Thinkpads Forum

Finally I am back here after having had a "break" this summer from most computer related. Now that the days get colder here in Norway and outdoor hobbies like cars etc. comes to a halt, I can start spending time on my winter hobby again. I simply had to pick up another T60 this summer, as it was so cheap, and one T30 is up for a LCD swap, but that's another story.

I am really not sure where to post this, as it's both general hardware and OS related, so I ended up posting it here, as it's meant to go in a T60. After a CPU and RAM upgrade, I have now finally decided to buy an SSD for it, preferably 160Gb. Here in Norway I have found two drives: The Intel 320 160Gb and the OCZ Vertex 2 160Gb. The cheapest one is the OCZ, so it represents the best Gb/price ratio. The OS I will install on it is Vista Ultimate. So the questions are:

• - Is there a good reason to not chose the OCZ drive? I have read about slightly higher failure rates, but no really bad experiences to find. On the other hand; if there *are* weak points compared to Intel, it makes more sense to go with the more expensive 160Gb Intel drive. We are not talking about a huge difference in price, and having a reliable drive long term is of course more important than saving $60 right now.

• - What kind of additional TRIM tools can I use with the OCZ drive in Vista? Intel seems to have a good solution with their SSD Toolbox, but not sure about OCZ. Some might advice me to upgrade to W7 at the same time, but Vista Ultimate runs great, and I really like it. W7 will probably work great for me too, but I can't justify spending more than the cost of the SSD itself to get a new OS now.

Thank you for any advices!

Read this first: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=99024
Then you'll most likely not want OCZ.

Thanks for that input, RBS. That settled it. The small price difference taken into account, I won't even bother considering the OCZ anymore.

I had the general impression that there are more errors and problems with the OCZ drives even before I posted here. I found several sources listing a higher failure rate compared to Intel, but not the huge number of cases where the OCZ simply didn't work(!). I also knew that the alignment can be an issue particularly when applying an image onto a SSD drive, so the following quote caught my attention:

Certain drives like Intel SSDs seem to work just as well when sectors aren't aligned due to some magic they've worked into their controllers.

Not sure if that's a problem only if the image is created from a regular mechanical drive, or if it's a problem even if the image is created and transfered from one SSD to another. Or if it can be a problem even with a clean install. I haven't read enough about the subject. Sector alignment really came to my attention with a pair of WD 2TB HDDs for my server. They have to be jumpered to get the proper alignment for XP and WinSrv2003. But that's also another story, a different technology and has little to do with this.