Solid State Disks?

K

Krilikz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2007
Messages
150
Would a SSD drive be much more efficient for running an os that a hdd?

Just was wondering because prices are slowly going down, and maybe on my next computer i might do something crazy like that. I have just never seen any bench marks though. However i would assume cause it is flash memory that its probably ridiculously fast (and imagine the read times on raid 0 lol)
 
It'll take a good 15-20 seconds off the boot time. And, yeah, it is going to bed much much faster then a normal hard drive.
 
unhappy_mage got some SSD recently and said he would do some benchmarks, but I haven't seen that post yet.
 
I picked up one of the Mton drives, and I love it. It boots Windows XP really fast. You never even see those three little blue bars go across the screen. They don't even appear. Although you can get hard drive configs nearly as fast, you don't have to deal with the heat, power, and noise issues that come with hard drives.

Once the OS is booted, I'm not sure I would say I can really tell the difference when just tooling around in the OS. Real applications that live on the SSD definitely load faster, but I wouldn't call that making the OS faster.
 
Waldorf said:
I picked up one of the Mton drives, and I love it. It boots Windows XP really fast. You never even see those three little blue bars go across the screen. They don't even appear. Although you can get hard drive configs nearly as fast, you don't have to deal with the heat, power, and noise issues that come with hard drives.

Once the OS is booted, I'm not sure I would say I can really tell the difference when just tooling around in the OS. Real applications that live on the SSD definitely load faster, but I wouldn't call that making the OS faster.
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Where'd you get the MTron at? I'm REAL tempted to buy a set and RAID0 'em.
 
Yeah, I know they're pricey, I just didn't know how accessable they were.

I wonder what SSD $$ will be like a year from now?
 
protias said:
unhappy_mage got some SSD recently and said he would do some benchmarks, but I haven't seen that post yet.
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No, I said I wouldn't :p I don't much care about the numbers... but this thing is snappy :D I'm not running much disk-heavy stuff on this machine (booting up is the most, and it's way CPU-bound) but it goes fast when I ask it to.
Brahmzy said:
Where'd you get the MTron at? I'm REAL tempted to buy a set and RAID0 'em.
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They're available at dvnation, as well. Similar prices to the other place posted.
 
It would be nice to see these go mainstream with higher capacities and lower prices. I'd give it at least a year or two before I would even consider buying one. Right now the $$$/gb ratio just isn't worth it.
 
unhappy_mage said:
No, I said I wouldn't :p I don't much care about the numbers... but this thing is snappy :D I'm not running much disk-heavy stuff on this machine (booting up is the most, and it's way CPU-bound) but it goes fast when I ask it to.

They're available at dvnation, as well. Similar prices to the other place posted.
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I thought you said you would. Ah well. Are you using that with your laptop? If you are, did battery life increase?
 
camelass said:
It would be nice to see these go mainstream with higher capacities and lower prices. I'd give it at least a year or two before I would even consider buying one. Right now the $$$/gb ratio just isn't worth it.
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Definately true
 
Brahmzy said:
Must...have...faster...
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I dunno...

You did see Battleship Mtron right?

2005943291545349608_rs.jpg

2005907602044126052_rs.jpg


Too bad it is bottlenecked by the RAID card :(
 
protias said:
I thought you said you would. Ah well.
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Aww, heck. Here's bonnie++, for whatever good it does you:
Code: 
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
debian           1G  5410  73 14117  20  6918  19  6413  82 13670  17 823.4  16
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                  1   279  98   492  97 +++++ +++   371  97   486  95   821  90
Please note that this test was very, very CPU-bound - this is only a P-M 1.7 which barely handles fullscreen video playback :eek: The hard drive light barely flickered, and there was a huge amount of lag in mouse input. A faster CPU (or a better filesystem) would make a big dent in these times. Seek times are a little over 1ms, which isn't bad.
protias said:
Are you using that with your laptop? If you are, did battery life increase?
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I got about 3:15 when booting off a USB stick, 2:45 off a hard drive, and this looks like it'll give me 3:25. Not very scientific, but good enough for me. I'm down to one moving part - the CPU fan - unless you count the screen hinge or the mouse :p
 
unhappy_mage, what drive did you run those tests against? Does the tool you used come with a bootable CD distro that I can run against my MTron?
 
Waldorf said:
unhappy_mage, what drive did you run those tests against? Does the tool you used come with a bootable CD distro that I can run against my MTron?
Click to expand...

The drive I'm using is a 2GB Sandisk Extreme III CF card in a CF to laptop-IDE adapter. Less performance than the Mtrons, but for the capacity I need a good bit cheaper, too.

As for a bootable CD, I don't know of one offhand. If you find a CD with a package manager available, it should be fairly simple; on my Debian box it takes 100k download and then it works. 'apt-get install bonnie++'. The Debian Live project's prebuilt images may be helpful.
 
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