Depressingly, I note that these fancy things have a fancy price. Sigh. I look forward to that improving with time. Meanwhile, it makes investing in one that would be genuinely useful somewhat challenging.
So is my understanding fairly accurate that these are sort of like giant flash drives, that everything is held in some kind of memory, vs. a physical disk? So how reliable are they? Is there a wide range of reliability, as in, don’t even bother with some brands because you’ll just end up with data that gets trashed especially fast?
Is it true they are all 2.5 and have to be adapted, or are they making 3.5 versions?
Does everything need to be on the SSD for the speed (system AND application AND document application is working on) or can you still get a speed improvement with just the system and application?
And what about these supposed hybrids? How does that work?
SSD’s are great but they are far more expensive per unit of storage than standard platter style drives. For low space, high speed applications, they rock. Just don’t try loading your movie library onto it.
There are 3.5 form factor drives out there but most of them are 2.5, bay adapters can be had for $3-$5
I have a couple customers with hybrid SSD’s, mainly POS systems.
The drives watch what you access the most and shift those files to the SSD segment. To test it in the shop we tried rebooting the machine about 10 times and timed it each time. It got 3-5 seconds faster each time until it settled around 38 seconds with that particular machine. (started about 1:10).
Hybrids are great of “one trick pony” systems like point of sale. General use will have them shuffling stuff too much for much of a boost unless you only use a couple applications. The ones I have messed with have 8GB of SSD coupled to a 500GB platter drive.
Don’t know much about hybrids, but every system I’ve made in the past 2 years has had an SSD for the main drive - there’s just no substitute for that kind of speed.
With the price-per-GB (and available sizes) being what they are, things like movies and games are on a spinning-platter disk, but I still see significant improvement in access times. I mentioned in a previous thread that it was the single most effective upgrade I’ve ever done to my work PC (which runs many many apps)
I think the prices have really come down from when I bought my first drive. My friend (who has less reason to worry about such things) runs a few of them in a RAID configuration, but mine all run singly and I’d sooner give up 1/2 my RAM than go back to a regular HD.
When I was buying an SSD recently, in my research I was referred to this site:
It’s a French site obviously but the fantastic thing is they seem to have access to warranty return rates. The failure rate statistics from their latest roundupare stark:
[The latter figures are for the previous year]
In other words, you might want to consider staying away from OCZ and to consider paying more for Intel.
For a personal computer, my current recommendation for SSDs is to get one with enough capacity to hold the OS, the pagefile, and maybe one or two key applications with a bit of headroom.
The idea is that you put the OS and pagefile on the SSD. There are real speed gains here. If you have a program or two that you use all the time, go ahead and put those on the SSD as well. Everything else goes on a separate traditional hard-drive or even an external USB hard-drive.
It would be “best” (speed-wise) to have everything on a SSD, but the cost/storage just isn’t there yet. Maybe in a year or two. Unless you have thousands of dollars to burn, you still need an older, slower, but higher capacity drive to hold everything other than the essentials.
Useful info.
I am getting ready to build a new rig and I want SSD for the boot, at the very least.
Maybe the swap file can go there as well, but I understand that SSD has a limited number of read/write cycles.
Perhaps the swap could go on an inner contiguous track of the main SATA drive.
Suggestions?
ETA: Didn’t read Gamehat’s suggestion about the pagefile (which I archaically call the swap file).
Isn’t there a limited r/w cycle for SSD’s?
Out of curiosity, what are people doing that time to read stuff off the hard-drive is a noticeable time-sink? I don’t think I’ve ever really had reason to wish my hard-drive was faster. I can see where having faster access to a swap-file would be advantageous, but then, if I was swapping that much I’d use the money to buy more RAM instead of a solid state drive.
Programs still have to load from the hard drive. Sometimes those programs will load content on demand, which will have to come from the drive. It’s these random reads that SSD’s excel at.
So much shorter loading times, and a more responsive environment is what you can expect.
Some of the latest mobo’s for the sandy bridge CPU’s offer a built in hybrid mode, BTW OP.
All you have to do is have a spindle drive (I have a 2 TB one) and a 64 GB SSD. The mobo and drivers will use the built in RAID controller to cache the larger drive on the SSD.
Actually works really well, giving you SSD reads a good percent of the time. I believe PcPer has done reviews of this system. you can check them out for details.
For an ordinary user, whenever you’re waiting for the computer to boot, or a program to launch, or a game level to load, the hard drive is almost always the limiting factor. And a spinning disk hard drive is greatly slowed by multitasking. Ever try to do anything while transferring big files from your system drive? Everything slows down exponentially. Any time you hear your hard drive “thrashing”, it’s slowing you down.
Basically, with a SSD your computer will boot much quicker, programs will open within a second of launching them, and game load times will go from the better part of a minute to just a few seconds. And none of these things will be noticeably slowed by multitasking.
Doesn’t this negate the supposed advantages of moving everything to the cloud? If all of your programs and data are elsewhere than on your computer, then what’s the point of faster access to a drive?
Can someone talk me through these two seemingly incompatible routes to the “future”?
I’ve always had a soft spot for fast primary drives. My last two builds have been the 10K WD Raptors, and before that various 10K SCSI drives (I managed to avoid the IBM “Deathstar” drives, thank goodness). The Raptor I have is the coolest one ever, since it’s the one with the clear cover, but speed comes at a price of reliability.
My understanding is that SSDs move frequently used data around to mimimize the problem of limited R/W cycles, but that it’s still a good idea to Ghost your primary drive so you don’t have a major problem if it goes bad. BTW, anyone know if 40gigs is enough for a typical Windows 7 and pagefile installation?
One thing you want to do when installing one is be sure that the OS has detected it correctly. In particular, you want to be sure that it hasn’t scheduled defrag on it - defragging an SSD is a useless exercise which wastes some of those limited write cycles. Windows superfetch should also not be activated for SSDs. Windows 7 actually decides a drive is an SSD when it reports a rotational speed of 0. It also turns off defragging on a drive that has a random read speed faster than a certain threshold, which generally keeps it turned off.
You may also want to investigate the trim command, which is supported by all the newer SSDs:
To partially solve the limited write problem, SSD controllers generally implement wear leveling. This, coupled with a higher number of write cycles in newer drives has made them practical for use as system drives. Still, be aware that the eventual mode of failure with heavy use is likely to be that writes start failing - fortunately, the device will probably still be able to be read.
The biggest speedup is in how long it takes your computer to start, followed by how long it takes you to open programs. The former can take minutes, and the latter usually a few seconds. On an SSD, that is reduced to mere seconds for the former and is near instantaneous with the latter.
The more big programs you run, the more you’ll appreciate starting them up quicker. A common example is most games. And since most games load from the disk quite often, the game itself will run faster.
BTW, it will really pick up the performance of an Access DB to keep the .mdb file for it on an SSD. The same remarks should apply to any relational DB vendor if you configure the data storage to reside on the SSD. Obviously, this also increases the amount of writing being done to the SSD, and you want to consider this. Also, if it’s a large DB, it may take too much space for this to be an option.
Yep. You’d even have room for most of your applications, and maybe a game or two. I’m using ~30 gigs on this laptop, which includes Office and all the usual every day programs, several gigs worth of media and user data, and another several gigs worth of apps and data related to my work.
On my desktop, the 128gb ssd is a comfortable amount of space, with plenty of room for the half dozen games that I’d ever be playing at the same time.
Why not? Memory is still a lot faster than SSD speeds and if I’m not mistaken superfetch should never need to write to the drive so degrading the drive shouldn’t be an issue.
Last year I wrote some software that processes batches of images. Processing a batch of 1401 images took 30 seconds from SSD, but only 7 seconds from superfetch.
Plus, a bonus of SSDs is that the standard failure mode is that they become read-only, unlike HDDs, which often fail in an unreadable state. So, the most common bad-case is that you just have to buy a new SSD and copy your data over. But, of course, you have a backup solution just in case, right?
Most sources claim it doesn’t provide enough significant benefit for a program on SSD to be worth it. Also, by not caching programs from the SSD, you can use the superfetch memory cache for programs you are loading off HDD, where it clearly DOES provide savings.
Another statement from Microsoft, on Windows 7 shutting off all of this sort of stuff on SSDs (actually based on random read performance for all of them, I believe):