Question to those using SSDs

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TheCommander

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Is there much of a difference going from a SATA hard drive to a SSD? I currently own an older 10k Raptor and was wondering if I would notice a performance increase.

If anything I'd like to get a 32gig drive for Windows 7- which leads to would a 32 gig drive be enough for Windows 7 (64 bit version)?
 
I'm currently running windows 7 on an 80gb SSD (intel g2) and yes, there is absolutely a noticeable difference in speed & startup times going from a fast SATA to a SSD drive.

As for whether 32gb will be enough, well, I've only a moderate number of applications installed and I'm already at 21gb used (I've yet to install office, visual studio, and other productivity apps related to my job). For my personal situation, I'd find 32gb to be a pretty tight squeeze - I suggest you give yourself a bit more breathing room and get a 64gb or 80gb drive if you opt for the SSD route.
 
I agree; go for a 64GB or 80GB if you can afford it. Someone on AnandTech is selling a first gen X25-M 80GB for $150 right now. Of course the 2nd gen drives are what everyone is rabid over right now but even the first gen X25-M would be a heck of an upgrade over a SATA drive. If you can't swing that, and you plan on installing less than 10GB of apps/games to the drive you could pick up a 30GB Vertex now and another one later when you stumble upon more money (or they drop in price).
 
I was planning on using the SSD solely for Windows and the SATA drives for games and other programs.

Anyone know if SSDs will go down in price anytime soon?
 
TheCommander said:
Is there much of a difference going from a SATA hard drive to a SSD? I currently own an older 10k Raptor and was wondering if I would notice a performance increase.
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Most certainly yes.

Might want to spend some time reading through this article (and some others there as well).

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

The charts there show the sort of gains you can see. My boot times went from a couple of minutes to less than 30 seconds to the usable desktop with Win7 X64.

The only thing that will slow you up at all is the stuff on the normal HD's. I notice it everytime the OS goes to another drive for data.

I highly recommend the 80GB Intel G2 model for a plain OS drive. More than enough room for the OS and plenty of Apps.

Good luck whichever patch you choose! ;)
 
I was not using a leet sata drive myself but was running and booting from one of the pretty quick 640gb sata drives. Last weekend I switched it up and installed one of the new 80gb G2 Intel SSD's. I have to admit that the difference is stunning. The difference really is that dramatic. I started clean with a new install of Win 7 x64 also. I have not done anything to the Windows install other than to confirm that defrag and superfetch were disabled and they already were. The only other thing I did was install the current Intel chipset inf update which changed the sata controller from the plain Windows driver to the Intel driver. I cannot see that made any difference though but I figured Intel chipset controller, Intel drive, it could not hurt....

System is a IP35 Pro board, Q6600, 4GB ram, not overclocked. Boot time (after BIOS stuff) from once it actually starts the windows load is 11s to the desktop. Applications like Photoshop CS4 load in about 2 seconds flat. Before it was probably 30 seconds.
 
Well my SSHD was back ordered, but I went ahead and freshly installed windows 7 over my old vista ultimate (plan to transfer it to the solid state via WHS so I don't have to go through the install again later). My Boot times went from a couple minutes (about 2) to about 30 seconds to the usable desktop. No solid state here! Are you sure all the gains you guys are seeing are from the solid state? No doubt they are much faster but my boot time was greatly reduced just switching to windows 7. This is off a 7200 RPM LAPTOP HD, not even my 10k raptor. I'm sure my desktop with 6GB ram and 10k OS drive would be even faster.
 
Justintoxicated said:
(plan to transfer it to the solid state via WHS so I don't have to go through the install again later).
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Be careful to make sure the alignment remains set properly on the SSD if you don't set it up through a normal Win 7 clean install. Might cause issues down the road or impact performance.

I've still yet to see any hard, definitive data on whether cloning to an SSD from an HD causes issues, but plenty of people seem to think it does, just FYI.
 
Limahl said:
Be careful to make sure the alignment remains set properly on the SSD if you don't set it up through a normal Win 7 clean install. Might cause issues down the road or impact performance.

I've still yet to see any hard, definitive data on whether cloning to an SSD from an HD causes issues, but plenty of people seem to think it does, just FYI.
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Do you have anymore information (Links) on this issue? I did some research but I do not fully understand it. I know that it is better to use larger Blocks for Hard drives that store movies etc because it speeds up access times and can waste less space, but I don't understand the alignment stuff or what will happen if I do a restore from WHS. I might just forget about solid state all together if it can not be backed up to a WHS box properly, I'd still rather have backups and primitive spinning disks that put all my eggs in one basket.
 
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Justintoxicated said:
Do you have anymore information (Links) on this issue? I did some research but I do not fully understand it.
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My understanding is that if you can prep the SSD with proper alignment and clone it by doing a file copy instead of drive to drive, you "might" be ok, but on one seems to know this 100% for sure. I did read some posts on a forum some time ago about cloned SSD's not working well, (stuttering), or at all after being cloned from HD's. This was many months ago however.

Found this through Google......
Aligning partitions is a time-tested method for improving performance (though most often done in server environment). Physical disks are laid out in tracks. From what I understand, SSDs emulate this layout. Most partitioning tools create a partition to start at the first available track on the disk, and map blocks to the track. The trick is that oftentimes, the blocks will overlay multiple tracks because of the alignment, essentially causing multiple I/Os for a single read or write (one block needs to access two tracks on the disk). By aligning the partition to a 64 (or 128) block offset (starting the partition on block 64 or 128, rather than the first available), the blocks will be aligned to tracks giving a more 1:1 relationship, thus reducing the number of I/Os required to read or write data. Fewer I/Os translates into better efficiency in dealing with disk-based data, and in turn translates to better performance.
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It may not be as big an issue as some believe, but I've yet to see concrete answers anywhere on the net, and I've been looking. I keep all my data on a seperate network volume, so for me a clean install is never a huge deal. I opted for a clean Win 7 install, and it's been smooth sailing ever since. If I can get another SSD in the near future, I may do some testing myself, but finances are tight atm.
 
Running 2 summit 120s in raid 0 on win 7 rtm and OMFG, the hard drives get the fastest score in the windows experience test, 7.4, even my vid card doesnt get that :(

They truly are magic things, no way will I ever go back to normal harddrives for installing an OS on, I will stick to normal drives for storage, but thats it.

As for aligning, I read that from a raw ssd, when installing 7 or vista, it will do the aligning for you, its just xp and below that you will need to manually adjust the aligning..
 
I just moved from 1 TB 7200rpm WD black to a 160GB X-25M G2 and the difference is startling. Biggest individual upgrade I can remember, and I've been building computers since the 386 days.
 
I think going from a regular HDD to a bigger SSD is a bigger and more noticeable upgrade than going from 2GB of RAM to 4GB, or even going from a dual core to a quad core... At 'least as far as daily tasks and overall feel of the system. For certain tasks (heavy multi-tasking, video encoding, etc.) those other upgrades will obviously provide a bigger benefit, but the SSD is definitely very noticeable in your daily usage of your rig.

I'm itching to get a 60GB OCZ Agility drive for my netbook now even tho I promised myself I'd just wait 'till prices came down considerably and I'd get something larger for the desktop (thus moving the 80GB X25-M from the desktop to the netbook)... Now I don't think I'll wanna wait that long, I'm hoping for some good Black Friday deals on the Agility line.
 
TheCommander said:
Is there much of a difference going from a SATA hard drive to a SSD? I currently own an older 10k Raptor and was wondering if I would notice a performance increase.

If anything I'd like to get a 32gig drive for Windows 7- which leads to would a 32 gig drive be enough for Windows 7 (64 bit version)?
Click to expand...

I went from an old barricuda 500GB, to a single 64gb ssd, now to two 64GB SSD's in raid-0.

SSD performance is kinda hard to explain. I've used raptor drives before, and I've gone from slow hard drives to faster hard drives, and the difference between my old 500GB drive and the falcon SSD wasn't quite the same. The performance increase was subtle and, for lack of a better phrase, expectedly unexpected. An increase in HDD performance is something thats hard to bench but is definatly noticable. In retrospect, it generally feels like where PC's should be. If your like me, watching ram size doubling every 12 months, processor power doubling every 18 months, and graphics power doubling every 3 minutes, and seeing hard drive speed double every 3 or 4 years, and thinking "somethings gotta give", an SSD is a good call. Its not so much the extra sequential read that makes it so much better, its the instantaneous seek times, and 100mb/s+ speeds offered when reading 5 thousand 10kB files, non sequential, that makes the system feel snappy. After I log on, I'm at my desktop and there isn't much waiting for me that cant be attributed to network activity. MSN is logging on, IRC is making its wierd connection noises, steam has its little "working" icon showing, etc. I cant find a single item appearing in system tray, there all already there, and the ones that don't have any network dealings are responsive.

That said, the extra sequential speed is also nice. The new raptors run from about 130MB/s and taper off down to about 90 right? My SSD ran at 220MB/s consistantly. The RAID-0 array runs between 350 and 425MB/s --less than a decade ago that was cache speed. In terms of boot speeds, while I never pulled out a stop watch, It runs through bios at its fixed speed, and when the windows 7 boot animation comes up, the four lights hit each other, the windows flag appears, and about a second after that Its asking for login credentials. On a WD 640GB blue I just built the windows 7 flag would pulse 4 or 5 times before it would get to that same point.

I guess my point would be that, if you went from an Athlon X2 to a C2Q, and found it hard to get that performance difference to show up, a fast SSD would make it apparent. Loading aps is no longer constrained by seek times and HDD throughput.

But yeah, if someone was asking me to build them a performance gaming machine, and the budget was over $1000, i would be looking hard into fitting them with some kind of SSD based solution.

edit: sorry but something I definatly forgot to mention was that my last real gaming machine had an 80GB spinmaster in it. I bought the 64GB SSD thinking that, If I got by on 80GB, I could surely get by on 64GB. Nope. Windows installs to about 10GB (turn off hybernation, windows vista/7 dont suffer from uptime problems, and it boots so fast anyways hybernation is moot), but I still found myself quickly out of space.
 
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Exactly. HD speed has always been a bottleneck for standard interactive tasks like browsing the internet, booting your computer, watching movies, etc. With a SSD that bottleneck is alleviated.

My computer feels one hell of a lot faster now.
 
I've just ordered an X25-M G2 at Buy.com for $248 after taxes (fucking $19.99 :mad:), but I can't wait to see what the "SSD Experience" is all about! :D

I know I said that I would probably wait for the third generation of SSD drives, but the price was pretty good and I decided to just "fuck it" and take the dive for the SSD. :)
 
80gb x25-m g2 was hands down the best upgrade I have ever done. was also the most I have ever spent on a hard drive.
 
TheCommander said:
Is there much of a difference going from a SATA hard drive to a SSD? I currently own an older 10k Raptor and was wondering if I would notice a performance increase.

If anything I'd like to get a 32gig drive for Windows 7- which leads to would a 32 gig drive be enough for Windows 7 (64 bit version)?
Click to expand...

The performance difference is absolutely massive. I went from a VelociRaptor to a OCZ Agility 60gb. Here's some of the things I noticed:

- POST takes longer than boot. Startup is done in 30seconds.
- Shutdown takes ~10-15 seconds
- Application startup times are super-fast
- Upon entering my password and logging in, the "lag" I'd see for ~1minute while startup stuff starts is gone. Literally, gone - it's not there anymore.

I'm @ about 18gb used w/ Windows+Programs, not including games. My media's stored externally.

You won't be able to install your entire library of games at the same time due to room, but you'll still be able to keep 5-6 installed at the same time, and you can always just remove the ones you don't play as much when the drive's close to full.
 
A little warning to those who have just got new SSD's.

If your using vista or 7, then turn off superfetch and indexing and also defragmenter and some also say hibernation and if you have lots of ram then disable pagefile also, as you dont want to do any of that stuff with your ssd as supposedly it will shorten the lifespan of the drive.

Even with those things turned off, I have the first 4 disabled, Booting is roughly 20 seconds for me, post takes longer, turning off the pc is roughly 5 seconds after I push the button and opening apps is instant, so even with those things that constantly write to the drive turned off your system will still be uber fast.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
A little warning to those who have just got new SSD's.

If your using vista or 7, then turn off superfetch and indexing and also defragmenter and some also say hibernation and if you have lots of ram then disable pagefile also, as you dont want to do any of that stuff with your ssd as supposedly it will shorten the lifespan of the drive.

Even with those things turned off, I have the first 4 disabled, Booting is roughly 20 seconds for me, post takes longer, turning off the pc is roughly 5 seconds after I push the button and opening apps is instant, so even with those things that constantly write to the drive turned off your system will still be uber fast.
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This is only needed with Vista, 7 is SSD-aware by default and disables SuperFetch and defragmenting. 7 also properly aligns the partition when formatting and enables TRIM.
 
Umm, I am running 7 and indexing was enabled and was indexing directories as I had to put a stop to it, superfetch was enabled as I had to disable the service and so was defragmenter, which I manually had to turn off, 7 only properly aligns a ssd if you install 7 from a RAW drive, if you already have a partition on the drive, installing 7 wont align it and the TRIM feature does not work with all drives, the drives firmware have to support it thus if your drive firmware doesnt support the trim feature then trim wont work.

Although 7 is more ssd aware than any other OS, it still isnt ssd aware enough to stop it constantly reading/writing to your drives, well it isnt on my 2.

I know superfetch and defragmenter are meant to be disabled by default but they werent and when I scheduled a defrag it actually started to defrag the drives :| maybe because they are in raid and they are being seen as nvidia raid rather than individual drives ? but what should be disabled by default isnt with me when running raid on 2 summit 120s with 1801Q firmware, desperately trying to get my hands on 18c1 firmware, once I get my rma number I can get them flashed by sending them back to ocz, or hopefully they release that updater soon so i dont have to rma.
 
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EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Umm, I am running 7 and indexing was enabled and was indexing directories as I had to put a stop to it, superfetch was enabled as I had to disable the service and so was defragmenter, which I manually had to turn off, 7 only properly aligns a ssd if you install 7 from a RAW drive, if you already have a partition on the drive, installing 7 wont align it and the TRIM feature does not work with all drives, the drives firmware have to support it thus if your drive firmware doesnt support the trim feature then trim wont work.

Although 7 is more ssd aware than any other OS, it still isnt ssd aware enough to stop it constantly reading/writing to your drives, well it isnt on my 2.

I know superfetch and defragmenter are meant to be disabled by default but they werent and when I scheduled a defrag it actually started to defrag the drives :| maybe because they are in raid and they are being seen as nvidia raid rather than individual drives ? but what should be disabled by default isnt with me when running raid on 2 summit 120s with 1801Q firmware, desperately trying to get my hands on 18c1 firmware, once I get my rma number I can get them flashed by sending them back to ocz, or hopefully they release that updater soon so i dont have to rma.
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Even though scheduled defragmentation is on, it's never actually going to work on the SSD. You can see this by going into Disk Defragmenter --> Configure Schedule --> Select Disks. You'll notice your SSD is not available for selection. I believe the same is true for SuperFetch - it's enabled, but doesn't actually do anything on the SSD itself - only to any HDDs you may or may not have connected.

Of course, this is all with a single SSD in my case. YMMV if using RAID, I know there are some issues with Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers with regards to SSD support, may be the same case for Nvidia.
 
Turning off file indexing is pretty unnecessary unless you're really really paranoid about the # of write cycles that your SSD is gonna go thru, and it's life expectancy... But I would think that any enthusiast with a spare $200 to drop on a SSD right now would probably have another $100+ to buy a new one in <4 years. :p I mean, the built-in desktop search is one of the nicest things about Vista/Win7, and having your files indexed is still a heck of a lot quicker than regular searching. /shrug

Same for hibernate, it might be kinda redundant on a desktop if you always leave it on tho... And if you have 8GB+ of RAM then yea, you might wanna turn it off as the hibernate file will be just as large (it's equivalent to the amount of RAM, as it literally saves the state of your RAM to the HD), for any laptop user it's still a big convenience to leave your work as-is by using hibernate when you step away tho, SSD or no SSD. I wouldn't even touch the page file, MS themselves see no issue with running it on a SSD, it's right on a Q&A they published regarding Win7 and SSD (link is all over the boards). Windows tends to manage it just fine, YMMV.

Superfetch/Prefetch/defragger yea, those should be off (as per the same Q&A article MS put out), I don't think you have to kill the process tho... And RAID just seems to complicate everything right now, heh (ironically Intel's probably to blame for that, since it's their storage drivers and all...).
 
So when can we expect 2nd gen SSD's?

I'm looking to build a workstation computer within the next few months, and I'm trying to get top of the line hardware. Thanks.
 
toenexx said:
So when can we expect 2nd gen SSD's?

I'm looking to build a workstation computer within the next few months, and I'm trying to get top of the line hardware. Thanks.
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Heh, we have 2nd gen SSDs right now. If you get an X25-M or an Indilinx-based drive like a Vertex, Falcon or Torqx you will be getting top of the line hardware (well OK, aside from SLC drives).

Who knows what will happen in the next few months, though.
 
toenexx said:
So when can we expect 2nd gen SSD's?

I'm looking to build a workstation computer within the next few months, and I'm trying to get top of the line hardware. Thanks.
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We already have them. Any Indilinix-based SSD or the X25-M G2 are all 2nd-gen. 1st gen includes X25-M G1, Samsung-based SSDs, and the infamous JMicron Junk SSDs.
 
We're already at 2nd gen (or 3rd gen, depending on how you look at it)... The first few attempts aimed at enthusiasts were mostly SSD using JMicron controllers that suffered from terrible stuttering and other issues, they were poorly optimized for actual desktop use and just put up good benchmark numbers. There were some Samsung drives as well. Once Intel got into the game w/their X25 G1 drives (which supposedly won't support TRIM, still great drives tho), other companies started to take notice of what users wanted...

Indilinx was one such company, in cooperating with OCZ, Anand and other people they've put out a controller that (paired w/SSD drives from OCZ, Patriot, etc.) competes pretty well w/Intel's drives, even their G2 drives (which will support TRIM eventually under Win7, as will all Indilinx drives). The G2 drives also brought prices down since they use 34nm flash which is cheaper for Intel, and their prices/sizes actually kinda complement Indilinx's offerings (they don't meet directly at any one size so they don't compete directly as much).

You can get a budget OCZ Agility drive w/slightly slower flash (same controller, the difference in performance is almost nil, 'specially on something like a laptop), 60GB for about $130 if you catch' a deal... Their regular Vertex line is costlier, the 60GB drive in that line is at around $190 and their 120GB drive is at $330+. Intel's 80GB X25-M G2 is at $230-ish (if you can find it in stock and the reseller isn't price gouging like crazy), and their 160GB version is over $450. The higher end Vertex lines (EX, Turbo, etc) aren't worth the money imo.

With the exception of Black Friday deals I don't think we'll see prices tapering off much towards the end of the year, X25-M stock is still quite limited so demand are high and many places are charging way more than MSRP ($300+), which in turn is keeping the Indilinx drive prices firmly in place... A lot of people are gonna be looking for 'em by next month when Win7 launches officially, so it's just gonna drive demand higher.
 
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Pretty much, tho there's been a huge controversy over Newegg's price for those drives... When the G2 was first announced, before they ever actually released it, they lowered the G1 to the MSRP of the G2 ($230)... Then the G2 came out, sold out, and the price started to go up up up and awayyyyy... As high as $500 at one point, now it's back to $330 as you can see but that's still a huge ripoff considering the MSRP. Eventually they raised the price on the G1 as well. You can find the G2 elsewhere for $100 less, literally, even the retail-boxed version (R5 = retail, I got mine for $260 including S&H, had I waited I could've probably found it for $30 less).
 
why is it that the general census about SSD's is to turn off SuperFetch? all that does is precache stuff, so why turn it off?
 
Honestly? I have no clue. I'm guessing that maybe, even tho RAM is still many times faster than a SSD, it's because the SSD is fast enough that the difference in loading an app from RAM vs the SSD is lost on the user (like saying you wouldn't notice the difference between 10ms and 50ms so why bother w/it)... Or maybe it's because of the way the file system works, those files are written/modified when they're analyzed by Superfetch for copying to RAM? Either way, the recommendation is probably born out of this article by MS:

Engineering Windows 7: Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.
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Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.
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Note that Superfetch/Prefetch and defragging are the only things the article quotes that should be disabled by default in Win7... And it touches on hibernate, the page file, indexing, etc.
 
MrWizard6600 said:
why is it that the general census about SSD's is to turn off SuperFetch? all that does is precache stuff, so why turn it off?
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Why do you pre-cache stuff?

To get around the slowness of mechanical HDDs.

SSDs don't have the latency of mechanical hdds, they find data nearly instantly, and they read it way faster, all superfetch does on an ssd is nothing.

Except that running superfetch uses up resources, so on balance it's better to turn it off.
 
Well, RAM is still faster than a SSD... So with a heavy enough app I imagine there's still a difference in loading it from the SSD vs RAM, but I imagine that's offset by the resources Superfetch uses up in the background to accomplish that (shouldn't it be doing that only when the system is idle tho?). /shrug
 
AVT said:
We already have them. Any Indilinix-based SSD or the X25-M G2 are all 2nd-gen. 1st gen includes X25-M G1, Samsung-based SSDs, and the infamous JMicron Junk SSDs.
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My summits are second gen and are Samsung based.

Atleast I think they are, I got em for free and looking at OCZ website they are listed as 2nd Generation.
 
It should be like this:

1st gen - JMicron, samsung and everything before (flash is actually a very OLD technology)
2nd gen - Intel X25-M, OCZ Vertex. Samsung 2nd gen
2.5 gen - The new Vertex lines, Intel X25-M G2

3rd gen would be the PCI-E SSDs (Fusion-IO, Z-drive), the super performance ones (e.g. Sandforce, Violin Memory), and some stuff in research labs.

So far, my Intel X-25M has been the most significant storage upgrade in my history of computing, since the days of Windows 3.1 or so. Imagine that ... Windows startup is now CPU limited by my dual core E8400.

I simply leave Superfetch on for Win 7 (it was never turned off despite what the blog said) ... the algorithm was tuned to be much less aggressive especially at startup. In addition, it shouldn't try to load VM images or that sort of stuff (that's what the Windows 7 dev team said apparently).

Comment from another forum:
When trying out the official beta I noticed that Superfetch was much less aggressive early on, but not until now after having run build 7057 for ten days or so have I started to look more closely at it. Not only has it been less present early after a start, it's much less active overall and for what little I've read about it I've seen some indications to the same general behavior. I'm curious if someone else has made some discoveries or has an experience to share.

For instance under Vista I'm used to heavy disk access early on and some 10-15min after a boot (depending on other activities) most of my 8GB of RAM has been filled with cached data from apps and games and probably a lot more. Now it's much less, maybe not even 500MB. It's been clearly positive for game loading performance early on after a bootup, which is what I'm missing the most.

With all the complaints about drive access in Vista I fully expected some tweaking of Superfetch to be done, but hope that in the end it isn't weakened as much as I've experienced so far. A hint on Microsofts Technet saying that Superfetch has been "enhanced" but that details are yet to be published is the only tangeable information I've found so far.
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TheCommander said:
Is there much of a difference going from a SATA hard drive to a SSD? I currently own an older 10k Raptor and was wondering if I would notice a performance increase.

If anything I'd like to get a 32gig drive for Windows 7- which leads to would a 32 gig drive be enough for Windows 7 (64 bit version)?
Click to expand...

I went from an old 74gb Raptor to an Corsair X32 SSD and i definatley noticed a performance increase. I was tossing up between upgrading my CPU (an e6400 @ 3.2ghz) to a e7500 which i hoped to OC to round 4.2 ghz but i chose to buy the SSD instead and im glad i did because theres no way i wouldve seen this kind of performance with just more clock speed!

I cloned windows XP onto my X32 and the boot times alone are awesome. Ive gone from taking 8 - 9 passes of the Windows loading progress bar, to 2 and half passes and im in. Then everything just pops up almost instantley.

My advice would be to buy a cheaper, smaller SSD like the 32gb, then later on as i fill it up buy a second one and put it in RAID 0 for phenomenal speeds, that way you'll be running fast than one 64 or 128 gb SSD and you dont have to buy them at the same time.
 
jimhsu said:
It should be like this:

1st gen - JMicron, samsung and everything before (flash is actually a very OLD technology)
2nd gen - Intel X25-M, OCZ Vertex. Samsung 2nd gen
2.5 gen - The new Vertex lines, Intel X25-M G2

3rd gen would be the PCI-E SSDs (Fusion-IO, Z-drive), the super performance ones (e.g. Sandforce, Violin Memory), and some stuff in research labs.

So far, my Intel X-25M has been the most significant storage upgrade in my history of computing, since the days of Windows 3.1 or so. Imagine that ... Windows startup is now CPU limited by my dual core E8400.

I simply leave Superfetch on for Win 7 (it was never turned off despite what the blog said) ... the algorithm was tuned to be much less aggressive especially at startup. In addition, it shouldn't try to load VM images or that sort of stuff (that's what the Windows 7 dev team said apparently).

Comment from another forum:
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What are the milestones between those?

The only serious technological change between all of those, not counting JMicron Junk SSDs, is TRIM support. This is how at least I separate the SSDs into generations.
 
Well, the X25-M & the Vertex (and other drives using the Indilinx Barefoot controller) were a milestone in the sense that they not only had a better controller but they were also optimized for desktop use and the aspects of performance that really matter... Junk controllers or not, up to that point all other drives were optimized for benchmarks and things like sequential read/writes, at the cost of random operations, etc. The success of the X25-M changed all that and everyone else jumped on the Indilinx bandwagon once they followed Intel's lead.

Between 2nd gen and what he describes as '2.5 gen' you'd be right, the only real milestone is TRIM support and other refinements in the same vein (to preserve performance over time). Hence why the poster you quoted didn't allude to them as a full generation jump... Altho the G2 Intel drives also brought prices down, that's as important as anything else if you ask me. There's still a lot of drives out there that lag heavily in the aforementioned areas tho, AFAIK you can't even update the firmware on many Samsung drives for instance, that's a big drawback.

Looking onward, I think it's gonna be about price/capacity more than any big leaps in performance... They're gonna keep moving to smaller/cheaper flash and expanding capacity while lowering prices. Next big improvement in performance is probably gonna come thanks to the SATA6G spec but current-gen mobos lack the controller necessary for that in most instances so it'll take a whole new wave of mobos/chipsets for it to become commonplace.
 
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