Must be an HP.

Not a chance... it is firmly afixed to the drive bay inside my rig... and that can't fall any farther [unless we have an earthquake] cos it's already on the ground.  I gotta say, though, these SSD's are diddy little things.  Having never seen one before, I thought it would be bigger. Oh well, so long as it does the job.

Nah, I think it's cactus.... cactus being an Oz term for f****d.  It no longer shows up in the BIOS so I'm fairly confident that it is d - e - a - d.... dead. Never mind, I'm pretty much finished installing everything now, and any important data [music, video, documents, etc] was backed up to another drive so I've lost nothing but my time, really.   Yes, I got frustrated when things didn't go to plan, and yes, I let fly a few cuss words here and there.... orright, A LOT of cuss words here and there, but I'm as happy as a hog in muck right now, with my rig running the best it ever has.

Aye.... HP shood ought ter be made t' walk tha plank.... AARRGGHHHH!!!!!

Pretty sure he's right....though I do actually build my own machines...

Re its size...yes it does look somewhat small and useless .... but that's the way computers go.....except Graphic cards.   They just get bigger and bigger....

how long is a piece of string?

Hey.........my lappys an HP and its working great. My last tower was an HP Pavilion and that one worked great to. Too bad it had Vista on it though.. The only other one I had was an eMachine. That worked pretty good. A few people I knew had Gateways and they sucked plus Dells. They weren't too bad but knock wood never had issues with anything HP.

Same here... if something can go wrong, I generally find a way to make it happen.  However, I also build my own machines.... and for the most part they go pretty good... I've just been a bit unlucky with hard drives, that's all... though I did get one bit of luck.  My PC bloke rang to tell me that my Hitachi drive can be exchanged.  Apparently it belongs to a batch that was recalled due to a faulty mechanism.

I haven't been around computers as long as many around here, but I have picked quite a few tips and ideas from various folk who have shared their experiences with the rest of us... and I cannot leave yrag out of that group of people.  I have probably learned more about PC's from his responses to folk here [myself included] than anywhere else.

That's for sure. If my drive bays were facing front to rear, instead of left to right, my GTX260 wouldn't fit.  Besides, I like the side-on mounting of drives because it makes for a tidier case, with much of the wiring/cabling hidden from view between the drive bay and the right side, looking from front to back. 

As for the SSD, bigger isn't always best and I can't help but be impressed with the performance of this baby.  Startups and shutdowns are lightening fast, as are program installations and operations, not to mention data transfers, etc.  I use TeraCopy to move and copy data, and wow, speeds up to 80 plus kbs... the best I saw before was in the mid to high 30's, sometimes low 40's.

Now you shouldn't be asking that here.  There'll be all sorts of answers, many exaggerated, and stringis envy will occur.

Okay, then, yours can stay aboard... if'n it be'aves itself.  Tha first sigh o' mutiny frum it, 'owever, an' it'll be keel'auled afore us makes it walk tha plank... orright?

Uvah - when they work, they are fine.  It is just the quirks they have (like the HD failing thing).  I once had one that the message kept coming up for years!  The HD never failed (I of course got scared and moved my data off, but the computer still worked until it just got too dang slow).

Well, if you have a little more that 240000$ and a PCI express 16x slot free, you can always try the io-drive octal ( http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodriveoctal/?tab=photos )... 5.12TB of capacity, read at 6.0 GB/s, write at 4.4 GB/s... beware that i wrote GB and not Gb... by example the 6.0 GB/s is in fact 48 Gb/s, almost 5 time faster that the new thunderbolt interface... with 6 drive, read speed can reach 1TB/s ( 8Tb/s ), speed that no hard drive can reach...

Well, this type of SSD is not for the general public but for data center, same with high buying price, it allow to spare a lot of money each year, mainly on the side of electric power... a data center with 792 server/55440 hard disk/396 SAN controllers/132 rack/1584 DDR Infinyband link can be replaced with 220 server/6 rack/448 DDR Infiniband link...

Point is that SSD for home user is somehow limited today but what we see in the professional sector today can become tomorrow the norm for home desktop...

Thoumsin....yep, there's stuff around that is seriously quick...but also seriously priced...

The actual limiter for FSX isn't drive speed...not even how big your GPU might be....but instead it's the CPU.

My 'current' FSX install [heavily edited] is 79gig, 170,000 files.

The most recent 'removals' to keep it 'small' are 28gig, 56,000 files.

The backup install [incremental] shows....109gig, 219,000 files. 

Stuff not used... 50gig, 134,000 files.

Total comes out as 256gig, or 579,000 files .... so there's probably actually a SSD that'd fit 'em....but there's no real point....

Based on this thread I picked up an SSD and I am fairly blown away. It's like that feeling you got when you install a fresh OS. Only double it, if you're doing a fresh OS on an SSD.

Time to turn my old drives into ze raid.

I love my 180gb OCZ SSD as an OS boot drive   But I don't find it that much quicker on startup, only the shutdown seems faster (and I mean super speedy - only about 5 seconds!)

I've been thinking about doing that, though I'd probably get a couple of extra externals for backing up... in the event that if one goes the data on all of them goes.

Anyhow, I have 3 regular drives in my box and it's a thought... would speed up data transfers, etc.

I'm not really seeing much improvement in boot-up either (maybe 5 seconds off ~20 seconds). More program starts and handling files, that's where I'm noticing a major improvement. Heck, even loading internet pages seem to go quicker, although that could just be imagination (it goes to ram, right?).

Win 7 on a regular HDD can take anywhere from  35 - 60 seconds to boot up, give or take, so if you're seeing boot times of 20 seconds or under with a SSD then you're laughing.  That is a significant improvement.  From the time I hit the power button to a usable desktop in Win 7, about 22 - 25 seconds... from the posting beep, about 17 - 18 seconds, give or take.

Yes, definitely, improved file handling and quicker response time for program loads, etc. I have a dual boot machine with Vista Home Premium x64 on a regular HDD, and I notice a distinct difference in speed between the two, whereas previously [to the SSD] there was little or no difference.

As for web pages loading faster, um, dunno about that one.  Yes, the browser of choice would have quicker response times on a SSD, as do all programs.... and that is probably where you are seeing the improvement.  Other than that, your ISP is generously chucking some extra speed your way.

ocz vertex right up to the current models have know issues.

SSD drives should however last longer than mechanical drives and have the added benefit that if they die generally the cells still retain data. Like mechanical drives ssd drives will throughout their life write out bad cells.

The mechanical drive has a chance of working for 20yrs if your really lucky, an SSD will pretty much reach its read or write limit and die. SSD tech is more fallible than mechanical in theory. So plan to replace your SSD!!!! Raid 1 anyone?