any means to create "High Frame Rate" (albeit converted to HFR; aka "Fake HFR") DVD's.
The best I could do with NTSC sources for HFR DVD's is to create an interlaced DVD, so I don't have to process the audio.
Plus, my TV doesn't support PAL frame rates, so it all would have to be NTSC-compliant specs.


However, converting to a compliant AVCHD would be more practical if that were my goal.
But, that's for another time when I get around to testing all the different modded plugins that SVP requires to interpolate video.



Still backing up the computer and sorting my externals. Bought a new external so really want to try keep things tidy before committing to anything.
Planning on installing the SSD today and give it a good run.

Thanks for clarifying on other concerns, though. I have more confidence about maintaining my SSD.

> How did you decide to get one?

It was time for a new PC and it's been obvious for some time that using an SSD for stuff that has to happen quickly, or depends on random access performance is a good idea.

> What did you get?

First SSD (~3 years ago) was an OCZ Vertex 2, 120gb. It started acting up so I replaced it with a Kingston 240gb - the model escapes me. Since building a completely new PC in February, I supplemented it with another Kingston of the same model and bought the Vertex back in as a "grunt" drive. I use it as temporary storage for downloads using Internet Download Manager, so all the parts get downloaded, reassembled on the SSD, then automatically shunted over to a spinning disk when they're done.

> How do you prepare your machine for your SSD?

On this occasion I hosed the whole lot and reinstalled everything. It's never a bad time to completely rebuild your system. Yeah, it takes a while to get everything back the way you like it, but it's usually worth the effort. I quite like Macrium Reflect for cloning (it's free, and it just works) for the occasions where I need to do that. Acronis is good but it a) costs and b) mollycoddles you.

> What do you use your SSD for?

Exclusively for boot and software. The PC itself gets used for everything gaming, video editing, encoding / cleaning up, etc, intense Photoshop work, etc, the works. I have one of these (fit-PC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fit-PC)) as a 24-hour torrent/Voip/mail/everything server.

> How do you look after your drive?

TRIM on of course. No defrag, NEVER defrag. Fragmentation is meaningless on a non-mechanical drive. There are no moving parts to consider when calculating access time - getting data at block 00000 takes just the same time as getting it from block FFFFF. Additionally, SSD firmware automatically distributes data in a random fashion for load balancing and to avoid unnecessary stress that would be caused by thrashing the same blocks again and again. IE, an SSD is actively trying to fragment itself for longevity and performance gains. Defragging does nothing except move all the randomly located data to another random location. The firmware will put the data wherever it feels like.

> Misc. Info

With 32gb of RAM who needs a RAMDisk? SSD's fast but RAM is faster.

SSD won't boost the speed of any processor intensive task - encoding, etc. The processing will be the bottleneck.

> I like to use Smooth Video Project (SVP) a lot when watching movies.

Welcome to Artefact Country! If there's only 24 frames of actual data, watch at 24fps. These interpolation algorithms are gimmicks - clever gimmicks, definitely, but gimmicks nonetheless. You cannot know what happened between the two frames you've got unless you have a time machine - you can only guess. Computers are bad guessers. Sometimes it looks OK, sometimes it looks terrible. (Try the Lightcycle race in Tron... URGH!)

Additionally... why would you want to throw away actual resolution (ie, picture detail you really have native) in favour of fake inter-frame data you have to conjure up with wonky movement vectors?

I like cake. I know pie is the more acceptable response, but I am not comfortable with "acceptable", and I really like cake. German Chocolate cake to be exact, though most any chocolate works.

**carry on**