From where?!

Craigslist. Some dude had 3. I'm guessing he bought them during the Intel Retail Edge promo and sold them for a little bit more.

Apparently people on NCIX forums for buying these on sale for $170ish.

Don't know how much they were for the Promo

I am so close to throwing my hard drive out the window.

tl;dr - Windows hanging at startup at pulsing GUI for ~40 seconds. Fine if HDD is disconnected and only SSD hooked up. Everything on the HDD functions perfectly fine in desktop and is not corrupted in any way. Boot order is correct, AHCI, drivers are correct. Second HDD shows up in UEFI as connected, but does not show up as a boot option, which it used to. Changed cables, ports to no avail.

BASICALLY, if the HDD is hooked up via SATA, it will not be displayed as a boot option in UEFI, but it will be recognized in system status under the SATA port it is connected to, and will boot up very slowly. With the HDD connected via USB HDD dock, the system boots up lightning quick and the drive is recognized as a UEFI drive or a floppy disk drive, and is recognized in Windows as the internal D Drive, but when I click the drive in Windows it will take around 30 seconds to load its files.

I am seriously out of ideas.

Have you tried plugging it into a friends computer? It might shed some light as to where the problem lies.

And what is your main goal here? Trying to make the system boot faster (by fixing the 40sec hang)? Or trying to make the boot option available again?
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Going to try plugging it into my other desktop to see.

My goal is to make the system boot the way an SSD is supposed to, in ~10 seconds. With the HDD disconnected that's the time it takes to boot. What's the point of having an SSD when it takes longer for it to boot than an HDD?

so need a new computer for my grandma somthing under $400 would be nice, what do you guys think of this?

NCIX - Buy Computers, Computer Parts, Laptops, World's Leading Discount Computer Store

i dont need anything but the tower, she only uses it for Skype, Browsing, and simple stuff like that but id like somthing that would last a while

^shoulda posted earlier..Lenovo had a price error $200 tax in for a new intel celeron..same size..

So I'm planning on upgrading to an SSD, and while the ones I'm looking at are hardly spectacular and I'd love to upgrade to something beastly....I'm just looking for something zippier than my current drive.

Am I, a moderate gamer/average user going to notice a huge difference between a 'decent' SSD and a 'beastly' one? Or am I better to save the hundred-some-odd bucks?

Decent SSDs:

Crucial m4
Kingston V300
Intel 335
OCZ Agility 3
Samsung 830
Samsung 840

'Beastly' SSDs:

Intel 520
Kingston HyperX 3000
OCZ Vector
OCZ Vertex 4
Samsung 840 Pro

Check prices and go from there. IMO the best bang for buck is the Kingston HyperX or Intel 520, whichever is cheaper. Intel 335 is also a good deal. I wouldn't recommend a Crucial m4 or a Samsung drive unless it's the 840 Pro.

Decent SSDs:

Crucial m4
Kingston V300
Intel 335
OCZ Agility 3
Samsung 830
Samsung 840

'Beastly' SSDs:

Intel 520
Kingston HyperX 3000
OCZ Vector
OCZ Vertex 4
Samsung 840 Pro

Check prices and go from there. IMO the best bang for buck is the Kingston HyperX or Intel 520, whichever is cheaper. Intel 335 is also a good deal. I wouldn't recommend a Crucial m4 or a Samsung drive unless it's the 840 Pro.

Mostly what I'm looking for is something that's 128gig give or take and as close to or below $150 as I can get. And yes, I realize I'm penny wise and pound foolish...but yeah. I've looked at benchmarks for some drives and their 256 and 512 are way better than the 120/128...and it's frustrating trying to figure out what to buy.

yes you need at least a 240 GB drive to get full performance. There were a few out there like the Vertex 3 Max IOPS that could perform, but not any more.

I don't really care about "full performance", I'm just looking for something zippier and snappier than what I've got. I know already that an SSD will be a huge difference from a conventional drive, so for a basic user I'm curious if I'll see a huge difference in the upgrade if I hold back and go a bit more nuts.

Any SSD will be HUGELY and noticeably faster that what you have now :)

It is one of the best upgrades.

if you're going to start out small with a 128gb,just install the OS on it + afew games & have the rest of your music on a 1TB hd it should work out fine,you can always future proof it & end up getting the 256gb Samsung pro SSD & throw that in a newer computer down the road,even with the 256gb i used barely any GB with the amount of games i installed.

but ncix is having a sale for the 128gb Crucial m4 for $125 with free shipping
NCIX - Buy Computers, Computer Parts, Laptops, World's Leading Discount Computer Store

reason why i say Crucial m4 brand is because I never heard any problems with them & i was about to get one before i found a decent price for the Samsung 840 ssd pro for only 20 dollars more then Crucial m4 ....per 256gb vs 256gb when Crucial were demanding 200 dollars.

I already have a Crucial m4 128gb, should I buy another to make it Raid0 or should I buy the Samsung 840pro?

RAID is not really worth it. The big gain you get from that is response time, and a fresh m4 has nearly instant access time (although that's not the case as it gets used more as you can see here:

http://www.hardcoreware.net/wordpres...x-response.png

from: OCZ Vector Review - 256GB High End Consumer SSD

I personally would say that it's better off you just buy a cheaper SSD. Unless you need a fancy setup, I don't think you will notice the difference between a "beastly" SSD vs a cheaper version of an SSD. I would save the money for an upgrade somewhere else or towards a new computer if that's a consideration in the future.
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Any SSD should handily beat out all HDD in performance. If $$ is an issue, I'd even consider going with this:

NCIX - Buy Computers, Computer Parts, Laptops, World's Leading Discount Computer Store

$130 and you're all done. As long as you don't put any data on it (OS, apps, and games only), there is very little risk in losing anything important.

Unless you're a hardcore power user, any SSD will be quite a significant upgrade over even the fastest of HDDs.

I'm using a Plextor M5S 64GB, a very speedy and low-cost alternative. Plextor is one of the most underrated Japanese companies out there, and they create some extremely high quality hardware which harks back to their optical drive days.

Plextor M5S 256 GB Review: Marvell Inside, With A Twist : Plextor's Fourth-Generation SSD Family Emerges
PX-M5S Series

They often go on sale for quite cheap at NCIX. If you're not keen on spending a fortune on an SSD, I'd say this is a good alternative.

Newegg.ca - Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (Stand-Alone Drive)

There you go, no need to look any further. $109 for a drive that is as likely as fast as it gets for this capacity.

If you can't get in on that sale, get a Kingston V300 instead. Should be the same price (which is why the sale at Newegg is so great) and performs very well (will be publishing a review soon)

Agility 3 at $1/GB is a terrible deal

and if anyone hasn't noticed the last few months...ram prices seems to have hiked up quite a bit.

Yup I am done testing that Kingston 64GB kit, anyone want it for $500? :lawl:

I was holding out on getting 32gb thinking it was going to get cheaper and now going to have to wait even longer :okay:

anyone know why the prices have gone up?