• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

SSD drive for OS worth it?

M

mmapcpro

n00b
Joined
Sep 12, 2005
Messages
3
It it a significant speed increase to get a 128GB SSD drive for the OS on a rig that I use mainly for work and watching hd movies? I wouldn't be gaming...but multitasking with several programs working at once. No photoshop.

Seems to me I would mostly see the speed boost in boot times...is that correct?
 
I just recently put an SSD in my laptop and I'll never go back. Not only are boot times considerably faster but everything opens faster. It's was like getting a whole new machine - its nice not having my drive be the bottleneck of the system.
 
I bought my wife a SSD for use in her business. Lots of windows open at a time (3 monitors for viewing).

She sees no benefit.

----

I am building my daughter a new machine (she works with my wife). SATA III, Windows 7 64bit, 8GB memory, Phenom X4, USB-3 (not really important for this discussion). A SSD as soon as they release the new ones this month. I hope it appears faster.
 
I upgraded my office pc from a single 7200RPM SATA to a 64GB C300 for os/apps and a 500GB SATA for storage. I went from 5 minutes to complete a full reboot, down to 30 seconds from the time I clicked restart, to the time I'm logged back in.

I've slowed it down another 10 or so seconds when I linked it up to AD and installed a bunch of other crap. But 40 seconds for a full reboot is fast IMO, with all the crap I have to run at the office. I can never go back to a single SATA.

At home my Inspiron One has a 1TB SATA, I hate it. I ordered a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB so I can get that caching benefit of SSD for my common apps. It works great on my laptops, so it's a fair trade off with storage capacity and a nice boost for day to day use with a hybrid SSD. You might consider going that route.
 
Yeah, SSD for OS and apps, regular drive for media (itunes, movies, etc.).

I moved to it, and I'm never going back.
 
Another YES from here!
I actually had to downgrade from a dying SSD to HDD, I imaged the OS and the difference was eye opening.
You know that annoying waittime right after login when the desktop shows but you can't start work for the next 1-2 minutes because windoze is still loading? I almost forgot it existed while using my SSD and was reminded instantly when I was back on the HDD ... it is also amazing how fast you can open multiple programs on SSD vs HDD
It was only a couple days till I got a replacement SSD but I really hated the time.
 
I run an Intel X25-M G2 SSD. I recently put together a computer basically identical to mine but it had a 7200rpm drive instead of the SSD. I almost tore it apart and sent it back (thought it was defective) until I realized that it was normal hard drive lag. Once you go SSD, you never go back.
 
I got an sad for about 3 weeks. Booting was faster but i couldn't see any other differences. I went to a 1tb wd black. If i give my machine that extra 1 minute after it is in windows i saw no other differences. My sad was sold and will not go back anytime soon.
 
jordan12 said:
I got an sad for about 3 weeks. Booting was faster but i couldn't see any other differences. I went to a 1tb wd black. If i give my machine that extra 1 minute after it is in windows i saw no other differences. My sad was sold and will not go back anytime soon.
Click to expand...

If you did not notice any other differences, you were using it wrong or got a crap SSD.
 
It really depends on what you want and what you expect. Boot and application times will be much faster and the overall experience will be faster.

However, some of this benefit is obviated by Windows prefetch and caching. The machine I'm using now is older, but with Windows 7 it takes all of 1 second to start chrome/firefox after the first time I load them up in the morning.

The differences is also greater on laptops since many laptops use slower drives. A lot of enthusiasts have drives like WD Black in their desktops, so you'll see less of a difference.

Personally, I found for "home use" that the few extra seconds you get from an SSD aren't worth the cost. Boot up times are irrelevant (for me) since I usually walk away from my desk during boot times anyway.

As far as application performance, it depends on what you are doing. If you are I/O bound, it's going to make a difference. If not, an SSD is not going to do much. Here is some data on compile times. Here is a thread on compile times

As people have pointed out in the thread I linked to, compile times were typically CPU bound. However, the overall experience using the IDE is faster.
 
MikeTrike said:
If you did not notice any other differences, you were using it wrong or got a crap SSD.
Click to expand...
Or perhaps SSDs do not provide an improvement. As I said my wife did not see a difference when I replaced her hard drive with a SSD. (I could not measure much difference in load times and computation times did not change much.)

Most office work is not waiting for the hard drive to load data.
 
GeorgeHR said:
Or perhaps SSDs do not provide an improvement. As I said my wife did not see a difference when I replaced her hard drive with a SSD. (I could not measure much difference in load times and computation times did not change much.)

Most office work is not waiting for the hard drive to load data.
Click to expand...

Then I guess you're best off saving your money then.

I manage about 200 systems to compare it with, they have various drives from 5400RPM, 7200RPM, 10,000RPM, 15,000RPM, SAS, SCSI, SATA. And from my experience with a quality SSD, not a random cheap one. But an Intel X25 or a Crucial C300 series, etc. There is a HUGE difference from your standard SATA drives. Things as simple as right clicking for a context menu to jumping in and out of a dozen applications. Hybrid SSD's from Seagate even make a noticable difference, and they only have 4GB of SSD cache.

Maybe you just ended up with a bad drive? But there is indeed a difference between SSD and mechanical spinning drives.

Which SSD drives have you tested?
 
MikeTrike said:
I manage about 200 systems to compare it with, they have various drives from 5400RPM, 7200RPM, 10,000RPM, 15,000RPM, SAS, SCSI, SATA. And from my experience with a quality SSD, not a random cheap one. But an Intel X25 or a Crucial C300 series, etc. There is a HUGE difference from your standard SATA drives. Things as simple as right clicking for a context menu to jumping in and out of a dozen applications. Hybrid SSD's from Seagate even make a noticable difference, and they only have 4GB of SSD cache.
Click to expand...

What iowait and iops improvements have you seen on those desktops?
 
LightningCrash said:
What iowait and iops improvements have you seen on those desktops?
Click to expand...

Here's the two drives in my office PC for comparison. SSD's are terrible performers because it lost in the burst category. Which is why I should switch back to a mechanical drive, all I do is copy large files around all day.

c300iops.jpg
spinpointi.jpg
 
MikeTrike said:
Here's the two drives in my office PC for comparison. SSD's are terrible performers because it lost in the burst category. Which is why I should switch back to a mechanical drive, all I do is copy large files around all day.
Click to expand...

oh I didn't mean benchmarks, I meant real system stats, from sar or iostat etc.
 
SSD's are often a bit misunderstood. For desktops I don't think they're nearly the benefit everyone thinks they are. I've got an Intel 160GB and I like it to be sure, but it's not an insanely good upgrade assuming you have a decent amount of RAM and otherwise healthy system already. Now apps installed on it will pretty much load like they're already in RAM, but that's initial startup time only. Likewise on-boot there's almost no lag in starting apps, but that's really only a significant time savings right after boot.

For laptops, they're an insanely awesome upgrade. Since they're often powered down quite frequently the much faster boot times are very useful and odds are high it's your only drive so everything on it runs at SSD speeds all of the time. They also use less power, so battery life improves, along with their lower heat signature. I won't own a laptop without one from now on.
 
LightningCrash said:
oh I didn't mean benchmarks, I meant real system stats, from sar or iostat etc.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure I'm running a Windows OS, what would you consider to be a comprable stat test? perfmon?

EDIT: Maybe it's just the type of work I do, but I do notice a difference during day to day work.
difference.jpg
 
Last edited:
MikeTrike said:
I'm pretty sure I'm running a Windows OS, what would you consider to be a comprable stat test? perfmon?

EDIT: Maybe it's just the type of work I do, but I do notice a difference during day to day work.
Click to expand...

perfmon would work, but i don't think you've bothered up to this point so i'm not sure how much good it will do.
 
I would guess the people who don't see a benefit from SSD are just chilling on the web or doing simple apps like word, excel, etc.

So basically, don't pay for SSD if you're not going to benefit from it. But don't be mistaken in assuming there are no benefits to be had for other people. It all depends on what you use it for.
 
LightningCrash said:
perfmon would work, but i don't think you've bothered up to this point so i'm not sure how much good it will do.
Click to expand...

I've only got perfmon data on our SATA and SCSI stuff. We ran that for a while when sizing one of our array's recently.
 
I have a newer Sony laptop with a quad core, and currently a Samsung 640Gb 7200RPM hard drive. I need storage that the SSD can't provide cheaply, but would it be worth installing an SSD for the boot drive and using the 640Gb drive as an eSATA drive for storage?

I am planning on setting up a dual-boot as well, and only use the external in Windows. The laptop is *almost* a desktop, as I really don't use it on the go. It's either sitting on my desk at home, or sitting on my desk at work.
 
iroc409 said:
I have a newer Sony laptop with a quad core, and currently a Samsung 640Gb 7200RPM hard drive. I need storage that the SSD can't provide cheaply, but would it be worth installing an SSD for the boot drive and using the 640Gb drive as an eSATA drive for storage?

I am planning on setting up a dual-boot as well, and only use the external in Windows. The laptop is *almost* a desktop, as I really don't use it on the go. It's either sitting on my desk at home, or sitting on my desk at work.
Click to expand...

You might take the middle ground and try a Hybrid SSD.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

I put one in my wifes laptop, as well as my laptop.

They improve boot/shutdown speeds and it does a decent job with caching common apps. It takes a few runs through for it to learn your habits (i.e. hot spots) on the drive. But it's not exactly expensive compared to your standard laptop drive. While giving you capacity that SSD's cant match for the price.
 
Very interesting... thanks Mike. 500G would probably be plenty, and that's a lot cheaper than SSD. I don't like the idea of requiring an external drive, either.
 
I bought 2 120GB Mushkin Callisto Deluxe drives and originally set them up RAID 0 in my laptop. Running benchmarks they were everything they were advertised to be. I split them up due to lack of TRIM support and put 1 of them as a boot drive in my desktop. Previous to this I had 2 320GB drives in the latop RAID 0. The single 120GB SSD does boot faster than the 640GB RAID array did but beyond that there is not enough of a difference to make it worth losing almost 500GB of storage.I will likely go back to the mechanical drives to gain the space back. The battery life did not increase greatly from the SSD, I do not care about the noise. The SSD runs much cooler but at this point I want the space back so for the most part I regret spending the $400 the drives cost. :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top