Ever seen 15 OCZ Vertex II SSDs in one place before?

August 20, 2011 11:31amPosted by Michael / Categories: Technology

Now you have! I know, no blog posts lately. But that’s okay, I don’t have many viewers anyway (yet…).

The past week I built fifteen workstations to be used in a small business. These boxes are awesome — they exemplify the new generation of computers. Only five have slimline DVD drives, which probably won’t ever be used anyway. They’re all ITX builds in the awesome Silverstone Sugo SG06 case, which comes with a 300W power supply. I really liked assembling these because there weren’t any inefficiencies, except if you count unused power supply lines.

The builds consist of the Sandy Bridge G620s, the lowest-end of the new Intel Sandy Bridge lineup. The speed comes from OCZ Vertex IIs, giving it plenty of snappiness needed for ultra quick response times in MS Office and reading PDFs. And, finally, 4GB of RAM ensures there’s no memory shortage.

It’s interesting to me that not more small businesses build their own computers. I mean, the reasons why are obvious — it’s too convenient to be able to quickly and easily order a large quantity of assembled and prepared desktops from HP or Dell. But this project has taught me that the huge drawback is that you get stuck with last-gen hardware.

2 responses to this article

Guthrie

November 14, 2011 at 1:52 am

It’s economically prudent for businesses to not be on the bleeding edge (except in certain areas, such as well… actually, can’t think of any good examples right now…)

The logic is, that when you buy Dell/HP/etc… you are also paying for some degree of reliability/support built in. When you go and build your own workstations, you don’t have as safe a network of “blanket” coverage as you do from purchasing from the OEM’s.

The potential for lost work productivity as a result of early adoption woes outweighs the benefits for most companies. Take for example the Intel Sandy-Bridge bug, or OCZ Vertex 3 BSOD firmware issues. – You don’t want your company workstations putting up with that in the real environment.

I think that it’s intelligent and a good risk-calculation to be about 1 year behind the “bleeding” edge, which these systems are, it ensures that you get a (if you did your homework, and it shows that you did) very fast, solid, and reliable system, that is still eons ahead of non-ssd systems.

That’s not to say that I don’t think building systems on the small scale isn’t worthwhile, it should just be looked at on a case-by case basis for the situation. (and nightly backups of crucial files to a NAS for a small business can be a LIFESAVER for very cheap cost as well.)

That, and I’m jealous you got to play with 15 SSD’s

Keep up the posts!

- G

Also, great article on enterprise SSD reliability if you’re into some really great reading on the subject: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

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Michael

November 20, 2011 at 11:40 pm

Thanks for the thoughts, Guthrie. We had done a lot of research on the right way to go before making the jump to SSD. Yes, when going with HP/Dell, you’re not just buying a computer but also the promise of reliability — not just time-tested hardware, but also a huge corporation that will support them. In this case, there were only 15, and “future-proofing” was a definite priority. Additionally, all data operated on a network-storage model, so losing a workstation only had financial implications.

And wwhomagod, these things are fast.

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Ever seen 15 OCZ Vertex II SSDs in one place before?

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