Corsair SSD in Real World Applications

No, laptops really do come that way.

And, you know, I think if I was trying to sell a product, I would have to produce my videos to target the largest audience I could.

To the average youtuber out there, this is going to be a great video.

But to Hardocp, I mean, c'mon now. All that bloat-shit-crap ware? SSD ? c'mon now ...
 
Json23 said:
I only trust [H] team, Anand, and Tom's reviews. Until one of these guys shows me something to justify the cost I am not concerned about using an old HDD in my rig.
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Are you kidding? Have you even read AnandTech in the last year? Anand has repeatedly shown reasons to justify the cost of switching to a SSD. In fact, Anand IS the reason I bought my SSD.

Reading this thread reminds me of how some people are slow to adopt new technology, and how they claim there is "no good reason" to do so when they are still clinging on to their own old tech.

I went from a VelociRaptor to an Intel X-25M G2 80gb, and there definitely are some differences. Plus, I have my other, older Raptor on another machine in my apartment, and when I use it to do various things, I can definitely appreciate my SSD rig.
 
i was skeptical about ssd's in comparison to the 7200's i was so used to using. then i upgraded my computer and decided what the hell, might as well try these new fangled things.

bought 2 60gb ocz vertex's, raid 0'd em together, and holy cow, not only was installing 7 on it a breeze, but loading/shutting down is incredibly fast. loading applications is incredibly fast, no more worrying about defragging, game load times are insane, etc. etc. ripping dvds/saving large as shit files, i could go on and on. To me, it was worth it. if you dont do jack shit but read the internet and email, you would do fine with a 7200. hell, even a 5400 would suit your needs.
 
OK I get it. They are fast.

Now I want to see how many of them it takes to stop a 50cal or see how many a hot chic...

nevermind
 
Madman0 said:
Who boots their computer constantly any more? :p
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I do. I never put my computer on standby and its never left turned on when Im not going to be in frront of the computer. My electric bill is high enough without my computer making it worse.

As for upgrading to ssd , well theyre still a bit expensive per GB to move to SSD's yet for me. I will wait at least another year for the prices to get reasonable.
 
Yeah. Whatever. I was still tapping my fingers on the desk...waiting.
 
BBA said:
Your raptor is not booting on a bloatware laden laptop either...

Trust me, SSD is amazing compared to ANY harddrive setup the same way. Heck, even a single SSD will be multitudes faster than even a fast raid mechanical HD setup. I've seen it first hand.
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Oh I know it is, I've got an SSD-fund right now (going to get a 120GB), I was just saying it seemed extremely slow for an SSD :)
 
Black-Tom said:
I think what a lot of people here are missing is the fact that it's not just a boot to desktop, they've opened a bunch of programs that would make booting VERY slow for many laptops on start up.

Sure, your computer might take way less time to boot, but I guarantee if you set it so that all of those programs started up on boot you would be seeing similar times.
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I agree entirely. In the workplace we recently went from 120Gb 7200 Seagates to 64Gb SSD in all of our laptops... And we have to load 5 things on start up for the ease of our Executives because finding the IE, Adobe, Word, and 2 other proprietary software icons are beyond them. Let me tell you we went from 3 - 5 minute start ups to just over 1 minute. And since I do the images I

NIGHT AND DAY difference.

At home Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit sits on a Kingston 64Gb SSD (forget the exact model) as does the few games I'm playing at the moment. The data, movies, games I'm not playing, music, and pictures reside on 3Tb of Western Digital drives.

No bloatware and my system boots in 36 seconds.
 
gtg465x said:
It would be nice to see this on a clean windows installation. Obviously that installation has some serious serious bloat for it to take that long.
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I bet in a way, the serious bloat times pretty accurately reflect the average joe's malware infected PC. Now, if only as IT guys, we can convince our company to upgrade company PCs to include SSDs you might get rid of the 'my pc is running slow' calls almost all together. Or get make their frequency take longer.
 
I think what most people are forgetting to say is 'Thanks Corsiar for taking the time to make the video' which should be in there somewhere with complaints about bloatware on the laptops :)

That being said, at least the forum members seem to have given Corsair lots of suggestions on what they would have liked to see tested/shown should a future video be made. I guess examples like Photoshop opening + loading 20 vacation images from an ssd versus mechanical hd
 
I have no idea why there is all the whining. It's a 'DEMONSTRATION' folks. A damned impressive one at that.

I could only imagine how quickly that pig of an office suite (office 2007) will load if I had an SSD drive.

That video can be easily broken down into boot time and then application load times. Either your lazy or stupid not to see that. The application load was, for me, the most impressive part.
 
even if the test is valid
don't forget the fact
128gb corsair ssd performance ~$375
120gb 7200rpm drive ~$65

I'd say go out and get a higher end laptop
 
Sure the test really isn't representative of just how much of a difference an ssd makes, but it's a good demonstration of some of the things they're capable of. I'm glad they added all of the bloat. It Helped to show just how much faster the ssd is, but didn't do a whole lot to show exactly how responsive it is. It's also loading a bunch of crap under controlled conditions, without any user inputs to throw off the numbers.
 
What a way to exploit the weakness of a mechanical hard drive. Making the read/write head jump around more than it was actually reading info.

Take 2 large files and copy them at the same time. On an SSD you'll see them copy roughly half as fast as you would a single file. On a mechanical hard drive it'll be about 1/4 the speed since the head has to jump back and forth all the time. Just sayin...

I'd love to have a SSD drive, but at $3-5 a gig it's hard to justify. When they start getting closer to $1 a gig I'll get much more temped to buy one, for general use anyway.
 
I always like to see side by side videos like this. But it did seem like that 7200rpm machine took a very very long time to boot and load up those applications. I try not to be a skeptic when a vendor or manufacturer puts up a video like this but this was far more one-sided than i was expecting.

That being said, price aside, i am a true believer in SSD technology. I haven't been able to afford myself as yet but have been considering it more and more as of late.

I remember Kyle's old file transfer tests video of the intel SSD against the Raptor Raid, Velociraptor, new WD Green, & Ye old Maxtor. I'd like to see some side-by side bootup reviews, application and game loadings of commonly used and popular programs, and just general usage to get more of a real world look and feel for what to expect.

Shane
 
I agree with what some of you guys are saying. If my machine took over three minutes to start I would be seriously looking into the cause of it and fix it straight away. My own windows 7 machine in Raid0 7200RPM HDD's take less than a minute to start up and is ready to use in that time.
 
What I took away from that was that the speed difference for the majority of the disk activitity you'll do wasn't much different between the two systems. Typically you only have heavy disk load coming from one application at a time, and notice that the time for windows to boot to desktop was only decreased by about 10% for the SSD.

The majority of the difference came about when they created a worst-case situation for the mechanical drive; trying to 'simultaniously' load data from different areas of the drive by launching multiple apps all at the same time.

Note, I'm not saying that SSDs are pointless, far from it. I'm just saying that this test was engineered to showcase mechanical drives in the worst case. For example you could drastically cut the time the mechanical drive system spent launching the apps by staggering the startup of those applications so that you're not having to initiate a seek for every single context switch...

Personally I'd like to have a large SSD for app/os/page file. However I can't convince myself that it's worth the difference in price. SSD runs around $3/gig, a mechanical drive will run around 8 cents a gig. I don't think that the SSD offers enough of an advantage to spend 35-40 times more.
 
I wasn't as impressed with this as I thought I would be.

I'm running the system in my sig, and its roughly 1 minute
from cold boot to fully ready.

I rarely cold boot systems anymore anyway. From Sleep mode to operational
its about 15 seconds.
 
Negative responses to this video only highlight the posters lack of comprehension. It's a loaded test for a reason. oftOCP day I guess.
 
I have an Intel 80GB G2 drive and am a big advocate of SSD, but this is not real world.

While it is real world in the sense that it can really happen, it is not real world in the sense that a system loaded like this would be extremely untypical. It would be even more untypical for someone with a system loaded like this to put the money down on an SSD.

I mean, my parents 1.4ghz P3, loaded with 512MB RAM and an IDE hard drive with 2 year old Windows XP install boots significantly faster than this. Actually, I don't know if I have seen anything newer than Socket 7 take 3 minutes to boot.

To me, this is no more real world than the synthetic gaming benchmark that the readers of this forum love to bash.
 
Some of you guys really crack me up with your oblivious "I don't have iTunes in my startup, so this video is irrelevant!" comments. :D
 
I didn't read many of the comments, but I can only assume that the SSD is also only using a small percentage of the power that the traditional HDD is using. Which is increasing your overall battery life when having to use high disk usage apps.

And people complaining about the presentation having multiple apps open at the start, that is kind of the point, to show that even with windows booting up, it was able to open that many applications drastically quicker then the other system.

Does the price per gb need to come down? Absolutely, if we started to see these drives with good read and write speeds at around $1.50-1.75 per gb we would be seeing a much quicker adoption of these drives. Intel drives are close at times with about $2 per gb from what I have seen, but their write speeds are much lower then the newer drives that are coming out.
 
Some estimates quite a while back a year or more before WIN 7 came out were that SSDs could add 20% or more to battery life under the proper usage scenarious involving high disk I/O. The fact that SSDs do not pull on the 12v rail is a good thing.
 
NKDietrich: i don't think this presentation is a good way to show the advantages of SSDs over HDDs either.

But the differences are huge, especially with random I/O; 100 times faster than HDD is no exception. How this translates to actual experience is instant response when you click things; launching applications, working with applications, anything that generates I/O on your system disk will feel instant.

For large files such as movies, music and archives, the speed difference is less significant; only about 2 times faster. So these types of files are best stored on mechanical drives as of yet, because the price difference is so huge per GB and the advantages of SSD too little.

Probably the biggest real-world performance gain is in actual usage when the OS gets more fragmented over time, causing the HDD to seek more often in actual usage. So while HDD degrades over time when using an operating system, the SSD's performance doesn't crash when having to seek alot (IOps). If you ever encountered slow systems with the HDD being lit all the time; that's fragmentation and the HDD will become very slow and drag the whole system down. Since CPUs and memory are so fast already, the bottleneck is now often I/O. Only gamers and special usage (render farms) may need to invest on CPU/GPU more than storage.

Aside from performance, the SSD provides other benefits such as resistance to heat variations (HDD killer), low energy consumption, resistance against physical impact, general reliability, produces no vibrations and virtually no heat.
 
Bottom line is: SSD are the future, no question about it. We are really no longer in "Early Adoption Phase' anymore really, more like mid-early phase. Sure, you can wait for the tech to get better and cheaper, but that goes without saying for pretty much any piece of computer hardware, it's the nature of the beast.

Right now, adding an SSD to your system is a no-brainer. You don't even have to splurge mega dollars anymore, as there are several options in the sub <$100 category, base price as well as the ever present internet sales. In addition to this, in many situations rocking a RAID-0 option with a couple of these sub <$100 drives will give you even more of a performance boost to what would already have been a stellar increase to your current systems performance grid.

So do a little research and throw down for one or more of these badboy's, you won't be disappointed!
 
You might not see as much of an improvement on a regular desktop, but it's night and day on a server. I have a Xeon 5500 series server at work with 12GB of RAM running MS Server 08 and it is stupendously fast running two Intel X25M 80GB drives. Boot up for our old server running (admittedly, not a "real" server) Raptor 300s was around 5 minutes- AMD X2 4400, 4GB RAM on MS Server 03. On the new server, it's about 90s.

Also, the data throughput is much much better. With Raptor 300s, I could hang the server up running a report on Quickbooks Enterprise for a good 15 minutes. Now that same report runs in maybe 5 minutes. Using a bloated crappy database system like Quickbooks shows how much of an improvement in I/O that the SSDs provide.

Maybe I could get decent throughput running 15k Cheetahs with a ton of cache on a really high-powered controller, but the cost would be far in excess of what SSDs cost.

Finally, in terms of power usage and heat, the server runs nice and cool- no heat from HDs heating up the box- the server sits in our office maybe 10 feet from my desk and I never hear it except when I reboot the server (rarely).
 
while i agree having 4-6 programs loading at startup is just stupid for most users, that video showed exactly what it was meant to show. obviously there is a big difference between ssd and normal hard drives. ive been thinking of getting a decent $400 ish 120-ish Gb ssd for a while now. since i blew a crapload on other things i feel this might be a better step, although i just wish the prices would come down on the larger drives to make them viable as a single drive option for most systems.
 
Yes, who cares if those aren't representative of programs you would have loading? Also it's obviously not a video aimed at the likes of you or me who clean their boots/installations/running_programs/etc with a fine tooth comb. It still show a major advantage over getting to a Ready-To_use status in Windows 7 with several intensive start up apps loading into the OS from the get go.

It still just baffles me the people thumbing their nose at this demonstration who are looking at it from a one dimensional aspect, with blinders on at that.
 
SSD's are becoming mainstream....why didn't they really get more into hybrid hard drives?

I would like a 60GB SSD and then a 2TB drive in one please :)
 
There definately is quite a big difference in boot up times between regular mechanical vs SSD harddrives. My only issue is with the 30GB SSD drives. They're just a bit too small when loading the Vista 64 operating system. I just picked up one of the Kingston V-series models, figuring I'd load just the Windows OS on it, and all the other applications and games on a regular 7200RPM drive. The problem I found, is that Vista 64 SP1 (by itself) took up 24.4GB. There is not enough room left to run SP2. The install wizard reports needing 5GB of free space to run. Vista without SP2 is quite a "resources hog". I'll probably have to use the SSD drive for an XP install on my laptop. Maybe later I'll get a 60GB or bigger when prices come down a bit.
 
Corsair is late for this. I've seen this type of comparison a 1.5 years ago.

Why don't they show a photoshop workflow? Because the difference would be negligible.
 
hmz said:
Corsair is late for this. I've seen this type of comparison a 1.5 years ago.

Why don't they show a photoshop workflow? Because the difference would be negligible.
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Adequately performning drives needed to do this type of comparison were not available 1.5 years ago.
 
hmz said:
Yes, they were.

Here is one 2yrs ago. There are a lot more though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJMGAdpCLVg
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No, they weren't. Your example is first generation devices that are not even comparable to the devices avaialble today. The same controllers with the proper cache, modern density NAND flash etc were NOT available 1.5 years ago. And, the drives that were available were extraordinarily cost prohibitive which is why we were not selling them at that time.
 
Mike Clements said:
No, they weren't. Your example is first generation devices that are not even comparable to the devices avaialble today. The same controllers with the proper cache, modern density NAND flash etc were NOT available 1.5 years ago. And, the drives that were available were extraordinarily cost prohibitive which is why we were not selling them at that time.
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Who cares about the controllers. SSD's improved since then, but not by much. It's the same technology and the same type of test.
 
hmz said:
Who cares about the controllers. SSD's improved since then, but not by much. It's the same technology and the same type of test.
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I still don't understand your initial statement that we were late :confused:

You gave an example to support your point that uses a drive that:

1. Was not available via retail.
2. Would have been cost prohibitive if it was available
3. Is no longer relevent in this discussion
4. Was ONLY a technology demo by the manufacturer as it was not going to be sold under the Samsung brand.
5. Was not a Corsair, or anyone else's, retail product.

I'm not trying to bust your chops but you made an unsupported statement that is not accurate. And nothing you've said since then backs up your statement.
 
Mike Clements said:
I still don't understand your initial statement that we were late :confused:

You gave an example to support your point that uses a drive that:

1. Was not available via retail.
2. Would have been cost prohibitive if it was available
3. Is no longer relevent in this discussion
4. Was ONLY a technology demo by the manufacturer as it was not going to be sold under the Samsung brand.
5. Was not a Corsair, or anyone else's, retail product.

I'm not trying to bust your chops but you made an unsupported statement that is not accurate. And nothing you've said since then backs up your statement.
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I really do not understand what are we arguing about? The Samsung test is exactly the same as Corsair or am I being blind?

I believe the main purpose of this test is to show how SSD performes against HDD and this was done long ago and you could have bought the Intel one 2yrs ago. So I really don't see the difference, sorry.
 
LOL...I guess I am putting too much emphasis on your statement that we were "late". I'm simply responding to what you posted and I did not realize we were arguing. I thought we were discussing.

We weren't selling drives 2 years ago. Very few people were. So, until they became mainstream and then we started selling them, why would be have been interested in making a demo?

Samsung and Intel did it because they were manufacturing the drives and demoing new technology. We had no reason to until recently. So, I don't see how we could be considered late.
 
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