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Reconsidering SSDs

Q

Quartz-1

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
May 20, 2011
Messages
4,257
I've previously disregarded - note, not dismissed - SSDs because I don't reboot a lot. But, to save electricity and for noise, I've taken to hibernating my desktop PC a lot. It's an 8 GB C2D E7300 with 2x EIDE drives (1x 80 GB, 1x 250 GB), both compressed, running Windows 7 Ultimate SP1, fully patched. Typical memory usage is 3 GB. Currently, resuming from Hibernation takes 30 seconds: how long would that take with a SSD?
 
rebooting itself is only one aspect, all programs will load faster on an ssd. as for the sleep/hibernate, just be careful you get a drive that has no issues with hibernation. some of then on occasion have had problems with that.
 
As gis278 said, the reboot time is about the least impressive feature of the SSD, because how often do you reboot? However, the ability to have multiple disk access at once without slowdowns is very noticeable - so much so that I get frustrated now when I'm trying to copy files from the spinning disk while also extracting a rar or something - it chokes, of course, but I do the same thing all the time on the SSD and it never slows down, so the contrast is very apparent.
 
Compressed IDE drives, boy, that has to be slow ! BTW, do you have backups ? I remember the only time I used compression, like ten years ago, I ended up losing data.
 
Of course I have backups. Note that I'm not particularly interested in boot times but resume times.
 
even resume times aren't really a reason to upgrade. you do it once a day.

its the multi tasking and just general responsiveness that are absolutely wonderful. you really take it for granted though, until you have to work on a system that doesn't have a SSD. then you want to claw your fucking eyes out.
 
I like my ssd because office opens in a snap, photoshop's splash screen blinks than its open, windows boots faster than the logo takes to complete. Resuming is instantaneous, but I (s3) sleep, not hibernate.

I can't see myself buying much larger than for my os and productivity apps, games would be nice, but the cost is just too prohibitive.
 
I use Hybrid Sleep - which is a combination of sleep + hibernate.

On my old 1st gen 80 GB Intel X25-M based SSD (it's an AData I bought a couple of years ago), it can take quite a while before the PC finishes writing the hibernation file to the SSD - probably writing at 50-75 MB/sec. With 8 GB of RAM that can take a while. Waking up from sleep takes a few seconds - maybe 5-10 seconds.

Two SSDs in RAID0 would speed up the time it takes to write the hibernate file. You have to be careful though - without a good garbage collection algorithm on the SSDs in RAID0 you could significantly impact SSD performance especially if you have lots of RAM which would result in large hibernation files.

I am actually considering moving the hibernation file to a cheap Intel SSD 311 just for this and swap haha! ($60 on sale).
 
I'm not too worried about the time it takes to hibernate - I just hit the button and walk away - but it's taking 30 seconds to resume. A reduction to 10 seconds isn't worth the expense.

And I thought you had to have the hibernation file on the boot drive.
 
Just going from IDE to SATA you are going to notice it, especially a WD black and even more so with a VelociRaptor. Going from IDE to a SSD Sata you will be loving life even more.

Why are you running compression on all your drives ? I don't think most have done that for many many years. Ditch the compression, go with a SSD and holy smokes everything will be faster.

Can your system make full usage of the new drives?
What motherboard ?
 
Quartz, waking from hybrid sleep is instant - the only thing is, windows has to reinitialize most or all of the devices and that takes time (videocard, sound, etc.). If you are only using hibernate then it will take longer - it is easy to do the math on how long it would take to load into RAM - 200 MB/sec reads for 8 GB RAM is approximately 30 seconds on an older SSD like mine.

I suggest you use Hybrid Sleep - then it'll be as fast as windows can re-initialize the devices.
 
If going from 30 seconds to 10 seconds isn't worth it, then I doubt the whole thing would be worth it for you honestly. There haven't been too many reviews done comparing the waking time from sleep of SSD drives, as that isn't really their main selling point. Actually some, like the sandforce drives, have issues with resuming from sleep. In my case, my motherboard for some odd reason doesn't wake up correctly. But the SSD allows me to just shut the system off completely now, because the SSD boots up so quickly compared to the older spinning disk. I never used to shut down until I got this SSD, I had always previously used sleep/hibernate.
 
ob1 said:
If going from 30 seconds to 10 seconds isn't worth it, then I doubt the whole thing would be worth it for you honestly. There haven't been too many reviews done comparing the waking time from sleep of SSD drives, as that isn't really their main selling point. Actually some, like the sandforce drives, have issues with resuming from sleep. In my case, my motherboard for some odd reason doesn't wake up correctly. But the SSD allows me to just shut the system off completely now, because the SSD boots up so quickly compared to the older spinning disk. I never used to shut down until I got this SSD, I had always previously used sleep/hibernate.
Click to expand...

This is a great point.
Bootup is probably faster than waking up :rolleyes: at least I never use Sleep or Hibernate since the startup is near instant! By the time I press power, sit down, and turn on my monitor I`m already at the login screen. No waiting even from a dead-startup!
 
ToddW2 said:
This is a great point.
Bootup is probably faster than waking up :rolleyes: at least I never use Sleep or Hibernate since the startup is near instant! By the time I press power, sit down, and turn on my monitor I`m already at the login screen. No waiting even from a dead-startup!
Click to expand...

Getting to the login screen is a time statistic that's useless to me: I need the time after I've logged in, opened 20- or 30-odd tabs in Chrome in 3 separate groups, opened Office, Solitaire ;), etc etc.
 
Quartz-1, I have 17 tabs in Chrome. I log in, move the mouse to click on the Chrome icon (takes a couple of seconds to move the mouse) and they are all up in 5 seconds. This is on an X25-M 80 GB 1st gen SSD, on an i7-2600K + Asus P8Z68V Pro motherboard + 2x4 GB RAM, stock speed.
 
Oh btw this is in Windows 7 Ultimate - installed onto the SSD. No manual tweaking for SSD applied at all - looks like the installer disabled Superfetch on its own.
 
As hard as it is for most people on this board to believe, there's some that don't really need or want an SSD.

I couldn't care less if the OP purchases one or not but I'm curious why anyone would want to talk him into it? :confused:

Just wondering........?
 
Old Hippie said:
As hard as it is for most people on this board to believe, there's some that don't really need or want an SSD.

I couldn't care less if the OP purchases one or not but I'm curious why anyone would want to talk him into it? :confused:

Just wondering........?
Click to expand...

Proselytizing takes all forms.
 
Forceman said:
Proselytizing takes all forms.
Click to expand...
Oh My!

I had to look that one up! :)

I guess I just don't feel it's worth my time or energy.

BUT, had I not asked the question I wouldn't have learned a new word.

Now.....if I can only remember it. :D
 
The people most against SSDs tend to be ones that have never used one. That's my observation I've seen on other forums of course. They rarely state facts as well (this goes for both sides). I'm not saying you two do that of course - in fact this forum is the opposite - I'm sure you guys tried to educate and are just too tired to say anything anymore. I've seen people take banners on either side - the reality is that there is a middle ground.

If you don't use your PC in multiple roles, you probably won't care for an SSD (ie. dedicated file server, or casual surfing with only a couple of tabs open, or only use one application and very little of anything else).

If you don't know if you want one or not - just go to a retailer and try one out - if you don't like it, return it for a full refund. Nothing to lose, right? I suggest the OP try that - that way there is less drama from us old farts. :)
 
Rectal Prolapse said:
The people most against SSDs tend to be ones that have never used one. That's my observation I've seen on other forums of course. They rarely state facts as well (this goes for both sides). I'm not saying you two do that of course - in fact this forum is the opposite - I'm sure you guys tried to educate and are just too tired to say anything anymore. I've seen people take banners on either side - the reality is that there is a middle ground.

If you don't use your PC in multiple roles, you probably won't care for an SSD (ie. dedicated file server, or casual surfing with only a couple of tabs open, or only use one application and very little of anything else).

If you don't know if you want one or not - just go to a retailer and try one out - if you don't like it, return it for a full refund. Nothing to lose, right? I suggest the OP try that - that way there is less drama from us old farts. :)
Click to expand...

What I've seen is that the people advocating for them tend to advocate for them no matter what the user's usage patterns are. You'll see people recommending SSDs for grandma's machine, for home server boxes, pretty much anything. SSDs are great, but the price/size ratio means they aren't necessarily for everyone.
 
Heh - the correct way is to put one in grandma's machine without telling her - that way her virus checker won't make the PC run like molasses going uphill! Oh and the spyware and trojans won't slow things down so much either! :)
 
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I bet OP would benefit hugely from just using a decent 1TB uncompressed system HDD. Or maybe enough RAM to effectively use Suspend to RAM. 50 or 60 bucks either way would make a good dent in the problem.
 
This PC cannot take more than the 8 GB it already has, and the fans are too noisy to bot, so suspend to RAM isn't an option. And yes, I'd love to buy some new HDDs, hence the question - to SSD or not to SSD. I've entered the draw for the 180 GB SSD, so with a ton of luck, I might get to report how well SSDs do.
 
Quartz-1 said:
This PC cannot take more than the 8 GB it already has, and the fans are too noisy to bot, so suspend to RAM isn't an option.
Click to expand...

I'm a bit confused by this... maybe you can clarify for me? I don't think that there's a RAM lower limit to use suspend to RAM (S3). And the fans -- and everything but the RAM itself -- should be powered down in S3 state.

Or maybe the motherboard doesn't support S3 and that's why you can't use it?

I must be missing something here... is this a laptop? I don't think there would ever be a case to use hibernation on a desktop unless you have a requirement that the session be maintained across a power interruption (either from unplugging the desktop to move it, a power outage, etc.).
 
My suggestion to the OP: Just pick up a friggin' SSD and try it out. This is just one big circle-jerk. If the OP doesn't like it he can take it back for a refund. It's really that simple.

EDIT: This kind of question has been addressed thousands of times on PC forums everywhere. So yes, my patience with these kinds of questions is a little thin. There are plenty of benchmarks to see as well.
 
Here's the thing:

Once you go SSD, it's tough to go back. Especially as your OS/app drive. Processors and memory has gotten faster, and spinning rust hasn't caught up.

Best practice I've found for a desktop is to put the OS and most used applications on the SSD, and have a large spinning rust disk for things like movies, mp3s, etc., which don't benefit from SSDs.

SSDs are blazingly fast for reads/writes, something like 200+ MBps, which honestly I don't care that much about. Perhaps if you did a lot of video editing, that would be significant, but I haven't run into that yet.

SSDs are also blazingly fast at random I/O operations (IOPS). On a regular drive made of spinning rust, that head needs to move back and forth across a physical platter. That's one of the reasons why we defragment our disks, to keep commonly accessed data close to each other so the head doesn't have to travel as far.

SSDs dont' really care, and can do IOPS at a much higher rate than regular drives. How much faster? Several orders of magnitude. And that's the real benefit for IOPS. Things like lauching applications, booting operating systems, and all the things that normally thrash a hard drive are typically IOPS-based.

A traditional SATA drive running at 7,200 RPM can give you about 100 IOPS (I/O operations per second, typically 4KB random files) . An MLC-based SSD that you get off Newegg can do 40,000 IOPS or more, depending on the model.

Again, things like streaming movies, MP3s, and anything sequential that doesn't require dozens of megabytes per second (an HD movie is about 5-10 megabytes per second unless your'e doing something fancy like watching a raw file from a RED camera) so keep your multimedia on spinning rust, where the cost per gig is low.

But SSDs? You'll pry SSDs out of my cold, dead hands.
 
Quartz-1 said:
I've previously disregarded - note, not dismissed - SSDs because I don't reboot a lot. But, to save electricity and for noise, I've taken to hibernating my desktop PC a lot. It's an 8 GB C2D E7300 with 2x EIDE drives (1x 80 GB, 1x 250 GB), both compressed, running Windows 7 Ultimate SP1, fully patched. Typical memory usage is 3 GB. Currently, resuming from Hibernation takes 30 seconds: how long would that take with a SSD?
Click to expand...

PATA HDDs, seriously?
You will see a vast improvement from a SSD, or hell, even from a modern HDD that isn't 5+ years old. :rolleyes:


Rectal Prolapse said:
My suggestion to the OP: Just pick up a friggin' SSD and try it out. This is just one big circle-jerk. If the OP doesn't like it he can take it back for a refund. It's really that simple.

EDIT: This kind of question has been addressed thousands of times on PC forums everywhere. So yes, my patience with these kinds of questions is a little thin. There are plenty of benchmarks to see as well.
Click to expand...
Amen to this.
 
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