I have the computer in my sig and have a 320GB HDD as the boot drive. I also have a 320GB for music and a 750GB for backups. I was wondering if an SSD as a boot drive would actually help me? I am unsure of what else to tell you guys about this, so if I am missing something let me know. Also, please give me a recommendation on a SSD if you don't mind. I suppose I need at least 120GB or so. Thanks in advance.
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Would an SSD help me?
- Thread starter Lyquist
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I love mine. Would never build a system for myself without one. I use it for a boot/app drive. Then i have a HDD for larger programs and games + storage of music movies and what have you. I like any sandforce SSD. They basically perform the same. Though new sandforce drives are coming in a couple months that should be almost twice as fast as the current crop of SSDs
from your post you ask if an ssd will help you. i guess my first question would be help you with what?
on my last rebuild i picked up an intel ssd, and i notice a difference. boot time and any program thats loaded on the ssd is faster. i have to say i noticed the biggest difference when i installed one in my htpc. for my gaming rig i load most games and apps on a secondary hdd. i only install os, main apps and a few games that i know will benefit from the ssd.
on my last rebuild i picked up an intel ssd, and i notice a difference. boot time and any program thats loaded on the ssd is faster. i have to say i noticed the biggest difference when i installed one in my htpc. for my gaming rig i load most games and apps on a secondary hdd. i only install os, main apps and a few games that i know will benefit from the ssd.
sabregen
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Vertex2 (Sandforce) SSD in the 120GB size is exactly what I just ordered. after the mail in rebate, instant discount, and promo code, it was the same price as the 90GB version ($199.99). If those codes expire and the rebate ends, regular price is $269.99.
Please tell us what you're hoping it would help with... just asking if it will help is entirely too general a question to answer for you.
Please tell us what you're hoping it would help with... just asking if it will help is entirely too general a question to answer for you.
I also use an SSD as my system/app drive and have a large HDD for my data. In my opinion there is only one reason to get an SSD; The appearance of Speed.
With the SSD:
-time from "Starting Windows" to a ready Desktop is 18 seconds
-Programs such as Word, Excel, iTunes, etc. start almost instantaneously
-Pictures appear instantly
Although, an SSD gives the appearance of a much faster computer, unless there are a lot of disk reads/writes, it will not speed up processing time.
I spent almost $300 in Nov 2009 for an 80GB SSD and have never once regretted spending so much more than what even a much larger HDD would have cost. It just feels good to tell the computer to do something and have it happen right away. I am now even thinking about replacing the excruciatingly slow (by comparison) HDD in my laptop with an SSD.
With the SSD:
-time from "Starting Windows" to a ready Desktop is 18 seconds
-Programs such as Word, Excel, iTunes, etc. start almost instantaneously
-Pictures appear instantly
Although, an SSD gives the appearance of a much faster computer, unless there are a lot of disk reads/writes, it will not speed up processing time.
I spent almost $300 in Nov 2009 for an 80GB SSD and have never once regretted spending so much more than what even a much larger HDD would have cost. It just feels good to tell the computer to do something and have it happen right away. I am now even thinking about replacing the excruciatingly slow (by comparison) HDD in my laptop with an SSD.
sabregen
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Dear Santa,
Please send me a second OCZ Vertex2 120GB SSD so that I can not be one of the poor kids, and get Sandforce RAID-0 as an early Christmas present. Also, I'm Jewish.
sabregen
MrWizard6600
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Yeah as others have said, imho it really brings computing to where its supposed to be.
If we bring computer latencies up into a human time scale: stuff in cache taking 1 second to access, then it would take months or years to access things from disk. The result is that getting paged into virtual memory (ie: memory written to disk) is one of the worst things that can happen to a program from an execution standpoint.
But, we have lots of ram, so chances are whatever program your looking at is far from being paged to virtual memory.
Furthermore, on large sequential loads, as any database engineer will tell you, hard disks are great, they will rip the data from the cylinders at very good speed (100MiB/s+).
So the only time an SSD's presence becomes blatantly obvious is with large distributed (ie: random) reads or writes. That happens at boot, when programs are loading, or when a huge chunk of memory needs to be grabbed from the page file (the most obvious example of that being when you minimize a game).
In terms of overall productivity SSD's don't really help much. In terms of FPS, SSD's don't really help much. But subjectively, SSD's are great.
PynkFloydd
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The short answer: Yes!
Long answer: I think your system will be more than capable of seeing a dramatic difference.
I have an Intel 80gb G2 drive in my desktop and laptop. There actually is a noticeable difference between the two. So, I think that the extent of the speed increase depends on your specs...but, it's still noticeable in my laptop. Even though the drive is a little "slower" in my laptop, I'd still NEVER go back to a regular HD.
To give you an idea... Run CMD then type "Winsat disk"
With my "slow" laptop I get:
Disk Seq 64 Read - 247.13 MB/s
Disk Random 16 Read - 199.92 MB/s
Average IO Rate 1.52 ms/IO
Disk Seq 64 Write - 82.63 MB/s
Latency Max - 10.76 ms
Average Read Time w/ Random Writes - .679 ms
That's with a P8600 in the laptop.
Long answer: I think your system will be more than capable of seeing a dramatic difference.
I have an Intel 80gb G2 drive in my desktop and laptop. There actually is a noticeable difference between the two. So, I think that the extent of the speed increase depends on your specs...but, it's still noticeable in my laptop. Even though the drive is a little "slower" in my laptop, I'd still NEVER go back to a regular HD.
To give you an idea... Run CMD then type "Winsat disk"
With my "slow" laptop I get:
Disk Seq 64 Read - 247.13 MB/s
Disk Random 16 Read - 199.92 MB/s
Average IO Rate 1.52 ms/IO
Disk Seq 64 Write - 82.63 MB/s
Latency Max - 10.76 ms
Average Read Time w/ Random Writes - .679 ms
That's with a P8600 in the laptop.
ive been reading a lot of posts with wild claims such as this and wonder where you are getting your information? ive never heard the next gen is claiming to be magnitudes faster. what do you base this on?
Old Hippie
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I also thought that was an exaggeration but between the old controller SF SF-1200 and the new SF-2582 the "twice as fast" scenario seems farily close but no cigar.
I've had Vertex2s and won't buy another for awhile but it will be interesting to see how the production versions compare to the samples.
MrWizard6600
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Once you use SSD, you won't want to ever use another machine with a regular hard drive.
I could not agree more!
Its nice to be spoiled.
[LYL]Homer
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Everyone wins with SSD's.
I've had 2 systems with SSDs now for 8-10 months, both 160gb Intel G2s. I haven't been super impressed with them, though I haven't been so unimpressed as to really regret buying them. Before the G2s, I had systems with 640gb, 2 platter WD6400AAKSes(latter known as WD blues) as boot/system drives, which were pretty quick when I bought them in 2008.
1. The OS does boot up a little quicker, though the Vista system with 4 monitors(4850x2) + multiple sound cards still takes around a minute(it was probably closer to 2 before). The other Windows 7 system with just a single monitor(on a 5870) boots in ~10-20 seconds. The Vista system it replaced was pretty quick to boot as well, I'd say about the same ~10-20 seconds. But... after boot, the various system tray stuff, and other background apps/services, start noticeably quicker, on both SSD systems. The total improvement is enough that I have started turning the Windows 7 system off when it's not in use. Though I have another system, that still has a WD6400AAKS boot disk, and I've been putting it to sleep when not in use, and it comes back up even quicker.
2. Firefox with a lot of tabs open(50+) comes up way quicker(10s of seconds to usable vs a couple of minutes). The first launch of other applications is quicker... but I tend to leave the system up for weeks at a time, and with 8 gigs of memory most apps stay in the disk cache... so overall, it's a small upgrade.
3. Copies from/to the same SSD are way faster than copies from/to the same HDD. Though I really don't do large copies from/to the same hdd a lot. I've always had 2+ hdds per system and if I need to read/transform/write or back-up something large enough to cause a noticable wait, then I usually arrange for it to read and write to different HDDs. Thus, in practice, for me, it's only a small win for the SSD. Most people have only 1 disk, so it's a huge win for them.
In addition, I've always installed my OS into a smaller(currently 100ish gig) partition at the start of the drive, I do use the remainder of the drive as a separate data partition, but in general, due to the partitioning, app launching and such is going to have a 3-5ms seek time instead of a 12-15ms seek time due to the small partition. So having an SSD with sub-ms seeks is still a huge advantage but not as huge as it is for most people(with unpartitioned drives). I did not partition the G2s as they were small enough it didn't seem worth, and there's no performance advantage.
4. Games, when I take the time to copy them onto the SSD with soft links(I always install them to a non system disk), do load faster, though it's usually like 20-30-40% not 2-3-4x.
5. Searching 10+ years of email in Thunderbird can be lightning fast, though I think that is more due to a new indexing method added in the last year or so, than due to the SSD. Also searching for files on the SSD is quite a bit faster... but due to the small size, most of my data, which I need to search, is still on HDDs...
6. I do expect SSDs in general and the Intel ones in particular to beat out HDDs for reliability, probably by at least an order of magnitude. So I feel safer having my important data on an SSD. But of course I still make backups. I have yet to have any issues with either SSD.
Other stuff, the Vista system was imaged from a HDD to the SSD, and I let the Intel utility that performs trim run weekly or so. The Windows 7 system was installed to the SSD, and should be auto trimming. Both are using AHCI. And when I benched them they benched similarly to reviews I've seen, so I think they're running about as well as they can.
I still use other systems that only have HDDs, and as long as they have fast ones I really don't notice a difference outside of boot times. When I use older machines with slow HDDs(and especially insufficient memory)... that is annoying, but that was annoying even before I switched to SSD.
So after all that, since you have multiple disks, and especially if you have a good bit of memory(6+gigs), and/or you sleep your system instead of turning it off, I would say buy one if you have money burning a hole in your pocket. Otherwise wait, they'll always be cheaper, and probably faster in the future.
1. The OS does boot up a little quicker, though the Vista system with 4 monitors(4850x2) + multiple sound cards still takes around a minute(it was probably closer to 2 before). The other Windows 7 system with just a single monitor(on a 5870) boots in ~10-20 seconds. The Vista system it replaced was pretty quick to boot as well, I'd say about the same ~10-20 seconds. But... after boot, the various system tray stuff, and other background apps/services, start noticeably quicker, on both SSD systems. The total improvement is enough that I have started turning the Windows 7 system off when it's not in use. Though I have another system, that still has a WD6400AAKS boot disk, and I've been putting it to sleep when not in use, and it comes back up even quicker.
2. Firefox with a lot of tabs open(50+) comes up way quicker(10s of seconds to usable vs a couple of minutes). The first launch of other applications is quicker... but I tend to leave the system up for weeks at a time, and with 8 gigs of memory most apps stay in the disk cache... so overall, it's a small upgrade.
3. Copies from/to the same SSD are way faster than copies from/to the same HDD. Though I really don't do large copies from/to the same hdd a lot. I've always had 2+ hdds per system and if I need to read/transform/write or back-up something large enough to cause a noticable wait, then I usually arrange for it to read and write to different HDDs. Thus, in practice, for me, it's only a small win for the SSD. Most people have only 1 disk, so it's a huge win for them.
In addition, I've always installed my OS into a smaller(currently 100ish gig) partition at the start of the drive, I do use the remainder of the drive as a separate data partition, but in general, due to the partitioning, app launching and such is going to have a 3-5ms seek time instead of a 12-15ms seek time due to the small partition. So having an SSD with sub-ms seeks is still a huge advantage but not as huge as it is for most people(with unpartitioned drives). I did not partition the G2s as they were small enough it didn't seem worth, and there's no performance advantage.
4. Games, when I take the time to copy them onto the SSD with soft links(I always install them to a non system disk), do load faster, though it's usually like 20-30-40% not 2-3-4x.
5. Searching 10+ years of email in Thunderbird can be lightning fast, though I think that is more due to a new indexing method added in the last year or so, than due to the SSD. Also searching for files on the SSD is quite a bit faster... but due to the small size, most of my data, which I need to search, is still on HDDs...
6. I do expect SSDs in general and the Intel ones in particular to beat out HDDs for reliability, probably by at least an order of magnitude. So I feel safer having my important data on an SSD. But of course I still make backups. I have yet to have any issues with either SSD.
Other stuff, the Vista system was imaged from a HDD to the SSD, and I let the Intel utility that performs trim run weekly or so. The Windows 7 system was installed to the SSD, and should be auto trimming. Both are using AHCI. And when I benched them they benched similarly to reviews I've seen, so I think they're running about as well as they can.
I still use other systems that only have HDDs, and as long as they have fast ones I really don't notice a difference outside of boot times. When I use older machines with slow HDDs(and especially insufficient memory)... that is annoying, but that was annoying even before I switched to SSD.
So after all that, since you have multiple disks, and especially if you have a good bit of memory(6+gigs), and/or you sleep your system instead of turning it off, I would say buy one if you have money burning a hole in your pocket. Otherwise wait, they'll always be cheaper, and probably faster in the future.
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Why would you ever have a need to have 50+ tabs open and how do you even remember what each tab represents?
I sometimes might have as many as seven or eight tabs open. Firefox loads almost instantaneously with my 80 GB G2.
I only have a single monitor but my boot up time from "Starting Windows" appearing to a finished desk to is only 18 seconds, about 20% of what it takes with a HDD.
I also thought that was an exaggeration but between the old controller SF SF-1200 and the new SF-2582 the "twice as fast" scenario seems farily close but no cigar.
Of course, we both know how much Sandforce tends to inflate their specs. The real test will be when they come out and someone runs AS-SSD on them.
My prediction: the AS-SSD speeds for the next-gen Sandforce will be similar to the speeds on the Crucial C400. Why? Because absent compression (that is not obtainable on most real data anyway), the speed is limited by the underlying flash chips, and Micron, Crucial's parent company, makes the flash chips via IMFT. If the new Sandforce drives use IMFT flash, then they will be about the same speed as the C400, since you can be sure that Micron/Crucial will squeeze all possible speed out of their own flash chips.
Old Hippie
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Naturally but my statement was made referring to Anand's tests on both controllers with compressable data.
Does that change your prediction?
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He probably read that comment by Anand.
Usability, the 50+ tabs are across 5+ windows using, using tree style tabs. I tend to make each window be one forum host or 1 category of hosts, so finding things, even dozens of things is pretty easy. I use firefox to keep open things that I only read a few times a week. Fire up Firefox... catch up, close some old threads, open some new threads... close firefox, go back to normal chaotic browsing.
For most other browsing I use Chrome(almost everything these days), IE(if something breaks in chrome or I fall into old habits) and Octave(I figure it's the most secure of the lot, since it has the least market share).
I've never figured out why the Vista machine takes so long to boot, for the longest time I thought it was the E-MU sound card(drivers), but now it's in the Windows 7 machine, and if there was a change it was a small one. Could be some esoteric bios setting or 2, or it could just be the extra hardware needing to be identified and initialized.
Since I leave it on 24/7, it isn't significant enough to troubleshoot. Excluding firefox the machine generally has 10-20 browsers open, multiple editors/IDEs, ssh terminals, command prompts, explorer windows, etc. And I don't like to lose my train(s) of thought by shutting it down or risk losing them by sleeping it(sleep seems to work very well on some machines, on others it's still iffy). For that machine, and only that machine, I run a 5 row high task bar on one of the monitors, which makes keeping track of everything pretty easy.
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Yes, even the weakest SSD will be faster than any HDD RAID array, and is leagues past the 320GB boot drive you are using.
Everything will load much much faster, and if it is used in a laptop it will also extend battery life due to it's low power consumption.
Everything will load much much faster, and if it is used in a laptop it will also extend battery life due to it's low power consumption.
He was speaking loosely -- there is no "Intel NAND". The IMFT (Intel Micron Flash Technology) partnership is where both Intel and Micron/Crucial get their flash from, and also some Sandforce drive makers use IMFT flash.
So no, the fact that Anand says some next-gen Sandforce drives will be using IMFT flash, as I said they likely would, does not change my prediction.
Old Hippie
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That's what I was missing.
Looks like it'll be a controller shoot-out
LOL I know. I feel like a second class citizen still using a WD Velociraptor 300gb.
When my tax return lands on Friday i'm going to buy some SSD's. 1 for my Media Center PC and 1 for my gaming rig.
1 Question I have which is probably unrelated to the OP or anything else more than being an SSD usage question. In order to spare writes and life of the SSD do you guys keep your page files turned off?